`At the Heart of the Heart of America'

Trace the places I’ve lived (states only – cities, towns and neighborhoods defy fractal geometry) and the line described is a flattened “V” with an aborted curlicue at the beginning – Ohio to Indiana, to New York, to Texas, to Washington. That’s “V” as in vagile, vitriolic, vivisepulture and volable, reflections of the variegated nation. We seem defined by geography. It’s part of our big, shifting, contradictory identity. In the title poem from his new collection, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, August Kleinzahler (a New Jersey-born longtime resident of San Francisco) writes:

“I have come here from far away
After many years of wandering
Disillusion
And found surcease here from all my cares
Surcease here from doubt
Here, at the center of it all
On a great slab of Mesozoic rock
This sanctified ground
Here, yes, here
The dead solid center of the universe
At the heart of the heart of America”

In July 1966, around the time Bob Dylan wrecked his motorcycle, during Dr. Sam Sheppard’s second trial, my brother and I passed through Rapid City, S.D., on a family vacation and remember nothing. To the east is Wall, S.D., home of Wall Drug Store, which we remember vividly (jackalopes, rattlesnakes frozen in polystyrene, “Free water!”); to the west, Mount Rushmore, which gets confused with North by Northwest. But Rapid City is a blank, and maybe that’s Kleinzahler’s point. In spite of the poem’s fragmentary state and drifting, unfocused sense of irony – references to Kevin Costner, for God’s sake – there’s an elegiac quality to it, a sadness it shares with William H. Gass’ “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”:

“So I have sailed the seas and come . . .
to B . . .
a small town fastened to a field in Indiana. Twice there have been twelve hundred people here to answer to the census. The town is outstandingly neat and shady, and always puts its best side to the highway. On one lawn there’s even a wood or plastic iron deer.”

Kleinzahler’s poems are always on the move, starting in media res and staying there, and his theme is movement, travel, “the Territory ahead.” In “Traveler’s Tales: Chapter 34” he writes:

“walking the streets
always in search of the red lantern
betokening the entrance to an unforeseen world.”

And in “Waking in a Room and Not Knowing Where One Is”:

“I cannot yet recall what city this is I’m in.
It must be close to dawn.”

Kleinzahler’s poems, like the country, don’t always cohere, and they’re probably not meant to. At the level of fragments, images compressed in isolation, he captures what Tom Waits called “the dark warm narcotic American night.” My brother, who has lived within a 20-mile radius all his life, wrote to me in an e-mail on Tuesday:

“Robing your compulsions as destinies is pure poetry.”

`The Capricious Infinite'

My 7-year-old’s teacher asked him to select three possessions he prizes and bring them to school on Monday in a brown paper bag. The object was to help introduce Michael to his new second-grade classmates whom he met for the first time last week, four days after we arrived from Houston. Without fuss he picked a stout volume of Poe’s stories and poems, Uncle John’s Top Secret! Bathroom Reader for Kids Only and a Bionicle (a Lego creation, portmanteau’ed from “biological” and “chronicle”). Rather than explain Uncle John’s, I’ll give a sample. On Page 64 is a coded message Michael chose to read to his class:

“OMHW VYPI, EHYPXW HVSSP!”

Here’s the message, decoded, also read to the class:

“KIDS RULE, ADULTS DROOL!”

Only with Poe do I feel on familiar ground. I remember sitting in a dentist’s waiting room as a kid, memorizing “The Bells” out of a desire to prolong the pleasure I took in its music. That’s how I learned “tintinabulation,” even before studying Latin:

“To the tintinabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells –
From the mingling and the tinkling of the bells.”

I introduced Michael to Poe several weeks ago when his interest in cryptography was peaking. I told him Poe had written a story, “The Gold Bug,” in which a coded message is central to the plot. Unfortunately, Poe’s clotted prose defeated my 7-year-old, as it has many worthies before him, so I started reading Poe aloud – “The Raven,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” etc. That works but it’s slow going. Almost every stanza or paragraph contains unfamiliar words or phrases – nitre, roquelaire, flambeaux, rapier, Pallas, Plutonian shore, nepenthe. What held Michael’s interest, what enabled him to tolerate the necessity of my improvised footnotes, was Poe’s music and creepiness. Poe writes for kids, adolescents at the oldest, who savor mood and melodrama more than plausibility and human insight. What Michael liked most about “The Cask of Amontillado” was not the bricking-in of Fortunato but all those dripping bones. For four pages you can put up with a lot of turgidity for the pleasure of dripping bones. I asked why he likes Poe and he said: “It’s suspenseful. It’s mysterious. Sometimes it’s scary.” Not a bad start. I thought of Randall Jarrell’s “Children Selecting Books in a Library,” particularly these lines:

“Their tales are full of sorcerers and ogres
Because their lives are: the capricious infinite
That, like parents, no one has yet escaped
Except by luck or magic; and since strength
And wit are useless, be kind or stupid, wait
Some power's gratitude, the tide of things.”

Even as adults we’re looking for correlatives to our lives in everything we read. How else could it be? Humans write for humans, to plumb “the capricious infinite,” and that’s why we read what they’ve written, even when it’s turgid.

`Language a Ploughman Can Understand'

On Saturday, the gratuitous generosity of two friends soothed the tedium of house hunting. Joe of Brooklyn sent a link to a video of Geoffrey Hill reading his translation of Eugenio Montale’s “La Bufera,” “The Storm.” The poem can be found in Without Title (2006), a volume dedicated “in omaggio a Eugenio Montale.” Hill, who turns 76 in June, reads like a demon.

Forty-seven minutes later, Brian Sholis passed along the notes he made of a lecture Marilynne Robinson delivered Thursday at DePaul University in Chicago. Sponsored by the school’s Catholic Studies Program, the event was titled “My Faith and My Fiction.” Robinson read two papers, one of which will be published in the next issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. Brian reports: “At the outset she noted her `abrasive resistance to what I'm being told by the culture at large.’” Here’s Brian:

“Underpinning the first paper she delivered was her assertion that nothing is as complex as the human mind, and that various deterministic theories (Freud, economic rationalism, selfish-gene theory, etc.) do harm to this fact. She doesn't understand `why human beings are so persistent in their attack on what is most distinctive about them.’ She then asserted that `if you do not believe in thought you cannot believe in faith’ and, in a swipe at Christopher Hitchens and his ilk, that `those who attack faith devalue thought.’ Later on in the essay, she praised Calvin's assertion that `an encounter with the other is always an encounter with God,’ said that she tries to live by that understanding, and stressed that reverence is the proper way of relating to the `shining garment of reality’ in which God reveals himself constantly.

“Metaphors gleaned from the world of science littered her talk, among them the idea that weaknesses in the Earth's gravitational pull might be due to a larger, unknown gravitational force pulling from outside our galaxy -- which she used to suggest that `anomalies in our thinking might be we simply do not know what is in play.’ She also mentioned dark matter in this regard. She seems to be a regular reader of the magazine Scientific American, which she cited twice.”

Robinson’s sensibility is one at home with and in mystery, a quality shared by scientists and the faithful. An acceptance of mystery implies some degree of humility in the face of the unknown. That’s what I meditated on Sunday morning while digging up seven rhododendrons and a rosemary bush the size of a Rottweiler from my brother-in-law’s front yard. Brian again:

“Later still, she said that `the act of perception is my greatest interest in life’ and that `all experience is profound; it can be perceived and not merely seen.’ `Experience befalls us’ and is `as near as we come to autonomous reality;’ language is insufficient to describe it.

“Her second talk was similar in scope but focused more on her own writing. She cited William Tyndale, who is responsible for much of the King James Bible and who `wrote in a language a ploughman can understand,’ as one inspiration for her own writing, and said that `I'm always governed by my characters when I write.’”

Brian reminds us that Robinson’s third novel, Home, is scheduled for publication in September. Her fiction and thought is anomalous in an age of codified narcissism. She challenges the lazy pigeonholing of people and thought our “culture at large” encourages. Find a copy of “Onward, Christian Liberals,” an essay Robinson published in the Spring 2006 issue of The American Scholar, reprinted in The Best American Essays 2007. Don’t neglect the clarity of Robinson’s prose, which refuses to indulge in emotionalism (in a time when the histrionic expression of extreme emotion is confused with authenticity), and squarely fits word to idea, like the parts of a Shaker chair. Read the entire essay but don’t neglect the third- and second-to-last paragraphs:

“What has personal holiness to do with politics and economics? Everything, from the liberal Protestant point of view. They are the means by which our poor and orphaned and our strangers can be sustained in real freedom, and graciously, as God requires. How can a Christian live without certainty? More fully, I suspect, than one can live with doctrines that constrict the sense of God with definitions and conditions.

“It is vision that floods the soul with the sense of holiness, vision of this world. And it is reverent attention to this world that teaches us, and teaches us again, the imperatives of ethical refinement.”

Thank you, Joe and Brian.

`Yet Stop I Did'

A profligate city without zoning, Houston is dense with churches and other houses of worship. Some are grandiose shrines to Mammon and resemble shopping malls or sports arenas. Others are storefronts with whitewashed windows. Each, I suppose, gets the job done. In greater Seattle, churches, temples and mosques appear more reticent, unassuming and tucked-away. We spent much of Saturday driving around, house-shopping and park-exploring, and noticed a Hindu temple on a tree-lined street, a suburban-style Roman Catholic church that might have doubled as a ski lodge, and the most modest-looking mosque I have ever seen. All seem integrated into their neighborhoods, like insurance agencies or check-cashing joints. I don’t mean to sound disparaging. Like Philip Larkin in “Church Going,” I feel the tug of worship while remaining unable to partake. Of a church he writes in the final stanza:

“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.”

More than 30 years ago I lived above a storefront church on the West Side of Cleveland. The congregants were white Appalachians, quiet people except in worship. Their evening prayer meetings were raucous and sweaty and seemed to skirt the margins of anarchy. The windows were papered on the inside with newsprint taped to the glass, but the sheets always sagged and I would look in, guiltily, to see a large woman with long hair pounding on the upright piano, Jerry Lee Lewis-style. People were singing and stomping, releasing the fury and exultation their normal demeanors never suggested. I felt like a voyeur, entranced and deeply uncomfortable. Larkin again:

“Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for…”

The most attractive, inviting house of worship I noticed on Saturday was a modest, red-brick Catholic church on a slope above a lake. Brick buildings for me imply sturdiness and ease of living. Nearby, in a sprawling public park, were a cricket field and coin-operated dog-washing station. Such is America’s weird inclusiveness. I always find comfort in Leon Wieseltier’s beautiful Kaddish:

“I am glad to be reminded that the rational and the irrational run into each other, that sense may be discovered in nonsense and nonsense in sense. And I am also glad to know that the appeal of a disembodied soul accomplishes nothing. A soul without a body lacks the authority of a soul with a body. We mourn on earth.”

`The Value of a Ray of Sun'

Among living writers I can think of a few I would look forward to meeting, and with whom I might anticipate pleasurable conversation. Foremost is Geoffrey Hill, our Donne, a forbidding poet and man, seemingly incapable of engaging in or indulging trivial matters -- rare qualities in any age but never so worthy of respect as today. Les Murray is another, the Australian poet who celebrates the natural world, suffers no fools and dedicates each of his books “To the Glory of God.” I would enjoy a chat with our own Marilynne Robinson, even if just to thank her.

The writer who breaks the pattern set by the first three is Aldo Buzzi, the difficult-to-describe Italian essayist who turns 98 on Aug. 10. For Buzzi, writing is digression. Even his first and last sentences are digressions. Think of him as a gifted proto-blogger, a discursive raconteur of the sentence and collector of curious information from gastronomy, literature and his own storied life. For English-language readers, the place to start is Journey to the Land of the Flies, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein and published by Random House in 1996. A stranger in Seattle, I’m rereading him for the comfort of the familiar, like a difficult uncle who tells reliably amusing stories.

In “First Travels” from that collection, Buzzi relates an anecdote about the German aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, then sets off down a different path:

“To understand something it is necessary to have lived a long time, perhaps to die...and to live again. A dead man coming out of the tomb would be the best master of life. Seated on his own name incised in the granite slab as shiny as a mirror, and turned toward the sun that has warmed the stone – now finally, he understands the value of a ray of sun, and he could, I believe, make us understand it.”

Typically, Buzzi drops this fancy, almost at random, into a slot between digressions on iguanas (among other things) and a blind man he sees sitting on the sidewalk. Buzzi’s essays resemble Emerson’s in their motley. This may resemble bricolage, but not in a trendy postmodern sense. In Emerson and Buzzi, the next sentence may contain anything, and the result is a sustained sense of anticipation and delight, not confusion or pretentiousness – a characteristically American aesthetic. Moby-Dick is a novel in which almost any matter might be inserted, and it would fit. Buzzi might have picked it up from his longtime friend, Saul Steinberg. His dead man’s epiphany reminded me first of Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle,” in which John Marcher visits the grave of May Bartram and for the first time awakens to his “arid end” and perceives “the sounded void of his life.” James’ story shares Buzzi’s template, but is written in a radically different key:

“The autumn day was dire for him as none had recently been, and he rested with a heaviness he had not yet known on the low stone table that bore Mary Bartram’s name. He rested without power to move, as if some spring in him, some spell vouchsafed, had suddenly been broken forever. If he could have done that moment as he wanted he would simply have stretched himself on the slab that was ready to take him, treating it as a place prepared to receive his last sleep. What in all the wise world had he now to keep awake for?”

Buzzi also reminds me of Samuel Beckett’s grave in the Cimetière de Montparnasse – a slab of polished black granite resembling a low Japanese table. Chiselled into its face is “Samuel Beckett 1906-1989,” beneath his wife’s name and dates. The day I visited in April 1999, a desiccated red rose lay on Beckett’s name.

Lone Wolves

Richard Cobb (1917-1996), the English-born historian of the French Revolution, virtually became a Frenchman, evolving what he called a “second identity.” His first books were written and published in French, and he had at least one French wife. His first book in English was published when he was 52. He briefly contemplated becoming a citizen of France, a decision he describes in “Experiences of an Anglo-French Historian,” the first essay in Paris and Elsewhere:

“A great deal of Paris eighteenth-century history, of Lyon nineteenth-century history can be walked, seen, and above all heard, in small restaurants, on the platform at the back of a bus, in cafes, or on the park bench. I have at times been so much aware of this that, in order to improve my chances as an investigator of the past and to cast deeper roots in France, I have been tempted to apply for naturalization. Fortunately, I have been deterred on each occasion by the slowly grinding mills of French bureaucracy, as well as by the thought that I would no more belong in a French institutional framework than in an English one. I have tried to have it both ways: to increase my sense of involvement, and to preserve my status of Lone Wolf.”

Cobb’s final sentence is poignant and powerful. I smiled the first time I read it because an old friend, now presumed lost somewhere in madness, dubbed me “Lone Wolf” for my temperamental non-alignment and lack of school spirit. Once, while enduring the tedium of a pointless meeting, he drew on a paper napkin a lupine caricature of me howling at the moon.

Two writers, an unlikely pair, next came to mind: Thoreau and Zbigniew Herbert. Neither was a social misfit in the contemporary American sense. Both were dauntingly principled. No hermit, Thoreau played an active if cranky role in the social life of Concord, a town crowded with idiosyncrasy. Witness his outspoken support for John Brown, a hero or psychotic. Thoreau, to use Cobb’s schema, increased his “sense of involvement” while remaining a Lone Wolf -- an appellation he would have prized.

Herbert, without self-aggrandizement, never compromised with Nazis, Stalinists, neo-Stalinists or the post-1989 Polish establishment. He remained reproachfully himself. In a 1984 interview, Herbert said:

“Writing -- and in this I disagree with everybody -- must teach men soberness: to be awake. [Spoken in English.] To make people sober. It does not mean, not to try. But with a small internal correction. I reject optimism despite all the theologians. Despair is a fruitful feeling. It is a cleanser, from desire, from hope. `Hope is the mother of the stupid.’ [This is a Polish proverb.] I don't like hope.”

The urge to join and belong is powerful in our species, and the source of much of our suffering. Unlike Cobb, Thoreau and Herbert would never have contemplated a change in nationality. Both, by remaining uncompromisingly themselves, became quintessential national types.

`I'm Going for a Walk' Part 2

Among its other disadvantages, the automobile seriously compromises visual acuity. Even a driver not listening to the radio, talking on a cell phone, berating the kids, looking for the dry cleaner’s or painting her nails is likely to miss the conceptual sweep of a cityscape, not to mention all the interesting details. Convenience and speed trump connection and understanding every time we get behind the wheel, and it’s a compromise most of us make, grudgingly or enthusiastically. The obvious solution, of course, is to walk. I envy my younger self: I lived within effortless walking distance of my first two newspaper jobs, and didn’t know how good I had it. I could visit the police and fire stations, town hall and diner on a casual, chew-the-fat circuit and still get the job done.

I have never read the prolific fiction of Georges Simenon. I vaguely admire the idea of doing so but mysteries as a genre, with few exceptions, hold little attraction. Instead, I enjoy reading about Simenon and the loyalty he inspires in readers. Guy Davenport was a devoted consumer of the Maigret series and Simenon’s other novels. So, too, was Richard Cobb, the English-born historian of the French Revolution. Last year, Brian Sholis urged me to read Paris and Elsewhere, published by New York Review Books in 2004, and I‘m pleased he did. Cobb’s essays are studded with aphorisms and nuggets of interesting information, sometimes having little to do with France or French history. For instance, in a 1976 piece titled “Maigret’s Paris,” Cobb writes:

“Simenon, too, is constantly and attractively reminding one that history should be walked, seen, smelt, eavesdropped, as well as read; he seems to say that the historian must go into the streets, into the crowded restaurant, to the central criminal courts, to the correctionnelles (the French equivalent of magistrates’ courts), to the market, to the café beside the canal Saint-Martin, a favourite hunting ground, to the jumble of marshalling yards beyond the Batignolles, to the back-yards of the semi-derelict workshops of the rue Saint-Charles, to the river ports of Bercy and Charenton, as well as to the library.”

As you see, Cobb conducts a sentence like a maestro. His prose, apart from the sheer volume of data it conveys, is vigorous, graceful and precise, free of self-preening. For “historian,” substitute “driver,” “reader” or “writer.” What Cobb describes should not be confused with the anti-intellectual cult of experience. Please note his final phrase. Cobb’s trademark as a historian was mining primary sources ignored by other historians. He was a single-minded mole and his devotion was always to the individual, not the collective tide. In his preface to Paris and Elsewhere, Julian Barnes describes Cobb’s work as “archival, anecdotal, discursive, button-holing, undogmatic, imaginatively sympathetic, incomplete, droll; sometimes chaotic, often manic, always pungently detailed” (sound familiar?).

Somewhere, A.J. Liebling said the best journalists report with their feet. I’m not certain Liebling, the most Manhattan-centric character imaginable, knew how to drive. I’m speculating about a link between walking and heightened attentiveness (consider the heroic walkers of English literature: Boswell and Johnson, Wordsworth and Coleridge). The best walking is cloud-like, drifting but purposeful, not a Volksmarch.

On a walk around downtown Bellevue on Wednesday with the boys, I talked with a Chinese-American librarian I had met several days earlier who described a mnemonic device for remembering the order of streets in downtown Seattle: "Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest." A look online uncovered several variants: “Jesus Christ Made Seattle Ugly On Purpose” (or “Under Pressure”) and “John Coltrane Made Saxophone Universally Prominent.” All (except the last) are part of the well-known American tradition of anti-boosterism, of subverting one’s home turf in favor of some shimmering mirage.

`I'm Going for a Walk'

People talk in Seattle and environs. I met a Russian-born librarian, a middle-aged woman with a young daughter, who told my boys, “You read! Good! Good! Always read!” She pronounced “good” to rhyme with “food.” A 44-year-old teller in a Redmond credit union was born in the Ukraine. Her husband’s job with Microsoft brought her to Seattle eight years ago. I asked if she was living in Kiev during the Chernobyl disaster. She was, and said she knew many people who were sick or dead. “They have,” she said, pointing to her throat. “Thyroid?” I asked, and she nodded.

On Monday, the trucker who picked up my car in Houston last Wednesday delivered it to my apartment in Bellevue, a minor miracle. He arrived by way of deliveries in Austin, Denver, Boise, Portland and somewhere else in greater Seattle. He liked to talk, which makes sense for a man who routinely drives thousands of miles a week, his only living company a voice on his CB radio. He was born in West Virginia and spoke with a drawl I recognized from childhood, when West Virginians came north to Cleveland looking for a job with Ford. He owns his rig, a massive white hulk with eagles and American flags painted on the doors. Except for Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and New Hampshire, he has visited every state in the line of work. Now he was headed home to his wife and three kids in Minot, N.D. I asked how far it was and he answered, “Thirteen-hundred miles and change. No biggie,” as though he were driving to the drug store.

In Tuesday’s post I mentioned Joseph Roth and the two volumes of his journalism in English, admirably translated from the German by Michael Hofmann. That sent me back to the first collection, published in 2003, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933, a gathering of hard news/feature hybrids, feuilletons from the heart of Weimar that have no precise counterpart in American journalism. The subsequent collection, from 2004, is Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France 1925-1939. Roth was a journalist most of his life, as well as a great novelist. His method in What I Saw is seemingly casual, impressionistic and “poetic.” The title piece, “Going for a Walk,” published in 1921 in Berliner Börsen-Courier, is typical. He describes a walk through the city, and begins:

“What I see, what I see. What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality.”

Roth is often gently satirical but never puffed-up or superior. Like his contemporary, Alfred Döblin, in Berlin Alexanderplatz, Roth revels in the urban swarm. Here’s the passage from “What I Saw” that flashed for me here in Seattle:

“Strolling around on a May morning, what do I care about the vast issues of world history as expressed in newspaper editorials? Or even the fate of some individual, a potential tragic hero, someone who has lost his wife or come into an inheritance or cheated on his wife or in one way or another makes some lofty appeal to us? Confronted with the truly microscopic, all loftiness is hopeless, completely meaningless. The diminutive of the parts is more impressive than the monumentality of the whole. I no longer have any use for the sweeping gestures of heroes on the global stage. I’m going for a walk.”

Roth, bursting with attentiveness and good humor, interested in everything, feigns ennui while enjoying the human spectacle. He finishes the piece like this:

“In consequence of which, my outing was that of a curmudgeonly soul, and I wish I hadn’t undertaken it.”

`Ignorance is Responsibility'

Imagine journalism written with the wit and elegance of a good sonnet and without the self-conscious pretensions of a lousy one. Adam Kirsch’s new book of poems, Invasions, recalls Robert Lowell’s more formidably titled History in its attention to the bigger world, beyond the poet’s self, of politics, history and culture. But Kirsch never elbows the world out of the way to make way for Adam Kirsch. His poetry reminds us of the great Joseph Roth’s journalism -- sophisticated but not jaded, deeply felt, learned, attuned to the private impact of public events, in love with telling detail. Often with Lowell we watch the unseemly spectacle of a brilliant writer sucking in the contents of reality like a black hole and diminishing the bounty by turning it into a species of mere autobiography. Kirsch is not so blindly presumptuous. Take this:

“The one thing needful to the Gallery
Of Bible Art that stands unvisited
And unabashed among the lights of Broadway
Wasn’t the funds the church solicited
From corporate endowments or its rich
Midwestern secretaries, but ignorance
Of the impression that its pious kitsch
Would make on those who aren’t congregants,
Like the twelve demonstrators who unroll
A banner, `NewYorkAtheists.com,’
And tape their Xeroxed fliers to the marble
Frieze of Bible heroes with a grim,
Impassioned disrespect inherited
From the first Christian pickets to protest
The temples of the gods they knew were dead,
No matter how much the embalming cost.”

The poem works until the final line, which is too glibly emphatic, like a cheap punch line. Kirsch understands the balance of vulgarity in the ongoing atheism wars. Tacky religious art meets its match in the strident mewlings of Dawkins & Co.: “grim/Impassioned disrespect.” Almost every poem I’ve read about the 9/11 attacks and most of the prose has been ghastly. Glyn Maxwell’s The Sugar Mile is an exception, as is this one by Kirsch:

“September fifteenth, and the house is full;
It seems few patrons died or stayed at home.
The City Opera, brave, professional,
Reminds us and themselves the show goes on.
Ash drifting north has left a coat so thin
The cladded travertine still glitters white,
And so mild no one coughs to breathe it in
On the hot breeze of a late summer night --
What I call ash, but know to be this face,
Snapshotted, Xeroxed, stapled to a pole,
Which every breath I take helps to erase
And scatter incorporate in a new whole.
But what air isn’t filled with old remains
Like these, and infinitely multiplied?
What did they die for but our ignorance
Of the ways and times and reasons that they died?”

Kirsch’s poem brings to mind this exchange in Boswell’s Life of Johnson: “Boswell: `But is not the fear of death natural to man?’ Johnson: `So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it.’”

Grand company for a young poet, but earned. That’s another thing: Reading Kirsch, I sense I’m in the company of a grownup, one somehow gifted with maturity beyond his years. His supreme gift in this poem is his willingness to turn his back on politics and self-righteous recriminations, and instead honor the dead by remembering them. Remembrance shapes this poem, too, which I remember finding so moving when it appeared last year in The Hudson Review:

“Knowing that some Army engineer
Was charged with calculating how to stack
For maximum efficiency the soldiers’
Corpses in the plane that brings them back;
That someone requisitioned all these flags
Tied diaper-like around each cedar box,
And drew up estimates for body-bags
And must revise them after each attack;
That someone seated on a forklift caught
Each coffin roughly in its iron prongs,
And dropped it on the pile; and that a guard
Is sealed up with the dead the whole flight long;
Knowing that all of these and hundreds more
Collaborate to help each soldier die,
Who could declare the necessary war?
Ignorance is responsibility.”

As I’m trying to make sense and draw maps of my new home, greater Seattle, Kirsch makes a fortuitous companion. He details the surface but never mistakes it for the essential. He writes in a realm beyond politics and history about something more difficult and important to understand -- the human essence that endures in spite of politics and history.

Northwest Passages

We smelled the sea before we saw it, a fishy tang I, a lifelong landlubber, associate with good health and vigor. I followed my brother-in-law’s car past conifers and expensive houses, down a steep hill to a cove on Puget Sound. For the first time I saw snow falling on a water-filled swimming pool. The beach would make for rugged swimming though exhibitionists take an annual dip on New Year’s Day. The wind off the silver-gray water was the coldest I’ve felt in more than four years, and the beach was black and white, a crunchy impasto of barnacles, driftwood and pulverized shells. My brother-in-law’s dog joined the pack already chasing tennis balls and exploring each others’ nether regions. We saw no seals but found a dead crab my 7-year-old, in his words, “dissected” with a stick. Everything reminded me of the “Proteus” chapter in Ulysses.

The locals we saw at the beach are indistinguishable from any random gaggle of Americans but for the higher density of those who appear headed for the ski slope. Caps on men are de rigueur, as are fleecy jackets, wraparound sunglasses with straps, conspicuous boots and a day or two of whiskers. Hearty laughter is encouraged. “I say,” Thoreau writes, a little priggishly, “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.”

We returned to the library for more books and to make copies of Michael’s school records so we can enroll him for his final six weeks of second grade. The library bookshop was open, and the proprietor was a nervous, twitchy man who spoke in a whisper and averted his eyes when I greeted him. As we poked about, a small, elderly woman with a disproportionally loud voice tried to engage the shy man in conversation. He wilted further. Clearly, she was a regular and he dreaded her arrival but she wouldn’t relent. She wanted a book spied during a previous visit but was unable to identify by author, title, publisher or subject matter. The shy man whispered apologies and I thought of “Bookshop Memories,” Orwell’s 1936 account of his time as a clerk in a London second-hand shop:

“Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who `wants a book for an invalid’ (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she doesn’t remember the title or the author’s name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover.”

Home

When we descended from the clouds on Saturday into a vista of sunlight and shimmering water, we echoed the Three Bears: “So much green!” I said. “So much water!” said my seven-year-old. “So many cars!” said his five-year-old brother. Our first glimpse of Seattle and Puget Sound.

My wife retrieved us and we were on the road 20 minutes before seeing a pickup truck. We have just left Houston where my Oldsmobile was the only non-truck in many a parking lot. Drivers in greater Seattle use turn signals, unlike their Houston cousins. The forsythia is in bloom along the highway. I haven’t seen forsythia, spring’s harbinger, in four years. The sunshine turned to sleet, and snow, and rain, and briefly hail. Downtown Bellevue, where we’ll live in “corporate housing” for a month or so, was crowded with shoppers, the neon glowed, snow fell, and it felt like Christmas. Many Asians, few blacks, no Latinos and, judging from appearances, lots of unreconstructed hippies.

We crossed the street from our apartment to the library, where all of us signed up for cards. I checked out one book, a title by Theodore Dalrymple, Mass Listeria: The Meaning of Health Scares, I hadn’t read or even seen before. Here’s the first sentence:

“Man is born immortal, but everywhere he dies.”

Home.

`More Than I Have Learnt'

The dolor of rental cars, hotel lobbies with adjoining "business centers," freeway access roads, reproductions of Jasper Johns' American flags hanging on the wall at Denny's, petrochemical rainbows on wet pavement, talking elevators, USA Today outside the hotel door in the morning, "impacting" as an adjective and "signage," the absence of books but for Gideons Bible, Rupert Holmes "Pina Colada" on the shuttlebus, mints on the pillow that even my kids won't eat.

I remember what Theodore Dalrymple wrote in The Spectator on Dec. 13, 2003:

"All in all, my life is a rich one, and it is a rich one, and it is rich because the world is so much richer than my life can ever be. I don't think I will lose interest in the world until the day I die, and my only regret is that I will not have long enough to learn much more than I have learnt."

`Everything Is in Everything'

Computer access will remain unreliable for several days. We’ll live in motels and airplanes, and touch down in another world. One of the masters of alternate worlds, who hardly seemed of ours, was the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. In his prose work The Book of Disquiet, one of the most enchanting books I know, he writes these words of encouragement:

“It’s a rule of life that we can, and should, learn from everyone. There are solemn and serious things we can learn from quacks and crooks, there are philosophies taught us by fools, there are lessons in faithfulness and justice brought to us by chance and by those we chance to meet. Everything is in everything.

“In certain particularly lucid moments of contemplation, like those of early afternoon when I observantly wander through the streets, each person brings me a novelty, each building teaches me something new, each placard has a message for me.

My silent stroll is a continual conversation, and all of us – men, buildings, stones, placards and sky – are a huge friendly crowd, elbowing each other with words in the great procession of Destiny.”

`A Way of Taking Things Particularly Hard'

“True humor is least of all a way of taking things lightly; on the contrary, it is a way of taking things particularly hard, for it looks always at our saddest humiliations and it does not compromise….the true humorist is not so embarrassed in the face of death and suffering – death and suffering are his subjects.”

Who was Robert Warshow writing about in this excerpt from a review published in The Nation (where you’re unlikely to find such sentiments in 2008) in 1946? No, he wasn’t being remarkably prescient about the work of Samuel Beckett or Flann O’Brien. He was reviewing Hotel Bemelmans by the insipid Ludwig Bemelmans, best known for the Madeleine books. In his review, “The Working Day at the Splendide,” Warshow takes on Bemelmans as an individual and as a representative of “his fellow [unnamed] humorists of The New Yorker.” I wonder about the identity of these “humorists.” I trust he didn’t mean S.J. Perelman. And while both were very funny, few would describe A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell as humorists.

A clue comes in another review collected in The Immediate Experience (find the enlarged edition published in 2001 by Harvard University Press): “E.B. White and the New Yorker,” a review of White’s The Wild Flag published in Partisan Review in 1947. I find most of White’s work impossibly precious, excluding his children’s books, so I’m a sympathetic audience for Warshow’s eviscerating of White’s “editorials about peace and world government.” Like most of us, White was a sap when it came to politics. Warshow writes:

“The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.”

I hear echoes of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell, and pre-echoes of Theodore Dalrymple. I think it’s important to understand that The New Yorker was never the single-minded monolith its critics have often lambasted. The just-quoted passage tells us nothing about Liebling, Mitchell, William Maxwell, Isaac Bashevis Singer and John Cheever, among many others. In the White review, Warshow rightly takes on another New Yorker sacred cow, John Hersey’s Hiroshima and its self-satisfied moral and literary posturing:

“…the trouble is not that the New Yorker treated Hiroshima like any scene of death and suffering; the trouble is that the New Yorker has always treated death and suffering the way it treated Hiroshima.”

Warshow seems not to have read Liebling’s World War II reporting, but quotes seven excerpts from White’s silly book to damning effect. This is White:

“Read the men with the short first names: Walt Whitman, John Donne, Manny Kant, Abe Lincoln, Tom Paine, Al Einstein.”

This is cringingly folksy and embarrassing, especially from a writer who in some quarters has been beatified. Here’s Warshow’s gloss:

“The purpose of this writing is not to say anything about democracy or the nature of the war or the possibility of permanent peace, but only to arouse certain familiar responses in the liberal middle-class reader….And there is the facetiousness of the `Manny Kant’ and `Al Einstein,’ to keep one from being taken in, even by one’s one side. In this humane and yet knowing atmosphere, history and destruction and one’s own helplessness become small and simple and somehow peaceful, like life back home on the farm….History may kill you, it is true, but you have taken the right attitude, you will have been intelligent and humane and suitably melancholy to the end.”

Warshow was a deeply serious man whose humor, for that reason, is mordantly precise and devastating. He took things “particularly hard,” and his words sound so usefully contemporary. He died in 1955, age 37.

A Little Traveling Music, Please

A sick kid, packing, and the insidious business of life have monopolized time and energy. The car ships to Seattle today and the men from the moving company, punctilious looters, will fill boxes with our earthly goods. They load the truck on Thursday and begin their journey to the Northwest, while I drive to my last day at work in Houston in a rented car. The boys and I spend Thursday and Friday nights in motels. I close on the sale of the house at noon Friday. The realtor promises to serve sandwiches. We are Seattle-bound Saturday morning.

Moving is not travel. Pleasure is incidental, though I look forward to flying over the Rocky Mountains and spying Seattle and Puget Sound for the first time, and remind myself not to be absorbed by fleeting inconveniences. For true travel and undiluted pleasure, I’m rereading Montaigne’s Travel Journal, based on his journey to Rome by way of Austria and Switzerland in 1580-81, when Shakespeare was 16. Part of the book’s charm is the frequent charmlessness of much of the journey. Montaigne suffers from kidney stones and is forever lamenting the pain, searching for cures and scrutinizing the contents of his chamber pot. He loves food and books and revels in both. Hawk-like, he pays attention to everything. He’s pious, skeptical, contentious and satiric. As a kvetcher, Montaigne is sometimes brother to Smollett and Waugh:

“The cost of living in Southern Germany is higher than in France; for by our reckoning a man and horse cost at least a sun-crown a day. The landlords reckon, in the first place, the meal at four, five, or six batzen each for table d'hôte. They make another item of all you drink before and after these two meals, and even the smallest collations; so the Germans commonly set out in the morning from their inn without drinking.”

And this, also about the Germans:

“We did not see one beautiful woman. Their clothes are very different from one another’s. Among the men it is hard to distinguish the nobles, for their velvet bonnets are worn by all kinds of people, and everyone wears a sword at his side.”

I’ll allude to the passage by Elizabeth Bishop I cited Tuesday and characterize Montaigne as a friend – reliable, competent, never dull and always good company. He teaches without laboring at it and instills in us a wish to follow his example and even please him. In his introduction to the 1983 North Point Press edition of the Travel Journal, Guy Davenport writes:

“We all lead a moral inner life of the spirit, on which religion, philosophy, and tacit opinion have many claims. To reflect on this inner life rationally is a skill no longer taught, though successful introspection, if it can make us at peace with ourselves, is sanity itself. The surest teachers of such reflection, certainly the wittiest and most forgiving, are Plutarch and Montaigne.”

`Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery'

We might call it The Bishop Test:

“The three qualities I admire in the poetry I like best are: Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery. My three `favorite’ poets – not the best poets, whom we all admire, but favorite in the sense of one’s `best friends,’ etc. are Herbert, Hopkins, and Baudelaire.”

That Elizabeth Bishop should befriend her favorites is typical. Friendship seems to have been her essential model for human relations. I’m reading the superb Library of America edition of her Poems, Prose, and Letters, which feels rather like renewing an old, sometimes neglected friendship. Like many readers, I valued her work but underestimated its true worth. Death often signals a plummet in literary reputation. Not so in Bishop’s case. In fact, an over-evaluation, rooted largely in politics and other extra-literary concerns, occurred. Today, almost 30 years after her death, she outshines most of her more highly touted contemporaries, in particular Robert Lowell. Her loyalty to Lowell is touching. Here’s what she said at his English memorial service in 1977:

“Our friendship, often kept alive through years of separation only by letters, remained constant and affectionate, and I shall always be deeply grateful for it.”

Of Randall Jarrell, her friend for 20 years, she writes: “He always seemed more alive than other people, as if constantly tuned up to the concert pitch that most people, including poets, can maintain only for short and fortunate stretches.”

A moving remembrance, one that sounds uncomfortably close to a diagnosis of manic depression. Bishop’s friendship with Flannery O’Connor was strictly epistolary. They exchanged letters for the final eight years of O’Connor’s life, and Bishop tells the story of how they once almost met when Bishop’s South America-bound freight stopped at Savannah, Ga. Bishop is forever saying she’s not a critic, yet she offers a succinct, generous and accurate assessment of O’Connor’s work:

“I am sure her few books will live on and on in American literature. They are narrow, possibly, but they are clear, hard, vivid, and full of bits of description, phrases, and odd insights that contain more real poetry than a dozen books of poems.”

Bishop’s trinity of literary qualities -- Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery – applies to her own work, of course, and even more acutely to O’Connor’s. Especially Mystery, her realm.

Paying Attention

One of the qualities I most admire in a writer, especially a nonfiction writer, is deft characterization – the economically artful portrayal of a specific man or woman. As a writer of features for newspapers and a wire service for many years, I worked hard at delivering human essence with a minimum of words. The work involves an instinct for significant, revealing detail – learning it and describing it. As such, it has a moral dimension. One of the masters, unacknowledged, is Guy Davenport. Here he is on Whitman:

“Lincoln on horseback tipped his hat to him in Washington one day, a gazing stranger whom Lincoln must have supposed was some office seeker or underling in one of the departments, perhaps a geologist with that grizzled beard. It was the republican equivalent of Napoleon looking in on Goethe to talk history and poetry.”

Indirectly, Davenport tells us he knows the literature, primary and secondary, but his paragraph is no show-off stunt. In a nutshell he gives us Lincoln, Whitman and Washington, D.C., in wartime. He also gives us context, a sense of the historical momentousness of the event. By implication, he gives us a sense of fondness and respect for both men. Here’s Davenport on his friend the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard:

“He was an unfailing follower-up, which is why I think of him as the best educated man I have ever known. As a professor I must work with people for whom indifference is both a creed and a defense of their fanatic narrowness of mind, but Gene knew nothing of this. When he met Louis and Celia Zukofsky at my house, he went away and read Zukofsky. Not that he was an enthusiast. He simply had a curiosity that went all the way, and a deep sense of courtesy whereby if a man were a writer he would read what he had written, if he were a painter he would look at his paintings.”

Just as Meatyard honors Zukofsky, so Davenport honors Meatyard. A writer respects his subject by devotion to detail. Attention is honor.

`Yet This is Life Too'

A phrase from one of Zbigniew Herbert’s essays on Dutch Golden Age painting, collected in Still Life with a Bridle, comes back to me: “the insatiable, never satisfied hunger for reality.” All of us possess it and its opposite – hunger for unreality, for fantasy, evasion and falsehood. The day-to-day tug-of-war between them defines who we are. I thought of this while reading “Courtyards in Delft” by the Irish poet Derek Mahon. He subtitles it “Pieter de Hooch, 1659,” and the poem refers to a series of Courtyard paintings by de Hooch (1629-1684), including “The Courtyard of a House in Delft” and “A Musical Party in a Courtyard”:

“Oblique light on the trite, on brick and tile –
Immaculate masonry, and everywhere that
Water tap, that broom and wooden pail
To keep it so. House-proud, the wives
Of artisans pursue their thrifty lives
Among scrubbed yards, modest but adequate.
Foliage is sparse, and clings. No breeze
Ruffles the trim composure of those trees.

“No spinet-playing emblematic of
The harmonies and disharmonies of love;
No lewd fish, no fruit, no wide-eyed bird
About to fly its cage while a virgin
Listens to her seducer, mars the chaste
Perfection of the thing and the thing made.
Nothing is random, nothing goes to waste.
We miss the dirty dog, the fiery gin.

“That girl with her back to us who waits
For her man to come home for his tea
Will wait till the paint disintegrates
And ruined dikes admit the esurient sea;
Yet this is life too, and the cracked
Out-house door a verifiable fact
As vividly mnemonic as the sunlit
Railings that front the houses opposite.

“I lived there as a boy and know the coal
Glittering in its shed, late-afternoon
Lambency informing the deal table,
The ceiling cradled in a radiant spoon.
I must be lying low in a room there,
A strange child with a taste for verse,
While my hard-nosed companions dream of fire
And sword upon parched veldt and fields of rain-swept gorse.”

I love the opening, internally rhymed phrase – “Oblique light on the trite” – and Mahon’s statement of his theme: “the chaste/Perfection of the thing and the thing made.” Also, the grand third stanza, with its affirmation of the real: “Yet this is life too.” Mahon has written a credo for art as witness in the metaphysical, not the political sense. It’s a impulse, this dedicated regard for the real, that we often see in Whitman. Consider the eighth section of “Song of Myself”:

“The little one sleeps in its cradle,
I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand.

“The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill,
I peeringly view them from the top.

“The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,
I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen.

“The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls,
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous'd mobs,
The flap of the curtain'd litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd,
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
What groans of over-fed or half-starv'd who fall sunstruck or in fits,
What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes,
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain'd by decorum,
Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips,
I mind them or the show or resonance of them -- I come and I depart.”

`After Shedding Warm Tears'

Living in upstate New York after having already lived in Ohio and Indiana, I could fairly accurately gauge the time of year, sometimes calibrated to the week, by the state of flora and fauna. Skunk cabbage peeking through the snow? Late February, early March. Trilliums in flower? Late April. Catalpas blooming? Second week of May. Living in Houston is like inhabiting a world of broken clocks. I’ve never felt so detached from the natural world, out of sync with unfamiliar rhythms. My ignorance of Texas wildlife is appalling, and I’ve done little to remedy the situation – a case, in part, of self-sabotage.

Moving to Seattle means, among other things, proximity to a more familiar temperate zone but also exotic ecosystems – tide pools and rain forests among them. For now most of my pleasure in nature is vicarious, by way of books. The boom in nature writing in recent decades, however, has amounted mostly to a lot of New Age hot air and oh-so-sensitive mysticism. Edward Hoagland has his moments. So, too, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez. But none possesses Thoreau’s intricately balanced gifts – self-taught naturalist, self-taught writer – rooted in his acute visual and auditory strength. He wrote with lyrical precision. Some of his prose, scattered in Walden and the journal, is the best written by an American. On May 29, 1857, during the loveliest time of the year in the Northeast, with the last snow melted only weeks earlier, Thoreau writes in his journal:

“The sun came out an hour or more ago, rapidly drying the foliage, and for the first time this year I noticed the little shades produced by the foliage which had expanded in the rain, and long narrow dark lines of shade along the hedge or willow-rows. It was like the first bright flashings of an eye from under dark eyelashes after shedding warm tears.”

Often Thoreau is judged cold and emotionally thwarted. True, he was no bestower of gratuitous hugs, but his writing is emotionally rich in an unconventional way. The metaphor in the passage above is complicated, lovely and a little disturbing. He expresses the human by way of the natural world. This in not unfeeling but different-feeling. Here’s a brave, plaintive passage from the journal dated March 28, 1856:

“I think to say to my friend [Emerson?], There is but one interval between us. You are on one side of it, I on the other. You know as much about it as I, -- how wide, how impassable it is. I will endeavor not to blame you. Do not blame me. There is nothing to be said about it. Recognize the truth, and pass over the intervals that are bridged.

“Farewell, my friends, my path inclines to this side the mountain, yours to that. For a long time you have appeared further and further off to me. I see that you will at length disappear altogether. For a season my path seems lonely without you. The meadows are like barren ground. The memory of me is steadily passing away from you. My path grows narrower and steeper, and the night is approaching.”

His finest biographer, Robert D. Richardson, understood and accepted this side of his subject with little compulsion to psychoanalyze him. In Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, referring to Thoreau’s cessation of poetry writing around 1852, Richardson says, beautifully:

“Strictly speaking, his poetic spring had pretty much dried up, but his prose had grown stronger and tougher with time and discipline. He no longer ignored or made light of losses, disappointments, and regrets but made them into songs – prose songs, indeed, but songs nevertheless. The writer of Walden is one of our greatest poets of loss, along with Longfellow, Frost, and Eliot, but his songs are about sustainable losses, and how not to go down beneath them.”

`An Irresistible Expedition of the Mind'

The boys and I fly to Seattle on April 19. I’ve never set foot in Washington or its contiguous states and province, and have seen the Pacific Ocean only once, during a visit to San Francisco eight years ago. The only people I know in Seattle are my brother-in-law, his wife and son. I hope to meet some of the region’s serious readers and writers, assuming such exist, especially as I’ve met none in Houston in the last four years. I’m a solitary by nature, rooted in family and work, and accustomed to relying on myself for amusement, but I welcome bookish acquaintances. One of them, Mike Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti, suggested several Seattle area names and passed along this bit of wishful thinking from Thoreau’s journal, dated Feb. 20, 1857:

“I wish that there was in every town, in some place accessible to the traveler, instead [of] or besides the common directories, etc., a list of the worthies of the town, i.e. of those who are worth seeing.”

I laughed out loud. How often, even with the assistance of the Internet, do we ever meet “worthies,” especially given Thoreau’s discerning tastes? True friends, in my experience, are rare and usually encountered through happenstance. One can’t will friendship anymore than one can will, with certainty, health and happiness. Friendship, the way it blossoms, remains a mystery to me.

Most of the rest of Thoreau’s entry that day amounts to gossip and Concord history. Thoreau visits George Minott, a subsistence farmer whom Thoreau elsewhere describes as “perhaps the most poetical farmer.” Minott lives in a house built and previously occupied by Captain Isaac Hoar – hence, the Hoar House. Thoreau says of Minott as a boy: “He was quite a lad and used to climb up on the frame and, with a teaspoon, take the eggs of the house wren out of the mortise holes.” Thoreau, never a model of conventionality, encourages us to conclude that Minott was a Dickensian eccentric, even by the standards of his place and time:

“Minott always sits in the corner behind the door, close to the stove, with commonly the cat by his side, often in his lap. Often he sits with his hat on. He says that Frank Buttrick (who for a great many years worked at carpentering for John Richardson, and was working for him when he died) told him that Richardson called him when he was at the point of death and told him that he need not stop working on account of his death, but he might come in to the prayer if he wished to. R. is spoken of as a strong and resolute man.”

It’s at this point that Thoreau writes the paragraph Gilleland sent me. By the way, it was a descendant of the above-mentioned Captain Isaac Hoar, Elizabeth Hoar (1814-1878), a schoolmate and friend of Thoreau, who said, “One would as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree as Henry’s.” She added, “I love Henry, but I can never like him.” (Thanks go to Walter Harding.)

Typically for Thoreau, the journal entry for Feb. 20, 1857, is a collection of paragraphs unified only by the fact that Thoreau wrote them on the same day. As in an Emerson paragraph, there’s no necessary continuity among the parts. He picks up the Minott family story for another paragraph, mentions Robert Beverley’s description of Virginia fauna in The History and Present State of Virginia (1705), speculates on the relation between the song of a bird and its human auditor, and concludes with this lovely coda, characteristically laced with botanical metaphors:

“What is hope, what is expectation, but a seed-time whose harvest cannot fail, an irresistible expedition of the mind, at length to be victorious?”

As I prepare for my own “expedition of the mind” and body, I assemble a small stack of books to carry in my bags. The rest will be hauled across the continent in a moving van and stowed in a storage unit until we buy a house. I pick carefully, though I’m told the corporate housing we’ll temporarily occupy in Bellevue, Wash., stands across the street from the main branch of the King County Public Library. When packing books for travel, one packs for sustenance. We need pemmican, not petit fours. My Library of America edition of Thoreau’s work is already pulled. So are Montaigne, Hopkins, Basil Bunting, Liebling and Flann O’Brien – a library of sustenance.

`The Best and Closest of All Your Friends'

Dr. Lewis Thomas, like so many others, seems to be fading from cultural memory. Thomas was a physician, a researcher in microbiology and immunology, who in 1973 became president of the Sloan-Kettering Institute. Two years earlier, while chairman of the Department of Pathology at Yale Medical School, Thomas was asked by the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine to write a monthly essay, “Notes of a Biology Watcher,” each about 1,000 words – enough to fill one page of the Journal. Thomas had published poetry as a young man but in his seventh decade discovered a gift for writing succinct, thoughtful, elegant, wide-ranging essays. In 1974, Viking collected 29 of them and titled the collection The Lives of a Cell. It won the National Book Award. Thomas published five more books and died, age 80, in 1993.

This overlap of medicine and literature – Keats, Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, Céline, Walker Percy – had always interested me and may have accounted for my early attraction to Thomas’ essays. I remember with peculiar vividness the first time I read them, working nights at an ARCO gas station/carwash in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1975-76, in the days before mandatory self-service and credit-card purchases at the pump. We greeted customers, pumped gas and checked their oil if they wanted it. We wore flimsy blue coveralls with “ARCO” embossed on the chest. The sleeves and legs were too short and we were forbidden in winter to obscure the corporate logo with a jacket or sweater, so we froze at the pump.

Fortunately, business was sparse at night so I spent most of my shift in the office, feet on the desk, reading and trying to keep warm. Among the books I remember from that period are Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, George Steiner’s After Babel, Dos Passos’ USA, and The Lives of a Cell. The impression I retain from my first encounter with Thomas is of being in the presence of a civilized man. He drew effortlessly upon science, medicine, literature, music, the news and his life. He was never cheaply cynical or self-regarding, and never behaved as though his words constituted Holy Writ. He thought a lot and let us, the readers, in on the process. Inevitably, he recalled the father of all good essayists, Montaigne.

In his second collection, The Medusa and the Snail (1979), Thomas acknowledged his lineage and included “Why Montaigne is Not a Bore.” We know what he means: Montaigne claimed to have no subject but himself, which ought to be a prescription for unrelieved tedium. Pause for a moment and consider the people you know for whom the only concern is King (or Queen) Self. You cease existing in the prolonged company of such people. Thomas writes of Montaigne:

“He is resolved from the first page to tell you absolutely everything about himself, and so he does. At the greatest length, throughout all 876 pages of the [Donald] Frame translation, he tells you and tells you about himself.

“This ought to be, almost by definition, the achievement of a great bore. How does it happen that Montaigne is not ever, not on any of all those pages, even a bit of a bore?”

Thomas says he at first found “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne’s longest essay, an “interminable” and “dull” defense of reason. “Then, one day, I got into it, and never got out again.” Why? Because, he writes, “…Montaigne simply turns his mind loose and writes whatever he feels like writing.” Thomas fails to point out that it’s also helpful to have something to say and to say it memorably. And genius doesn’t hurt. Thomas continues:

“Montaigne makes friends in the first few pages of the book, and he becomes the best and closest of all your friends as the essays move along. To be sure, he goes on and on about himself, but that self turns out to be the reader’s self as well. Moreover, he does not pose, ever. He likes himself, to be sure, but is never swept off his feet after the fashion of bores. He is fond of his mind, and affectionately entertained by everything in his head.”

I wrote a friend on Wednesday, asking how it felt to no longer report daily to an office. He answered:

“It's an interesting experience -- of course, just about everything is interesting if you take the trouble to observe it (except politics: the more closely I observe that, the more repellent it seems).”

That’s the spirit of Montaigne and Thomas – minds strong, mature and nimble enough to find the world, inside and out, a bottomless source of interest. Boredom is laziness or an affectation of cool. In some quarters, to be interested in the ways of the world, in its mystery, is unforgivably unhip. After quoting Montaigne at some length, Thomas writes:

“And so, on he goes, page after page, giving away his thoughts without allowing himself to be constrained by any discipline of consistency. `The greatest thing in the world,’ he writes, “is for a man to know how to be his own.’ As it turns out, contrary to his own predictions, what emerges is all his own, all of a piece, intact and solid as any rock. He is, as he says everywhere, an ordinary man. He persuades you of his ordinariness on every page.”

`Poems or People Are Rarely so Lovely'

With Michael Gilleland, proprietor of Laudator Temporis Acti, I share a fondness for trees and old books. On Monday he paired them and posted a passage from Specimen Days in which Whitman lauds the yellow poplar or tulip tree. Last September I wrote about the tulip after Mike recommended Donald Culross Peattie’s delightful A Natural History of North American Trees. I’ll return the favor by sharing with him a poem by Howard Nemerov, “Trees,” from Mirrors and Windows (1958):

“To be a giant and keep quiet about it,
To stay in one’s own place;
To stand for the constant presence of process
And always to seem the same;
To be steady as a rock and always trembling,
Having the hard appearance of death
With the soft, fluent nature of growth,
One’s Being deceptively armored,
One’s Becoming deceptively vulnerable;
To be so tough, and take the light so well,
Freely providing forbidden knowledge
Of so many things about heaven and earth
For which we should otherwise have no word –
Poems or people are rarely so lovely,
And even when they have great qualities
They tend to tell you rather than exemplify
What they believe themselves to be about,
While from the moving silence of trees,
Whether in storm or calm, in leaf and naked,
Night or day, we draw conclusions of our own,
Sustaining and unnoticed as our breath,
And perilous also -- though there has never been
A critical tree -- about the nature of things.”

Trees as moral exemplars: Nemerov was a deceptively philosophical poet, one who didn’t throw around abstruse terminology or genuflect before Heidegger. Nor was he a nature mystic. Rather, he honored the real world by paying attention to its details as it organizes, unravels and organizes again. Nemerov saw verbs where others see nouns. Hence: “One’s Being deceptively armored,/One’s Becoming deceptively vulnerable.”

Nemerov had the chutzpah to title his poem “Trees,” surely knowing he risked censure for associating with Joyce Kilmer’s much-memorized, much-maligned “Trees” (1914). In the line “Poems or people are rarely so lovely,” he even dares to echo Kilmer’s “I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree.” Kilmer was an American poet, editor, journalist and Roman Catholic lecturer. During World War I, he enlisted in the fabled “Fighting 69th.” During the Second Battle of the Marne, on July 30, 1918, he was killed by a German machine gunner. Nemerov served throughout World War II as a pilot in the Royal Canadian unit of the U.S. Army Air Corps.

I learned “Trees” from Alfalfa, who sang it in the 1936 Our Gang episode “Arbor Day,” but it took Guy Davenport in his essay “Trees” (collected in The Geography of the Imagination), to convincingly render Kilmer and his poem the justice they deserved:

“`Trees’ is, if you look, very much of its time. Trees were favorite symbols for Yeats, Frost, and even the young Pound. The nature of chlorophyll had just been discovered, and Tarzan of the Apes – set in a tree world – had just been published. Trees were everywhere in art of the period, and it was understood that they belonged to the region of ideas, to Santayana’s Realm of Beauty.”

Gilleland is the rare sort of blogger who encourages one to think like this, to celebrate creation by observing, across time and space, its infinite weave of connections. Davenport said it like this in another essay from The Geography of the Imagination, “That Faire Field of Enna”:

“Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world. Ancient intuition went foraging after consistency. Religion, science, and art are alike rooted in the faith that the world is of a piece, that something is common to all its diversity, and that if we knew enough we could see and give a name to its harmony.”

`The Great Feral Novel'

Thanks to Dave Lull for sending a link to “King Lear Had Alzheimer’s,” a poem by Les Murray published in the April 11 issue of Commonweal. The Australian poet turns 70 later this year, old enough, perhaps, to know something of Lear’s madness and final devastation from the inside. Having recently read Peter Alexander’s Les Murray: A Life in Progress, I know the poem is drawn in part from a dreadful event in the poet’s father’s life. Here it is:

“The great feral novel
every human is in
is ruthless. It exists
to involve and deflate.
It is the meek talking.”

“The great feral novel
is published, not written
(science bits may be written).
Media grope in its shallows.
The Real Story is their owner.

“The feral novel can get you
told the lies about you,
let you hear the Line about you.
It may even tell the truth
if truth is the cool story.

“Any farmer who breaks
and suicides, some lot’s
politicians wanted him
o don’t say dead. Gone.
Dead doesn’t always die.

“The folk novel’s eyes
did register the barbed wire
and how to get behind it.
Being in the novel helped
a lot in, it says. Some out.

“A father jealous of one son’s
bush skills failed to prove
himself the better man, and caused
a young son’s death trying.
When the skilled son complained

“at being kept dependent
and dirt poor for punishment
only other listened
and other don’t back you
in plots not their own.

“In theirs, they may be hero
even to acquaintances
but then if they rise
into notice, into print,
fellow convicts eye them.

“The man next door
cursed our builder’s noise.
He was writing a book,
so we scoffed, through the hedge,
Shops would sell him a book.

“The great feral novel
heaped up streetsful of flowers
for the faux-demure princess
then sniggered them away.
What survives, survives this.”

“Great feral novel” appears, with variations, four times in the poem’s 10 five-line stanzas. Lear’s name is not mentioned beyond the title. I’m reminded of “Diagnosing Lear,” published last year in The New Criterion by Dr. Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple):

“…the medicalization of Lear’s behavior deprives it of moral significance. If only Lear had taken the right pills, everything would have been all right, and Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia would have been like the Andrews Sisters. The only question Lear raises for the modern mind is how to get him, or anyone like him, to the right doctor on time, before it is too late; presumably absolute monarchs carry adequate health insurance.”

To read King Lear in the manner of a diagnostician (or psychologist, or political scientist), in a manner like anyone other than a thinking, feeling man or woman, is worse than obtuse; it compounds aesthetic sin with a moral one. Consider what Samuel Johnson wrote while preparing his edition of Shakespeare:

“And, if my sensations could add any thing to the general suffrage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.”

Do I imagine a thematic continuity here? Consider: Lear, Johnson, Murray. Let me add another link in this mortal chain. In 1911, the English poet Alice Meynell published a volume of selections from Johnson’s work. Her friend G.K. Chesterton contributed an introduction in which he writes:

“For Johnson is immortal in a more solemn sense than that of the common laurel. He is as immortal as mortality. The world will always return to him, almost as it returns to Aristotle; because he also judged all things with a gigantic and detached good sense. One of the bravest men ever born, he was nowhere more devoid of fear than when he confessed the fear of death. There he is the mighty voice of all flesh; heroic because it is timid. In the bald catalogue of biography with which I began, I purposely omitted the deathbed in the old bachelor house in Bolt Court in 1784. That was no part of the sociable and literary John, but of the solitary and immortal one. I will not say that he died alone with God, for each of us will do that; but that he did in a doubtful and changing world, what in securer civilizations the saints have done. He detached himself from time as in an ecstasy of impartiality; and saw the ages with an equal eye. He was not merely alone with God; he even shared the loneliness of God; which is love.”

Back from the Dead

Even in a digital age, most newspaper copy is ephemeral, destined for the recycling bin. I’ve written thousands of stories, millions of words, and most have effectively evaporated. My hard-copy files are increasingly brown and brittle, and I’m weighing whether to weed them before our move to Seattle.

A kind reader surprised me with a link to one of my stories dating from around 1996. It was published in The Daily Gazette, in Schenectady, N.Y., where I worked from 1994 to 1999. It’s a feature about the largest collection of film scripts in the world, housed in the New York State Museum in Albany, N.Y. Rereading the story felt like visiting a ghost – one who didn’t embarrass me too much.

David Solway Talks

Thanks to Dave Lull for passing along Nigel Beale's audio interview with the great Canadian poet David Solway.

Borges and the Rock Star

Many years ago I saw the 1969 film Performance on a big screen in Cleveland. Subsequently it became a cult movie, and like most cult movies it’s campy, inartistic and generally unwatchable (Rocky Horror Picture Show, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Pink Flamingos, etc.). The film’s big attraction, of course, was Mick Jagger. I watched it again recently on video, resorting often to the “fast-forward” button. I’ve retained a fondness for some of the soundtrack, in particular Jagger’s “Memo from Turner,” but otherwise Performance is a garbled, pretentious gangster flick, redolent of late-sixties self-indulgence.

I forgot that directors Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg had dragged poor Jorge Luis Borges into their mess. At one point we see an underworld goon seated in a car reading A Personal Anthology, the Grove Press collection published in 1967. With Ficciones (1962) and Labyrinths (1964), it helped introduce Borges to English-speaking readers. Later, Jagger, cleverly cast as a rock star, reads aloud from the Borges story “The South,” included in A Personal Anthology. Finally, when the Jagger character is shot the bullet shatters a portrait of Borges (the one on the original cover of A Personal Anthology). This is what I meant by pretentious, and does anyone know whether Borges, a one-time movie reviewer in Buenos Aires (he reviewed King Kong and Citizen Kane), was aware of his disrespectful expropriation by the filmmakers?

One can see why they chose “The South” from among Borges’ stories. The world inhabited by the protagonist, Juan Dahlmann, is hallucinatory. He suffers an accidental head injury that becomes infected, and ends up in a sanitarium: “Though blind to guilt, fate can be merciless with the slightest distraction.” Reality is flux –a very sixties notion. Dahlmann, a librarian (like Borges), grows resigned to the malevolent instability of the world. A thug in a café baits him, Dahlmann responds, and the two leave the café, each carrying a knife. The story’s final sentence (in Andrew Hurley’s translation):

“Dahlmann firmly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to manage, and steps out into the plains.”

Drugs and violence figure prominently in Performance, and its makers must have been attracted to Dahlmann’s fever dreams and Borges’ longtime fascination with knife-fighting and the Buenos Aires demimonde. (Unlike Performance, the Borges story is conspicuously sexless). “The South” is minor Borges, a recycling of familiar themes. There’s a tawdry, unconvincing hollowness to Performance. The clumsy attempts at depicting taboo-breaking drug use, sexuality and violence seem adolescent, like so many artifacts of the counterculture. It also seems earnest and plodding, and recalls what Borges wrote in his 1931 review of Chaplin’s City Lights:

“Its lack of reality is comparable only to its equally exasperating lack of unreality.”

`A Tradition in English of Cadence'

The membrane between prose and poetry has always been porous in both directions. To my taste the “prose poem” is, except in Baudelaire’s hands, a pretentious, non-poetic cul-de-sac. Much contemporary American verse is another species of prose poem – unmusical, unrhythmic, unreadable. Self-consciously “poetic” prose, larded with precious purple patches, is likewise abominable. So, what can prose writers learn from poets, and what can poets learn from their prosaic cousins?

Basil Bunting on Poetry, edited by Peter Makin, collects lectures Bunting delivered at Newcastle University in 1969-71 and in 1974. The texts, drawn from recordings and photocopies of drafts, are fragmented but often eccentrically suggestive. Bunting, who in the preceding decade had returned to poetry with renewed vigor and produced Briggflatts, works from a tradition of his own – Wyatt, Wordsworth, Whitman, Pound, Zukofsky. For Bunting, poetry is music. As Makin says in the introduction:

“Bunting assumes that art is shape, not content. There is no excuse, of course, for decoration; it simply spoils shape. In this art, in the English language, rhythm is the most essential shapeable: and if the poet has the rhythm right, he probably needs nothing else to give main form to his poem.”

For the likes of Tony Hoagland and Franz Wright, among many others, Bunting’s words might as well be written in Linear B. In his lecture on Whitman, Bunting addresses English poetry’s musical debt to prose:

“…a tradition in English of cadence – a musical notation: plain song, where you have a lot of freedom until the `cadence.’

“This in prose – where it joins forces with Hebrew parallelism because of Coverdale’s psalms & Song of Songs.”

Further on he cites examples of “cadence” in English prose, including Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici and Hydriotaphia, and Swift’s Tale of a Tub. To prose writers and thoughtful readers, Bunting’s insights are exhilarating. He proposes an alternative canon of musical English prose, to which I would add, off the top of my head, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Education, and much of Ruskin – Praeterita and parts of his Fors Clavigera. Elsewhere, Bunting writes:

“But Whitman brought something quite new to English poetry. I dont mean `free verse’, whatever that is. Lots of people had tried loose, unrhymed rhythms before him: Blake and Christopher Smart, Milton, the translators of the Psalms and Song of Songs. Some kinds of heavily rhythmed prose make an approach to poetry – Browne and Burton, Latymer [Hugh Latimer, 1485-1555, author of Sermons on the Card] and Cranmer [Thomas Cranmer, 1489-1556, oversaw the first Book of Common Prayer, 1549].”

To bolster Bunting, savor this sample, chosen at random from The Anatomy of Melancholy, the section titled “Simples purging Melancholy downward”:

“Stoechas, fumitory, dodder, herb mercury, roots of capers, genista or broom, pennyroyal and half-boiled cabbage, I find in this catalogue of purgers of black choler, origan, featherfew, ammoniac salt, saltpetre. But these are very gentle; alyppus, dragon root, centaury, ditany, colutea, which Fuchsius…and others take for senna, but most distinguish. Senna is in the middle of violent and gentle purgers downward, hot in the second degree, dry in the first.”

`Something a Little More Than Human'

“We ought to rejoice greatly in him.”

That’s what Henry David Thoreau wrote to his friend Harrison Blake in December 1856 about his meeting the previous month with Walt Whitman, though the convergence of these American heroes, spawn of Emerson, almost didn’t happen. On Nov. 9, 1856, in the company of Amos Bronson Alcott, the stage manager of this Transcendentalist farce, Thoreau traveled to Whitman’s house on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. Alcott knocked and the door was opened not by Walt but his mother – “a stately sensible matron,” Alcott noted in his journal. Walt wasn’t home, but Mrs. Whitman, like a stage mother, trumpeted her son’s virtues at worrisome length.

Alcott and Thoreau returned the following day and found Whitman at home. According to Alcott, not always a reliable witness, Whitman greeted them “kindly, yet awkwardly.” Not surprisingly, the author of Leaves of Grass did most of the talking. Alcott writes:

“He is very curious of criticism on himself or his book, inviting it from all quarters, nor suffering the conversation to stray very wide away from Walt’s godhead without recalling it to that high mark. I hoped to put him in communication direct with Thoreau, and tried my hand a little after we came downstairs and sat in the parlour below; but each seemed planted fast in reserves, surveying the other curiously, -- like two beasts, each wondering what the other would do, whether to snap or run; and it came to no more than cold compliments between them….At all events, our stay was not long.”

Thoreau made no mention of the meeting in his journal. While staying in Eagleswood, N.J., that night, however, he noted the most common oak in that region was Quercus montana. That makes his letter to Blake, written Dec. 7, all the more curious and precious:

“That Walt Whitman, of whom I wrote to you, is the most interesting fact to me at present. I have just read his second edition (which he gave me), and it has done me more good than any reading for a long time. Perhaps I remember best the poem of Walt Whitman, an American, and the Sun-Down Poem. There are two or three pieces in the book which are disagreeable, to say the least; simply sensual. He does not celebrate love at all. It is as if the beasts spoke. I think that men have not been ashamed of themselves without reason. No doubt there have always been dens where such deeds were unblushingly recited, and it is no merit to compete with their inhabitants. But even on this side he has spoken more truth than any American or modern that I know. I have found his poem exhilarating, encouraging. As for its sensuality--and it may turn out to be less sensual than it appears--I do not so much wish that those parts were not written, as that men and women were so pure that they could read them without harm, that is, without understanding them. One woman told me that no woman could read it--as if a man could read what a woman could not. Of course Walt Whitman can communicate to us no experience, and if we are shocked, whose experience is it that we are reminded of?

“On the whole, it sounds to me very brave and American, after whatever deductions. I do not believe that all the sermons, so called, that I have preached in this land put together are equal to it for preaching.

“We ought to rejoice greatly in him. He occasionally suggests something a little more than human. You can't confound him with the other inhabitants of Brooklyn or New York. How they must shudder when they read him! He is awfully good.

“To be sure I sometimes feel a little imposed on. By his heartiness and broad generalities he puts me into a liberal frame of mind prepared to see wonders--as it were, sets me upon a hill or in the midst of a plain--stirs me well up, and then--throws in a thousand of brick. Though rude, and sometimes ineffectual, it is a great primitive poem--an alarum or trumpet-note ringing through the American camp. Wonderfully like the Orientals, too, considering that when I asked him if he had read them, he answered, `No: tell me about them.’

“I did not get far in conversation with him--two more being present--and among the few things which I chanced to say, I remember that one was, in answer to him as representing America, that I did not think much of America or of politics, and so on, which may have been somewhat of a damper to him.

“Since I have seen him, I find that I am not disturbed by any brag or egoism in his book. He may turn out the least of a braggart of all, having a better right to be confident.

“He is a great fellow.”

Bravo, Henry! I love this letter. After confessing his discomfort with Whitman’s frankness over the “simply sensual” – an uneasiness shared by many readers of that day and ours -- he forthrightly asks: “and if we are shocked, whose experience is it that we are reminded of?”

I recount this episode at some length because I’ve been browsing in Vol. 3 of With Walt Whitman in Camden, the nine-volume transcription of Whitman’s conversation kept by Horace Traubel during the poet’s final, illness-plagued years. Traubel visited the poet at his home in Camden, N.J., almost daily from the mid-1880s until Whitman's death in 1892. He started taking notes of their talks in March 1888, and transcribed them nightly. Traubel published three volumes of Whitman’s conversation before his own death in 1919. The final two volumes did not appear until 1996, more than a century after Traubel wrote them.

Whitman introduces Thoreau into conversation nine times in Vol. 3, which covers Traubel’s Camden visits between Nov. 1, 1888 and Jan. 20, 1889. Thoreau, who died in 1862, clearly made a lasting impression. This is from Dec. 17, 1888:

“Thoreau, in Brooklyn, that first time he came to see me, referred to my critics as `reprobates.’ I asked him: `Would you apply so severe a word to them?’ He was surprised: `Do you regard that as a severe word? reprobates? what they really deserve is something infinitely stronger, more caustic; I thought I was letting them off easy.’”

Whitman was a self-mythologizer, but this rings true. Despite his reservations about the sexual content of Leaves of Grass, Thoreau celebrates the roughneck from Long Island. The coolness between the men in person warmed to passionate advocacy once they parted. Here’s a portion of Whitman’s conversation on Christmas Eve 1888. A visitor has asked the poet who is “bigger” – Emerson or Thoreau? Whitman answers:

“…my prejudices, if I may call them that, are all with Emerson: but Thoreau was a surprising fellow – he is not easily grasped – is elusive: yet he is one of the native forces – stands for a fact, a movement, an upheaval: Thoreau belongs to America, to the transcendental, to the protesters: then he is an outdoor man: all outdoor men everything else being equal appeal to me. Thoreau was not so precious, tender, a personality as Emerson: but he was a force – he looms up bigger and bigger: his dying does not seem to have hurt him a bit: every year has added to his fame. One thing about Thoreau keeps him very near to me: I refer to his lawlessness – his dissent – his going his own absolute road let hell blaze all its choices.”

Both men speak of the other in oversized, epical terms. For Thoreau, Whitman is “a little more than human.” For Whitman, Thoreau “looms up bigger and bigger.” Genius recognizes genius.

`The Significant Word Unknown'

April 4, 1968, was a Thursday so my brother and I were watching Daniel Boone on NBC television. The title role was played by Fess Parker who in the previous decade had portrayed another rugged American hero, Davy Crockett. During the show, which came on at 7:30 p.m. in Cleveland, news broke that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been fatally shot in Memphis, Tenn., and the already savage year of 1968 was becoming unimaginably more savage.

While watching Daniel Boone I was reading the Signet paperback edition of Leaves of Grass, with a mild-looking Walt Whitman in pastels on the cover. I no longer remember which poem held my divided attention, though my favorite, one I reread compulsively in those years, was “Song of Myself.” In memory, that day 40 years ago remains an unlikely confluence of American heroes: Boone, Whitman, King.

The Internet Movie Database tells me the episode of Daniel Boone broadcast that night was titled “Faith’s Way.” “Faith” refers not to the virtue but to a character, Faith, played by Julie Harris, whose best-known role in subsequent decades was that of another American hero, Emily Dickinson, in The Belle of Amherst. Dickinson’s most productive period, 1861-1865, coincided with the Civil War, during which she wrote some 800 poems.

In his great prose work Specimen Days, Whitman returns obsessively to the Civil War, during which he served as a nurse in Union field hospitals, and Abraham Lincoln, whose assassination is the subject of Whitman’s greatest poem (“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”) and his worst and most popular (“O Captain! My Captain!”). A piece from Specimen Days, “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up,” consists of three long, stirring sentences, such as a preacher might deliver. Whitman writes:

“And everywhere among these countless graves—everywhere in the many soldier Cemeteries of the Nation, (there are now, I believe, over seventy of them)—as at the time in the vast trenches, the depositories of slain, Northern and Southern, after the great battles—not only where the scathing trail passed those years, but radiating since in all the peaceful quarters of the land—we see, and ages yet may see, on monuments and gravestones, singly or in masses, to thousands or tens of thousands, the significant word Unknown.”

Whitman, the most tender of men, couldn’t bear the thought of so much anonymous death. In his notebooks he records the names, ranks, units and home towns of thousands of sick, wounded, dying men, much like Ernie Pyle in another war, though not as a journalist but a caregiver, a nurse, an angel of mercy. He also noted their wishes for small comforts and sought to fulfill them – jelly, oranges, newspapers, rice pudding, plugs of tobacco. In Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington, Daniel Mark Epstein writes of the poet’s visits to the hospitals:

“Whitman wore a wine-colored suit with large pockets, his baggy pants tucked into his black morocco boots. With his rosy cheeks, white beard, and the leather haversack slung over his shoulder, it was no wonder the boys called him Santa Claus. According to Nellie O’Connor, one Yuletide Whitman was coming from the hospital when a suspicious policeman ordered him to `remove the false face!’ Walt showed him the face was really his own, but then asked the policeman, `Do we not all wear “false faces?”’ He was delighted to have been mistaken for St. Nick.”

Epstein adds:

“Above all it was the gift of his kind presence that the soldiers valued. He told his mother, `the reason I am able to do some good in the hospitals, among the poor languishing & wounded boys, is that I am so large and well – indeed like a great wild buffalo, with much hair.”

On the inside cover of one notebook he signed himself “Walt Whitman Soldier’s Missionary to Hospital, Camp, & Battle Ground.”

`Vulgar and Tavern-Musick'

In the title essay of his 1957 collection, The Fine Art of Reading, Lord David Cecil quotes Sir Thomas Browne:

“Whosoever is harmonically composed, delights in harmony; which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all Church-Musick. For myself, not only from my obedience, but my particular Genius, I do embrace it: for even that vulgar and Tavern-Musick, which makes one man merry another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first Composer. There is something in it of Divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole World, and creatures of God; such a melody to the ear, as the whole World well understood, would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony, which intellectually sounds in the ears of God.”

Cecil draws the passage from Browne’s Religio Medici (1643). I remember reading it in the steamy summer of 1975 as I rode the bus to the bookstore where I worked in downtown Cleveland. Browne’s prose is filigreed and incantatory; his mind, fanciful and attracted, magpie-fashion, to queer details. He was beloved by Johnson, Coleridge, Lamb, Melville (who called him “a cracked archangel”) and, rather unexpectedly, Virginia Woolf: “Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those that do are the salt of the earth.” Such as W.G. Sebald, another admirer. But I quote the Browne passage to get to Cecil’s gloss:

“For me, this is the most illuminating statement ever made about art. In it, as by a flash of unearthly divination, Browne reveals art’s function in the scheme of creation, and also the mode in which it is performed. The artist, he suggests, converts the imperfect into an image of perfection, not by softening or omitting ugly facts – if he did, he would shake our confidence in his work as a true picture of the reality we know – but rather by presenting these ugly facts as the component parts of a perfect order and harmony. Further, the passage illustrates how any work of art does this, whatever its substance. Not some celestial strain of Byrd or Orlando Gibbons is it, but `vulgar and Tavern-Musick’ that strikes in Browne his deep fit of devotion.”

I, too, love the phrase “vulgar and Tavern-Musick.” On Tuesday I was listening to Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys in the car. When John C. Reilly’s version of the traditional English song “My Son John” ended, my 7-year-old asked to hear it again, and again, until we got home. Here’s the first verse:

“My son John was tall and slim
And he had a leg for every limb
Now he's got no legs at all
For he ran a race with a cannonball.”

It’s an appalling, black-humored and all-too-timely song, and probably qualifies as “vulgar and Tavern-Musick.” It’s also sublime and irresistibly catchy, as drinking songs ought to be. For my son, its appeal started on the Looney Tunes level: “For he ran a race with a cannonball.” He’s seen Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam do that. Because the song has the ring of the Napoleonic Wars about it, I lectured briefly on naval warfare, Nelson, Trafalgar, etc. “So, it’s funny and it’s serious?” Michael asked. Precisely. Here’s where Cecil picks it up again:

“So also with literature. Any phase of human feeling, however, trifling, any point of view, however dismal or perverse, can be transmuted into an image of spiritual perfection – slighter no doubt than that evoked for us by Dante, yet an image of spiritual perfection all the same. The author may not have intended it to be, but he cannot help himself. By a sublime irony, not only pious Herbert and mystical Blake, but mocking Byron and irresponsible Sterne and worldly Congreve and despairing Hardy, are, in Sir Thomas Browne’s sense of the word, devotional authors. For in so far as they have expressed their spirit in the harmony of a true work of art, they have opened the eyes of the soul to a sight of that divine and flawless essence whence she springs and for which, while her unquiet exile on earth endures, she is immedicably homesick [a nice echo of Religio Medici].”

Reading “however dismal or preserve,” I thought immediately of Naked Lunch and American Psycho, and wondered how Browne and Cecil would have judged Burroughs and Ellis.