Among dedicated drinkers, New Year’s Eve is known as “Amateur’s Night,” a once-a-year bacchanalia for the out-of- and never-in-practice. It signifies little but a harbinger of hangovers, a pretext for socially sanctioned debauchery -- which isn't always a bad thing. With age, the turning of the year is just another reminder of time’s accelerating rate of evaporation. More so in the North than at these compromised latitudes, the new year signals the start of the long, dark, cold, holiday-free ascent to Spring. One enters a dim cave illuminated briefly and treacherously by the February thaw, followed by the revenge of March. I miss this seasonal predictability, though Verlyn Klinkenborg reminds me of it in The Rural Life, his chronicle of a year on his farm in upstate New York. Here’s part of his entry for January:
“All of the days with eves before them are behind us now for another year. The grand themes -- rebirth and genial carnality -- have come and gone like a Chinook wind, bringing a familiar end-of-year thaw to body and spirit. Now the everyday returns and with it the ordinary kind of week in which Friday doesn’t turn into Sunday -- and Saturday into Sunday -- as it has for two weeks running. It’s time for a week in which each morning throws off a magnetic field all its own, when it’s no trick telling Tuesday from Wednesday just by the sound of the alarm clock or the mood of your spouse.”
Only a middle-aged writer, for whom predictability has displaced novelty as the foremost virtue, could compose or appreciate such a passage. My New Year’s Eves blur into sameness -- passed out in youth, asleep each year since. My only distinctive New Year’s Eve came in 1993, when I visited a friend in Albuquerque. The farthest west I had traveled earlier was South Dakota, and I found the harsh, brown landscape of New Mexico seductive. On New Year’s Eve we drove to Chaco Canyon, once the center of Anasazi life. I have no interest in Native American culture but the quiet beauty of this site, dating from about 900 to 1130 A.D., is stunning. The temperature was in the highs 50s, and the quality of the light evoked a word I had never used before -- “pellucid.” We hiked across the escarpment and ate a lunch of cold tamales above Pueblo Bonita. That night, back in Albuquerque, we attended a conventional New Year’s Eve party and I was, as usual, bored, not up to the obligatory social performance after a visit to the place Edgar Bowers evokes in “Chaco Canyon.” It begins:
“Plato, my lord, might wonder, if he saw,
As we saw, from the cliff, the holy city
Built like a cave, its front shaped to the arc
The East’s bright arrow follows in its flight.”
Chaco Canyon, like the coming year, is a mystery. In the face of mystery, resolutions are a comforting futility. Like the exquisite geometry of Pueblo Bonita, they echo with the vanity of human wishes.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Sunday, December 30, 2007
`Some Overlooked But Bracing Truth'
I’ve been quietly reading Shakespeare again, starting with the history plays, now the tragedies, soon the comedies. What I remember and what I’ve forgotten surprise me. Details of plot, even from familiar plays like Richard III, have slipped from memory, while phrases and passages felt vivid, as though I last read them last week. I sense continuity with earlier generations of readers -- not scholars but common readers, who while reading little else but the Bible and Shakespeare permitted these texts to suffuse their lives. They became wisdom books, a sophisticated form of solace and self-help. In Facsimiles of Time, Eric Ormsby includes “The Place of Shakespeare in a House of Pain,” a memoir of growing up in his grandmother’s house in Coral Gables, Fla., in the nineteen-fifties. The grandmother, the alcoholic aunt and a cast of hapless uncles casually quoted and misquoted Shakespeare the way more recent Americans exchange catchphrases from pop music and sitcoms. They
“…had been raised on Shakespeare, not merely to become literate or cultured or well-read, but principally in order to learn how to live. From Shakespeare they learned thrift as well as eloquence; what they knew of love they gleaned from his pages and what they already knew of hatred they found confirmed and given indelible utterance in his verses. Shakespeare taught them to be circumspect, honourable and dignified; he tutored them in the protocols of mourning as of courtship; he was their master in all the niceties of melodious speech. Later, out of her (by then almost entirely oral) knowledge of Shakespeare my grandmother had stitched together a patchwork of maxims, some of which stifled while other warmed. To me, confusedly, it seemed at times as though Shakespeare had pre-imagined our travails and had, rather officiously, provided the very wisdom by which we were expected to surmount them. I think there was almost no occasion on which my grandmother, abetted by her elder daughter, my aunt, and my mother, could not furnish some pungent apothegm excised from `the Bard.’ Sometimes these dicta, with their aura of unassailable authority, stuck in my throat; at other times, they managed to illumine our darkness, as if his words had split open the obdurate husk of dim reality in order to direct one slight but piercing beam onto some overlooked but bracing truth.”
My reading suggests Shakespeare offers something to please every common reader -- violence, sex, wit, consolation, compelling stories, human drama, peerless language. In short, the world or, as Hamlet puts it, “a rhapsody of words.”
.
“…had been raised on Shakespeare, not merely to become literate or cultured or well-read, but principally in order to learn how to live. From Shakespeare they learned thrift as well as eloquence; what they knew of love they gleaned from his pages and what they already knew of hatred they found confirmed and given indelible utterance in his verses. Shakespeare taught them to be circumspect, honourable and dignified; he tutored them in the protocols of mourning as of courtship; he was their master in all the niceties of melodious speech. Later, out of her (by then almost entirely oral) knowledge of Shakespeare my grandmother had stitched together a patchwork of maxims, some of which stifled while other warmed. To me, confusedly, it seemed at times as though Shakespeare had pre-imagined our travails and had, rather officiously, provided the very wisdom by which we were expected to surmount them. I think there was almost no occasion on which my grandmother, abetted by her elder daughter, my aunt, and my mother, could not furnish some pungent apothegm excised from `the Bard.’ Sometimes these dicta, with their aura of unassailable authority, stuck in my throat; at other times, they managed to illumine our darkness, as if his words had split open the obdurate husk of dim reality in order to direct one slight but piercing beam onto some overlooked but bracing truth.”
My reading suggests Shakespeare offers something to please every common reader -- violence, sex, wit, consolation, compelling stories, human drama, peerless language. In short, the world or, as Hamlet puts it, “a rhapsody of words.”
.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
`And the Children Dance'
A coin dealer in Houston offers one dollar in credit for every “A” a kid gets on his report card. Grades in hand, my 7-year-old and I visited the shop on Thursday. Between his handsome report card and the three dollars left the previous night by the Tooth Fairy, Michael had eight dollars burning a hole in his pocket. While he prospected, I sat on a stool by the counter and talked with the owner, like a tavern patron consulting the bartender.
On a previous visit I had admired a framed photograph of Jimi Hendrix hanging on the wall above the Indian-Head Penny Table. Jeff, the owner -- a bearded man about my age with a deep drawl -- said years before he had swapped some coins for the black-and-white picture of a subdued Hendrix, looking young and vulnerable and without his customary swagger. Jeff was born in Miami, and he told stories about seeing Hendrix, and Jim Morrison and The Doors, in the months preceding their premature deaths. I can’t vouch for their authenticity, but it was pleasant to recall a time when the way a guitarist bent a note seemed like a weighty matter. On the CD player at the back of his shop, Jeff was playing early Traffic. He went on toextol Led Zeppelin, a band which, like The Doors, I always abhorred, but we circled back to Hendrix and agreed Electric Ladyland remains his finest album.
The last thing about the guitarist I had read was “Improvisations for Jimi Hendrix,” a poem by Geoffrey Hill from Without Title. Its epigraph comes from the lyrics to “The Wind Cries Mary,” a cut from Are You Experienced?:
“Somewhere a Queen is weeping
Somewhere a King has no wife”
The poem feels improvisatory, without the heft of Hill’s best work, and I‘m unable to make much of it, though these lines, recalling Hendrix’s guitar-burning stunt, are pleasing:
“The show guitar melts like sealing wax.
It mutes and scalds. Your fingers
burning secrets.
“Your legerdemain.
Extraordinary progressions chart
No standard progress.”
Jeff said he believes Hendrix probably would have given up the show-biz pyrotechnics, literal and otherwise, matured into a pioneering jazz guitarist, and probably gone on to collaborate with Miles Davis. Had he lived, Hendrix would have turned 65 last month. Here’s the conclusion to Hill’s poem:
“Somewhere the slave is master of his desires
And lords it in great music
And the children dance.”
Michael went home with a book of Jefferson nickels and a five-dollar piece from Liberia.
On a previous visit I had admired a framed photograph of Jimi Hendrix hanging on the wall above the Indian-Head Penny Table. Jeff, the owner -- a bearded man about my age with a deep drawl -- said years before he had swapped some coins for the black-and-white picture of a subdued Hendrix, looking young and vulnerable and without his customary swagger. Jeff was born in Miami, and he told stories about seeing Hendrix, and Jim Morrison and The Doors, in the months preceding their premature deaths. I can’t vouch for their authenticity, but it was pleasant to recall a time when the way a guitarist bent a note seemed like a weighty matter. On the CD player at the back of his shop, Jeff was playing early Traffic. He went on toextol Led Zeppelin, a band which, like The Doors, I always abhorred, but we circled back to Hendrix and agreed Electric Ladyland remains his finest album.
The last thing about the guitarist I had read was “Improvisations for Jimi Hendrix,” a poem by Geoffrey Hill from Without Title. Its epigraph comes from the lyrics to “The Wind Cries Mary,” a cut from Are You Experienced?:
“Somewhere a Queen is weeping
Somewhere a King has no wife”
The poem feels improvisatory, without the heft of Hill’s best work, and I‘m unable to make much of it, though these lines, recalling Hendrix’s guitar-burning stunt, are pleasing:
“The show guitar melts like sealing wax.
It mutes and scalds. Your fingers
burning secrets.
“Your legerdemain.
Extraordinary progressions chart
No standard progress.”
Jeff said he believes Hendrix probably would have given up the show-biz pyrotechnics, literal and otherwise, matured into a pioneering jazz guitarist, and probably gone on to collaborate with Miles Davis. Had he lived, Hendrix would have turned 65 last month. Here’s the conclusion to Hill’s poem:
“Somewhere the slave is master of his desires
And lords it in great music
And the children dance.”
Michael went home with a book of Jefferson nickels and a five-dollar piece from Liberia.
Friday, December 28, 2007
`A Long Conversation'
Forty-three years ago today, after too many decades of overindulgence in food and drink (I write this not as a disapproving neo-Puritan but as an occasional fellow gourmand who loves great prose), A.J. Liebling, whom Garrison Keillor correctly described as “the wittiest American writer who ever lived,” died at the pitiable age of 59 in the intensive care unit of Mount Sinai Hospital, in his beloved native New York City. According to his biographer, Raymond Sokolov, Liebling’s last words were in French and unintelligible. Sokolov writes:
“Jean Stafford [the short story writer and Liebling’s widow], who was with him in the ambulance, thought that in his delirium he was having an imaginary, impassioned conversation with Camus. It must have been the kind of talk he had in mind when, in the very last sentence he ever wrote, he said that reading Camus’s notebooks was `intensely enjoyable for its own sake -- a long conversation with a companion who does not pall.’”
My own long conversation with Joe Liebling started about 30 years ago and has never palled. On my shelves are 17 of his books, two of which are compendiums (from Playboy Press!) containing nine titles between them, plus Sokolov’s life published in 1980. I’ve been a consistent, soft-spoken, unsuccessful proselytizer for Liebling’s work. It shouldn’t be a tough sell. Liebling is reliably funny, his prose is splendid and his subjects include boxing, the press, France, food, and lowlife on three continents. He covered World War II in North Africa and Europe for The New Yorker, and if I were forced to choose I’d say his finest books were Normandy Revisited and Between Meals.
About 15 years ago, the City of Troy, N.Y., invited me to speak on The Sweet Science, Liebling’s great collection of boxing essays, published in 1956. The city had organized a weekend of events to celebrate its place in boxing history, and I had recently reviewed The Neutral Corner, Liebling’s previously uncollected boxing pieces published by North Point Press. Except for what Liebling has taught me, I know almost nothing about boxing. Some 20 people, mostly young men, showed up for the talk, and none had ever heard of Liebling. By the time I finished speaking, the audience had dwindled to three or four. The idea that I could admire a book on a subject of no interest to me left everyone baffled, but we don’t read Liebling for facts but for raffishly colorful style and storytelling. He is a master raconteur for readers blessed with an ear for such things.
A funeral service was held for Liebling on Dec. 30, 1963, and the eulogy was read by his oldest, dearest friend, the other great Joe at The New Yorker, Mitchell. Sokolov reprints it in toto, but here’s an excerpt:
“Shortly after I heard Joe was dead, I went over and looked at his books in a bookcase at home. There were fifteen of them. I looked through The Road Back to Paris and reread `Westbound Tanker,’ which is one of my favorite stories of his, and when I finished it I suddenly recalled, with great pleasure, a conversation I had had some years ago with the proprietor of one of the biggest and oldest stores in the Fourth Avenue secondhand bookstore district. I had been going to this store for years and occasionally talked to the proprietor, who is a very widely read man. One day I mentioned I worked for The New Yorker, and he asked me if I knew A.J. Liebling. I said that I did, and he said that every few days all through the year someone, sometimes a woman, sometimes a young person, sometimes an old person, came in and asked if he had Back Where I Came From or The Telephone Booth Indian or some other book by A.J. Liebling. At that time all of Joe’s early books were out of print. `The moment one of his books turns up,’ the man said, `it goes out immediately to someone on my waiting list.’ The man went on and said that he and other veteran secondhand bookstore dealers felt that this was a certain sign that a book would endure. `Literary critics don’t know which books will last,’ he said, `and literary historians don’t know, and those nine-day immortals up at the Institute of Arts and Letters don‘t know. We are the ones who know. We know which books can be read only once, if that, and we know the ones that can be read and reread and reread.’”
“Jean Stafford [the short story writer and Liebling’s widow], who was with him in the ambulance, thought that in his delirium he was having an imaginary, impassioned conversation with Camus. It must have been the kind of talk he had in mind when, in the very last sentence he ever wrote, he said that reading Camus’s notebooks was `intensely enjoyable for its own sake -- a long conversation with a companion who does not pall.’”
My own long conversation with Joe Liebling started about 30 years ago and has never palled. On my shelves are 17 of his books, two of which are compendiums (from Playboy Press!) containing nine titles between them, plus Sokolov’s life published in 1980. I’ve been a consistent, soft-spoken, unsuccessful proselytizer for Liebling’s work. It shouldn’t be a tough sell. Liebling is reliably funny, his prose is splendid and his subjects include boxing, the press, France, food, and lowlife on three continents. He covered World War II in North Africa and Europe for The New Yorker, and if I were forced to choose I’d say his finest books were Normandy Revisited and Between Meals.
About 15 years ago, the City of Troy, N.Y., invited me to speak on The Sweet Science, Liebling’s great collection of boxing essays, published in 1956. The city had organized a weekend of events to celebrate its place in boxing history, and I had recently reviewed The Neutral Corner, Liebling’s previously uncollected boxing pieces published by North Point Press. Except for what Liebling has taught me, I know almost nothing about boxing. Some 20 people, mostly young men, showed up for the talk, and none had ever heard of Liebling. By the time I finished speaking, the audience had dwindled to three or four. The idea that I could admire a book on a subject of no interest to me left everyone baffled, but we don’t read Liebling for facts but for raffishly colorful style and storytelling. He is a master raconteur for readers blessed with an ear for such things.
A funeral service was held for Liebling on Dec. 30, 1963, and the eulogy was read by his oldest, dearest friend, the other great Joe at The New Yorker, Mitchell. Sokolov reprints it in toto, but here’s an excerpt:
“Shortly after I heard Joe was dead, I went over and looked at his books in a bookcase at home. There were fifteen of them. I looked through The Road Back to Paris and reread `Westbound Tanker,’ which is one of my favorite stories of his, and when I finished it I suddenly recalled, with great pleasure, a conversation I had had some years ago with the proprietor of one of the biggest and oldest stores in the Fourth Avenue secondhand bookstore district. I had been going to this store for years and occasionally talked to the proprietor, who is a very widely read man. One day I mentioned I worked for The New Yorker, and he asked me if I knew A.J. Liebling. I said that I did, and he said that every few days all through the year someone, sometimes a woman, sometimes a young person, sometimes an old person, came in and asked if he had Back Where I Came From or The Telephone Booth Indian or some other book by A.J. Liebling. At that time all of Joe’s early books were out of print. `The moment one of his books turns up,’ the man said, `it goes out immediately to someone on my waiting list.’ The man went on and said that he and other veteran secondhand bookstore dealers felt that this was a certain sign that a book would endure. `Literary critics don’t know which books will last,’ he said, `and literary historians don’t know, and those nine-day immortals up at the Institute of Arts and Letters don‘t know. We are the ones who know. We know which books can be read only once, if that, and we know the ones that can be read and reread and reread.’”
Thursday, December 27, 2007
`I Won't Try to Put the Experience Into Words'
An anonymous reader asks an impertinent question: “Why don't you believe?”
Why impertinent? Because it is the obverse of the ultimate question we pose in the privacy of 3 a.m.: “Why do I believe?” and its corollary, “What do I believe?” There’s something indecent about airing intimacies in public, a suggestion of exhibitionism. Besides, I have no satisfactory answer. I remember what Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of his friend Herman Melville in 1856, five years after Moby-Dick:
“He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.”
There’s nothing courageous or noble about me, and I wrestle hourly with pride and presumption, but Hawthorne is otherwise right on the money. The current vogue for vulgar atheism has its counterpart in vulgar religiosity. What they share is self-righteousness, the human curse, and each fuels the other. In general, my sympathies lie with certain believers; if not with the particulars of their faith, with the worthiness of their questions. I think of R.S. Thomas, a priest as well as a poet, and a memorably difficult, even hateful man. In a 1948 essay, “Two Chapels,” he describes an experience he had the previous summer visiting a chapel, Maes-yr-Onnen, in Radnorshire:
“When I had walked around the building and stared in through the windows (there was no one there to unlock the door for me), I stretched myself out on the grass and let my mind wander back into the past. And indeed after a while, I saw the first worshippers coming through the fields -- sober men and women dressed in a sober fashion. I saw them leave the sunlight for the darkness of the chapel and then heard the rustling of the Bible pages and the murmurs of soft voices mingling with the wind. Yes, it was two and a half centuries earlier on a fine August morning. And almost immediately, I saw, I understood. As with St. John the Divine on the island of Patmos I was `in the Spirit’ and I had a vision, in which I could comprehend the breadth and length and depth and height of the mystery of the creation. But I won’t try to put the experience into words. It would be impossible. I will simply say that I realised there was really no such thing as time, no beginning and no end but that everything is a fountain welling up endlessly from immortal God.”
I envy Thomas his experience, as I do Augustine’s and Pascal’s (and a certain Father Roos’, in upstate New York), and it reminds me of moments in Eliot’s Four Quartets:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
I prefer the company of men such as Eliot and Thomas to Dawkins and Co. They are explorers and ask better questions.
Why impertinent? Because it is the obverse of the ultimate question we pose in the privacy of 3 a.m.: “Why do I believe?” and its corollary, “What do I believe?” There’s something indecent about airing intimacies in public, a suggestion of exhibitionism. Besides, I have no satisfactory answer. I remember what Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of his friend Herman Melville in 1856, five years after Moby-Dick:
“He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.”
There’s nothing courageous or noble about me, and I wrestle hourly with pride and presumption, but Hawthorne is otherwise right on the money. The current vogue for vulgar atheism has its counterpart in vulgar religiosity. What they share is self-righteousness, the human curse, and each fuels the other. In general, my sympathies lie with certain believers; if not with the particulars of their faith, with the worthiness of their questions. I think of R.S. Thomas, a priest as well as a poet, and a memorably difficult, even hateful man. In a 1948 essay, “Two Chapels,” he describes an experience he had the previous summer visiting a chapel, Maes-yr-Onnen, in Radnorshire:
“When I had walked around the building and stared in through the windows (there was no one there to unlock the door for me), I stretched myself out on the grass and let my mind wander back into the past. And indeed after a while, I saw the first worshippers coming through the fields -- sober men and women dressed in a sober fashion. I saw them leave the sunlight for the darkness of the chapel and then heard the rustling of the Bible pages and the murmurs of soft voices mingling with the wind. Yes, it was two and a half centuries earlier on a fine August morning. And almost immediately, I saw, I understood. As with St. John the Divine on the island of Patmos I was `in the Spirit’ and I had a vision, in which I could comprehend the breadth and length and depth and height of the mystery of the creation. But I won’t try to put the experience into words. It would be impossible. I will simply say that I realised there was really no such thing as time, no beginning and no end but that everything is a fountain welling up endlessly from immortal God.”
I envy Thomas his experience, as I do Augustine’s and Pascal’s (and a certain Father Roos’, in upstate New York), and it reminds me of moments in Eliot’s Four Quartets:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
I prefer the company of men such as Eliot and Thomas to Dawkins and Co. They are explorers and ask better questions.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
`An Unpleasant Whiff of Apprehension'
The ham is sliced and Tupperwared, the wrapping paper recycled. Jigsaw puzzles have been put together, taken apart, reboxed. The cookies are stale. We watched The Christmas Story twice and one-fifth of the 300-cartoon Looney Tunes Golden Collection. Yesterday’s gift-heap has sifted into domestic anonymity. Where did Christmas go?
The Christmas constant is post-Christmas dolor. Once this meant reality’s letdown after months of anticipation. Now? I’m not sure. Time passes audibly at Christmas. Children age, memories form and decay. The gimcrack and the eternal come face to face -- another year evaporated.
W.H. Auden wrote For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio over the terrible winter of 1941-1942. Newly returned to the Church, Auden sought “to redeem from insignificance” the dailiness of daily life and the enfeeblement of Christmas into a mere holiday. He captures our weakness, human failing and inevitable sadness:
"Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes --
Some have got broken -- and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week --
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted -- quite unsuccessfully --
To love all our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But for the time being, here we all are,
Back to the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry
And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it."
The Christmas constant is post-Christmas dolor. Once this meant reality’s letdown after months of anticipation. Now? I’m not sure. Time passes audibly at Christmas. Children age, memories form and decay. The gimcrack and the eternal come face to face -- another year evaporated.
W.H. Auden wrote For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio over the terrible winter of 1941-1942. Newly returned to the Church, Auden sought “to redeem from insignificance” the dailiness of daily life and the enfeeblement of Christmas into a mere holiday. He captures our weakness, human failing and inevitable sadness:
"Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes --
Some have got broken -- and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week --
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted -- quite unsuccessfully --
To love all our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But for the time being, here we all are,
Back to the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry
And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it."
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
A Christmas in Wales
No one wrote more austere, less conventionally festive Christmas poems than R.S. Thomas. If you have read The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas, by Byron Rogers, you know how impossible a man he was, a poet/priest dedicated to upsetting the expectations of everyone, especially family and parishioners, not to mention readers. To read Gwydion Thomas on his father, as reported by Rogers, is chilling. On Christmas Eve, Bryan Appleyard posted one of Thomas’ cheerier Yuletide works, “Song,” from the volume with perhaps the strangest title in modern poetry, H’m (1972). Inspired by Appleyard (who made me laugh out loud by calling Thomas “Laughing Boy”), I went trolling for Christmas poems in Collected Poems: 1945-1990 and Collected Later Poems: 1988-2000, and found another 10, some disguised, all oblique, so I probably missed others. Here they are, starting with “Christmas,” from Pieta (1966):
“There is a morning:
Time brings it nearer.
Brittle with frost
And starlight. The owls sing
In the parishes. The people rise
And walk to the churches’
Stone lanterns, there to kneel
And eat the new bread
Of love, washing it down
With the sharp taste
Of blood they will shed.”
Cheery, eh? All the earmarks of Thomas and his hard faith are present in these 11 lines. Here is “Lost Christmas,” from Young and Old (1972):
“He is alone, it is Christmas.
Up the hill go three trees, the three kings.
There is a star also
Over the dark manger. But where is the child?
“Pity him. He has come far
Like the trees, matching their patience
With hi. But the mind was before
Him on the long road. The manger is empty.”
This is “Hill Christmas,” from Laboratories of the Spirit (1975):
“They came over the snow to the bread’s
purer snow, fumbled it in their huge
hands, put their lips to it
like beasts, stared into the dark chalice
where the wine shone, felt it sharp
on their tongue, shivered as at a sin
remembered, and heard love cry
momentarily in their hearts’ manger.
“They rose and went back to their poor
holdings, naked in the bleak light
of December. Their horizon contracted
to the one small, stone-riddled field
with its tree, where the weather was nailing
the appalled body that had asked to be born.”
And “Carol,” from Later Poems (1983), in which the robin recurs, as in the poem cited by Appleyard:
“What is Christmas without
snow? We need it
as bread of a cold
climate, ermine to trim
“our sins with, a brief
sleeve for charity’s
scarecrow to wear its heart
on, bold as a robin.”
“Nativity,” from Experimenting with an Amen (1986):
“The moon is born
and a child is born,
lying among white clothes
as the moon among clouds.
“They both shine, but
the light from the one
is abroad in the universe
as among broken glass.”
Another “Nativity,” from Mass for Hard Times (1992):
“Christmas Eve! Five
hundred poets waited, pen
poised above paper,
for the poem to arrive,
bells ringing. It was because
the chimney was too small,
because they had ceased
to believe, the poem passed them
by on its way out
into oblivion, leaving
the doorstep bare
of all but the sky-rhyming
child to whom later
on they would teach prose.”
“Christmas Eve,” from No Truce with the Furies (1995):
“Erect capital’s arch;
decorate it with the gilt edge
of the moon. Pave the way to it
with cheques and with credit –
“it is still not high enough
for the child to pass under
who comes to us this midnight
invisible as radiation.”
“Blind Noel,” also from No Truce with the Furies:
“Christmas; the themes are exhausted.
Yet there is always room
On the heart for another
Snowflake to reveal a pattern.
“Love knocks with such frosted fingers.
I look out. In the shadow
Of so vast a God I shiver, unable
To detect the child for the whiteness.”
“The Mass of Christ,” from No Truce with the Furies:
“This day I am with the beasts –
animal Christmas – staring
with brute eyes at the mystery
in the cradle. Emmanuel!
God with men, but not God
with the creatures. Are we in need
of a saviour, when it is not
our fault? Nebuchadnezzar,
the beasts’ Christ, incarnate
as an animal and not
as a human being, but with a human
conscience. What love sentenced
us to murder in order
that we survive? Does God know
what it is to eat his food
off the ground, to draw sustenance
from intestines? We prey
and are preyed on. Such peace
as we know is purchased
only by an interminable
alertness. When winter arrives
we lie out in open country
because we have to, wrapping
our threadbare breath about our
aggrieved bones. Does God die
and still live? We live only
by the perpetual sacrifice
of our kind, ignorant
of love, yet innocent of a love
that has anthropomorphised its creation.”
“Festival,” published posthumously in Residues (2002):
“This Christmas before
an altar of gold
the holly will remind
us how love bleeds,
“the mistletoe remind
how pale and puny
the knuckles of the few
fingers clenched upon faith.”
“There is a morning:
Time brings it nearer.
Brittle with frost
And starlight. The owls sing
In the parishes. The people rise
And walk to the churches’
Stone lanterns, there to kneel
And eat the new bread
Of love, washing it down
With the sharp taste
Of blood they will shed.”
Cheery, eh? All the earmarks of Thomas and his hard faith are present in these 11 lines. Here is “Lost Christmas,” from Young and Old (1972):
“He is alone, it is Christmas.
Up the hill go three trees, the three kings.
There is a star also
Over the dark manger. But where is the child?
“Pity him. He has come far
Like the trees, matching their patience
With hi. But the mind was before
Him on the long road. The manger is empty.”
This is “Hill Christmas,” from Laboratories of the Spirit (1975):
“They came over the snow to the bread’s
purer snow, fumbled it in their huge
hands, put their lips to it
like beasts, stared into the dark chalice
where the wine shone, felt it sharp
on their tongue, shivered as at a sin
remembered, and heard love cry
momentarily in their hearts’ manger.
“They rose and went back to their poor
holdings, naked in the bleak light
of December. Their horizon contracted
to the one small, stone-riddled field
with its tree, where the weather was nailing
the appalled body that had asked to be born.”
And “Carol,” from Later Poems (1983), in which the robin recurs, as in the poem cited by Appleyard:
“What is Christmas without
snow? We need it
as bread of a cold
climate, ermine to trim
“our sins with, a brief
sleeve for charity’s
scarecrow to wear its heart
on, bold as a robin.”
“Nativity,” from Experimenting with an Amen (1986):
“The moon is born
and a child is born,
lying among white clothes
as the moon among clouds.
“They both shine, but
the light from the one
is abroad in the universe
as among broken glass.”
Another “Nativity,” from Mass for Hard Times (1992):
“Christmas Eve! Five
hundred poets waited, pen
poised above paper,
for the poem to arrive,
bells ringing. It was because
the chimney was too small,
because they had ceased
to believe, the poem passed them
by on its way out
into oblivion, leaving
the doorstep bare
of all but the sky-rhyming
child to whom later
on they would teach prose.”
“Christmas Eve,” from No Truce with the Furies (1995):
“Erect capital’s arch;
decorate it with the gilt edge
of the moon. Pave the way to it
with cheques and with credit –
“it is still not high enough
for the child to pass under
who comes to us this midnight
invisible as radiation.”
“Blind Noel,” also from No Truce with the Furies:
“Christmas; the themes are exhausted.
Yet there is always room
On the heart for another
Snowflake to reveal a pattern.
“Love knocks with such frosted fingers.
I look out. In the shadow
Of so vast a God I shiver, unable
To detect the child for the whiteness.”
“The Mass of Christ,” from No Truce with the Furies:
“This day I am with the beasts –
animal Christmas – staring
with brute eyes at the mystery
in the cradle. Emmanuel!
God with men, but not God
with the creatures. Are we in need
of a saviour, when it is not
our fault? Nebuchadnezzar,
the beasts’ Christ, incarnate
as an animal and not
as a human being, but with a human
conscience. What love sentenced
us to murder in order
that we survive? Does God know
what it is to eat his food
off the ground, to draw sustenance
from intestines? We prey
and are preyed on. Such peace
as we know is purchased
only by an interminable
alertness. When winter arrives
we lie out in open country
because we have to, wrapping
our threadbare breath about our
aggrieved bones. Does God die
and still live? We live only
by the perpetual sacrifice
of our kind, ignorant
of love, yet innocent of a love
that has anthropomorphised its creation.”
“Festival,” published posthumously in Residues (2002):
“This Christmas before
an altar of gold
the holly will remind
us how love bleeds,
“the mistletoe remind
how pale and puny
the knuckles of the few
fingers clenched upon faith.”
Monday, December 24, 2007
`An Old and Quaint Christmas Song'
The mousy brown book on a bottom shelf on the third floor of the Fondren Library at Rice University almost eluded me. Before I checked it out, the last stamped due date was Aug. 1, 1987. Pulled from its dusty lodging, bound in vivid oxblood buckram, it revived and appears less mousy. Songs of the Nativity: Being Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern, Several of Which Appear for the First Time in a Collection was edited by William Henry Husk (“Librarian to the Sacred Harmonic Society”) and published in London by John Camden Hotten (“74, Piccadilly”) in 1868. The bookplate at the front shows it was given to the library in memory of Mrs. George Seaman by Beatrice Harrison in December 1951. Someone tucked a small newspaper clipping, browned almost to oxblood, between its pages. Like the book, it’s English in origin (“favour” and “finance of Blackburn Bishopric” on the reverse), and here is the pertinent matter:
“Here (writes a correspondent) is an old and quaint Christmas song which might very well be used to start the fun of the `after dinner proceedings.’ It is a memory-tickler, and though I cannot trace its origin or its tune, its recital would most probably lead to the singing of other roundelays of a similar nature. It is called the `Twelve Days of Christmas’:
“On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me
Twelve bells a-ringing, eleven bulls a-beating,
Ten asses racing, nine ladies dancing,
Eight boys a-singing, seven swans a swimming,
Six geese a-laying, five goldie rings,
Four collie birds, three Breton hens,
Two turtle doves, and the part of a mistletoe bough.”
Who wrote this? Who, in some English Yuletide past, was pleased enough to clip and preserve it? How did the volume and clipping end up shelved in a university library in Houston? And who placed the bit of newspaper between pages 180 and 181, both of which are indelibly stamped with coffee-brown stains in the shape of the newspaper clipping? On page 181 appears Husk’s introduction to “The Twelve Days of Christmas”:
“This piece is found on broadsides printed in Newcastle at various periods during the last hundred and fifty years. On one of these sheets, nearly a century old, it is entitled `An Old English Carol,’ but it can scarcely be said to fall within that description of composition, being rather fitted for use in playing the games of `Forfeits,’ to which purpose it was commonly applied in the metropolis upwards of forty years since. The practice was for one person in the company to recite the first three lines; a second the four following; and so on; the person who failed in repeating her portion correctly being subjected to some trifling forfeit. The lady who was the favoured recipient of the gifts enumerated must have required no small extent of shelf or table room for their accommodation, as at the end of the Christmas festivities she must have found herself in possession of twelve partridges in pear trees, twenty-two turtle-doves, thirty French hens, thirty-six colley [i.e. black] birds, forty gold rings, forty-two laying geese, forty-two swimming swans, forty milk-maids, thirty-six drummers, thirty pipers, twenty-two dancing ladies, and twelve leaping lords; in all three hundred and sixty-four articles, one for each day in the year save one. This piece is now printed for the first time in a collection of carols.”
Writing two years before Dickens’ death, the Librarian to the Sacred Harmonic Society permits an inadvertent peek into the novelist’s domestic world. Husk is a jolly, earnest writer whose enthusiasm for music, Christmas and English folkways almost makes up for his limitations as a prose stylist. Here’s how he chooses to introduce readers to his collection: “Christmas! – What a multitude of associations crowd into the mind at the mere sight or mention of that word!” and so on.
A modern reader is struck by the continuities Husk documents, and by how much a 21st-century American Christmas is 19th-century and English in origin. Fourteen of the songs Husk reproduces I know by heart or nearly so. He includes seven short lyrics published in 1648 by Robert Herrick (of “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” fame), including:
“Come, guard this night the Christmas pie,
That the thief, though ne’er so sly,
With his flesh-hooks don’t come nigh
To catch it
“From him who all alone sits there,
Having his eyes still in his ear,
And a deal of nightly fear,
To watch it.”
Husk then appends a recipe, dating from 1394, during the reign of Richard II, “For to make a moost choyce paste of gamys to be eaten at ye feste of Chrystmasse.” The ingredients include “Pheasant, Hare, and Chicken, or Capon, of each one; with two Partridges, two Pigeons, and two Conies; and smite them in pieces, and pick clean away therefrom all the bones that ye may, and therewith do them into a foyle [crust] of good paste, made craftily in the likeness of a bird’s body, with the livers and hearts, two kidneys of sheep, and forces [forced meat, finely chopped and seasoned] and eyren [eggs] made into balls….” Thus, Yorkshire pie.
Our dual responses to Christmas, reverent and earthy, soulful and corporeal, seem quintessentially human and contradictory. In his wonderful essay on comic English postcards, “The Art of Donald McGill,” in a passage having nothing to do with Christmas, George Orwell diagnoses our bifurcated condition with precision. Read the whole thing but here’s a pertinent excerpt:
“Evidently it corresponds to something enduring in our civilization, not in the sense that either character is to be found in a `pure’ state in real life, but in the sense that the two principles, noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by side in every human being. If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with `voluptuous’ figures. He it is who punctures your fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth.”
Merry Christmas.
“Here (writes a correspondent) is an old and quaint Christmas song which might very well be used to start the fun of the `after dinner proceedings.’ It is a memory-tickler, and though I cannot trace its origin or its tune, its recital would most probably lead to the singing of other roundelays of a similar nature. It is called the `Twelve Days of Christmas’:
“On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me
Twelve bells a-ringing, eleven bulls a-beating,
Ten asses racing, nine ladies dancing,
Eight boys a-singing, seven swans a swimming,
Six geese a-laying, five goldie rings,
Four collie birds, three Breton hens,
Two turtle doves, and the part of a mistletoe bough.”
Who wrote this? Who, in some English Yuletide past, was pleased enough to clip and preserve it? How did the volume and clipping end up shelved in a university library in Houston? And who placed the bit of newspaper between pages 180 and 181, both of which are indelibly stamped with coffee-brown stains in the shape of the newspaper clipping? On page 181 appears Husk’s introduction to “The Twelve Days of Christmas”:
“This piece is found on broadsides printed in Newcastle at various periods during the last hundred and fifty years. On one of these sheets, nearly a century old, it is entitled `An Old English Carol,’ but it can scarcely be said to fall within that description of composition, being rather fitted for use in playing the games of `Forfeits,’ to which purpose it was commonly applied in the metropolis upwards of forty years since. The practice was for one person in the company to recite the first three lines; a second the four following; and so on; the person who failed in repeating her portion correctly being subjected to some trifling forfeit. The lady who was the favoured recipient of the gifts enumerated must have required no small extent of shelf or table room for their accommodation, as at the end of the Christmas festivities she must have found herself in possession of twelve partridges in pear trees, twenty-two turtle-doves, thirty French hens, thirty-six colley [i.e. black] birds, forty gold rings, forty-two laying geese, forty-two swimming swans, forty milk-maids, thirty-six drummers, thirty pipers, twenty-two dancing ladies, and twelve leaping lords; in all three hundred and sixty-four articles, one for each day in the year save one. This piece is now printed for the first time in a collection of carols.”
Writing two years before Dickens’ death, the Librarian to the Sacred Harmonic Society permits an inadvertent peek into the novelist’s domestic world. Husk is a jolly, earnest writer whose enthusiasm for music, Christmas and English folkways almost makes up for his limitations as a prose stylist. Here’s how he chooses to introduce readers to his collection: “Christmas! – What a multitude of associations crowd into the mind at the mere sight or mention of that word!” and so on.
A modern reader is struck by the continuities Husk documents, and by how much a 21st-century American Christmas is 19th-century and English in origin. Fourteen of the songs Husk reproduces I know by heart or nearly so. He includes seven short lyrics published in 1648 by Robert Herrick (of “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” fame), including:
“Come, guard this night the Christmas pie,
That the thief, though ne’er so sly,
With his flesh-hooks don’t come nigh
To catch it
“From him who all alone sits there,
Having his eyes still in his ear,
And a deal of nightly fear,
To watch it.”
Husk then appends a recipe, dating from 1394, during the reign of Richard II, “For to make a moost choyce paste of gamys to be eaten at ye feste of Chrystmasse.” The ingredients include “Pheasant, Hare, and Chicken, or Capon, of each one; with two Partridges, two Pigeons, and two Conies; and smite them in pieces, and pick clean away therefrom all the bones that ye may, and therewith do them into a foyle [crust] of good paste, made craftily in the likeness of a bird’s body, with the livers and hearts, two kidneys of sheep, and forces [forced meat, finely chopped and seasoned] and eyren [eggs] made into balls….” Thus, Yorkshire pie.
Our dual responses to Christmas, reverent and earthy, soulful and corporeal, seem quintessentially human and contradictory. In his wonderful essay on comic English postcards, “The Art of Donald McGill,” in a passage having nothing to do with Christmas, George Orwell diagnoses our bifurcated condition with precision. Read the whole thing but here’s a pertinent excerpt:
“Evidently it corresponds to something enduring in our civilization, not in the sense that either character is to be found in a `pure’ state in real life, but in the sense that the two principles, noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by side in every human being. If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with `voluptuous’ figures. He it is who punctures your fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth.”
Merry Christmas.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
`Nicked'
My 7-year-old has read five of the Harry Potter books and is working on his sixth. One of the unforeseen results of his immersion in J.K. Rowling’s world is the acquisition of expressions peculiar to British English. This morning, pleased to be tattling on his 4-year-old brother, Michael announced: “David nicked something from the pantry!”
`Exiling Melancholy'
For a nonbeliever in a secular age, who loves the Nativity and thrills at Santa Claus, Christmas carols are the season’s reliable inducers of exaltation. More than Dickens or the scent of balsam fir, the songs learned from grade-school teachers and Bing Crosby trigger the heightened state of “Christmas spirit,” one unassociated for me with giving or receiving gifts. The songs feel timeless and demand that we actively listen to words we already know by heart. Singing them, I feel an imaginative affinity with first-century Palestine, the court of Elizabeth I and Dickens’ London. Consider the less-than-familiar sixth verse of “God Rest You Merry Gentlemen”:
“With sudden joy and gladness,
The Shepherds were beguil’d
To see the Babe of Israel,
Before his mother mild,
On them with joy and chearfulness,
Rejoice each Mother’s Child.
And it’s tidings of comfort and joy.”
The drift of the First Christmas is set in order and quietly rendered universal. The “Babe of Israel” and “his mother mild” seamlessly evoke “each Mother’s Child.” And note how, in seven lines, joy, that rarest of emotional commodities, is paired – promised -- three times: “sudden joy and gladness,” “joy and chearfulness” and “comfort and joy.” In the melody, bolstered by the words, I hear two emotional strains – a raucous, masculine sound, thumping and celebrative, and a plaintive, thoughtful echo, almost a foreshadowing of the Babe’s suffering and death. It’s usually sung in E minor, and it’s the song that sets off Scrooge: “Let nothing you dismay.”
Christmas poems, too, reflect the season’s multiple nature. Phyllis McGinley (the first poet I knew, along with Frost and Stevenson), is gently satirical and reminiscent of John Cheever in “City Christmas”:
“Now is the time when the great urban heart
More warmly beats, exiling melancholy.
Turkey comes table d'hôte or à la carte.
Our elevator wears a wreath of holly.
“Mendicant Santa Claus in flannel robes
At every corner contradicts his label,
Alms-asking. We’ve a tree with colored globes
In our apartment foyer, on a table.
“There is a promise – or a threat -- of snow
Noised by the press. We pull our collars tighter.
And twenty thousand doormen hourly grow
Politer and politer and politer.”
And then there’s the most solemn and oblique of Christmas poems, “Christmas Trees,” by Geoffrey Hill:
“Bonhoeffer in his skylit cell
bleached by the flares’ candescent fall,
pacing out his own citadel,
“restores the broken themes of praise,
encourages our borrowed days,
by logic of his sacrifice.
“Against wild reasons of the state,
his words are quiet but not too quiet.
We hear too late or not too late.”
From Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (“And all about the Courtly Stable,/Bright-harnest Angels sit in order serviceable.”) to Anthony Hecht’s “Illumination” (“The child lies cribbed below, in bestial dark,/Pale as the tiny tips of crocuses/That will find their way to the light through drifts of snow.”), poets have been moved to verse by the glory and mystery of Christmas, sacred and secular. The only poem by Allen Tate I set to memory is the second of his “Sonnets at Christmas.” The first line is almost supreme in the language and always makes me smile:
“Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky
And I must think a little of the past:
When I was ten I told a stinking lie
That got a black boy whipped; but now at last
The going year, caught in an after-glow,
Reverse like balls englished upon green baize –
Let them return, let the round trumpets blow
The ancient crackle of the Christ`s deep gaze.
Deafened and blind, with senses yet unfound,
Am I, untutored to the after-wit
Of knowledge, knowing a nightmare has no sound;
Therefore with idle hands and head I sit
In late December before the fire’s daze
Punished by crimes of which I would be quit.”
“With sudden joy and gladness,
The Shepherds were beguil’d
To see the Babe of Israel,
Before his mother mild,
On them with joy and chearfulness,
Rejoice each Mother’s Child.
And it’s tidings of comfort and joy.”
The drift of the First Christmas is set in order and quietly rendered universal. The “Babe of Israel” and “his mother mild” seamlessly evoke “each Mother’s Child.” And note how, in seven lines, joy, that rarest of emotional commodities, is paired – promised -- three times: “sudden joy and gladness,” “joy and chearfulness” and “comfort and joy.” In the melody, bolstered by the words, I hear two emotional strains – a raucous, masculine sound, thumping and celebrative, and a plaintive, thoughtful echo, almost a foreshadowing of the Babe’s suffering and death. It’s usually sung in E minor, and it’s the song that sets off Scrooge: “Let nothing you dismay.”
Christmas poems, too, reflect the season’s multiple nature. Phyllis McGinley (the first poet I knew, along with Frost and Stevenson), is gently satirical and reminiscent of John Cheever in “City Christmas”:
“Now is the time when the great urban heart
More warmly beats, exiling melancholy.
Turkey comes table d'hôte or à la carte.
Our elevator wears a wreath of holly.
“Mendicant Santa Claus in flannel robes
At every corner contradicts his label,
Alms-asking. We’ve a tree with colored globes
In our apartment foyer, on a table.
“There is a promise – or a threat -- of snow
Noised by the press. We pull our collars tighter.
And twenty thousand doormen hourly grow
Politer and politer and politer.”
And then there’s the most solemn and oblique of Christmas poems, “Christmas Trees,” by Geoffrey Hill:
“Bonhoeffer in his skylit cell
bleached by the flares’ candescent fall,
pacing out his own citadel,
“restores the broken themes of praise,
encourages our borrowed days,
by logic of his sacrifice.
“Against wild reasons of the state,
his words are quiet but not too quiet.
We hear too late or not too late.”
From Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (“And all about the Courtly Stable,/Bright-harnest Angels sit in order serviceable.”) to Anthony Hecht’s “Illumination” (“The child lies cribbed below, in bestial dark,/Pale as the tiny tips of crocuses/That will find their way to the light through drifts of snow.”), poets have been moved to verse by the glory and mystery of Christmas, sacred and secular. The only poem by Allen Tate I set to memory is the second of his “Sonnets at Christmas.” The first line is almost supreme in the language and always makes me smile:
“Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky
And I must think a little of the past:
When I was ten I told a stinking lie
That got a black boy whipped; but now at last
The going year, caught in an after-glow,
Reverse like balls englished upon green baize –
Let them return, let the round trumpets blow
The ancient crackle of the Christ`s deep gaze.
Deafened and blind, with senses yet unfound,
Am I, untutored to the after-wit
Of knowledge, knowing a nightmare has no sound;
Therefore with idle hands and head I sit
In late December before the fire’s daze
Punished by crimes of which I would be quit.”
Saturday, December 22, 2007
`Bubbles of Artificial Fame'
December spawns “best of” book lists, a dreary end-of-year custom reflecting our fetish for ranking everything from villanelles to thoroughbreds, though they leave me cold. Most of the few new titles I have read were awful, especially Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, a favorite with critics. Not surprisingly, the other Johnson – Samuel – took the long view of such matters. In The Rambler, No. 106, published March 23, 1751, he writes:
“Nothing is more common than to find men whose works are now totally neglected, mentioned with praises by their contemporaries, as the oracles of their age…. Every period of time has produced these bubbles of artificial fame, which are kept up awhile by the breath of fashion, and then break at once, and are annihilated.”
We can only aspire to such optimism. I read a few enduringly good books published in 2007 -- The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, by Zbigniew Herbert; A Treatise of Civil Power, by Geoffrey Hill; In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas, by Theodore Dalrymple; Cultural Amnesia, by Clive James – but most of the best books I read date from earlier centuries. That’s as it should be, of course. Little of value is published in any year, the century is still young, and the ultimate critic is time. Here’s Dr. Johnson again, this time in his notes to King Henry V:
“Not even Shakespeare can write well without a proper subject. It is a vain endevour for the most skillful hand to cultivate barrenness, or to paint upon vacuity.”
“Nothing is more common than to find men whose works are now totally neglected, mentioned with praises by their contemporaries, as the oracles of their age…. Every period of time has produced these bubbles of artificial fame, which are kept up awhile by the breath of fashion, and then break at once, and are annihilated.”
We can only aspire to such optimism. I read a few enduringly good books published in 2007 -- The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, by Zbigniew Herbert; A Treatise of Civil Power, by Geoffrey Hill; In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas, by Theodore Dalrymple; Cultural Amnesia, by Clive James – but most of the best books I read date from earlier centuries. That’s as it should be, of course. Little of value is published in any year, the century is still young, and the ultimate critic is time. Here’s Dr. Johnson again, this time in his notes to King Henry V:
“Not even Shakespeare can write well without a proper subject. It is a vain endevour for the most skillful hand to cultivate barrenness, or to paint upon vacuity.”
Friday, December 21, 2007
`Does He Move You?'
An anonymous reader writes:
“I am in the midst of a Samuel Johnson bender and was wondering what your take is on Dr. Johnson. Do you like him? Does he move you? (I have just finished Bate's biography of Johnson and found the overview of Johnson's work on Shakespeare amazing.)”
Lucky fellow. A Johnson bender is my kind of dissipation. Almost two years ago, in the first post I wrote for Anecdotal Evidence, I described Johnson as “one of the tutelary spirits of this blog,” and hardly a week has passed without the great man making an appearance. I went on to quote Boswell quoting Johnson in Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides:
“I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.”
So, Johnson helped name this blog, and his preference for anecdotes over “system” continues to inform it. That goes to the heart of my attraction to Johnson – his bluffness, common sense and distaste for pretension or any species of bullshit (one of his definitions for cant is “a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms”). Writing about books ought to be a straightforward business, a sharing and fine-tuning of enthusiasms and aversions. For me, that has always been the case. I never aim for theoretical consistency. Reading, first and always, is about love, and there’s no figuring that out. For Johnson, the membrane between life and letters is highly permeable. Consider his July 18, 1780, letter to Hester Maria Thrale, better known as “Queeney,” when she was not yet 16 years old:
“When you read alone read diligently, they who do not read can have nothing to think, and little to say. When you can get proper company talk freely and cheerfully, it is often by talking [or blogging] that we come to know the value of what we have read, to separate it with distinctness, and fix it in the memory. Never delight yourself with the dignity of silence or the superiority of inattention. To be silent or to be negligent are so easy, neither can give any claim to praise, and there is no human being so mean or useless, but his approbation and benevolence is to be desired.”
Imagine, as a teenager, having received such a letter -- to be treated with such respect and devotion, to be told without pussyfooting or condescension that “they who do not read can have nothing to think.” An obvious truth but one ignored by too many parents, teachers and others purporting to be allies of children. That’s another reason for loving Johnson – his alacrity to teach, to share his experience, strength and hope, with a teenage girl or a middle-aged man. “Do you like him? Does he move you?” The questions are well-intentioned but inadequate. W. Jackson Bate, Johnson’s second-best biographer, put it like this, and try to think of another writer about whom the same might be said:
“One of the first effects he has on us is that we find ourselves catching, by contagion, something of his courage. .... Johnson, time and again, walks up to almost every anxiety and fear the human heart can feel. As he puts his hands directly upon it and looks at it closely, the lion’s skin falls off, and we often find beneath it only a donkey, maybe only a frame of wood. This is why we so often find ourselves laughing as we read what he has to say. We laugh partly through sheer relief.”
“I am in the midst of a Samuel Johnson bender and was wondering what your take is on Dr. Johnson. Do you like him? Does he move you? (I have just finished Bate's biography of Johnson and found the overview of Johnson's work on Shakespeare amazing.)”
Lucky fellow. A Johnson bender is my kind of dissipation. Almost two years ago, in the first post I wrote for Anecdotal Evidence, I described Johnson as “one of the tutelary spirits of this blog,” and hardly a week has passed without the great man making an appearance. I went on to quote Boswell quoting Johnson in Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides:
“I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.”
So, Johnson helped name this blog, and his preference for anecdotes over “system” continues to inform it. That goes to the heart of my attraction to Johnson – his bluffness, common sense and distaste for pretension or any species of bullshit (one of his definitions for cant is “a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms”). Writing about books ought to be a straightforward business, a sharing and fine-tuning of enthusiasms and aversions. For me, that has always been the case. I never aim for theoretical consistency. Reading, first and always, is about love, and there’s no figuring that out. For Johnson, the membrane between life and letters is highly permeable. Consider his July 18, 1780, letter to Hester Maria Thrale, better known as “Queeney,” when she was not yet 16 years old:
“When you read alone read diligently, they who do not read can have nothing to think, and little to say. When you can get proper company talk freely and cheerfully, it is often by talking [or blogging] that we come to know the value of what we have read, to separate it with distinctness, and fix it in the memory. Never delight yourself with the dignity of silence or the superiority of inattention. To be silent or to be negligent are so easy, neither can give any claim to praise, and there is no human being so mean or useless, but his approbation and benevolence is to be desired.”
Imagine, as a teenager, having received such a letter -- to be treated with such respect and devotion, to be told without pussyfooting or condescension that “they who do not read can have nothing to think.” An obvious truth but one ignored by too many parents, teachers and others purporting to be allies of children. That’s another reason for loving Johnson – his alacrity to teach, to share his experience, strength and hope, with a teenage girl or a middle-aged man. “Do you like him? Does he move you?” The questions are well-intentioned but inadequate. W. Jackson Bate, Johnson’s second-best biographer, put it like this, and try to think of another writer about whom the same might be said:
“One of the first effects he has on us is that we find ourselves catching, by contagion, something of his courage. .... Johnson, time and again, walks up to almost every anxiety and fear the human heart can feel. As he puts his hands directly upon it and looks at it closely, the lion’s skin falls off, and we often find beneath it only a donkey, maybe only a frame of wood. This is why we so often find ourselves laughing as we read what he has to say. We laugh partly through sheer relief.”
Thursday, December 20, 2007
`Infamous Greeting-Card Stores'
Two weeks ago I placed an order for three books, among them a volume I wished to give as a Christmas present, with Amazon.com. A prompt e-mail informed me my books would not be delivered until late in January, so I cancelled the book intended as a gift and bought it from a chain bookstore in Houston. On Wednesday I received another e-mail from Amazon.com saying one of the books I had ordered for myself, Time's Covenant: Selected Poems, by Eric Ormsby, could not be shipped:
“Though we had expected to be able to send this item to you, we've since found that it is not available from any of our sources at this time. We realize this is disappointing news to hear, and we apologize for the inconvenience we have caused you.”
“Disappointing,” yes, but also baffling. Time’s Covenant was published in October 2006 by Biblioasis, of Windsor, Ontario, Canada – that is, south of Detroit, in a much-touted era of free trade and globalization. It remains in print. Ormsby is an American and long-time resident of Canada now living in London. He is also among our finest living poets. I reordered his book from Amazon.ca (the Canadian cousin), and they expect to ship it between Jan. 16 and Jan. 30.
Edward Dahlberg was a formidably bookish writer, and his bitchy, acerbic letters are collected in Epitaphs of Our Time. On Dec. 2, 1958, Dahlberg wrote to Robert M. Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago (where he abolished the school’s football program) and founder of the Great Books Curricula:
“Since publishing became luxurious see what has happened to bookshops. They are infamous greeting-card stores, littered with trash. The only decent and civilized people left in the books business are those who have shambly stores on Fourth Avenue. Do I want La Rochefoucauld, Saint-Simon, La Bruyère or Dio, and I am being literal, I have to go to used-book dealers. Should I desire to procure Strabo or the elder Pliny or Alexander von Humboldt, do you imagine I should have the least luck in buying these on Fifth Avenue? Suppose I desire Whiston’s translations of Jewish Antiquities by Josephus, where do I get it, in a meretricious book house which looks like a Greyhound bus – or in the shabby stalls on Fourth Avenue? I have found a rare Guerrera, a fifteenth-century Spanish monk who did some marvelous chapters of Heliogabalus and Otho, in an immense loft glutted with all sorts of volumes that would entice a fevered brain. You can’t even get literary staples in the new, gimcrack bookshops, Ruskin, Burton, Coleridge’s Letters, Sartor Resartus, the City of God by St. Augustine.”
“Though we had expected to be able to send this item to you, we've since found that it is not available from any of our sources at this time. We realize this is disappointing news to hear, and we apologize for the inconvenience we have caused you.”
“Disappointing,” yes, but also baffling. Time’s Covenant was published in October 2006 by Biblioasis, of Windsor, Ontario, Canada – that is, south of Detroit, in a much-touted era of free trade and globalization. It remains in print. Ormsby is an American and long-time resident of Canada now living in London. He is also among our finest living poets. I reordered his book from Amazon.ca (the Canadian cousin), and they expect to ship it between Jan. 16 and Jan. 30.
Edward Dahlberg was a formidably bookish writer, and his bitchy, acerbic letters are collected in Epitaphs of Our Time. On Dec. 2, 1958, Dahlberg wrote to Robert M. Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago (where he abolished the school’s football program) and founder of the Great Books Curricula:
“Since publishing became luxurious see what has happened to bookshops. They are infamous greeting-card stores, littered with trash. The only decent and civilized people left in the books business are those who have shambly stores on Fourth Avenue. Do I want La Rochefoucauld, Saint-Simon, La Bruyère or Dio, and I am being literal, I have to go to used-book dealers. Should I desire to procure Strabo or the elder Pliny or Alexander von Humboldt, do you imagine I should have the least luck in buying these on Fifth Avenue? Suppose I desire Whiston’s translations of Jewish Antiquities by Josephus, where do I get it, in a meretricious book house which looks like a Greyhound bus – or in the shabby stalls on Fourth Avenue? I have found a rare Guerrera, a fifteenth-century Spanish monk who did some marvelous chapters of Heliogabalus and Otho, in an immense loft glutted with all sorts of volumes that would entice a fevered brain. You can’t even get literary staples in the new, gimcrack bookshops, Ruskin, Burton, Coleridge’s Letters, Sartor Resartus, the City of God by St. Augustine.”
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
`A World of Figures'
Reading Shakespeare becomes habitual and comforting, like visiting your brother and resuming an interrupted conversation. We experience effortless recognition. No need to recalibrate or make allowances. Just talk or read, and understanding, if not agreement, follows. I’ve returned to Henry IV, Part I, and marvel at its comprehensiveness. So far as we know, Shakespeare never served as a soldier, yet his imagination was so inclusive, his characters embodied every understanding of war, heroism and honor. For the aptly named Hotspur, in Act I, Scene 3, honor is the supreme virtue:
“By heaven methinks it were an easy leap,
To pluck bright honor from the pale-fac’d moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honour by the locks,
So he that doth redeem her thence might wear
Without corrival all her dignities.
But out upon this half-fac’d fellowship.”
Worcester replies:
“He apprehends a world of figures here,
But not the form of what he should attend.”
By the end of the play, Hotspur has died in battle. In Act V, Scene 1, Sir John Falstaff, who embodies a species of cowardice wedded to a powerful love of life, finds the body:
“Well, ‘tis no matter, honour pricks me on; yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? how then? can honour set to a leg? no, or an arm? No, or take away the grief of a wound? no, honour hath no skill in surgery then? no, what is honour? a word, what is in that word honour? air, a trim reckoning. Who hath it? he that died a’Wednesday, doth he feel it? no, doth he hear it? no ‘tis insensible then? yea, to the dead, but will it not live with the living? no, why? detraction will not suffer it, therefore I’ll none of it, honor is a mere scutcheon, and so ends my Catechism.”
In talk of war, Hotspurs and Falstaffs predominate. The stance of each is uncomplicated, immoderate, resistant to nuance and appealing in simplicity and self-righteousness. No need to bother with ethical niceties. Both speak, long-windedly, in bumper stickers. Shakespeare endorses neither man’s intemperance. He contains more multitudes than Whitman.
“By heaven methinks it were an easy leap,
To pluck bright honor from the pale-fac’d moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honour by the locks,
So he that doth redeem her thence might wear
Without corrival all her dignities.
But out upon this half-fac’d fellowship.”
Worcester replies:
“He apprehends a world of figures here,
But not the form of what he should attend.”
By the end of the play, Hotspur has died in battle. In Act V, Scene 1, Sir John Falstaff, who embodies a species of cowardice wedded to a powerful love of life, finds the body:
“Well, ‘tis no matter, honour pricks me on; yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? how then? can honour set to a leg? no, or an arm? No, or take away the grief of a wound? no, honour hath no skill in surgery then? no, what is honour? a word, what is in that word honour? air, a trim reckoning. Who hath it? he that died a’Wednesday, doth he feel it? no, doth he hear it? no ‘tis insensible then? yea, to the dead, but will it not live with the living? no, why? detraction will not suffer it, therefore I’ll none of it, honor is a mere scutcheon, and so ends my Catechism.”
In talk of war, Hotspurs and Falstaffs predominate. The stance of each is uncomplicated, immoderate, resistant to nuance and appealing in simplicity and self-righteousness. No need to bother with ethical niceties. Both speak, long-windedly, in bumper stickers. Shakespeare endorses neither man’s intemperance. He contains more multitudes than Whitman.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
`He Was Little or Nothing But Life'
But for a brief burst of sunlight in the afternoon, Sunday was what Thoreau called “a dark-aired winter day,” even in Houston. The high was 53 degrees, the low 34 – a range dismissed as balmy at hardier latitudes. People here have been wrapped in mittens, boots and scarves since October, while I drive coatless with the windows down. The air is cool and the stink of pollution less pronounced. I tormented myself reading what Thoreau had written in his journal on Dec. 20, 1854:
“It has been a glorious winter day, its elements so simple, -- the sharp clear air, the white snow everywhere covering the earth, and the polished ice. Cold as it is, the sun seems warmer on my back even than in summer, as if its rays met with less obstruction. And then the air is so beautifully still; there is not an insect in the air, and hardly a leaf to rustle.”
How I love the quiet, clarity and long blue shadows of a winter’s day in the North. Nostrils tingle and eyes water, as though every sense has to work harder in the cold sunlight. Late Sunday afternoon, returning from my 7-year-old’s Cub Scout meeting, where we baked gingerbread men in an overheated church kitchen, I noticed a moth clinging to the back door of our house, sheltered from the wind. It was brown-gray, the color of squirrel fur, and big as a thumbnail. I touched the back and it flexed in slow motion, as though shuddering. I remembered the word “torpid” and a walk I took once in a woods in upstate New York, probably in February, a very different season from December. The snow glistened but stayed crunchy in the afternoon sunlight. The only animals I had seen were “LBJ’s” – a birder’s term for undifferentiated “little brown jobbers.”
I stopped by the tall stump of an elm. Most of its bark had fallen off. I peeled back the remaining piece and uncovered a large gray moth, four or five times the size of his Houston cousin. He, too, trembled, exposed to the sunlight and frigid air. He fanned his outer wings and exposed the gaudy pink beneath. It was like prying open an oyster shell and not expecting the nacre’s rainbow. I knew my idle blundering had condemned it to an unseasonable death. The shortest sentence in Virginia Woolf’s essay, “The Death of the Moth,” came to mind: “He was little or nothing but life.”
I gently opened and closed our back door and told the kids to stay away as I started preparing dinner. I remembered the moth later, near sundown, and slowly opened the door. He was gone and not among the brown leaves on the doormat. Here’s what Thoreau wrote in his journal on Christmas Day, 1856:
“Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”
“It has been a glorious winter day, its elements so simple, -- the sharp clear air, the white snow everywhere covering the earth, and the polished ice. Cold as it is, the sun seems warmer on my back even than in summer, as if its rays met with less obstruction. And then the air is so beautifully still; there is not an insect in the air, and hardly a leaf to rustle.”
How I love the quiet, clarity and long blue shadows of a winter’s day in the North. Nostrils tingle and eyes water, as though every sense has to work harder in the cold sunlight. Late Sunday afternoon, returning from my 7-year-old’s Cub Scout meeting, where we baked gingerbread men in an overheated church kitchen, I noticed a moth clinging to the back door of our house, sheltered from the wind. It was brown-gray, the color of squirrel fur, and big as a thumbnail. I touched the back and it flexed in slow motion, as though shuddering. I remembered the word “torpid” and a walk I took once in a woods in upstate New York, probably in February, a very different season from December. The snow glistened but stayed crunchy in the afternoon sunlight. The only animals I had seen were “LBJ’s” – a birder’s term for undifferentiated “little brown jobbers.”
I stopped by the tall stump of an elm. Most of its bark had fallen off. I peeled back the remaining piece and uncovered a large gray moth, four or five times the size of his Houston cousin. He, too, trembled, exposed to the sunlight and frigid air. He fanned his outer wings and exposed the gaudy pink beneath. It was like prying open an oyster shell and not expecting the nacre’s rainbow. I knew my idle blundering had condemned it to an unseasonable death. The shortest sentence in Virginia Woolf’s essay, “The Death of the Moth,” came to mind: “He was little or nothing but life.”
I gently opened and closed our back door and told the kids to stay away as I started preparing dinner. I remembered the moth later, near sundown, and slowly opened the door. He was gone and not among the brown leaves on the doormat. Here’s what Thoreau wrote in his journal on Christmas Day, 1856:
“Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”
Monday, December 17, 2007
`The Best Talk is Artless'
Spending almost 30 years as a journalist and out of professional necessity talking and listening to thousands of strangers, often at the most desperate moments in their lives, and advancing the conversation to the point where they volunteer the insight or information you’ve been waiting for, constitutes the finest therapy money cannot buy. Most reporters, like most of us generally, start out moderately introverted. With time, they develop a professional extroversion, a form of self-confidence that permits them to encourage confidence in their sources. They don’t necessarily become gregarious, the life of the damn party, but they are no longer hobbled by shyness or timidity. Some, and I’m among them, acquire a taste for good conversation.
One of the great reporters, one of the few to transcend daily journalism and turn it into literature, was Joseph Mitchell, long of The New Yorker and best friend of the equally great A.J. Liebling. Seldom does a season pass without my return to them, sometimes for a fondly remembered passage, sometimes for all of, say, Old Mr. Flood. From them, and their confrere Whitney Balliett, I learned the art of the sentence. In the following excerpt from Mitchell’s My Ears Are Bent (1938), his first book, a selection of pre-New Yorker newspaper pieces, he writes:
“Do not get the idea, however, that I am outraged by ear-benders. The only people I do not care to listen to are society women, industrial leaders, distinguished authors, ministers, explorers, moving picture actors (except W.C. Fields and Stepin Fetchit), and any actress under the age of thirty-five. I believe the most interesting human beings, so far as talk is concerned, are anthropologists, farmers, prostitutes, psychiatrists, and an occasional bartender. The best talk is artless, the talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves, women in the sun grouped around baby carriages, talking about their weeks in the hospital or the way meat has gone up, or men in saloons, talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels.”
That’s the sort of therapy I was talking about. The humanity is obvious, but it never spills over into a self-congratulatory display of sensitivity. Humor undercuts what might otherwise be mistaken for folksy, proletariat-slumming romanticism, especially in a passage dating from the highly politicized nineteen-thirties. Mitchell and Liebling, not Strunk and White, shadowed me through my years as a newspaper reporter, and they still hover nearby. When Mitchell died in 1996, I wrote a memorial column for my newspaper in upstate New York. Here’s how it starts:
“I learned of Joseph Mitchell’s death in the kindest possible manner – from a fellow admirer of the great New Yorker writer.
“That was May 25, the day after Mitchell died in his beloved New York City at the age of 87. Afterward, numb and sad in a way that can only be assuaged by time, I drove my son to Lock 7 [of the Erie Canal] in Niskayuna, to watch the sun set on the river and to talk with the fishermen.
“Mitchell loved fishermen and life along the water, and inevitably I recalled the opening line from `Up in the Old Hotel,’ which always reminds me of Ishmael’s apologia for going to sea on the first page of Moby-Dick:
“`Every now and then, seeking to rid my mind of thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go down to the Fulton Fish Market.'”
And here’s the conclusion:
“Toward sunset at Lock 7, my son and I spoke with three Puerto Rican men who had been fishing and gabbing since 7 a.m. They’d caught buckets of fish, and returned them all to the Mohawk [River].
“My Spanish is shabby and their English was only slightly better, but one of the guys joked about opening a pescaderia – a fish market.
“Joe Mitchell lives.”
I was puzzled Sunday afternoon when I couldn’t find this column in my Mitchell file. I took a copy of McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon from the shelf and there it was, tucked among the brown pages. A few days after the column appeared, I ran into the former editor of my newspaper, a funny, deeply cynical man, at a jazz club in town. He had retired before I joined the staff but we shared an enthusiasm for jazz, journalism and Italian cuisine. He had enjoyed the column and insisted I accept his copy of McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon. Until then I had thought Buddy Otaviano’s reading consisted exclusively of paperback mysteries, but he loved Mitchell. Buddy died a few years later.
Joe Mitchell lives.
One of the great reporters, one of the few to transcend daily journalism and turn it into literature, was Joseph Mitchell, long of The New Yorker and best friend of the equally great A.J. Liebling. Seldom does a season pass without my return to them, sometimes for a fondly remembered passage, sometimes for all of, say, Old Mr. Flood. From them, and their confrere Whitney Balliett, I learned the art of the sentence. In the following excerpt from Mitchell’s My Ears Are Bent (1938), his first book, a selection of pre-New Yorker newspaper pieces, he writes:
“Do not get the idea, however, that I am outraged by ear-benders. The only people I do not care to listen to are society women, industrial leaders, distinguished authors, ministers, explorers, moving picture actors (except W.C. Fields and Stepin Fetchit), and any actress under the age of thirty-five. I believe the most interesting human beings, so far as talk is concerned, are anthropologists, farmers, prostitutes, psychiatrists, and an occasional bartender. The best talk is artless, the talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves, women in the sun grouped around baby carriages, talking about their weeks in the hospital or the way meat has gone up, or men in saloons, talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels.”
That’s the sort of therapy I was talking about. The humanity is obvious, but it never spills over into a self-congratulatory display of sensitivity. Humor undercuts what might otherwise be mistaken for folksy, proletariat-slumming romanticism, especially in a passage dating from the highly politicized nineteen-thirties. Mitchell and Liebling, not Strunk and White, shadowed me through my years as a newspaper reporter, and they still hover nearby. When Mitchell died in 1996, I wrote a memorial column for my newspaper in upstate New York. Here’s how it starts:
“I learned of Joseph Mitchell’s death in the kindest possible manner – from a fellow admirer of the great New Yorker writer.
“That was May 25, the day after Mitchell died in his beloved New York City at the age of 87. Afterward, numb and sad in a way that can only be assuaged by time, I drove my son to Lock 7 [of the Erie Canal] in Niskayuna, to watch the sun set on the river and to talk with the fishermen.
“Mitchell loved fishermen and life along the water, and inevitably I recalled the opening line from `Up in the Old Hotel,’ which always reminds me of Ishmael’s apologia for going to sea on the first page of Moby-Dick:
“`Every now and then, seeking to rid my mind of thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go down to the Fulton Fish Market.'”
And here’s the conclusion:
“Toward sunset at Lock 7, my son and I spoke with three Puerto Rican men who had been fishing and gabbing since 7 a.m. They’d caught buckets of fish, and returned them all to the Mohawk [River].
“My Spanish is shabby and their English was only slightly better, but one of the guys joked about opening a pescaderia – a fish market.
“Joe Mitchell lives.”
I was puzzled Sunday afternoon when I couldn’t find this column in my Mitchell file. I took a copy of McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon from the shelf and there it was, tucked among the brown pages. A few days after the column appeared, I ran into the former editor of my newspaper, a funny, deeply cynical man, at a jazz club in town. He had retired before I joined the staff but we shared an enthusiasm for jazz, journalism and Italian cuisine. He had enjoyed the column and insisted I accept his copy of McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon. Until then I had thought Buddy Otaviano’s reading consisted exclusively of paperback mysteries, but he loved Mitchell. Buddy died a few years later.
Joe Mitchell lives.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
`A Nut-Job Blog Before the Fact'
My most embarrassing bookish moment occurred 31 years ago, in a diner in Lakewood, Ohio. I was seated in the corner booth by the front window, for the light. Open on the table in front of me was the plump New Directions edition of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, the one with the pumpkin-colored cover that today collects dust on my shelf. The pages on view were from the late sections Pound published in the nineteen-fifties, the pages on which Chinese characters outnumber words printed in the Roman alphabet. I’d been wooing a waitress, unsuccessfully, with winning smiles and tips I couldn’t afford. Now I hoped to impress her with my nonexistent knowledge of Asian languages.
While filling my coffee cup she noticed the Chinese characters and asked, “Can you read that?” With boyish modesty I responded with something like, “Oh, that? Sure, that’s pretty simple.” And she said, “So read it to me. What does that say?” My precise answer I no longer recall but it amounted to, “My Mandarin must be getting a little rusty.” She laughed and called me a liar and continued laughing as she re-entered the kitchen, and I’ve never set foot in that diner again. That night I got even drunker than usual.
I rehash my humiliation because of Clive James’ essay, “The Arrow Has Not Two Points,” in the December issue of Poetry, in which the author of Cultural Amnesia reevaluates his one-time devotion to Pound’s Cantos, and then reevaluates his reevaluation. It’s a critic’s unusually candid inspection of his own evolving critical standards:
“When I fell out of love with the Cantos I fell all the way out, but one of my critical principles, such as they are, is to take account of the history of my critical opinions, on the further principle that they have never existed in some timeless zone apart from the man who held them, but have always been attached to him, like his hair, or, lately, like his baldness. There is a promising analogy there, somewhere: my hair yielded baldness as my enthusiasms yielded disenchantment. First the one thing, then the other, and the second thing clearly definable only in terms of the first.”
This is useful and possibly unprecedented. Readers and critics, myself included, seldom possess the honesty and willingness to chronicle and evaluate their own critical histories. I feel a strong, pride-driven instinct to cover my tracks, to distance myself thoroughly from previous enthusiasms that now embarrass me. I once genuinely enjoyed the fiction of Robert Coover. Today, “The Babysitter” seems shallow and puerile, unfit for grownups. I once pretended to admire and enjoy Juan Goytisolo, the Spanish novelist, when in fact I found him empty, dull and occasionally offensive. I think such dishonesty and posturing is especially common among devotees of much “experimental” writing, as I fancied myself at the time. I’m reminded of an English professor I knew who claimed to love Charles Olson and Albert Ayler. Such a stance is essentially an adolescent: “I like and understand this difficult, transgressive avant-garde work and you don’t, which makes you a reactionary and not terribly bright bourgeois.” James continues:
“But just as we can scrutinize the aging remains of our bodies in the mirror and decide that these loose remnants would not even be here to be looked at if we had not been strong and healthy when we were young, so we can look back to when we were wrong, and decide whether we were as wrong as all that. Youth and health have their virtues even in envious retrospect, and perhaps some of our early and ridiculous appreciations were pure and nourishing. Maybe, that is, we later overcorrected, like one of those terrible old men who write articles against the sexual laxity of youth when they are no longer capable of pursuing their notorious careers as indiscriminate lechers. Maybe we overdid the disillusionment.”
James’ candor is refreshing. He’s not waffling or qualifying his reevaluation of Pound. Here’s the beginning of his next sentence:
“In the case of the Cantos, I don't think I did. I think I can nowadays go right through the long text of that doomed project and show that although it has some arresting passages, they are not quite as arresting as their author meant them to be, and indeed claimed them to be by the way he chose their diction and set them into position. I hasten to admit that for my younger self the claims seemed valid, and that I could not have been more arrested if I had been caught breaking into a liquor store.”
Read the whole essay for a first-rate demolition of this imposing, sacrosanct Modernist cathedral, though parts of it may make you uncomfortable:
“To the end of his life, [Pound] went on believing that if he could just define every aspect of existence clearly enough, it would all add up. Not all that far in the future, his central belief would be echoed all over the Internet, and really the Cantos is, or are—or perhaps was or were—a nut-job blog before the fact.”
While filling my coffee cup she noticed the Chinese characters and asked, “Can you read that?” With boyish modesty I responded with something like, “Oh, that? Sure, that’s pretty simple.” And she said, “So read it to me. What does that say?” My precise answer I no longer recall but it amounted to, “My Mandarin must be getting a little rusty.” She laughed and called me a liar and continued laughing as she re-entered the kitchen, and I’ve never set foot in that diner again. That night I got even drunker than usual.
I rehash my humiliation because of Clive James’ essay, “The Arrow Has Not Two Points,” in the December issue of Poetry, in which the author of Cultural Amnesia reevaluates his one-time devotion to Pound’s Cantos, and then reevaluates his reevaluation. It’s a critic’s unusually candid inspection of his own evolving critical standards:
“When I fell out of love with the Cantos I fell all the way out, but one of my critical principles, such as they are, is to take account of the history of my critical opinions, on the further principle that they have never existed in some timeless zone apart from the man who held them, but have always been attached to him, like his hair, or, lately, like his baldness. There is a promising analogy there, somewhere: my hair yielded baldness as my enthusiasms yielded disenchantment. First the one thing, then the other, and the second thing clearly definable only in terms of the first.”
This is useful and possibly unprecedented. Readers and critics, myself included, seldom possess the honesty and willingness to chronicle and evaluate their own critical histories. I feel a strong, pride-driven instinct to cover my tracks, to distance myself thoroughly from previous enthusiasms that now embarrass me. I once genuinely enjoyed the fiction of Robert Coover. Today, “The Babysitter” seems shallow and puerile, unfit for grownups. I once pretended to admire and enjoy Juan Goytisolo, the Spanish novelist, when in fact I found him empty, dull and occasionally offensive. I think such dishonesty and posturing is especially common among devotees of much “experimental” writing, as I fancied myself at the time. I’m reminded of an English professor I knew who claimed to love Charles Olson and Albert Ayler. Such a stance is essentially an adolescent: “I like and understand this difficult, transgressive avant-garde work and you don’t, which makes you a reactionary and not terribly bright bourgeois.” James continues:
“But just as we can scrutinize the aging remains of our bodies in the mirror and decide that these loose remnants would not even be here to be looked at if we had not been strong and healthy when we were young, so we can look back to when we were wrong, and decide whether we were as wrong as all that. Youth and health have their virtues even in envious retrospect, and perhaps some of our early and ridiculous appreciations were pure and nourishing. Maybe, that is, we later overcorrected, like one of those terrible old men who write articles against the sexual laxity of youth when they are no longer capable of pursuing their notorious careers as indiscriminate lechers. Maybe we overdid the disillusionment.”
James’ candor is refreshing. He’s not waffling or qualifying his reevaluation of Pound. Here’s the beginning of his next sentence:
“In the case of the Cantos, I don't think I did. I think I can nowadays go right through the long text of that doomed project and show that although it has some arresting passages, they are not quite as arresting as their author meant them to be, and indeed claimed them to be by the way he chose their diction and set them into position. I hasten to admit that for my younger self the claims seemed valid, and that I could not have been more arrested if I had been caught breaking into a liquor store.”
Read the whole essay for a first-rate demolition of this imposing, sacrosanct Modernist cathedral, though parts of it may make you uncomfortable:
“To the end of his life, [Pound] went on believing that if he could just define every aspect of existence clearly enough, it would all add up. Not all that far in the future, his central belief would be echoed all over the Internet, and really the Cantos is, or are—or perhaps was or were—a nut-job blog before the fact.”
Saturday, December 15, 2007
`I Have to Hear Prose to Feel It'
August Kleinzahler, a poet and stylish prose writer, sounds like an adventuresome reader when he touts the charms of Jean-Henri Fabre on arthropods, Gould and Pyle’s classic Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (1896) and Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts. In his Paris Review interview (Fall 2007) he confesses to not being “a big fiction reader,” and says he prefers stories to novels and, implicitly, nonfiction and poetry to fiction:
“I like shorter forms, a lot of bang for the buck, a lot of action in the diction, syntax, sentences. I think a poet works so closely with language that it’s easy to become impatient with the larger, more diffuse structures a novelist needs to develop his material.”
I sympathize, and the sympathy may be rooted in age. Kleinzahler is my senior by three years. In my teens and twenties I was a trencherman of the book shelves, swallowing if not digesting everything, but I’ve lost my iron gut or perhaps my palate has grown more sensitive. Either way, I have little taste for prose padding, the flavorless filler fleshing out most fiction. I don’t think Kleinzahler is dismissing longer forms in general, though he claims to find Henry James “cloying.” I find in James precisely what Kleinzahler is calling for: “a lot of action in the diction, syntax, sentences.” He has interesting and unexpected things to say about a recently dead Irish writer whom I admire, John McGahern:
“His sentences are musically delicious and coherent. I have to hear prose to feel it. The critic Kenneth Cox talked about how language tastes, the vowels and consonants and movement of it in the mouth. One spits out what one doesn’t like. McGahern’s prose tastes delicious. A lot of fiction writers are plot and character driven, and I don’t really care that much about the story or the character, although I do have a soft spot for good description. I like fiction that’s closely written.”
Kleinzahler could be describing fiction writers as different as Bellow and Beckett. Both, like Dickens and Joyce, are delicious. So, even in translation, are Per Petterson, whose Out Stealing I recently read, and the stories of Isaac Babel. In the wrong hands, “closely written” fiction quickly turns precious and purple. Even The Unnamable never dispenses entirely with plot and character. It’s Kleinzahler’s omnivorous spirit I wish to celebrate. Here’s what he says when asked to name prose writers he admires:
“Joseph Mitchell. That’s the kind of writing I really love. I enjoy Liebling’s fight writing. A great enthusiasm of mine is David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film. His other books don’t interest me but his dictionary entries are magnificent. I like compendia. Nicolas Slonimsky’s dictionary of musicians is a favorite of mine. I love many of the old New Yorker writers. Whitney Balliett was one of the great American writers. Conversely I find Roger Angell’s articles about baseball unreadable. Perhaps there’s something arch lurking in the tone, a man of letters slumming. People have a snobbish thing about journalism, but what I love, what I read mostly, is nonfiction. I’m on a Kenneth Tynan jag now. His profiles are heaven.”
“I like shorter forms, a lot of bang for the buck, a lot of action in the diction, syntax, sentences. I think a poet works so closely with language that it’s easy to become impatient with the larger, more diffuse structures a novelist needs to develop his material.”
I sympathize, and the sympathy may be rooted in age. Kleinzahler is my senior by three years. In my teens and twenties I was a trencherman of the book shelves, swallowing if not digesting everything, but I’ve lost my iron gut or perhaps my palate has grown more sensitive. Either way, I have little taste for prose padding, the flavorless filler fleshing out most fiction. I don’t think Kleinzahler is dismissing longer forms in general, though he claims to find Henry James “cloying.” I find in James precisely what Kleinzahler is calling for: “a lot of action in the diction, syntax, sentences.” He has interesting and unexpected things to say about a recently dead Irish writer whom I admire, John McGahern:
“His sentences are musically delicious and coherent. I have to hear prose to feel it. The critic Kenneth Cox talked about how language tastes, the vowels and consonants and movement of it in the mouth. One spits out what one doesn’t like. McGahern’s prose tastes delicious. A lot of fiction writers are plot and character driven, and I don’t really care that much about the story or the character, although I do have a soft spot for good description. I like fiction that’s closely written.”
Kleinzahler could be describing fiction writers as different as Bellow and Beckett. Both, like Dickens and Joyce, are delicious. So, even in translation, are Per Petterson, whose Out Stealing I recently read, and the stories of Isaac Babel. In the wrong hands, “closely written” fiction quickly turns precious and purple. Even The Unnamable never dispenses entirely with plot and character. It’s Kleinzahler’s omnivorous spirit I wish to celebrate. Here’s what he says when asked to name prose writers he admires:
“Joseph Mitchell. That’s the kind of writing I really love. I enjoy Liebling’s fight writing. A great enthusiasm of mine is David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film. His other books don’t interest me but his dictionary entries are magnificent. I like compendia. Nicolas Slonimsky’s dictionary of musicians is a favorite of mine. I love many of the old New Yorker writers. Whitney Balliett was one of the great American writers. Conversely I find Roger Angell’s articles about baseball unreadable. Perhaps there’s something arch lurking in the tone, a man of letters slumming. People have a snobbish thing about journalism, but what I love, what I read mostly, is nonfiction. I’m on a Kenneth Tynan jag now. His profiles are heaven.”
Friday, December 14, 2007
`Surrealism Prescient of the Real'
The finest poet working in English has a publisher in the United States again, and Geoffrey Hill is being well served by Yale University Press. His latest, A Treatise of Civil Power, with a title borrowed from John Milton’s 1659 pamphlet attacking the establishment of a state church, was first published in 2005 by the Clutag Press of Thame, in Oxfordshire, England, in an edition of 400 copies. That eight-poem pamphlet must be a valuable collector’s item, as it sold out and went out of print immediately. Penguin then brought out an edition in England. The new Yale edition reproduces the handsome Clutag cover and title page design, and the number of poems, most recast, has grown to 34. The title poem of the Clutag edition, its 42-stanza centerpiece, is gone, though fragments of it now stand as autonomous poems or have been mutated into other forms. Hill, as ever, is a great confounder, a crank of genius. Gone, regrettably, is Stanza XX of “A Treatise of Civil Power”:
“And Berryman – how did he slip through
this trawl of gratitude? The Dream Songs, then,
with other things; their bone-yard vaudeville,
sparkish, morose, multi-voiced monologue,
erratic tenderness to self and lovers.
A gentle courteous man, no-nonsense scholar,
badly transmitted, blarneying on location,
face-fungused wizard in a camp film.”
The love song to John Berryman is touching, though the stanza works well as self-portraiture, down to “face-fungused.” For density of sheer linguistic matter and quantity of business going on word by word, line by line, few poets since Berryman can rival Hill. Here’s “The Peacock at Alderton”:
“Nothing to tell why I cannot write
in re Nobody; nobody to narrate this
latter acknowledgement: the self that counts
words to a line, accountable survivor
pain-wedged, pinioned in the cleft trunk,
less petty than a sprite, poisonous as Ariel
to Prospero’s own knowledge. In my room
a vase of peacock feather. I will attempt
to describe them, as if for evidence
on which a life depends. Except for the eyes
they are threadbare: the threads hanging
from some laminate tough weed in February.
But those eyes – like a Greek letter,
omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl;
like a shaved cross-section of living tissue,
the edge metallic blue, the core of jet,
the white of the eye in fact closer to beige,
the whole encircled with a black-fringed green.
The peacock roosts alone on a Scots pine
at the garden end, in blustery twilight
his fulgent cloak a gathering of the dark,
the majarajah-bird that scavenges
close by the stone-troughed, stone-terraced, stone-ensurfed
Suffolk shoreline; at times displays his scream.”
No fretting, please, about meaning. First, enjoy the music: “some laminate tough weed in February,” “omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl,” “his fulgent cloak a gathering of the dark,” “stone-troughed, stone-terraced, stone-ensurfed.” Shades of Hopkins, who wrote his own, rather more conventional peacock poem, “The Peacock’s Eye:
“Mark you how the peacock's eye
Winks away its ring of green,
Barter'd for an azure dye,
And the piece that's like a bean,
The pupil, plays its liquid jet
To win a look of violet.”
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “fulgent,” a word I love, as “Shining brightly; brilliant, glittering, resplendent. Now poet. or rhetorical [read: kept current by Geoffrey Hill].” The OED cites Milton’s use of the word in Paradise Lost: “At last, as from a Cloud, his fulgent head/And shape Starr-bright appeer'd.” Old Hill hands will recognize the poet’s return to the Suffolk shoreline. Hill’s poetic home is often the littoral (from the Latin, litus, “shore”), the coast, shoreline, marsh, estuary or river bank – the amorphous zone between water and land – and he returns there with metronomic regularity. In one of his best poems, “Discourse: For Stanley Rosen,” collected in Without Title, he writes of language: “its bleak littoral swept by bursts of sunlight.” Another meeting of sun and soil comes in “An Emblem,” a stanza from the jettisoned “A Treatise of Civil Power”:
“Among the slag remonstrances of this land
memory reinterprets us, as with
a Heraclitean emblem. On a sudden,
sunslanting rain intensifies, the roses
twitch more rapidly, flights
of invisible wing-roots lift
from the lighter branches; a purple sky
ushering a rainbow. Now it is gone.”
As the web site of the Geoffrey Hill Study Centre reminds us, on its annotations page: “The dust jacket of the American edition of The Orchards of Syon has a `pen-and-wash drawing by [D.H.] Lawrence done after completing his novel The Rainbow’ -- a rainbow over a polluting mining town.” More importantly, read these eight lines aloud, relishing “slag remonstrances,” “sudden/sunslanting rain intensifies,” and the rest. Like lines of Shakespeare, Keats and Hopkins, Hill’s lines lure and pleasure the lips and tongue. Here is another new poem from A Treatise of Civil Power, “In Memoriam: Aleksander Wat”:
“O my brother, you have been well taken,
and by the writing hand most probably:
on photographs it looks to be the left,
the unlucky one. Do nothing to revive me.
“Surrealism prescient of the real;
The unendurable to be assigned
No further, voice or no voice; funérailles,
Songs of reft joy upon another planet.”
Hill adds Wat (1900-1967) to his roll call of poetic heroes, joining Milton and Ben Jonson (“my god,” Hill calls the latter). Wat was a Polish poet and one-time Communist hounded and imprisoned by Nazis and Soviets alike. Late in life, visiting in California, he recorded lengthy conversations with his countryman, Czeslaw Milosz. The transcripts were translated into English and published in 1988 as My Century. Wat, to my taste, is a middling poet, a “futurist,” but his oral memoir is a necessary document from the most bloodthirsty century in history. Hill has resurrected Wat before. In section XV of The Triumph of Love (1998), he writes:
“Flamen I draw darkly out of flame.
Lumen is a measure of light.
Lumens are not luminaries. A great
Polish luminary of our time is the obscure
Aleksander Wat.”
In Aleksander Wat: Life an Art of an Iconoclast, Tomas Venclova quotes an article written by Wat late in his life that sounds a seemingly un-Hill-ian note:
“Now I think that a return to the clear, most simple poem in a traditional form, with a theme, is not just desirable but possible. Yet what a difficult path it is, how many superstitions and small vanities have to be repudiated.”
To quote another authority, also among Hill’s enthusiasms, here are the final sentences of Milton’s A Treatise of Civil Power or, to cite the full title, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes; Showing That it Is Not Lawful For Any Power on Earth to Compel in Matters of Religion:
“Pomp and ostentation of reading is admired among the vulgar, but doubtless, in matters of religion, he is learnedest who is plainest. The brevity I use, not exceeding a small manual, will not therefore, I suppose, be thought the less considerable, unless with them, perhaps, who think that great books only can determine great matters. I rather choose the common rule, not to make much ado where less may serve, which in controversies, and those especially of religion, would make them less tedious, and by consequence read oftener by many more, and with more benefit.”
“And Berryman – how did he slip through
this trawl of gratitude? The Dream Songs, then,
with other things; their bone-yard vaudeville,
sparkish, morose, multi-voiced monologue,
erratic tenderness to self and lovers.
A gentle courteous man, no-nonsense scholar,
badly transmitted, blarneying on location,
face-fungused wizard in a camp film.”
The love song to John Berryman is touching, though the stanza works well as self-portraiture, down to “face-fungused.” For density of sheer linguistic matter and quantity of business going on word by word, line by line, few poets since Berryman can rival Hill. Here’s “The Peacock at Alderton”:
“Nothing to tell why I cannot write
in re Nobody; nobody to narrate this
latter acknowledgement: the self that counts
words to a line, accountable survivor
pain-wedged, pinioned in the cleft trunk,
less petty than a sprite, poisonous as Ariel
to Prospero’s own knowledge. In my room
a vase of peacock feather. I will attempt
to describe them, as if for evidence
on which a life depends. Except for the eyes
they are threadbare: the threads hanging
from some laminate tough weed in February.
But those eyes – like a Greek letter,
omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl;
like a shaved cross-section of living tissue,
the edge metallic blue, the core of jet,
the white of the eye in fact closer to beige,
the whole encircled with a black-fringed green.
The peacock roosts alone on a Scots pine
at the garden end, in blustery twilight
his fulgent cloak a gathering of the dark,
the majarajah-bird that scavenges
close by the stone-troughed, stone-terraced, stone-ensurfed
Suffolk shoreline; at times displays his scream.”
No fretting, please, about meaning. First, enjoy the music: “some laminate tough weed in February,” “omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl,” “his fulgent cloak a gathering of the dark,” “stone-troughed, stone-terraced, stone-ensurfed.” Shades of Hopkins, who wrote his own, rather more conventional peacock poem, “The Peacock’s Eye:
“Mark you how the peacock's eye
Winks away its ring of green,
Barter'd for an azure dye,
And the piece that's like a bean,
The pupil, plays its liquid jet
To win a look of violet.”
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “fulgent,” a word I love, as “Shining brightly; brilliant, glittering, resplendent. Now poet. or rhetorical [read: kept current by Geoffrey Hill].” The OED cites Milton’s use of the word in Paradise Lost: “At last, as from a Cloud, his fulgent head/And shape Starr-bright appeer'd.” Old Hill hands will recognize the poet’s return to the Suffolk shoreline. Hill’s poetic home is often the littoral (from the Latin, litus, “shore”), the coast, shoreline, marsh, estuary or river bank – the amorphous zone between water and land – and he returns there with metronomic regularity. In one of his best poems, “Discourse: For Stanley Rosen,” collected in Without Title, he writes of language: “its bleak littoral swept by bursts of sunlight.” Another meeting of sun and soil comes in “An Emblem,” a stanza from the jettisoned “A Treatise of Civil Power”:
“Among the slag remonstrances of this land
memory reinterprets us, as with
a Heraclitean emblem. On a sudden,
sunslanting rain intensifies, the roses
twitch more rapidly, flights
of invisible wing-roots lift
from the lighter branches; a purple sky
ushering a rainbow. Now it is gone.”
As the web site of the Geoffrey Hill Study Centre reminds us, on its annotations page: “The dust jacket of the American edition of The Orchards of Syon has a `pen-and-wash drawing by [D.H.] Lawrence done after completing his novel The Rainbow’ -- a rainbow over a polluting mining town.” More importantly, read these eight lines aloud, relishing “slag remonstrances,” “sudden/sunslanting rain intensifies,” and the rest. Like lines of Shakespeare, Keats and Hopkins, Hill’s lines lure and pleasure the lips and tongue. Here is another new poem from A Treatise of Civil Power, “In Memoriam: Aleksander Wat”:
“O my brother, you have been well taken,
and by the writing hand most probably:
on photographs it looks to be the left,
the unlucky one. Do nothing to revive me.
“Surrealism prescient of the real;
The unendurable to be assigned
No further, voice or no voice; funérailles,
Songs of reft joy upon another planet.”
Hill adds Wat (1900-1967) to his roll call of poetic heroes, joining Milton and Ben Jonson (“my god,” Hill calls the latter). Wat was a Polish poet and one-time Communist hounded and imprisoned by Nazis and Soviets alike. Late in life, visiting in California, he recorded lengthy conversations with his countryman, Czeslaw Milosz. The transcripts were translated into English and published in 1988 as My Century. Wat, to my taste, is a middling poet, a “futurist,” but his oral memoir is a necessary document from the most bloodthirsty century in history. Hill has resurrected Wat before. In section XV of The Triumph of Love (1998), he writes:
“Flamen I draw darkly out of flame.
Lumen is a measure of light.
Lumens are not luminaries. A great
Polish luminary of our time is the obscure
Aleksander Wat.”
In Aleksander Wat: Life an Art of an Iconoclast, Tomas Venclova quotes an article written by Wat late in his life that sounds a seemingly un-Hill-ian note:
“Now I think that a return to the clear, most simple poem in a traditional form, with a theme, is not just desirable but possible. Yet what a difficult path it is, how many superstitions and small vanities have to be repudiated.”
To quote another authority, also among Hill’s enthusiasms, here are the final sentences of Milton’s A Treatise of Civil Power or, to cite the full title, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes; Showing That it Is Not Lawful For Any Power on Earth to Compel in Matters of Religion:
“Pomp and ostentation of reading is admired among the vulgar, but doubtless, in matters of religion, he is learnedest who is plainest. The brevity I use, not exceeding a small manual, will not therefore, I suppose, be thought the less considerable, unless with them, perhaps, who think that great books only can determine great matters. I rather choose the common rule, not to make much ado where less may serve, which in controversies, and those especially of religion, would make them less tedious, and by consequence read oftener by many more, and with more benefit.”
Thursday, December 13, 2007
`But I Hate Being Entertained'
In the last year or so I’ve been obligated to read a number of novels because I agreed to review them for newspapers. Most were awful in a peculiarly pretentious way, top-heavy with over-heated ideas but empty of character, life and interesting prose. Often, despite a hyperactive plot, nothing of consequence happens and the result is interminable, inert verbiage. I think, in ascending order of awfulness, of Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker, Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero, and Denis Johnson’s The Tree of Smoke, the last nothing more than a tarted-up thriller and the dullest novel I’ve read since the last time I read a Denis Johnson novel. I’ve been despairing of contemporary fiction, wondering why trash garners awards, reading past masters and waiting for the next Cynthia Ozick or Marilynne Robinson title to appear.
Somewhere I learned of Out Stealing Horse, by Per Petterson, a Norwegian. The narrator is Trond Sander, a 67-year-old a widower who has moved from Oslo into a small house outside a village near the Swedish border. For a novel devoted to the ever-presentness of the past, in which little seems to happen, Out Stealing Horses generates its own quiet, compelling sense of momentum. Early in the novel, after Sonder realizes one of his neighbors is a childhood acquaintance, he comments on the unlikelihood of such a thing happening in real life rather than fiction:
“Lars is Lars even though I saw him last when he was ten years old, and now he’s past sixty, and if this had been something in a novel it would just have been irritating. I have in fact done a lot of reading particularly during the last few years, but earlier too, by all means, and I have thought about what I’ve read, and that kind of coincidence seems far-fetched in fiction, in modern novels anyway, and I find it hard to accept. It may be all very well in Dickens, but when you read Dickens you’re reading a long ballad from a vanished world, where everything has to come together in the end like an equation, where the balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile again. A consolation, maybe, or a protest against a world gone off the rails, but it is not like that any more, my world is not like that, and I have never gone along with those who believe our lives are governed by fate. They whine, they wash their hands and crave pity. I believe we shape our lives ourselves, at any rate I have shaped mine, for what it’s worth, and I take complete responsibility. But of all the places I might have moved to, I had to land up precisely here.”
Sentence for sentence (as translated by Anne Born), Petterson gives us much to admire. I hear echoes of Beckett, especially Malone Dies, in the halting eloquence of the voice. There’s self-reflexiveness, an awareness of fictional artifice, but it’s not irritatingly clever or self-congratulatory. One can accept an aging, thoughtful, literate man regretting that life does not quite measure up to the resolutions in Dickens. After such a lovely phrase, “a long ballad from a vanished world,” think of Little Dorritt. And consider how he rejects the notion of fate while slowly perceiving its dominion over his life. Ten pages after the passage quoted above, Sander sharpens his chain saw and muses:
“I don’t know where I learned to do this. Presumably I have seen it on film; a documentary about the great forests or a feature film with a forestry setting. You can learn a lot from films if you have a good memory, watch how people do things and have done them always, but there is not much real work in modern films, there are only ideas. Thin ideas and something they call humour, everything has to be a laugh now. But I hate being entertained, I don’t have any time for it.”
Much matter is compacted in five sentences. Sander, who owns a car, a chainsaw, a radio and a dog, has nothing but time on his hands. We understand his impatience with the “entertainment industry,” its dedication to trivia. Laughs, for its characters and the reader, are rare in Out Stealing Horses, which is closer in spirit to Wild Strawberries than Star Wars.
At his blog on Wednesday, Terry Teachout quoted the Hungarian composer Miklós Rózsa: “I have no time for any music which does not stimulate pleasure in life, and, even more importantly, pride in life.”" Paradoxically, much unhappiness and duplicity are chronicled in Out Stealing Horses (an unfortunate title referring to boys “joy riding” on a neighbor’s horses), but the result is the pride we feel in the presence of any well-crafted creation. Petterson’s descriptions of “real work” – haying, cutting timber, building a fire, rowing a boat – inspire pleasure and admiration for the work described and the artist who renders it.
Out Stealing Horses is notable for tight authorial control. There’s no sloppiness or self-indulgence. Its architecture is ingeniously complex but on the surface it appears elegant and inconspicuous. In contrast, the novels cited above, by Powers, Ondaatje and Johnson, are arbitrary and impulsive in construction. Their forms and themes are divorced. Not coincidentally, one can imagine all three turned into films, but not Petterson’s novel. Its beauty and mysterious power are rooted in plain, luminous words.
Somewhere I learned of Out Stealing Horse, by Per Petterson, a Norwegian. The narrator is Trond Sander, a 67-year-old a widower who has moved from Oslo into a small house outside a village near the Swedish border. For a novel devoted to the ever-presentness of the past, in which little seems to happen, Out Stealing Horses generates its own quiet, compelling sense of momentum. Early in the novel, after Sonder realizes one of his neighbors is a childhood acquaintance, he comments on the unlikelihood of such a thing happening in real life rather than fiction:
“Lars is Lars even though I saw him last when he was ten years old, and now he’s past sixty, and if this had been something in a novel it would just have been irritating. I have in fact done a lot of reading particularly during the last few years, but earlier too, by all means, and I have thought about what I’ve read, and that kind of coincidence seems far-fetched in fiction, in modern novels anyway, and I find it hard to accept. It may be all very well in Dickens, but when you read Dickens you’re reading a long ballad from a vanished world, where everything has to come together in the end like an equation, where the balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile again. A consolation, maybe, or a protest against a world gone off the rails, but it is not like that any more, my world is not like that, and I have never gone along with those who believe our lives are governed by fate. They whine, they wash their hands and crave pity. I believe we shape our lives ourselves, at any rate I have shaped mine, for what it’s worth, and I take complete responsibility. But of all the places I might have moved to, I had to land up precisely here.”
Sentence for sentence (as translated by Anne Born), Petterson gives us much to admire. I hear echoes of Beckett, especially Malone Dies, in the halting eloquence of the voice. There’s self-reflexiveness, an awareness of fictional artifice, but it’s not irritatingly clever or self-congratulatory. One can accept an aging, thoughtful, literate man regretting that life does not quite measure up to the resolutions in Dickens. After such a lovely phrase, “a long ballad from a vanished world,” think of Little Dorritt. And consider how he rejects the notion of fate while slowly perceiving its dominion over his life. Ten pages after the passage quoted above, Sander sharpens his chain saw and muses:
“I don’t know where I learned to do this. Presumably I have seen it on film; a documentary about the great forests or a feature film with a forestry setting. You can learn a lot from films if you have a good memory, watch how people do things and have done them always, but there is not much real work in modern films, there are only ideas. Thin ideas and something they call humour, everything has to be a laugh now. But I hate being entertained, I don’t have any time for it.”
Much matter is compacted in five sentences. Sander, who owns a car, a chainsaw, a radio and a dog, has nothing but time on his hands. We understand his impatience with the “entertainment industry,” its dedication to trivia. Laughs, for its characters and the reader, are rare in Out Stealing Horses, which is closer in spirit to Wild Strawberries than Star Wars.
At his blog on Wednesday, Terry Teachout quoted the Hungarian composer Miklós Rózsa: “I have no time for any music which does not stimulate pleasure in life, and, even more importantly, pride in life.”" Paradoxically, much unhappiness and duplicity are chronicled in Out Stealing Horses (an unfortunate title referring to boys “joy riding” on a neighbor’s horses), but the result is the pride we feel in the presence of any well-crafted creation. Petterson’s descriptions of “real work” – haying, cutting timber, building a fire, rowing a boat – inspire pleasure and admiration for the work described and the artist who renders it.
Out Stealing Horses is notable for tight authorial control. There’s no sloppiness or self-indulgence. Its architecture is ingeniously complex but on the surface it appears elegant and inconspicuous. In contrast, the novels cited above, by Powers, Ondaatje and Johnson, are arbitrary and impulsive in construction. Their forms and themes are divorced. Not coincidentally, one can imagine all three turned into films, but not Petterson’s novel. Its beauty and mysterious power are rooted in plain, luminous words.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
`Cindery In-Betweens'
At last, I’m reading Charles Tomlinson, who published his first book of poems in 1951 and will turn 81 in January. My excuse is ignorance abetted by laziness, which, of course, is no excuse. I’ve seen his name, notably in Hugh Kenner, but never took the obvious next step. Here’s the poem, “The Marl Pits,” from Selected Poems: 1955-1997, that turned me around:
“It was a language of water, light and air
I sought--to speak myself free of a world
Whose stoic lethargy seemed the one reply
To horizons and to streets that blocked them back
In a monotone fume, a bloom of grey.
I found my speech. The years return me
To tell of all that seasoned and imprisoned:
I breathe the familiar, sedimented air
From a landscape of disembowelings, underworlds
Unearthed among the clay. Digging
The marl, they dug a second nature
And water, seeping up to fill their pits,
Sheeted them to lakes that wink and shine
Between tips and steeples, streets and waste
In slow reclaimings, shimmers, balancings,
As if kindling Eden rescinded its own loss
And words and water came of the same source.”
Tomlinson was born in Stoke-on-Trent, in the West Midlands – Arnold Bennett country. On one level, the poem is a coming-of-age story, the escape of a young provincial from “stoic lethargy.” But the twist on an old theme is Tomlinson’s desire “to speak myself free of a world.” He transcends this industrial wasteland by reclaiming it, as language and theme. In musical language, Tomlinson distils his theme: “kindling Eden rescinded.” In another poem first published in The Way In and Other Poems (1974), “At Stoke,” he writes, more conventionally: “By ash-tips, or where the streets give out/In cindery in-betweens…”
As to “marl”: an old word, at least from the 13th century, with myriad meanings. Spenser used it in The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing (Act II, Scene 1): “To make an account of her life to a clod of waiward marle?” In this sense the Oxford English Dictionary defines it plainly as “Earth, soil; the ground.” In Paradise Lost, Milton uses the word to mean, according to the OED, “the ground of Hell; (symbolically) the torments of Hell,” as in “His Spear../He walkt with to support uneasie steps/Over the burning Marle.”
By the early 19th century, with the Industrial Revolution under way, “marl” evolves to mean “volcanic ash or slag.” This is Tomlinson’s sense. His poem takes its place in the English literary tradition of ravaged industrial landscapes. Think of Blake and Ruskin. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle writes, “Is that a real Elysian brightness... Is it of a truth leading us into beatific Asphodel meadows, or the yellow-burning marl of a Hell-on-Earth?” Especially, think of a hundred scenes in Dickens, as in this passage from The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Chapter 45:
“In all their journeying, they had never longed so ardently, they had never so pined and wearied, for the freedom of pure air and open country, as now. No, not even on that memorable morning, when, deserting their old home, they abandoned themselves to the mercies of a strange world, and left all the dumb and senseless things they had known and loved, behind--not even then, had they so yearned for the fresh solitudes of wood, hillside, and field, as now, when the noise and dirt and vapour, of the great manufacturing town reeking with lean misery and hungry wretchedness, hemmed them in on every side, and seemed to shut out hope, and render escape impossible.”
Or this, from Chapter 7 of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), by George Orwell:
“I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-heaps in the distance, stretched the 'flashes'--pools of stagnant water that had seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was horribly cold. The 'flashes' were covered with ice the colour of raw umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates wore beards of ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water.”
W.H. Auden was born in York and his family moved to Harborne, Birmingham, when he was one year old. As a child, he was imaginatively absorbed by the limestone landscape of the moors and the declining lead mines of the North. One of his brothers became a geologist and Auden’s poetry is studded with geological, mining and industrial references. This, from “Letter to Lord Byron” (1937) is closer to Tomlinson’s vision:
“Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,
That was, and still is, my ideal scenery.”
“It was a language of water, light and air
I sought--to speak myself free of a world
Whose stoic lethargy seemed the one reply
To horizons and to streets that blocked them back
In a monotone fume, a bloom of grey.
I found my speech. The years return me
To tell of all that seasoned and imprisoned:
I breathe the familiar, sedimented air
From a landscape of disembowelings, underworlds
Unearthed among the clay. Digging
The marl, they dug a second nature
And water, seeping up to fill their pits,
Sheeted them to lakes that wink and shine
Between tips and steeples, streets and waste
In slow reclaimings, shimmers, balancings,
As if kindling Eden rescinded its own loss
And words and water came of the same source.”
Tomlinson was born in Stoke-on-Trent, in the West Midlands – Arnold Bennett country. On one level, the poem is a coming-of-age story, the escape of a young provincial from “stoic lethargy.” But the twist on an old theme is Tomlinson’s desire “to speak myself free of a world.” He transcends this industrial wasteland by reclaiming it, as language and theme. In musical language, Tomlinson distils his theme: “kindling Eden rescinded.” In another poem first published in The Way In and Other Poems (1974), “At Stoke,” he writes, more conventionally: “By ash-tips, or where the streets give out/In cindery in-betweens…”
As to “marl”: an old word, at least from the 13th century, with myriad meanings. Spenser used it in The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing (Act II, Scene 1): “To make an account of her life to a clod of waiward marle?” In this sense the Oxford English Dictionary defines it plainly as “Earth, soil; the ground.” In Paradise Lost, Milton uses the word to mean, according to the OED, “the ground of Hell; (symbolically) the torments of Hell,” as in “His Spear../He walkt with to support uneasie steps/Over the burning Marle.”
By the early 19th century, with the Industrial Revolution under way, “marl” evolves to mean “volcanic ash or slag.” This is Tomlinson’s sense. His poem takes its place in the English literary tradition of ravaged industrial landscapes. Think of Blake and Ruskin. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle writes, “Is that a real Elysian brightness... Is it of a truth leading us into beatific Asphodel meadows, or the yellow-burning marl of a Hell-on-Earth?” Especially, think of a hundred scenes in Dickens, as in this passage from The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Chapter 45:
“In all their journeying, they had never longed so ardently, they had never so pined and wearied, for the freedom of pure air and open country, as now. No, not even on that memorable morning, when, deserting their old home, they abandoned themselves to the mercies of a strange world, and left all the dumb and senseless things they had known and loved, behind--not even then, had they so yearned for the fresh solitudes of wood, hillside, and field, as now, when the noise and dirt and vapour, of the great manufacturing town reeking with lean misery and hungry wretchedness, hemmed them in on every side, and seemed to shut out hope, and render escape impossible.”
Or this, from Chapter 7 of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), by George Orwell:
“I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-heaps in the distance, stretched the 'flashes'--pools of stagnant water that had seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was horribly cold. The 'flashes' were covered with ice the colour of raw umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates wore beards of ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water.”
W.H. Auden was born in York and his family moved to Harborne, Birmingham, when he was one year old. As a child, he was imaginatively absorbed by the limestone landscape of the moors and the declining lead mines of the North. One of his brothers became a geologist and Auden’s poetry is studded with geological, mining and industrial references. This, from “Letter to Lord Byron” (1937) is closer to Tomlinson’s vision:
“Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,
That was, and still is, my ideal scenery.”
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
`Wearied of This Mortal Life, I Rest'
I worked for two newspapers in upstate New York and for both of them I wrote a regular feature called “Crossroads,” devoted to rural non-places scattered over that part of the country. New York doesn’t recognize the existence of hamlets, though I documented more than 200 of them. I would show up unannounced and tramp about all day, talking to locals who related to me the rumors and folklore that passed for history. Most of these forgotten places were not marked with signs and had no post office but bore the name of a once-prominent, now extinct family – Drummonds Corners, Porters Corners and Coons Corners, for instance, in Saratoga County. I might find a church, tavern or feed and grain store. In Eagle Bridge, in Rensselaer County, I explored the remains of an abandoned bookstore in the skeleton of a saloon. Books were shelved on and under the bar, in sinks and coolers, and all were dusted with snow that blew through the doors and broken windows.
Almost every hamlet had a small cemetery, most surrounded by stone walls, and that’s where I would sit to eat my lunch. Some were well-tended, some overgrown. The most beautiful, especially in May and June, were dense with phlox, violets and other wildflowers that grew in a dense carpet over the graves. I was always reminded of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” one of the essays in Joseph Mitchell’s The Bottom of the Harbor, devoted to an old black community on the south shore of Staten Island. Mitchell said he would go there, Ishmael fashion, “when things get too much for me,” to wander and look for wildflowers in the old graveyard. There’s a lovely moment when he identifies peppergrass on the grave of Rachel Dissoway, who died April 7, 1802, at the age of 27. In such places, thoughts of mortality and mutability mingle easily with flowers, birds and sunshine. Thanks to time and acid rain, inscriptions on many grave stones, some dating from the19th and even the late 18th century, were illegible. More than 250 years ago, Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” noted the pathos of graveyard vanity:
“Yet e’en these bones from insult to protect
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.
“Their name, their years, spelt by th' unletter'd Muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply…”
All of this came to mind as I was reading Over Their Dead Bodies: Yankee Epitaphs & History, collected by Thomas C. Mann and Janet Greene, and published in 1962 by the Stephen Greene Press in one of my favorite small cities, Brattleboro, Vt. (former home of Rudyard Kipling, burial site of Saul Bellow). I’ve read similar collections, some too scholarly, some too folksy, but this is an elegant piece of book design, written with a fine balance of humor and thoughtfulness, rather like the epitaphs themselves. Here’s one for the wonderfully named Lorenzo Sabine, who died in 1877, age 74, in Eastport, Maine:
“Transplanted.”
How’s that for Yankee laconicism? And here’s vanity masking as anti-vanity, from a grave dated 1882 in Hartford, Conn.:
“Those who cared for him while living
Will know whose body is buried here.
To others it does not matter.”
The intent of this epitaph, for Mrs. Eunice Page, who died in 1888, age 73, in Plainfield, Vt., is uncertain:
“Five time five years I lived a virgin’s life
Nine times five years I lived a virtuous wife;
Wearied of this mortal life, I rest.”
Such inscriptions have something in common with the fiction of Henry James. We wish to ask: Who wrote this, and what did he or she mean? What was their intent? Where does the irony start and stop? What constitutes an unreliable narrator? Take this message left by Capt. Augustus N. Littlefield, who died in 1878 at age 75 in Newport, R.I.:
“An experienced and careful master
mariner who never made a call upon
underwriters for any loss.”
Is that how Capt. Littlefield wished to be remembered, or did friends and relatives have a say in the matter? We’ll never know. And let me note another mortal resonance. The copy of Over Their Dead Bodies I’m reading is from the Fondren Library at Rice University. It was given to the Fondren as part of the personal library of the late literary critic and scholar Frederick J. Hoffman. Every week I come across one or two of his books, all neatly inscribed inside the cover with his signature, place of residence (“Madison, Wisconsin,” in this case) and date. In this volume it’s “May 6, 1967.” Hoffman died that year.
Almost every hamlet had a small cemetery, most surrounded by stone walls, and that’s where I would sit to eat my lunch. Some were well-tended, some overgrown. The most beautiful, especially in May and June, were dense with phlox, violets and other wildflowers that grew in a dense carpet over the graves. I was always reminded of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” one of the essays in Joseph Mitchell’s The Bottom of the Harbor, devoted to an old black community on the south shore of Staten Island. Mitchell said he would go there, Ishmael fashion, “when things get too much for me,” to wander and look for wildflowers in the old graveyard. There’s a lovely moment when he identifies peppergrass on the grave of Rachel Dissoway, who died April 7, 1802, at the age of 27. In such places, thoughts of mortality and mutability mingle easily with flowers, birds and sunshine. Thanks to time and acid rain, inscriptions on many grave stones, some dating from the19th and even the late 18th century, were illegible. More than 250 years ago, Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” noted the pathos of graveyard vanity:
“Yet e’en these bones from insult to protect
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.
“Their name, their years, spelt by th' unletter'd Muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply…”
All of this came to mind as I was reading Over Their Dead Bodies: Yankee Epitaphs & History, collected by Thomas C. Mann and Janet Greene, and published in 1962 by the Stephen Greene Press in one of my favorite small cities, Brattleboro, Vt. (former home of Rudyard Kipling, burial site of Saul Bellow). I’ve read similar collections, some too scholarly, some too folksy, but this is an elegant piece of book design, written with a fine balance of humor and thoughtfulness, rather like the epitaphs themselves. Here’s one for the wonderfully named Lorenzo Sabine, who died in 1877, age 74, in Eastport, Maine:
“Transplanted.”
How’s that for Yankee laconicism? And here’s vanity masking as anti-vanity, from a grave dated 1882 in Hartford, Conn.:
“Those who cared for him while living
Will know whose body is buried here.
To others it does not matter.”
The intent of this epitaph, for Mrs. Eunice Page, who died in 1888, age 73, in Plainfield, Vt., is uncertain:
“Five time five years I lived a virgin’s life
Nine times five years I lived a virtuous wife;
Wearied of this mortal life, I rest.”
Such inscriptions have something in common with the fiction of Henry James. We wish to ask: Who wrote this, and what did he or she mean? What was their intent? Where does the irony start and stop? What constitutes an unreliable narrator? Take this message left by Capt. Augustus N. Littlefield, who died in 1878 at age 75 in Newport, R.I.:
“An experienced and careful master
mariner who never made a call upon
underwriters for any loss.”
Is that how Capt. Littlefield wished to be remembered, or did friends and relatives have a say in the matter? We’ll never know. And let me note another mortal resonance. The copy of Over Their Dead Bodies I’m reading is from the Fondren Library at Rice University. It was given to the Fondren as part of the personal library of the late literary critic and scholar Frederick J. Hoffman. Every week I come across one or two of his books, all neatly inscribed inside the cover with his signature, place of residence (“Madison, Wisconsin,” in this case) and date. In this volume it’s “May 6, 1967.” Hoffman died that year.
Monday, December 10, 2007
`How Shall a Generation Know Its Story?'
My French friend, a computational mathematician, asked who I thought was the greatest American. I had too many answers and thus no answer: Lincoln? Walt Whitman? Henry James? Louis Armstrong? I don’t know, but probably I should be proud so many nominees come to mind. Without hesitation, Jean-David agreed with my first response, Lincoln. Why? I asked. “Because he freed the slaves,” he answered with certainty. I reminded him that Napoleon III and the French upper crust maintained cordial relations with the slave-owning Confederacy, making no formal denunciation or endorsement of either side. “The French are always careful,” he said, a response I’m still weighing.
In turn, I asked Jean-David to name the greatest of his countrymen. Again he replied without hesitation: “Louis Pasteur.” My kneejerk answer would have been Proust, with Montaigne a close second, but consider Pasteur: He confirmed the germ theory of disease, developed the first rabies vaccine and demonstrated the importance of the process we call pasteurization. He showed that diseases, including anthrax, cholera and smallpox, were caused by microorganisms and could be prevented by vaccination. In the last 150 years, Pasteur, who died in 1895, has saved tens of millions of lives. He transformed the world for the better, and I conceded to Jean-David he was right.
The late American poet Edgar Bowers agreed. In “For Louis Pasteur,” Bowers claimed to observe three birthdays each year: Mozart’s, Pasteur’s and Paul Valery’s. The poem begins:
“How shall a generation know its story
If it will know no other? When, among
The scoffers at the Institute, Pasteur
Heard one deny the cause of child-birth fever,
Indignantly he drew upon the blackboard,
For all to see, the Streptococcus chain.
His mind was like Odysseus and Plato
Exploring a new cosmos in the old
As if he wrote a poem -- his enemy
Suffering, disease, and death, the battleground
His introspection.”
In turn, I asked Jean-David to name the greatest of his countrymen. Again he replied without hesitation: “Louis Pasteur.” My kneejerk answer would have been Proust, with Montaigne a close second, but consider Pasteur: He confirmed the germ theory of disease, developed the first rabies vaccine and demonstrated the importance of the process we call pasteurization. He showed that diseases, including anthrax, cholera and smallpox, were caused by microorganisms and could be prevented by vaccination. In the last 150 years, Pasteur, who died in 1895, has saved tens of millions of lives. He transformed the world for the better, and I conceded to Jean-David he was right.
The late American poet Edgar Bowers agreed. In “For Louis Pasteur,” Bowers claimed to observe three birthdays each year: Mozart’s, Pasteur’s and Paul Valery’s. The poem begins:
“How shall a generation know its story
If it will know no other? When, among
The scoffers at the Institute, Pasteur
Heard one deny the cause of child-birth fever,
Indignantly he drew upon the blackboard,
For all to see, the Streptococcus chain.
His mind was like Odysseus and Plato
Exploring a new cosmos in the old
As if he wrote a poem -- his enemy
Suffering, disease, and death, the battleground
His introspection.”
Sunday, December 09, 2007
`The Dead Go on Before Us'
“The Explosion,” dated “5 January 1970” by Philip Larkin and published in High Windows (1974), has always seemed like an anomalously public poem to be written by so private a poet. It contains no conventional “I.” The narrator is transparent. The poem concerns the dead, not we who await death. In 25 lines it tells a story that resolves with muted promise. There is no suggestion of the despairing resignation of “Aubade” or wistful unbelief of “Church Going.” Its clipped, condensed lines attain a modest grandeur rooted in respect for miners and their families, and all mortals. In the Wall Street Journal, in this weekend’s regular “Masterpiece: Anatomy of a Classic” feature, William Amelia reminds us that Larkin was moved to write the poem after watching a television documentary on the dangers of the mining industry. In other hands, especially in those years, such material might have been turned into apitprop, grist for the political mill. On its seemingly unlikely inspiration (for Larkin) from television, Amelia writes:
“It is an artful and telling connection because it validates Larkin's own thoughts on the process of poetry, how poetry happens. Briefly explained, it is a process in which a poet, so impressed with an experience or image, is compelled to construct a verbal device, a poem, that will reproduce his emotional concept, recurrently, in anyone who cares to read it anywhere, anytime.”
The “emotional concept” rendered in the poem is a mingling of respect, sadness, commemoration, a sense of communion in death. The poem’s only italicized lines might be spoken by an unnamed minister or other eulogist:
“The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God’s house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face –”
Here the common destiny of men is stated plainly, by the famously agnostic Larkin. Death, regardless of faith or its absence, is inevitable. The next lines, “Plain as lettering in the chapels/It was said…” recall Larkin’s frequent visits to churches and hallowed ground, especially the final stanza of “Church Going”:
“A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.”
The nest of lark’s eggs found by a miner early in “The Explosion” remains intact after disaster: “One showing the eggs unbroken.” Larkin’s language is elegantly plain, as the occasion deserves. My brother has been reading Larkin’s poems for the first time. At first exposure, we read him with a sense of kinship and relief. He writes what we have sometimes furtively felt. Then the language elicits awe and trust. Clive James said of Larkin: “He found ways of saying things and the ways led to poems.”
\
“It is an artful and telling connection because it validates Larkin's own thoughts on the process of poetry, how poetry happens. Briefly explained, it is a process in which a poet, so impressed with an experience or image, is compelled to construct a verbal device, a poem, that will reproduce his emotional concept, recurrently, in anyone who cares to read it anywhere, anytime.”
The “emotional concept” rendered in the poem is a mingling of respect, sadness, commemoration, a sense of communion in death. The poem’s only italicized lines might be spoken by an unnamed minister or other eulogist:
“The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God’s house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face –”
Here the common destiny of men is stated plainly, by the famously agnostic Larkin. Death, regardless of faith or its absence, is inevitable. The next lines, “Plain as lettering in the chapels/It was said…” recall Larkin’s frequent visits to churches and hallowed ground, especially the final stanza of “Church Going”:
“A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.”
The nest of lark’s eggs found by a miner early in “The Explosion” remains intact after disaster: “One showing the eggs unbroken.” Larkin’s language is elegantly plain, as the occasion deserves. My brother has been reading Larkin’s poems for the first time. At first exposure, we read him with a sense of kinship and relief. He writes what we have sometimes furtively felt. Then the language elicits awe and trust. Clive James said of Larkin: “He found ways of saying things and the ways led to poems.”
\
Saturday, December 08, 2007
`Unavoidable Rubs and Uncertain Reception'
I’m blessed with boys who are not bullies, at least not in my company. Even the daintiest among us take pleasure, clandestinely, in the occasional abuse of others. This is human nature. By bully I mean a habitual thug, a predator, a scourge of the playground. We know them and remember them. In sixth grade it was Charlie Gray, who resembled the dome-headed, chinless Henry in Carl Anderson’s comic strip. Charlie was famous for cold-cocking kids in school corridors, and he once told a boy with copious acne that he had syphilis.
Once you have children you become vulnerable in ways you never imagined. I perform a perpetual two-step with my instincts for wanting to protect them and wanting them to be independent, and independence means knowing with certainty they will get hurt and will at least occasionally hurt others. In 1822, William Hazlitt wrote a charming essay, "On the Conduct of Life,” in the form of a letter to his son William, who was away at school. Hazlitt concisely and tactfully addresses this issue of protectiveness versus independence:
“You complain since, that boys laugh at you and do not care about you, and that you are not treated as you were at home. My dear, that is one chief reason for your being sent to school, to inure you betimes to the unavoidable rubs and uncertain reception you may meet with in life. You cannot always be with me, and perhaps it is as well that you cannot. But you must not expect others to show the same concern about you as I should.”
Hazlitt rightly encourages William to mind his own business, maintain his own moral inventory, and monitor the ever-present urge to vanity:
“Think that the minds of men are various as their faces -- that the modes and employments of life are numberless as they are necessary -- that there is more than one class of merit -- that though others may be wrong in some things, they are not so in all -- and the countless races of men have been born, have lived and died without ever hearing of any of those points in which you take a just pride and pleasure -- and you will not err on the side of that spiritual pride or intellectual coxcombry which has been so often the bane of the studious and learned!”
As a father, Hazlitt struggles mightily not to say “Because I told you so.” Like many of us, he vacillates among the roles of father, son and stranger, forever recalibrating the limits of his power. He’s aware the passive counterpart to the active bully is the whiner and all-too-willing victim:
“Do not begin to quarrel with the world too soon: for bad as it may be, it is the best we have to live in -- here. If railing would have made it better, it would have been reformed long ago: but as this is not to be hoped for at present, the best way is to slide through it as contentedly and innocently as we may. The worst fault it has, is want of charity: and calling knave and fool at every turn will not cure this failing.”
As an addendum, after expressing the hope that his son learns “Latin, French, and dancing,” he offers advice on what to read:
“As to the books you will have to read by choice or for amusement, the best are the commonest. The names of many of them are already familiar to you. Read them as you grow up with all the satisfaction in your power, and make much of them. It is perhaps the greatest pleasure you will have in life, the one you will think of longest and repent of least. If my life had been more full of calamity than it has been (much more than I hope yours will be) I would live it over again, my poor little boy, to have read the books I did in my youth.”
Once you have children you become vulnerable in ways you never imagined. I perform a perpetual two-step with my instincts for wanting to protect them and wanting them to be independent, and independence means knowing with certainty they will get hurt and will at least occasionally hurt others. In 1822, William Hazlitt wrote a charming essay, "On the Conduct of Life,” in the form of a letter to his son William, who was away at school. Hazlitt concisely and tactfully addresses this issue of protectiveness versus independence:
“You complain since, that boys laugh at you and do not care about you, and that you are not treated as you were at home. My dear, that is one chief reason for your being sent to school, to inure you betimes to the unavoidable rubs and uncertain reception you may meet with in life. You cannot always be with me, and perhaps it is as well that you cannot. But you must not expect others to show the same concern about you as I should.”
Hazlitt rightly encourages William to mind his own business, maintain his own moral inventory, and monitor the ever-present urge to vanity:
“Think that the minds of men are various as their faces -- that the modes and employments of life are numberless as they are necessary -- that there is more than one class of merit -- that though others may be wrong in some things, they are not so in all -- and the countless races of men have been born, have lived and died without ever hearing of any of those points in which you take a just pride and pleasure -- and you will not err on the side of that spiritual pride or intellectual coxcombry which has been so often the bane of the studious and learned!”
As a father, Hazlitt struggles mightily not to say “Because I told you so.” Like many of us, he vacillates among the roles of father, son and stranger, forever recalibrating the limits of his power. He’s aware the passive counterpart to the active bully is the whiner and all-too-willing victim:
“Do not begin to quarrel with the world too soon: for bad as it may be, it is the best we have to live in -- here. If railing would have made it better, it would have been reformed long ago: but as this is not to be hoped for at present, the best way is to slide through it as contentedly and innocently as we may. The worst fault it has, is want of charity: and calling knave and fool at every turn will not cure this failing.”
As an addendum, after expressing the hope that his son learns “Latin, French, and dancing,” he offers advice on what to read:
“As to the books you will have to read by choice or for amusement, the best are the commonest. The names of many of them are already familiar to you. Read them as you grow up with all the satisfaction in your power, and make much of them. It is perhaps the greatest pleasure you will have in life, the one you will think of longest and repent of least. If my life had been more full of calamity than it has been (much more than I hope yours will be) I would live it over again, my poor little boy, to have read the books I did in my youth.”
Friday, December 07, 2007
`Intricate Footwork'
I worked with a reporter who had amassed a record collection too big for the cheap, cracked-ceiling apartments he favored. Almost all of his LPs fell into one of three grand categories – comedy, Count Basie and Bill Evans. Most of the comedy dated from the sixties -- Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, Nichols and May, Jonathan Winters, Allan Sherman. On Jan. 6, 1993, the day Dizzy Gillespie and Rudolf Nureyev died and TV news covered only the latter, we fumed until my friend put The 2000-Year-Old Man on the turntable and we could finally finish our pizza. (Something similar happened on April 30, 1983, when Muddy Waters and George Balanchine shared a date with death.)
His Basie collection was immense – hundreds of recordings. I can date the start of our friendship from the day I told him I had interviewed Basie a year before the great man’s death. But Evans was something else. For Steve, the pianist was scripture – deep, inspirational and inerrant. He told me You Must Believe in Spring, an album Evans recorded in 1977, had saved his life. He was convinced the title song, by Michel Legrand, and the “Theme from M*A*S*H” (“Suicide is Painless”) had kept him buoyed when he wanted to sink.
Evans (1929-1980) has that effect on people, some of whom are not otherwise given to jazz. People take Evans personally. His recordings are accessibly moody, and many of us respond to music primarily or exclusively through the emotions – like my friend who, discordantly, played accordion. I’ve been listening to Moon Beams, an album of ballads recorded by Evans and his trio in May 1962. It was the first trio album he made since the death of his bassist Scott La Faro a year earlier. La Faro died at 25 and his work appears on fewer than 20 albums. He’s one of those sad, Keats-like figures in jazz – Clifford Brown is another – whose promise is exceeded only by the bounty of his abbreviated accomplishment. Here’s Whitney Balliett on the chemistry between Evans and La Faro:
“When Evans formed a trio, late in 1959, with [La Faro] and Paul Motian on drums, a peculiar thing happened: The burden of being the soloist instead of a soloist appeared too much for him, and he became increasingly ruminative and withdrawn. He experimented endlessly with slow, cloudy numbers, and the singing climaxes all but vanished. Then, in the spring of 1961, La Faro, a stunning musician who tried to draw Evans out by working contrapuntally with him and by playing daringly executed solos, was killed in an accident, and Evans work became even more closeted and gloomy. The irony was uncomfortably plain: Evans, shy to the point of pain, had become a young Werther.”
On Moon Beams, Evans is accompanied by Motian and bassist Chuck Israels. Even without knowledge of La Faro’s death, thoughtful listeners will recognize the album as emotionally wracked but free of self-pity. It’s grieving music, sometimes painfully beautiful. Absence is always present, and that’s why it reminds me of Hemingway’s “Big, Two-Hearted River.” Back from the First World War, Nick Adams hikes, sets up camp and fishes so methodically, with such obsessive attention to detail, every move becomes as quietly stylized as a Japanese tea ceremony. Hemingway never mentions shell-shock or trauma, and Evans never plays for tears. He’s not your run-of-the-mill heroin addict. On songs like “I Fall in Love Too Easily” (Sammy Cahn-Jule Styne), “If You Could See Me Now” (Tadd Dameron) and “In Love in Vain” (Leo Robin-Jerome Kern), he calmly and systematically dismantles melodies, sometimes reassembles them, and slows tempos. There’s no schlocky Sturm und Drang, and the performances illustrate the distinction between introspection and mere narcissism. This is from a piece Balliett wrote about Evans in the nineteen-sixties:
“The most impressive of modern pianists is Bill Evans, a pale, shy, emaciated figure who wears glasses and long hair combed flat, and who, when he plays, hunches like an S over the keyboard, his face generally turned away from his audience, as if the struggle of improvisation were altogether too personal to be practiced in public. For Evans, improvisation is obviously a constant contest – a contest between his intense wish to practice a wholly private, inner-ear music and an equally intense wish to express his jubilation at having found such a music within himself.”
Balliett said of a 1974 performance by Evans, “Henry James would have relished such intricate footwork.”
His Basie collection was immense – hundreds of recordings. I can date the start of our friendship from the day I told him I had interviewed Basie a year before the great man’s death. But Evans was something else. For Steve, the pianist was scripture – deep, inspirational and inerrant. He told me You Must Believe in Spring, an album Evans recorded in 1977, had saved his life. He was convinced the title song, by Michel Legrand, and the “Theme from M*A*S*H” (“Suicide is Painless”) had kept him buoyed when he wanted to sink.
Evans (1929-1980) has that effect on people, some of whom are not otherwise given to jazz. People take Evans personally. His recordings are accessibly moody, and many of us respond to music primarily or exclusively through the emotions – like my friend who, discordantly, played accordion. I’ve been listening to Moon Beams, an album of ballads recorded by Evans and his trio in May 1962. It was the first trio album he made since the death of his bassist Scott La Faro a year earlier. La Faro died at 25 and his work appears on fewer than 20 albums. He’s one of those sad, Keats-like figures in jazz – Clifford Brown is another – whose promise is exceeded only by the bounty of his abbreviated accomplishment. Here’s Whitney Balliett on the chemistry between Evans and La Faro:
“When Evans formed a trio, late in 1959, with [La Faro] and Paul Motian on drums, a peculiar thing happened: The burden of being the soloist instead of a soloist appeared too much for him, and he became increasingly ruminative and withdrawn. He experimented endlessly with slow, cloudy numbers, and the singing climaxes all but vanished. Then, in the spring of 1961, La Faro, a stunning musician who tried to draw Evans out by working contrapuntally with him and by playing daringly executed solos, was killed in an accident, and Evans work became even more closeted and gloomy. The irony was uncomfortably plain: Evans, shy to the point of pain, had become a young Werther.”
On Moon Beams, Evans is accompanied by Motian and bassist Chuck Israels. Even without knowledge of La Faro’s death, thoughtful listeners will recognize the album as emotionally wracked but free of self-pity. It’s grieving music, sometimes painfully beautiful. Absence is always present, and that’s why it reminds me of Hemingway’s “Big, Two-Hearted River.” Back from the First World War, Nick Adams hikes, sets up camp and fishes so methodically, with such obsessive attention to detail, every move becomes as quietly stylized as a Japanese tea ceremony. Hemingway never mentions shell-shock or trauma, and Evans never plays for tears. He’s not your run-of-the-mill heroin addict. On songs like “I Fall in Love Too Easily” (Sammy Cahn-Jule Styne), “If You Could See Me Now” (Tadd Dameron) and “In Love in Vain” (Leo Robin-Jerome Kern), he calmly and systematically dismantles melodies, sometimes reassembles them, and slows tempos. There’s no schlocky Sturm und Drang, and the performances illustrate the distinction between introspection and mere narcissism. This is from a piece Balliett wrote about Evans in the nineteen-sixties:
“The most impressive of modern pianists is Bill Evans, a pale, shy, emaciated figure who wears glasses and long hair combed flat, and who, when he plays, hunches like an S over the keyboard, his face generally turned away from his audience, as if the struggle of improvisation were altogether too personal to be practiced in public. For Evans, improvisation is obviously a constant contest – a contest between his intense wish to practice a wholly private, inner-ear music and an equally intense wish to express his jubilation at having found such a music within himself.”
Balliett said of a 1974 performance by Evans, “Henry James would have relished such intricate footwork.”
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Leaves
When a writer I admire expresses spirited admiration for the work of another, I pay attention. As it does each year, the Guardian asked some 70 writers and literary types to name their favorite books of 2007. Of course, many choices are trifling and dishonest, predictably judged by political not literary values. Some are pure posing or remarkable bad taste – Cormac McCarthy? Kerouac? Rowling? Shameful. In contrast, here is part of Oliver Sacks’ reply:
“My favourite non-fiction book this year has been David Beerling's The Emerald Planet (Oxford), a minutely argued but highly readable history of the last half-billion years on earth. The story Beerling tells could not have been put together even 10 years ago, for it depends on the latest insights from palaeontology, climate science, genetics, molecular biology and chemistry, all brilliantly and beautifully integrated.”
Daily, at my office, I read the prose of engineers and scientists, and much of it is nearly as clotted and jargon-ridden as that produced by their confreres in the humanities. Sacks is a neurologist and an elegant writer – an unlikely pairing of gifts. Beerling is a professor of paleobiology at the University of Sheffield, and his prose is also stylishly transparent. I have only just started reading his book, which bears the subtitle How Plants Changed Earth’s History, but find it compulsively readable. Here’s a passage from Chapter 2, “Leaves, Genes, and Greenhouse Gases”:
“If we start the clock ticking from the appearance of the first vascular plant Cooksiana and stop it when large leaves become widespread, we can see the whole affair is bracketed by a 40-50-million-year-thick slice of geological time, within the accepted dating uncertainties. It is genuinely puzzling why it took plants such an inordinately long time to come up with what, on the face of it, is a rather simple evolutionary innovation, and why when it did arrive it took an age to become widespread throughout the floras of the day. Consider, for example, that humans evolved from primates in a tenth of the time. Come to that, mammals sprang from being furtive bit-part players in the game of life to their present diversity and dominance in the 65 million years since the dinosaurs famously went extinct.”
Such writing is more difficult to do than it might appear. Beerling poses a scientific riddle, one of immense dimensions and significance, simply but without egregious oversimplification.
He helps us comprehend the time scale involved by putting it in the context of human and mammal evolution. I could have done without the cliché of the ticking clock, but otherwise the passage is admirably and memorably clear. I will remember the unusually protracted evolution of the leaf. Incidentally, aiding memorization was central to the discipline of classical rhetoric.
Here’s another of Beerling’s virtues, part scientific, part literary: As the mention of greenhouse gases suggests, his research into paleobotany involves issues that are growing increasingly contentious and politicized. A lot of people, many of them ill-informed and self-righteous, have come to premature conclusions about global warming and related phenomena. Based on what I’ve read thus far, Beerling is not among them. He is obviously excited about his research and able to communicate his enthusiasm for botanical fossils to readers who may never have thought about them before. He and his prose are animated, but the animation doesn’t go to his head and override scientific rigor. Sacks, as usual, is right.
At the same time I’m reading Beerling I’ve been reading Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses (2003), a selection from the Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge (1908-1994). The translation, from Anvil Poetry Press, is by Robin Fulton, the Scottish poet and editor. As the title suggests, Hauge’s work spans the natural and human worlds. The black-and-white cover photograph, by Fulton, is striking and stark, like many of Hauge’s poems: A slender tree bent to the snow-covered ground. It reminds us that “dendron” and “dendrology” share etymological roots. Getting back to leaves, here’s one of Hauge’s many tree poems, “Leaves Loosen”:
“Let him have them,
thinks the birch, and
gives the wind free play
“with yellow leaves –
left standing naked
and cold in thin twigs.
“Nothing like it,
being poor,
no better
“place to stand on
than bare rock
either.
“The oak naked now too
but not poor.
Wisely sucked out
“strength from leaves before
letting them one
by one go,
“has long since been asleep
under grey bark,
knuckled branches
“poking in the night
for stars,
and the roots pierce deep
“in sheltering mould.”
“My favourite non-fiction book this year has been David Beerling's The Emerald Planet (Oxford), a minutely argued but highly readable history of the last half-billion years on earth. The story Beerling tells could not have been put together even 10 years ago, for it depends on the latest insights from palaeontology, climate science, genetics, molecular biology and chemistry, all brilliantly and beautifully integrated.”
Daily, at my office, I read the prose of engineers and scientists, and much of it is nearly as clotted and jargon-ridden as that produced by their confreres in the humanities. Sacks is a neurologist and an elegant writer – an unlikely pairing of gifts. Beerling is a professor of paleobiology at the University of Sheffield, and his prose is also stylishly transparent. I have only just started reading his book, which bears the subtitle How Plants Changed Earth’s History, but find it compulsively readable. Here’s a passage from Chapter 2, “Leaves, Genes, and Greenhouse Gases”:
“If we start the clock ticking from the appearance of the first vascular plant Cooksiana and stop it when large leaves become widespread, we can see the whole affair is bracketed by a 40-50-million-year-thick slice of geological time, within the accepted dating uncertainties. It is genuinely puzzling why it took plants such an inordinately long time to come up with what, on the face of it, is a rather simple evolutionary innovation, and why when it did arrive it took an age to become widespread throughout the floras of the day. Consider, for example, that humans evolved from primates in a tenth of the time. Come to that, mammals sprang from being furtive bit-part players in the game of life to their present diversity and dominance in the 65 million years since the dinosaurs famously went extinct.”
Such writing is more difficult to do than it might appear. Beerling poses a scientific riddle, one of immense dimensions and significance, simply but without egregious oversimplification.
He helps us comprehend the time scale involved by putting it in the context of human and mammal evolution. I could have done without the cliché of the ticking clock, but otherwise the passage is admirably and memorably clear. I will remember the unusually protracted evolution of the leaf. Incidentally, aiding memorization was central to the discipline of classical rhetoric.
Here’s another of Beerling’s virtues, part scientific, part literary: As the mention of greenhouse gases suggests, his research into paleobotany involves issues that are growing increasingly contentious and politicized. A lot of people, many of them ill-informed and self-righteous, have come to premature conclusions about global warming and related phenomena. Based on what I’ve read thus far, Beerling is not among them. He is obviously excited about his research and able to communicate his enthusiasm for botanical fossils to readers who may never have thought about them before. He and his prose are animated, but the animation doesn’t go to his head and override scientific rigor. Sacks, as usual, is right.
At the same time I’m reading Beerling I’ve been reading Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses (2003), a selection from the Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge (1908-1994). The translation, from Anvil Poetry Press, is by Robin Fulton, the Scottish poet and editor. As the title suggests, Hauge’s work spans the natural and human worlds. The black-and-white cover photograph, by Fulton, is striking and stark, like many of Hauge’s poems: A slender tree bent to the snow-covered ground. It reminds us that “dendron” and “dendrology” share etymological roots. Getting back to leaves, here’s one of Hauge’s many tree poems, “Leaves Loosen”:
“Let him have them,
thinks the birch, and
gives the wind free play
“with yellow leaves –
left standing naked
and cold in thin twigs.
“Nothing like it,
being poor,
no better
“place to stand on
than bare rock
either.
“The oak naked now too
but not poor.
Wisely sucked out
“strength from leaves before
letting them one
by one go,
“has long since been asleep
under grey bark,
knuckled branches
“poking in the night
for stars,
and the roots pierce deep
“in sheltering mould.”
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