`Being a Poet Begins With Watching'

Some poets are so varied in their gifts, so appealing in music and matter, that readers outside the academy and poetry ghetto, even children, can know the pleasures of artful language. I’ve seen attractively illustrated kids’ editions – published in the 21st century, I mean -- of Browning, Whitman, Kipling and Wallace Stevens. With her devotion to animals, eccentric arrangement of words on the page and general enjoyment of life, a well-edited selection from Marianne Moore would seem a likely recruit to the ranks of kiddie lit, and I’m not alone in my hunch. A search of the library catalog on Friday uncovered an unexpected gem – Call Me Marianne, a children’s book written by Jen Bryant and illustrated by David A. Johnson. It passed the conclusive test: My 5-year-old read the book in silence as we drove home from the library.

Bryant’s story is simple: A young boy, Jonathan, boards a bus in Brooklyn in the 1940s and sits across from a woman dressed in black. She is making notes and holds in her hand the same Times article as Jonathan: “Exotic Lizards Have New Home at City Zoo.” Both get off at the zoo and go separately. Jonathan sees a tri-cornered hat blowing in the wind and returns it to the owner –Marianne Moore, who invites Jonathan to accompany her to the Reptile House. Jonathan asks if she is a scientist:

“`No, I’m not a scientist – I’m a poet.’

“`Oh,’ I reply. I’ve never met a poet before. `What, exactly, does a poet do?’ I ask her.”

The crowd interrupts before Moore can answer. Eventually, she says:

“`For me, being a poet begins with watching. I watch animals. I watch people. I read books and look at photographs. I notice details – little things that other people miss.’

“`Then I write them all down, I shuffle them around, like pieces of a puzzle, and I read them over and over out loud. And if I’m patient, very patient –‘

“and if I work, line by line, to get the words and the sounds just right, and the rhythm just right, then I make a good poem.’”

Together, they watch the lizards and other animals, and as a reward for returning her hat, Moore gives Jonathan a blank notebook and whispers, “`You could write poetry.’” And you, reader, can supply the dénouement. It’s a charming book and Johnson’s ink and watercolor illustrations are pointillist triumphs. Friday night, when David asked me to read to him, he asked for “the book with the bears in it.” Moore would have appreciated his emphasis. I also read him Moore’s “O to be a Dragon” (“Felicitous phenomenon!”) aloud to him. In her introduction to A Marianne Moore Reader (1961) Moore explains:

“Why an inordinate interest in animals and athletes [her love of the Brooklyn Dodgers was legendary]? They are subject for art and exemplars of it, are they not? minding their own business. Pangolins, hornbills, pitchers, catchers, do not pry or prey – or prolong the conversation; do not make us self-conscious; look their best when caring least; although in a Frank Buck documentary I saw a leopard insult a crocodile (basking on a river bank – head only visible on the bank) – bat the animal on the nose and continue on its way without so much as a look back.”


Her sentiments recall these lines from Section 32 of “Song Of Myself”:


“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”


Today we observe Whitman’s 189th birthday.

`Spelt As Pronounced'

Still the best parody of advertising copy, from Samuel Beckett’s Watt, written some 65 years ago:

“Have you tried Bando, Mr. Graves, said Arthur. A capsule, before and after meals, in a little warm milk, and again at night, before turning in. I had tried everything, and was thoroughly disgusted, when a friend spoke to me of Bando. Her husband was never without it, you understand. Try it, she said, and come back in five or six years. I tried it, Mr. Graves, and it changed my whole outlook on life. From being a moody, listless, constipated man, covered with squames, shunned by my fellows, my breath fetid and my appetite depraved (for years I had eaten nothing but high fat rashers), I became, after four years of Bando, vivacious, restless, a popular nudist, regular in my daily health, almost a father and a lover of boiled potatoes. Bando. Spelt as pronounced.”

I especially like “almost a father.”

`Save the Word'

On Tuesday, a woman without children told me she knows what it’s like to have children. On Thursday, I overheard another woman, this one seated near me in a doctor’s waiting room, say to a companion, “I know what it must be like to have prostate cancer.” In the name of empathy, both were willing to defy biology. Presenting an appearance of sensitivity, of “sharing and caring,” has become more important, more virtuous, than simple honesty. The late Thom Gunn, the most tender and vicious of poets, nailed this phenomenon for what it is – self-aggrandizement masking as concern for others. The untitled poem is from Boss Cupid, his last book:

“Save the word
empathy, sweetheart,
for your freshman essays.
Doesn’t it make
A rather large claim?
Think you can
syphon yourself
into another human
as, in the movie,
the lively boy-ghosts
pour themselves
down the ear-holes
of pompous older men?
Don’t try it. Only
Jesus could do it and he
probably didn’t exist.
Try `sympathy.’ With that
your isolated self may
split a cloak with a beggar,
slip a pillow under the head
of the arrested man, hold tight
the snag-toothed hustler with red hair.”

My new doctor is a young, briskly friendly Hawaiian woman who treats bodies, not “feelings,” hers or mine. She asked questions about my health and never presumed to know a damned thing about my emotional state, nor inflict hers on me. Quite a good doctor.

`A Flash of Splendour'

Montana-born Edward McKnight Kauffer was a childhood friend of T.S. Eliot who later befriended Marianne Moore and Eudora Welty. He was an artist and designer who, in the decades after World War I, created strikingly modern advertising posters. Go here to see photos of Kauffer, including one with Eliot, and more of his work. Like Eliot, Kauffer lived for much of his life in England. He was afflicted with a sense of injustice, feeling unrecognized, unappreciated and misunderstood in his own country. He died in 1954, age 64, of alcoholism. About two years earlier, Moore, who understood being misunderstood, had written in a letter to Kauffer:

“If one lies in wait; if one is ready for the problem, that is sufficient.”

How often does a friend’s encouragement arrive with a semi-colon? Moore taught herself to lie in wait like one of her animals – jelly-fish, jerboa, wood-weasel, pangolin. Of the last she wrote: “Not afraid of anything is he,/and then goes cowering forth, tread paced to meet an obstacle/at every step.” In the same poem, it’s worth noting, she says “humor saves a few steps, it saves years.” In her letter to Kauffer, Moore writes:

“To speak is to blunder but I venture, for I know the bewilderment one experiences in being misapprehended. We must face it, as you said. When we do well – that is to say, you – in designs of yours which are standard – the Ethyl horse-power, the Gilbey’s port, the Devon downs, the girl in the helmet with the star and effect of velvet darkness, the tall hat on the Victorian table, the door with the keyhole made dramatic, -- there is a flash of splendour apart from the pretext; and when a thing snares the imagination, it is because of a secret excitement which contributes something private – an incontrovertible to admire afresh at each sight, like the bloom and tones of a grape or the glitter of Orion as one emerges into the dark from the ordinariness of lamplight.”

I wish we could know Kauffer’s reaction to receiving this letter. Did it relieve, even for a moment, his despair? One is touched by its solicitude, Jamesian eloquence and unexpected self-revelations: Many of her poems give “a flash of splendour apart from the pretext.” Moore seems to have been born gifted with a sense of clarity and self-acceptance. Such at-homeness is rare, and in her case it was sometimes mistaken for aloofness or mere eccentricity. It gave her the strength to accept with grace the libel of mandarin obscurity. Like one of her great enthusiasms, Henry James, Moore looked with horror upon simple-minded directness. It was vulgar, naïve and misleading, and made for bad poetry. In "Armor’s Undermining Modesty” she writes (please pardon Blogger’s botching of indentations):

“If tributes cannot
be implicit

“give me diatribes and the fragrance of iodine,
the cork oak acorn grown in Spain;
the pale-ale-eyed impersonal look
which the sales-placard gives the bock beer buck.
What is more precise than precision? Illusion.”

`The Northern Lights of Her Continual Irony'

The funniest person I know – all of his instincts are effortlessly, naturally funny – joined the staff of the newspaper where I was working in upstate New York 20 years ago. Like me, John was a reporter, though he covered a suburban beat and I wrote features. Some people who fancy themselves humorists are, in fact, histrionic narcissists. They try too hard and the effort is deadly: If a joke flops the first time, repeat it seven or eight times. John is different. His timing and sense of brevity are flawless, and he knows how to size up an audience. Returning from his rounds, he regaled the city desk with stories of malfeasance and general idiocy. Where others saw cause for outrage and cynicism, John saw unadulterated human comedy. At least until he sat at the keyboard and tried to turn raw reporting into 12 inches of copy. Everyday, John choked. The membrane between his spoken and written language was not permeable. It was plate steel.

John left the business, went to Cornell and became a lawyer. He’s still funny and much wealthier and more successful.

I thought of John while reading Kay Ryan again. John’s dilemma will never be hers. She’s no journalist, but she reliably delivers news that stays news. She’s a general-assignment reporter, and her beat one day is epistemology, aesthetics the next, without the dullness those categories suggest. Her poems, already compressed, cannot be reduced to “theme.” Her short lines are elliptical and suggestive. Her unit is the word or word-cluster. She flatters the reader into attentiveness. Here is “Blandeur” from Say Uncle:

“If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth's
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your
terrible glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.”

That cluster of trochees is funny – but not merely funny -- and the last two lines, also funny, look sideways at Hopkins. We read a Ryan poem once to orient ourselves, to catch the rhythm and direction; again for the way she toys with single words (“flatten/Eiger, blanden”); and again and again to enjoy the whole unlikely apparatus. Ryan has the funny person’s and the serious person’s gift or affliction of hypersensitivity to words. Words have meaning, yes, and also music, heft, taste, echo and mass. Words displace nothing. Ryan’s please the tongue and mind. In his review of Marianne Moore’s Collected Poems, published in 1952 in Partisan Review, Randall Jarrell might be describing Ryan’s work:

“She wished to trust, as absolutely as she could, in flat laconic matter-of-factness, in the minimal statement, understatement: these earlier poem of hers approach as a limit, a kind of ideal minimal statement, a truth thought of as underlying, prior to, all exaggeration and error; the poet has tried to strip or boil everything down to the point of hard, objective, absolute precision.”

Jarrell’s passage would deny Moore and Ryan their wit and comedy, but he addresses that elsewhere in his review. He praises Moore’s “exactness, concision, irony,” and memorably notes that her poems “sparkle under the Northern Lights of her continual irony.” That slippery word, irony, should not be confused here with postmodern glibness. Moore and Ryan are elegant moralists. They skirt whimsy and cuteness but elude their fatal allure. Each, as Auden wrote of Henry James, is a “Master of nuance and scruple.” Here’s a poem thematically similar to “Blandeur” – “Nothing Getting Past” from The Niagara River:

“If life is a
thin film
sandwiched between twin
immensities
of nothing
you get the best
taste of this
out west in
the open country
where a keen
could mean the
double scrape
of nothing almost
touching nothing
or the wind
coming through
dry grass. In
either case it's
pretty close
to nothing
getting past.”

Ryan takes a term from physics and materials science – “thin film” – jiggers it to fit a string of food metaphors, works in some internal rhymes (one of her trademarks) and a quiet allusion to “The Hollow Men,” and repeats “nothing” four times in 21 lines (it shows up 29 times in King Lear, more often than in any of Shakespeare’s plays). The result, in other hands, could have been preachy and dull. In Ryan’s, it’s like one of John’s stories – the spoken ones, I mean – funny and true.

`She Aims to Liberate the Mind'

The best criticism, I’m becoming convinced, is hardly criticism at all, at least not principally, but rather a mingling of sympathetic sensibilities. Think of Eliot on Samuel Johnson, or Jarrell on Kipling or Stead. What passes for criticism too often amounts to riding a fashionable or idiopathic hobbyhorse external to the work at hand, a spectacle reminiscent of the watchmaker whose favorite tool is a coal shovel. In their priggish zeal, such critics appear not to be having a very good time, nor bothering to share pleasure with readers. They are literary wet blankets, humorless apparatchiks of theory.

Kay Ryan is of a different tribe. I’ve bought magazines solely to read her latest poems, which are always precise, concise and often funny. How many contemporary poets make us laugh intentionally? Go here for a selection of her poetry and prose, and here for the sort of illuminating, pleasure-giving criticism I was trying to describe -- Ryan’s review of The Poems of Marianne Moore, first published in 2004 in the Yale Review. But to digress for a moment, consider the foreword Moore wrote for Predilections, her prose collection published in 1955. Here, in its entirety, it is:

“Silence is more eloquent than speech – a truism; but sometimes something that someone has written excites one’s admiration and one is tempted to write about it; if it is in a language other than one’s own, perhaps to translate it – or try to; one feels that what holds one’s attention might hold the attention of others. That is to say, there is a language of sensibility of which words can be the portrait – a magnetism, an ardor, a refusal to be false, to which the following pages attempt to testify.”

Moore speaks of “admiration,” “attention,” “sensibility,” “magnetism,” “ardor” – an exotically old-fashioned vocabulary by today’s standards, a hybrid of Whitman and Henry James. She also sounds like Ryan, who writes of Moore:

“She aims to liberate the mind. It is an elegant paradox that close application to the physical somehow does release the mind from the physical. There is probably never a time when poetry couldn't stand a good dose of Marianne Moore's profound respect for the mind and her tonic view of the poet's job. She will always represent a grease-cutting alternative to the poetry of self-occupation.”

Beautiful. Ryan loves Moore enough and has wrestled with her work long enough to occasionally find fault with the poems, with their difficulty, allusiveness and – well, strangeness. Only a lover can possess such confidence, knowing she will not be spurned. As Ryan puts it:

“When a poet delights us, it's amazing how much we'll put up with. I feel as indulgent and proud as a parent.”

We can never know what Moore’s poems know for they know too much, but she is ever reminding us to pay attention, to honor creation by observing it in detail and prizing its bottomless beauty. In “The Mind Is an Enchanted Thing” she writes:

“the mind
feeling its way as though blind,
walks along with its eyes on the ground.”

My English Romanticism professor once asked us to imagine Shelley and Keats walking along a woodland path. The former makes grand gestures at the heavens, marveling at the vastness of the cosmos. Keats’ eyes are focused on the ground, noting mushrooms, the shape and color of flowers, the glistening web of an orb weaver. In this sense at least, Moore is ever a Keats, never a Shelley. Eric Ormsby describes her as “one of the most fastidiously sensuous writers in the English language; her perceptions garb themselves in a surface chinoiserie beneath which the intellectual and erotic meld in a seamless and articulate continuum of pleasure.”

Language lush with music and thought – like Moore’s, like Keats’, like Wallace Stevens’ – packs an erotic kick, regardless of the ostensible subject. In her review of Moore’s letter for the Boston Review, Ryan writes:

“Moore's letters reveal how literal her poems are, how of a piece with her life. Everywhere is evidence of her darting, delicate, exacting, pan-interested mind. Detail is poetry to her. Throughout her life she receives exotic bric-a-brac from traveling friends. Her exquisite appreciations stimulate further gifts, and the cycle continues, object to object, pleasure irresistibly inviting pleasure, leapfrogging like her poems.”

“Pleasure irresistibly inviting pleasure”: Ryan’s prose illuminating Moore’s poetry is almost more pleasure than a reader can bear.

`It's No Burden To Do So'

Memorial Day is the orphan among American holidays. Even its name has changed: My father, a World War II veteran, called it Decoration Day, just as Veterans Day was Armistice Day. Today will be rightly claimed by veterans and their families, and by hawks and doves, and patriots of all stripes, exhibitionists and contemplatives. For many its significance will be less exalted – a three-day weekend, summer’s symbolic start, the day that will seem like yesterday on Labor Day. Memorial Day is orphaned, too, because it poses unseemly marketing dilemmas. We observe other holidays by buying something: presents, fireworks, turkeys, trick-or-treat candy. What does one buy for Memorial Day? A flag? Flowers for a grave?

When he returned to the United States in 1904 after 20 years in Europe, Henry James observed the distinctly American mingling of solemnity and informality, of democracy, when he visited Grant’s tomb, dedicated 12 years after the general’s death in 1885. In The American Scene, James contrasted it with Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides:

“The tabernacle of Grant's ashes stands there by the pleasure-drive, unguarded and unenclosed, the feature of the prospect and the property of the people, as open as an hotel or a railway-station to any coming and going, and as dedicated to the public use as builded things in America (when not mere closed churches) only can be.”

In The Rural Life, Verlyn Klinkenborg notes how “holidays that begin as legislative events embed themselves in our sense of the year’s natural order.” Memorial Day started in 1868 as a way to coordinate commemorations of the Union dead. Klinkenborg associates the holiday, as do I, with parades, always in the morning and always ending in a cemetery. Here’s Klinkenborg:

“To enter summer with an act of solemnity, however slight, however quickly dispelled by the long after noon that follows the parade, has a certain emotional fitness. It’s almost an apology for the thoughtless vitality of this season, a time when the naked exuberance of nature bears the living away into June and July and forgetfulness. Our job now is to live out all those summers that were lost to the men and women who died in wars past, as well as our own summers too. It’s no burden to do so.”

`Thy High Requiem Become a Sod'

We spent much of Saturday flaying my brother-in-law’s front lawn – dirty, tedious, oddly satisfying work. He rented a sod-cutter, a sort of roto-tiller with lateral rather than rotary blades, to slice grass off the ground with the roots intact so you can roll it up like carpeting. He also hired three day-laborers to help – two Mexicans and a black guy from Alaska.

The latter told me his family has been in the military “since they were buffalo soldiers,” and that his father was killed in Vietnam and buried at Fort Richardson, near Anchorage. He’s writing a book titled My Sin Is My Skin, which he insisted is not about race. Besides his book, his favorite subjects were firearms, martial arts, hunting and fishing. When I asked how many blacks live in his native state, he said, “About seven, counting me.” He made me promise to visit him in Alaska so he could take me salmon fishing – “for free, no charge” – and wrote his telephone number on paper torn from a pocket notebook, adding this inscription:

“Come to Alaska land of the free and home of the fucking brave.”

I thanked him and, for no good reason, as we pushed wheel barrows full of sod up the sloping lawn, asked if he knew what the “Old Sod” referred to. No, he didn’t, so I tried to paraphrase this entry from Brewer’s Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable:

“A nickname for Ireland in the mouth of exiles, used mostly with genuine affection but in recent times with a strong element of mockery. The word `sod’ is the equivalent of the English `turf’…”

Emphasis on “mockery,” I’d say, as in Beckett and Flann O’Brien. I told my Alaskan friend about the scene in Finnegans Wake, the vaudeville-like bit involving Butt and Taff, in which an Irish soldier takes aim at a Russian general in the Crimea. The Irishman pauses as the Russian lowers his pants to defecate, but changes his mind and shoots when the general wipes himself with a bit of green sod. Like many Wake readers, my friend needed a bit of exegesis on Irish nationalism before he laughed. Only on the drive home could I remember most of the sixth stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale,” a great favorite of Beckett’s:

“Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.”

`An Arboretum of the Mind'

One of my favorites among the books I read in 2007 was A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America by Donald Culross Peattie, published in 1950. I thank Mike Gilleland for the tip. Go here, here and here to see what I wrote at the time. Now that we have moved to greater Seattle it’s time to consult the companion volume, A Natural History of Western Trees (1953). Last year, Houghton Mifflin published both of Peattie’s books under a single title, A Natural History of North American Trees, with a foreword by his son, Mark R. Peattie, and an excellent introduction-cum-celebration by Verlyn Klinkenborg. More than 100 wood engravings by Paul Landacre are retained from the original volumes.

Here’s an illustration of the book’s usefulness and beauty. Straddling our yard and the neighbor’s to the south, 15 feet from where I’m sitting, stands a lush, 35-foot Alaska cedar. The trunk at its base is about 18 inches in diameter. The tree looks shaggy but elegant. Here’s how Peattie begins his three-page Alaska cedar essay (Beware: This is more than a field guide. Peattie profiled trees the way Whitney Balliett profiled jazz musicians.):

"The Alaska cedar can be one of the most beautiful yet most sorrowful of western conifers. Its long, lithe leader shoot bows its head – sometimes bent nearly double in a young tree – and its dull, dark bluish green foliage is evergreen for two years, then turns a rusty brown. The dead foliage is not shed, however, for another year, leaving the whole tree more or less tinged with the hue that, for vegetable life, is the color of mourning."

Not since Ovid has a writer so winningly anthropomorphized a tree. This sort of thing is not to every reader’s taste, and at times Peattie’s penchant for purple prose grows oppressive. But his learning is encyclopedic, so each essay is a collection of interestingly wayward nuggets: The Alaska cedar grows to 150 feet in British Columbia. Boat builders use the wood for decking, railing and interior paneling. The trees grow slowly and may not reach "saw-timber size" until they are 200 years old.

Unlike any other place I’ve lived, the dominant trees in Seattle and environs are conifers, lending mountains their characteristic ragged profiles. In contrast to Houston, I’ve seen no Chinese tallow trees, no palms (fine with me: palms make any landscape resemble a movie set) and few maples. In our backyard is the tallest tree I have ever lived near, a Douglas fir at least 60 feet tall and almost five feet in diameter. One of the longest essays in Peattie’s book – 10 pages – is devoted to the Douglas fir. He begins with an anecdote. When the frigate Constitution was launched in 1798, her three masts were made from Eastern white pines. When the ship was refurbished in 1925, no white pine tall enough could be found in the East. Instead, the restorers imported three Douglas firs from the Pacific Northwest. Writing almost 60 years ago, Peattie says:

"One-fourth of all the standing saw timber in the United States is Douglas fir. In volume cut it surpasses any other one species."

One of the charms of Peattie’s book is the frequency of such anachronisms. The environment, the economy and technology – everything has changed since the flush postwar years. Today, the Douglas fir is best known as a Christmas tree. Peattie never mentions this use. Here’s a lovely fir- and Christmas-related digression from Thoreau’s journal for Nov. 27, 1857:

"Standing before Stacy’s large glass windows this morning, I saw that they were gloriously ground by the frost. I never saw such beautiful feather and fir-like frosting. His windows are filled with fancy articles and toys for Christmas and New Year’s presents, but this delicate and graceful outside frosting surpassed them all infinitely. I saw countless feathers with very distinct midribs and fine pinnae. The half of a trunk seemed to rise in each case up along the sash, and these feathers branched off from it all the way, sometimes nearly horizontally. Other crystals looked like pine plumes the size of life. If glass could be ground to look like this, how glorious it would be!"

Where you and I see ferns, Thoreau sees feathers and firs. It’s a metaphor Peattie would have prized. Here’s Klinkenborg on Peattie as a writer:

"In these essays Peattie reminds us again and again that perhaps the most important thing to know about the trees we live among is the effect they have upon us. And that can only be captured in words, by a writer whose greatest work is an arboretum of the mind."

`It Extends the Self'

“My high school had no library worthy of the name `book,’ so I would walk about a mile downtown to the public one to borrow, in almost every case, a new world. That’s what a library does for its patrons. It extends the self. It is pure empowerment. I would gather my three or four choices, after deliberations governed by ignorant conjecture, and then before leaving, I would sit at one of the long, wide tables we associate with the institution now, and read a page or two further than I had while standing in the stacks. I scorned the books deemed appropriate for my age, and selected only those I wouldn’t understand. Reading what I didn’t understand was, for one blissful period of my life, the source of a profound, if perverse, pleasure.”

I could sign my name to this passage from William H. Gass’ “A Defense of the Book,” collected in A Temple of Texts. My grade school had a better library than my high school, stocked with antiquated science texts and “classics” abridged for children – Gulliver’s Travels with Swift’s scatology excised. In that library I met Max Ellison, the first self-identified poet I met and later the poet laureate of Michigan. I was a Roethke enthusiast and had read Allan Seagar’s The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke. Ellison, folksy and bearded like Whitman, assured me Roethke was overrated. I asked him about Buber and Tillich, writers important to Roethke late in his life, but Ellison knew nothing of them.

Gass’ essay mingles memoir and reverie. A good book, especially when we’re young, is always “a new world,” a reaching beyond the self. Just as Columbus followed the Vikings, so a “new world” can be rediscovered, which describes much of my reading today. A library, Gass says, ought to “extend the self.” I thought of this phrase on Thursday when I took my younger sons to the central library in Bellevue. One man was watching an ABBA video on a library computer and another, a clip from a Bruce Lee movie. No selves were being extended. Still, in the stacks I found Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons, Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years and, through interlibrary loan, Daniel Fuchs’ Three Novels. My sons, between them, checked out 23 books, from Calvin and Hobbes to a kid’s history of the Trojan War. Gass continues:

“I also liked to look at the card pasted in the back of the book to record previous borrowings – a card that is, like so much other information, there no longer or discreetly incomplete. It gave me a good deal of satisfaction to be taking home some rarely read, symbolically dusty, arcane tome. I checked out both my book and my pride at the same desk. See O world what I am reading and be amazed: Joyce, Wells, Carlyle. Well, Wells I could understand. That, I would realize later, was what was the matter with him.”

“My book and my pride,” indeed. How often I paraded my elevated tastes (including my taste for early Gass). They were usually genuine but made insufferable by my exhibitionism. Youth and arrogance are a potent cocktail. More Gass:

“Libraries have succumbed to the same pressures that have overwhelmed the basic cultural functions of museums and universities, aims which should remain what they were, not because the old ways are always better, but because in this case they were the right ones: the sustaining of standards, the preservation of quality, the conservation of literacy’s history, the education of the heart, eye, and mind – so that now they devote far too much of their restricted space, and their limited budget, to public amusement, and to futile competition with the Internet. It is a fact of philistine life that amusement is where the money is: Finally, you are doing something for the community, spokesmen for the community say, saluting the librarian with a gesture suitable to a noble Roman without, however, rising from their bed of banality.”

`So Yours, So Mine'

Warne Marsh was one of the purest, most nimble of jazz improvisers. Since his death at age 60 in 1987, his reputation, never ample, has contracted to cultish proportions. His sound on the tenor saxophone was fluid and highly melodic but stringent, sometimes somber. He sounded nothing like John Coltrane. He was an intellectual player but never barren, accessible but not a crowd pleaser. In jazz history, despite his well-known associations with Lennie Tristano and Lee Konitz, he remains uncompromising and solitary. In his 1985 profile of Marsh, “A True Improviser,” Whitney Balliett writes:

“The saxophone is a hard instrument not to be emotional on. Marsh’s emotions are filtered through his mind. What is moving about him is the logic and order of his phrasing, his little, almost sighing connective notes, the sheen and flow of his ideas, his density and prolificacy and urgency.”

Only this week did I become aware I associate Marsh’s playing with J.V. Cunningham’s poetry, just as I hear Paul Desmond in the poems of L.E. Sissman. I’m not claiming influence or even knowledge of one artist by another. Rather, it’s an elusive kinship involving sound and temperament. In the Balliett excerpt, substitute “poem” for “saxophone” and reread it with Cunningham in mind: “Cunningham’s emotions are filtered through his mind,” and so on.

Listen to this 1955 recording of Count Basie’s “Topsy” by Marsh, Konitz (alto), Billy Bauer (guitar), Sal Mosca (piano) Oscar Pettiford (bass) and Kenny Clarke (drums). There’s a confident coolness in the swing, emotions filtered through mind. Then read Cunningham’s “The Man of Feeling” (1943):

“The music of your feeling has its form,
And its symphonic solitude affirms
The resonance of self, remote and warm.
With private acmes at appointed terms.

“So yours, so mine. And no one overhears.
O sealed composer of an endless past,
Rejoice that in that harmony of spheres
Pythagoras and Protagoras fuse at last!”

A cursory gloss: Pythagoras and Protagoras were pre-Socratic philosophers. The former, among other things, formulated the mathematical scaffolding of music. For Protagoras, a postmodernist before his time, all is relative. In Cunningham’s scheme, the “man of feeling” is a twit. “Fusing” the Greeks is impossible, and Marsh might have named a tune “So Yours, So Mine.”

`The Irrepressible Human Urge to Talk'

I had a Canadian-born friend in Findlay, Ohio, a retired tractor salesman with a gift for pungently archaic figures of speech. Speaking of a former acquaintance, Bob said, “I haven’t seen him since Hector was a pup.” And of a woman given to violent mood swings, he said, “She’s up and down like a washerwoman’s ass.” Once, when we observed an exceedingly thin woman in downtown Fostoria, Ohio, he said, “She’s as skinny as six o’clock.” Today, classical references and “sexist” language just won’t do. Each of us, even the most illiterate, is a linguistic snob of some persuasion.

Monday morning, I heard a woman here in Bellevue, Wa., make fun of a college applicant who had said she was “fixin’ to do” something. Four years in Texas softened my hauteur about such harmless conveniences. It’s the cliché that rankles me more than the errant “ain’t,” and the lazy catchphrase, especially those drawn from popular culture – empty sounds bereft of thought, the non-pathological counterpart of the obscenities shouted by a Tourette’s sufferer. I agree, in part, with Emerson’s assessment of linguistic entropy in “The Poet”:

“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”

Though I doubt the existence of a linguistic Golden Age, when every word and phrase glittered in our mouths, Emerson’s insight is still cause for hope. He implies that each of us can potentially “speak like a poet,” using language that is precise and colorful. When we meet such a person – speaker or writer – we feel refreshed and entertained, and we strive to reenergize our own way with words. The obvious mistake is to become self-consciously folksy or pretentious. The best language feels natural, though it may be the product of high artifice. In The Rural Life, Verlyn Klinkenborg mourned the passing of such antiquated phrases as “boardinghouse reach.” Then Klinkenborg shakes off the ooze of nostalgia and reminds himself that language is forever sloughing off old words and accumulating new ones. He writes:

“But the power of common speech doesn’t grow from the soil or from a simple life or from any other virtue rooted in the past. It stems only from the irrepressible human urge to talk. To find the casual poetry of the past, all you need to do is listen closely to the present. Any day, anywhere, people will say anything. And though I know that all of this is true, I’d like to go back to the past for a time in any case. Not to meet Mr. Abraham Lincoln or to interview the Buddha. I’d like to go to a small Congregational church in Iowa on a Saturday afternoon in May. Outside, my grandfather is mowing the lawn. Inside, my grandmother is practicing the Sunday organ, and my mom is sitting in the front pew with her children, singing to herself the words of the hymn my grandmother, whose name was Nellie, plays. The oldest child pretends to be coloring, but he’s really waiting until the mowing and the music stop and his mother and grandparents start to talk together among themselves. He can hardly wait to hear what they’ll say.”

Does anyone remember the ending of Robert Benton’s 1984 movie Places in the Heart? Klinkenborg’s reverie reminds me of that beautiful scene in the church.

`To Dare and Violate and Make Escapades'

By most accounts, Emerson was no spellbinder in person, though, as a lecturer he drew large, enthusiastic audiences after his status as a bona fide sage was established. Presumably, his crowds included those attracted to his celebrity – call them Transcendentalist groupies. His obdurate, Unitarian blandness must have disappointed some – even those accustomed to hours of sermons on Sundays -- and blunted the pyrotechnics of his sentences. More than most, Emerson is a writer at his best on the silent page, where he can be savored at leisure. His best prose is so electric, sparking across paragraphs, it requires the grounding of print; aloud, it fizzles. At age 37, on June 11, 1840, Emerson wrote in his journal:

“I, cold because I am hot – cold at the surface only as a sort of guard and compensation for the fluid tenderness of the core – have much more experience than I have written there, more than I will, more than I can write. In silence we must wrap much of our life, because it is too fine for speech, because also we cannot explain it to others, and because somewhat we cannot yet understand.”

This is a powerfully moving insight, especially for so young a man, and reminds me of Emily Dickinson:

“Silence is all we dread.
There's Ransom in a Voice –
But Silence is Infinity.”

We distrust bombast, histrionics, special effects. Dickinson, too, wrapped much of her life in silence, and for this we trust her. Outwardly, these American writers led lives of non-adventure; inwardly, each was a Shackleton, exploring the polar regions. On May 24, 1847, Emerson wrote in his journal, “Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.” Henry Miller, that inveterate con man, starts a chapter in Tropic of Cancer with Emerson’s sentence and follows it with:

“If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine. I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at night.”

As an act of provocation, Miller is picking on American literature’s father figure, his own unacknowledged father, whom he fancied a Puritan without a body. His anatomy, however, is confused. The intestine is filled not with food but shit. In his preceding paragraph, Miller cites the writer who links him to Emerson, without recognizing the kinship: “When I think of this city where I was born and raised, this Manhattan that Whitman sang of, a blind white rage licks my guts.” Whitman, too, conceals much, masking reticence with the persona of a blowhard. I wish we could reclaim his vision and read Emerson with Whitman’s eyes. He told Horace Traubel:

“[Emerson’s] quality, his meaning has the quality of the light of day, which startles nobody. You cannot put your finger upon it yet there is nothing more palpable, nothing more wonderful, nothing more vital and refreshing…The most exquisite taste and caution are in him, always saving his feet from passing beyond the limits, for he is transcendental of limits, and you see underneath the rest a secret proclivity, American maybe, to dare and violate and make escapades.”

`Enlivened'

Frank Wilson, writing about his happy meetings in Philadelphia with Canadian blogger Nigel Beale, sounds almost utopian:

“Not that many years ago, he would have been a book lover in Canada and I a reviewer in Philadelphia and anything we knew about each would have been purely accidental. Thanks to blogging we are part of a worldwide network of kindred spirits. Admission to that network is based on mutual love of books and reading and writing. Note to newspaper editors: People like Nigel and I - and Dave and Paul and Maxine and Patrick - are the people you should go to if you want to know what people who care about books and reading are really interested in. And politics and policy do not top the list, even though it appears to exhaust the list for said editors, most of whom couldn't quote a line of poetry if their lives depended on it, have never really listened to the Bach cello suites, or stood in front of a Sargent for several minutes just taking it in. It's called civilization.”

Only by our degraded standards – admittedly, yawped by the loudest voices – could this be understood as utopian. Bookishness is mistrusted and misunderstood and perhaps never more so than now. It’s not timidity or neurotic maladjustment and it’s certainly not, to use my favorite cant word, elitistism. Bookishness, a devotion to books, is a willing communion with other minds, some long dead. Frank’s “kindred spirits” experience an intensification of this intimacy: They have nurtured friendships with others already in communion. I like Boswell’s account of Johnson’s indirect definition of friendhip:

“I regretted that I had lost much of my disposition to admire, which people generally do as they advance in life. Johnson: `Sir, as a man advances in life, he gets what is better than admiration, --judgement, to estimate things at their true value.’ I still insisted that admiration was more pleasing than judgement, as love is more pleasing than friendship. The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne. Johnson: `No, Sir, admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne; judgement and friendship like being enlivened.’”

That’s it: In the company of a friend I’m enlivened. I have a surfeit of thoughts and impressions because I know he will listen to them, appreciate them even in disagreement, and respond in kind. A friend encourages me to become more than myself. Blogging has given me friends, whom I trust and who offer reliably good company, I’m likely never to have otherwise known. We would have remained passengers on a train, departing from the same station, arriving at the same station, having never intersected, like parallel lines in a geometry text. Frank wrote in another post, in another context, on Sunday:

“As I have made plain here a number of times, my life was enriched by encounters with great teachers. But what made those teachers great was that they never lost sight of the connection between the subjects they were teaching and life.”

One’s bookish friends place books in one dish, life in the other, and the scales always balance. On Saturday, Frank, via Dave Lull, linked to a story in Harper’s by Wyatt Mason about the writer and teacher Josiah Mitchell Morse. A long time ago Dave suggested I read Morse, a name previously unknown to me, and now, finally, I have – The Irrelevant English Teacher, published by Temple University Press in 1972. This aphoristic and logically constructed passage from Morse’s preface will sound reassuringly familiar to friends:

“We are perishing for lack of style.

“Style is a matter of intellectual self-respect. To write well, a certain moral courage is essential. A certain insouciance.

“Literary judgment is not a matter of feeling but a matter of intellectual perception. This too takes courage. And knowledge.

“Good writing is relevant to itself. It need not be relevant to anything else.

“Bad writing is not relevant to itself, or to anything else.

“The difference between good writing and bad is objectively demonstrable.

“The contemplation of a well-made sentence is the second greatest pleasure in life. The greatest, of course, is to write such a sentence oneself. What did you think it was?”

Well, friends?

`Draw Up Exact Accounts'

On Saturday, a student studying English in Kraków, Poland, asked me to send her lines from the English translation of Zbigniew Herbert’s “Mr Cogito on the Need for Precision.” I had cited another portion of the five-page poem in a post last September, using Alissa Valles’ translation in The Collected Poems: 1956-1998. Perhaps I was abetting a cheater but out of love for Herbert I transcribed them and sent them to her in an e-mail. She had asked for “5 lines that mean more or less that WE MUST KNOW/ COUNT PRECISELY / CALL THEM BY THEIR NAMES/PROVIDE THEM FOR THE JOURNEY/WITH (...) THE RING OF JUSTICE -- this is obviously my literal translation of the Polish lines.” Here are the lines, including those before and after, in Valles’ translation:

"ignorance about those who are lost
undermines the reality of the world

"casts us in the hell of appearance
the diabolical net of the dialectic
which says there is no difference
between substance and the specter

"we must therefore know
draw up exact accounts
summon them by name
ready them for the road

"in a clay bowl
millet poppyseed
an ivory comb
arrowheads
a ring of fidelity

"amulets"

I don’t read Polish but I’m struck by the evocative smoothness of Valles’ version compared to Marta’s. “COUNT PRECISELY” may be a literal trot but “draw up exact accounts” suggests the grim iciness of an actuarial table. This clinical quality runs throughout the poem, starting with the opening lines:

“Mr Cogito
is disturbed
by a problem in the field of applied mathematics”

And so forth. Herbert’s poem juxtaposes the scientific method with the elusiveness of the human heart. An hour after Marta’s e-mail arrived from Poland, my wife’s brother and family showed up for pizza. My sister-in-law is an ornithologist with a Ph.D. in biology from Berkeley, and I’ve wanted her help identifying the birds inhabiting the shrubs in front of our house. She knew immediately: dark-eyed juncos, also known as Oregon juncos – a species I had never seen before because I’ve never lived on the West coast. I consulted the invaluable “All About Birds” web site at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and found this precise description:

“The `Oregon junco’ is boldly marked blackish and brown, with a distinct dark hood, and is found in the western half of the continent.”

Scroll down to the fourth photo from the top to see the one closest in appearance to the birds singing outside my window as I write. These compact, nervous birds are even more elegantly beautiful than the photo suggests. Play the Cornell recording of their songs, and the fourth is the sound I’ve heard them make – an emphatic, unmusical click-click-click.

Birds show up infrequently in Herbert’s poems. One of the funniest is a satirical prose poem, “Hen,” that nicely echoes the repetitive, metronome-like clicking of the Oregon junco, while taking a swipe at mediocre versifiers. Here’s Valles’ version, dedicated to Marta in Kraków:

“The hen is the best example of what living constantly with human leads to. She has completely lost the lightness and grace of a bird. Her tail sticks up over her protruding rump like a too large hat in bad taste. Her rare moments of ecstasy, when she stands on one leg and glues up her round eyes with filmy eyelids, are stunningly disgusting. And in addition, that parody of song, throat-slashed supplications over a thing unutterably comic: a round, white, maculated egg.

“The hen brings to mind certain poets.”

`The Wrong Books, the Wrong Papers'

As students in Miss Murphy’s creative writing class during our junior and senior years in high school, we were expected to subscribe to The Atlantic Monthly as part of the curriculum. Each month she encouraged us to read the magazine cover to cover and required us to write something – review, essay, fiction, poem, whatever – based on what we had read. I wonder if even one high school or university class today is built around such an idea. Most of the books I was reading then (Kafka, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Melville, Thoreau) had been written by authors no longer alive. My evolving sense of a canon hardly made room for living writers, but reading the Atlantic with attentiveness and pleasure opened me to James Alan McPherson’s early stories, the urbane prose of L.E. Sissman, an essay by James Dickey on Theodore Roethke and Saul Bellow’s latest work.

I had already been devotedly reading Bellow’s past work but in November and December 1969, when I was 17, the magazine serialized his new novel (Like Dickens! Like Dostoevsky!), Mr. Sammler’s Planet. This was the first of his novels I read as it was published, even before it appeared in book form. There was a sense of urgency about a contemporary master writing in installments. This hot-off-the-presses excitement echoed the novel’s themes, for Mr. Sammler’s Planet is a book of its historical moment. Mr. Sammler’s principled bafflement and outrage reflect the cultural insanity of the late nineteen-sixties. A Holocaust survivor, a scholar in his seventies who witnessed countless killings and knew the undiluted thrill of righteous killing, who endured the triumph of barbarism, helplessly watches its return. His disorientation begins with the novel’s first sentence:

“Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a normal sky, Mr. Artur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of his West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books, the wrong papers.”

Bellow’s delight in language remains evident – who else would modify “eye” with “bushy”? – but this is not the Whitmanesque gusto of The Adventures of Augie March or the loopy importunings of Herzog. Mr. Sammler’s Planet is an angry novel by a man about another man convinced their civilization had been betrayed. In the subsequent 40 years, the betrayal has succeeded more pervasively than either could have imagined. Given that, and given the book’s obvious contemporary pertinence, it was a pleasure to discover in the Spring 2008 issue of City Journal an essay celebrating the novel and its prophetic acuity. Thoughtful readers have never stopped reading Bellow’s work, but Myron Magnet encourages new readers, those without the good fortune of reading the Atlantic in 1969. He concludes with these words:

“From page one of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow himself insists that, beyond the explanations we construct through Enlightenment reason, the soul has `its own natural knowledge.’ We all have `a sense of the mystic potency of humankind’ and `an inclination to believe in archetypes of goodness. A desire for virtue was no accident.’ We all know that we must try `to live with a civil heart. With disinterested charity.’ We must live a life `conditioned by other human beings.’ We must try to meet the terms of the contract life sets us, as Sammler says in the astonishing affirmation with which Bellow ends his book. `The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. . . . As all know. For that is the truth of it—that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.’”

`Something Plausible and Coherent'

Last night we spent our first night in the house we’ll occupy for at least the next 12 months. In local parlance it’s a “rambler” – one floor, no basement, supposedly a scaled-down postwar variant of the ranch-style house, though ours is laid out like the shotgun shacks I first saw described in a Eudora Welty story. The movers were relieved when they saw it – no steps. The houses on our narrow, winding street are close, within hollering distance. The sloping lawn is more moss than grass, which makes for spongy walking. Small, fearless birds with black executioner-style masks make a rhythmically regular clicking sound, hardly a song, in the rhododendrons outside the front windows, and drive the cat nuts. Our landlady, Irina, is Russian. She is young, her English is excellent and she claims to like children. At our request, she removed the trampoline from the backyard before we moved in.

The neighbors across the street, the ones with white Christmas lights hanging from their eaves, are also Russian, a clan of indeterminate size. The women favor bathrobes accessorized with babushkas and tall black rubber boots. Earlier this week I watched – discretely, from behind the curtains I had just hung – as the entire family tried to pull a stump from the middle of their front yard. They labored with shovels, axes, wrecking bars and a white Honda pickup truck. The lawn is trampled, rutted and muddy; the stump remains.

In short, we dwell in the much-coveted, much-maligned suburbs, or at least one of their modest, working-class mutations. I grew up in a suburb, in the decades when Cheever, Updike and Yates were flourishing. I resent Richard Wilbur’s lines in “To and American Poet Just Dead,” from 1963:

“In summer sunk and stupefied
The suburbs deepen in their sleep of death.”

Once that was a fashionable pose – all that guff about conformity, phoniness and angst. Worse still are suburbanites compelled to tell you how much they hate the suburbs; that, though they live in one, they recognize their awfulness and repudiate it, for their souls are made for (and of) finer things. As though living in a ghetto were somehow more authentic. In fact, suburbs are the preserve of contemporary yeoman farmers. They give city dwellers a second chance at self-reliance – a piece of land, a decent house, a garden, a neighborhood. I like what Cheever writes of Will Pym in “Just Tell Me Who It Was,” even with its suggestion of gentle satire:

“He did not ever like to see the signs of poverty. He took a deep pleasure in the Dutch Colonial house where he lived – in its many lighted windows, in the soundness of his roof and his heating plant – in the warmth of his children’s clothing, and in the fact that he had been able to make something plausible and coherent in spite of his mean beginnings.”

`Waiting for You'

School field trips to the Cleveland Museum of Art were annual events beginning in third grade, and I retain vivid memories of lapis lazuli and a particularly ugly Rauschenberg collage (“Gloria”). The visits continued even into high school, and I remember being impressed when a classmate I hardly knew, John Zill, bought a copy of George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty in the museum gift shop. I lied and said I had already read it.

One of the blessings of the Internet is its potential for substantiating or discrediting memory. I’ve carried around for decades a nebulous image of Walt Whitman glimpsed in the museum, a print or engraving of the poet in his Old Testament mode, on display in a glass case. Like the half-remembered lyrics of a song, the recollection idly flits through my mind, causes mild consternation and evaporates.

This week I’ve been reading Prose Works 1892: Volume II, part of The Collected Works of Walt Whitman, fat volumes published in 1964 by New York University Press (original price: $10). In 1886, an editor at the New Orleans Picayune, after hearing Whitman had once visited the city, asked the poet for his recollections. Whitman responded with an anecdotal memoir, “New Orleans in 1848,” published by the paper on Jan. 25, 1887. I was pleased to discover the following passage, describing a stop on his way back to New York from New Orleans:

“June 12. -- We stopped last evening in Cleveland, and though it was dark, I took the opportunity of rambling about the place; went off in the heart of the city and back to what appear’d to be the court-house. The streets are unusually wide, and the buildings appear to be substantial and comfortable. We went down through Main Street and found, some distance along, several squares of ground very prettily planted with trees and looking attractive enough. Return’d to the boat by way of the lighthouse on the hill.”

I knew Emerson and Thoreau had passed through my home town but it was pleasing to learn Whitman had visited, too, a mere 104 years before my birth. The connection is attenuated but real, and it revived my memory of Walt’s image at the museum. With a single search I found the lithograph I remembered, created by Boardman Robinson (1876-1952) in 1920. There it was: The foamy corona of white beard and hair, the gleaming dome, the demeanor of a dyspeptic Santa Claus -- an uncertain memory vindicated, as Whitman had promised in the concluding lines of “Song of Myself”:

“Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

`An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky'

“Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping, if it were not. God delights to isolate every day, and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but with grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky. `You will not remember,’ he seems to say, `and you will not expect.’’

First thing in the morning, Emerson and black coffee supply eye-opening and sustenance. He serves food for rumination. I’ve read “Experience” (Essays: Second Series, 1844) a hundred times but it’s always “a series of surprises” thanks largely to the unexpected metaphors. Past and future are conventionally likened to darkness. Emerson substitutes, with some charm, “an impenetrable screen of purest sky,” so all but the present is unblemished blue, which is somehow comforting. This thought came in handy later in the morning when I took my younger sons to the barber shop.

The woman who cut my hair and my 5-year-old’s was born in Thailand, grew up in Hawaii and settled in Seattle eight years ago. She was raised a Buddhist. When her parents and the rest of her family joined a Baptist church, she balked. “I’m not Buddhist. I’m not Baptist. I’m busy,” she said, and impressed me as smart, self-reliant and nobody’s fool. Approaching 30, she’s engaged to be married (“I’m in no hurry.“), and wants to get out of the hair-cutting business (back pains, squalling brats). She said she was interested in computer science and I asked if she had ever considered going to college. “You teacher?” she asked. No, but if you’re contemplating a new life, college might be a good start. Without mentioning him by name I laid some Emerson on her, suggesting she think of her future as a cloudless blue sky. “In Seattle?” she replied, and that‘s when I knew she had nothing to worry about. I remembered Karl Shapiro’s “Haircut” but kept it to myself:

“In mirrors of marble and silver I see us forever
Increasing, decreasing the puzzles of luminous spaces
As I turn, am revolved and am pumped in the air on a lever,
With the backs of my heads in chorus with all of my faces.”

The Piano Player and Saul Bellow

Once I interviewed by telephone a prominent jazz pianist, one whose peerless technique and shrewd sense of marketing had earned him a sizeable following even beyond the hardcore jazz audience. He collected awards and made lots of money but his playing had never touched me. The recordings were shiny and remote, with more than a hint of exhibitionism, of virtuosity without purpose. Before the interview I had heard scuttlebutt from musicians and music writers that the pianist was impossible, an ego-monster of the first order, and the man I interviewed confirmed the dirt-relishing gossip. He was insulting and condescending, a sink hole of relentless self. When I misspoke, making a minute faux pas, his instinct was not merely to correct my mistake but to make certain I recognized the depths of my idiocy. He ignored questions that displeased him and answered others with monosyllables. It was the most memorably unpleasant interview in all my time as a journalist, counting several jailhouse visits with convicted murderer-rapists. They, though incapable of telling the truth, were courteous.

KPLU-FM in Seattle bills itself as the home of “NPR News and All That Jazz,” and its play list is exceptional. Last week I had to call my oldest son in New York City after an announcer played Howlin’ Wolf’s “Rockin’ Daddy” followed by the 1957 Riverside recording by Monk and Coltrane of “Ruby My Dear.” Over the weekend, inevitably, the station played a recent performance by the pianist I had interviewed more than 20 years ago. I mentally winced when I heard his name but as a form of spiritual discipline, or something, I listened to the entire recording. Call it smooth and empty, buffed to a gleam with the rag of narcissism.

The same day I read “A Genius for Grief: Memories of Saul Bellow,” published by the Cleveland-born novelist Herbert Gold in The Republic of Letters (reprinted in Pushcart Prize XXXII: Best of the Small Presses, where I read it). Those already familiar with Bellow’s life and work will find few revelations about the novelist who dominated American fiction for half a century. After Faulkner, he is our best and the best of his books are always a pleasure to revisit. Gold reports a familiar story about his friend -- early generosity, encouragement and loyalty, followed by coldness, touchy vanity and baffling slights. Bellow was difficult, and Gold believes Bellow’s gifts as a writer were inextricably entwined with his flaws of temperament. After a partial reconciliation late in Bellow’s life, Gold writes:

“It made me fear my own old age to look into those great dark eyes and see the laughter in retreat.”

That’s an acute observation and echoes my own fears when I meet an abusively self-centered senior citizen. Is such nastiness an inevitable result of longevity? Gold writes:

“The flaws seemed to be magnified by the fineness of the achievement.”

There’s the rub. The artist and man dwell symbiotically, non-identical Siamese twins, a package deal. What I know of Bellow’s occasionally insufferable behavior does nothing to alter my love for the best of his fiction. How self-defeatingly priggish of me to repudiate Seize the Day, Herzog and Mr. Sammler’s Planet because I don’t approve of the author’s character. I owe Bellow only a reader’s gratitude, not a moral report card.

In the case of the pianist, it’s different: His music is tiresome and he’s an asshole.

`The Rest is Silence'

Richard Bausch’s Peace is the finest new work of fiction I’ve read since Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses. What they have in common is spare, exacting language and a maturity about the world. Both are written by adults for adults. The artistic stance crafted by Bausch and Petterson inspire confidence in the narrators and, by extension, the authors. Pop culture, as content or method, is virtually absent from both, though Peace makes passing mention of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. Like Peace, Catch-22 is set in Italy during World War II but never transcends its essential identity as a seditious cartoon. Only a strong, flexible version of “realism”—you won’t find a comprehensive definition of that Tar Baby here -- is equipped to render war, and most of the rest of life, in language. Imagine Donald Barthelme, the minor New Yorker humorist, deploying his tedious little collages on the subject of the Battle of Monte Cassino.

In his preface to The Stories of Richard Bausch (2003), Bausch describes the novelist’s task as “constructing an involving, believable imaginative expression about things that matter.” Such definitions are notoriously slippery and of necessity fail to include some good work (Bausch’s leaves out At Swim-Two-Birds but not Molloy). We might call Bausch’s approach common-sensical, one shared by thoughtful common readers. Even those of us who never served in the military and who were born after V-E day recognize that the experiences, and reflections on those experiences, endured by Bausch’s squad of American infantrymen are “things that matter,” not jokes or trendy poses. The late Anthony Hecht, an infantry veteran of World War II, wrote in “`More Light! More Light!’”:

“Much casual death had drained away their souls.”

We bring to Bausch’s story some understanding of war, however inadequate, as we bring an understanding of human nature, the raw matter of any story. Our reading of Peace quietly, methodically challenges what we think we know about men in war and ourselves. He concludes his Stories preface with this:

“I have always believed that writing stories is not so much a matter of obsession as it is of devotion – being there for work in the days, as the good men and women who came before you were; attempting to be as determined and stubborn and willing to risk failure as they were. You work in the perfect understanding that you will probably never write as well as they, but that by being faithful to their example, you can be worthy of their company. The rest is silence.”

Bausch might be writing about the men in his beleaguered squad in Italy and the rest of us, whether or not we are writers.

`The Tide of the War'

Before this week Richard Bausch was only the name of a fiction writer and protégé of William Maxwell whose work I had never read. A review by Ron Slate sent me to his new novel, Peace, about an American infantry squad following the Germans north as they withdraw from Italy in the winter of 1944. This is not an action story, though it begins with an abrupt, shocking scene of violence. No romanticizing or cut-rate philosophy is evident. This is a war story as Maxwell or Chekhov might have written one, though composed with idiomatic fluency and extreme compression, beginning with the first sentence:

“They went on anyway, putting one foot in front of the other, holding their carbines barrel down to keep the water out, trying, in their misery and confusion – and their exhaustion – to remain watchful.”

The deftly critical word is “anyway.” The narrative voice – and this remains true throughout the 90 pages of the 171-page novel I have read – is cool, measured and scrupulously observant of what happens and fails to happen, what is spoken and remains unsaid. On the third page, the squad comes upon a cart pulled by a donkey and two boys who run away. Sgt. Glick orders two of his men to overturn the cart and dump the straw, and out tumble a German officer and an Italian “whore.” The German shoots and kills two Americans before Cpl. Marson kills him. The woman screams and gestures at the soldiers and Glick shoots her in the forehead. Bausch picks it up from there:

“She fell back into the tall wet stalks of grass by the side of the road, so that only her lower legs and her feet showed. She went over backward; the legs came up and then dropped with a thud into the sudden silence. Marson, who was looking at the Kraut he shot, heard the fourth shot and turned to see this. And he saw the curve of her calves, the feet in a man’s boots where they jutted from the grass. For a few seconds, no one said anything. They all stood silent and did not look at one another, or at Glick, and the only sound was the rain.”

Such tight-lipped precision should not be confused with so-called “hard-boiled” prose, the doleful legacy of Hemingway and Hammett. Bausch’s words bear a moral heft disproportionate to their sometime elliptical brevity. Bausch’s young, burned-out infantrymen spend a lot of time not looking at one another, and brooding much while saying little. Here’s Slate:

“This story is told with startling subtlety. The characters are seemingly unexceptional, their thoughts and reactions predictable, their speech ordinary. Peace is a lesson taught by Bausch, a master novelist, about compression. By drawing a close circle around his materials, Bausch lets the reader feel both confined by circumstance and unmoored by the effects of the unrelenting cold, wetness, pain, boredom, abject fear, and spookiness of this almost otherworldly scene.”

There’s an unexpected intimacy, almost claustrophobia, in Bausch’s strict unity of time and place. The image of the dead woman’s legs frequently recurs, accompanied with Glick’s execution-like killing of the “whore.” The image recalls a passage in “Clothes,” a poem by Edgar Bowers included among the new works in Collected Poems. Here’s the relevant passage, in which Bowers, a young soldier stationed in Bavaria in 1946, sees the body of a woman, once a secretary for the Gestapo, has committed suicide with poison:

“Within the outer office, by the row
Of wooden chairs, one lying on its side,
On the discolored brown linoleum floor
Under a Gl blanket was the lost
Unmoving shape; uncovered, from a fold,
A dirty foot half out of a dirty shoe,
Once white, heel bent, the sole worn through, the skin
Bruised red and calloused, uncut toenails curved
And veined like an old ivory. No one spoke.”

A woman’s feet, I suppose, suggest a semi-public glimpse of sexuality, but feet are somehow the humblest part of our bodies, hinting at vulnerability and comic awkwardness, in life or death. Bowers was assigned to a counter-intelligence unit with the 101st Airborne Division, and was stationed at Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s retreat in the Bavarian Alps. Bausch dedicates Peace “in loving memory” of his father, Robert Carl Bausch, “who served bravely in Africa, Sicily, and Italy.” Slate says his father “served in the Army Air Force as a B-17 ball-turret gunner, flying out of the airbase at Foggia, Italy, 50 miles northeast of Naples.” My father, too, served in the Army Air Corps, from 1942 to 1946, and was stationed in North Africa and France. Bausch writes in his excellent novel:

“You marched into the tide of the war and arrived nowhere.”

`He Can't Think Without His Hat'

When he was 4 I took my oldest son, now almost 21, to a Laurel and Hardy film festival at the public library in Glens Falls, N.Y. “Festival” is misleading. For four hours on a Saturday afternoon in winter, a middle-aged fan rolled his collection of their films in 8-mm prints. Mostly he showed their best work, the short films from the nineteen-thirties (“County Hospital,” “Big Business,” “Liberty,” “The Music Box” and so on), and the features Way Out West and Sons of the Desert. The audience, but for the impresario running the noisy projector and me, was very old or very young. Despite the metal folding chairs and the festival’s length, interrupted only by reel changes, Joshua sat through every movie and I was proud of his iron butt and excellent taste in comedy.

Joshua has returned the favor by passing along a video of the duo’s final appearance together on film, made in 1956, the year before Hardy’s death by the last of many strokes. The home movie is shot in washed-out color. That and Hardy’s massive weight loss give the film an artificiality that heightens its sadness. The boys are uncomfortable and self-conscious, recycling well-known bits on command – Hardy poking Laurel’s eye and fluttering his tie. An unspeakably depressing finale for the funniest team in film comedy. The poet John Mole wrote “Stan Laurel” about his fellow Englishmen:

“Ollie gone, the heavyweight
Balletic chump, and now
His turn to bow out, courteous,
A perfect gentleman who
Tips his hat to the nurse.

“Or would, that is, if he were
Still in business. She
Adjusts his pillow, smooths
The sheets until their crisp-
And-even snow-white starchiness

“Becomes his cue. It’s time
For one last gag, the stand-up
Drip-feed: Sister,
Let me tell you this
I wish I was skiing,

“And she, immaculately cornered
For the punch-line: Really
Mr. Laurel, do you ski? A
chuckle –No, but I’d rather I was doing
That than this,

“Than facing death, the one
Fine mess he’s gotten into
That he can’t get out of
Though a nurse’s helpless
laughter
Is the last he hears.”

My middle son had his tonsils and adenoids removed Friday morning. For diversion while he recovered on the couch, I played two Laurel and Hardy shorts – the wonderful “Be Big!” (1931) and their debut as a duo, “The Lucky Dog” (1921). The latter is disappointing. The former includes a 15-minute tour de force in which Laurel struggles to remove a riding boot from Hardy's foot. All the fooling around with hats and footwear plays like a retrospective echo of Waiting for Godot:

“Silence. They put on their hats.

“ESTRAGON: Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!

“VLADIMIR: (to Pozzo). Tell him to think.

“POZZO: Give him his hat.

“VLADIMIR: His hat?

"POZZO: He can't think without his hat.”

`Today I Inscaped Them Together'

The Winter 2007-2008 edition of Image includes an excerpt from Paul Mariani’s upcoming biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Havoc & the Glory. Judging from these 12 pages, Mariani’s approach is impressionistic, not ponderously academic. I read his biography of John Berryman years ago and remember it as disappointingly thin and obligatory. In almost two decades, Mariani’s prose has improved, though it occasionally succumbs to fulsomeness. The selection in Image reads like variations on themes from Hopkins’ life and works, not a rigorous biography. To his credit, Mariani spurns the psychosexual approach that blighted another recent life of the poet-priest, but devotes several pages to a more important matter -- Hopkins as landscape and skyscape painter in prose (rivaled only by Thoreau – like Hopkins, dead at 44), in his letters and notebooks. Has anyone written more rapturously of clouds? Here’s Mariani:

“…a drunken bevy of clouds high over Dublin in the interstices between one summer squall and another, 26 July 1888. Clouds drunk and weaving across the heavens, because they have imbibed so deeply of the deluge they themselves – whatever selves they can be said to have -- have poured out on the earth in one of their millions of earlier manifestations. ‘Cloud-puffball,’ he begins, his bleeding eyes following the cloud formations above him, this perennial star-gazer and sunset-painter and cloud-watcher, who years before had studied the heavens as he had studied bluebells, looking for any least sign, looking for any least sign of god’s presence and beauty and order to be found there.”

Of late I’ve paid unusual attention to skyscapes. In greater Seattle, clouds are seldom gaudily colorful, even at sunrise and sunset. The view overhead is constantly in flux, and a typical ceiling includes blue patches, roiling mountains of black and a palate of subtly differentiated grays. Gray no longer seems an appropriate synonym for drab. There’s pewter, silver-gray, charcoal-gray, grizzled gray and the pale gray of a Northern mockingbird’s breast. The sky is as variegated as an Ansel Adams print, if you look closely enough. Here’s Hopkins in his notebook in 1864, the year he turned 20:

“Sept. 14. Grey clouds in knops [“A small decorative knob or boss”]. A curious fan of this kind of cloud radiating from a crown, and covering half the sky.”

And the same year:

“Saw a curious thing on, I think, Oct. 1. – A cloud hid the sun and its edges were so brilliant that the lustre prevented one from seeing outlines which swam in the light. Happening to look in a pond, I saw the cloud reflected and therefore with much diminution of light, of course, and the outlines of the lightest part of the cloud were distinct and touched here and there with spots of colours.”

Here, in a spectacularly detailed passage from March 12, 1870, note the use of “inscaped” as a verb:

“A fine sunset, the higher sky dead clear blue bridged by a broad slant causeway rising from right to left of wisped or grass cloud, the wisps lying across; the sundown yellow, moist with light but ending at the top in a foam of delicate white pearling and spotted with big tufts of cloud in colour russet between brown and purple but edged with brassy light. But what I note it all for is this: before I had always taken the sunset and the sun as quite out of gauge with each other, as indeed physically they are for the eye after looking at the sun is blunted to everything else and if you look at the rest of the sunset you must cover the sun, but today I inscaped them together and made the sun the true eye and ace of the whole, as it is. It was all active and tossing out light and started as strongly forward from the field as a long stone or a boss in the knop of the chalice-stem; it is indeed by stalling it so that it falls into scape with the sky.”

Mariani draws his title from an untitled poem Hopkins wrote two months before his death in 1889:

“The shepherd’s brow, fronting forked lightning, owns
The horror and the havoc and the glory
Of it. Angels fall, they are towers, from heaven—a story
Of just, majestical, and giant groans.
But man—we, scaffold of score brittle bones;
Who breathe, from groundlong babyhood to hoary
Age gasp; whose breath is our memento mori—
What bass is our viol for tragic tones?
He! Hand to mouth he lives, and voids with shame;
And, blazoned in however bold the name,
Man Jack the man is, just; his mate a hussy.
And I that die these deaths, that feed this flame,
That…in smooth spoons spy life’s masque mirrored: tame
My tempests there, my fire and fever fussy.”

The first line might be Hart Crane’s. The poem is a bit of mess and let’s forgive him the “hussy/fussy” rhyme. Hopkins was monstrously depressed and soon to die of typhoid fever. There are sweet touches: “we, scaffold of score brittle bones” and “life’s masque mirrored.” That he wrote so well near the end, albeit sporadically, is miraculous. Hopkins’ last words are reported to have been “I am so happy, so happy.”

`The Cement, the Bitumen, the Matrix'

While my brother and I were talking on Sunday, as we usually do, I realized May had become the month of memory. Vaguely, I associated memory with autumn in the North, sweet sadness triggered by the apple harvest, V’s of southbound Canada geese and the scent of burning leaves. But those are echoes of conventional sentiments, potent but suspect for being rooted in bad verse, good verse (Frost), Tin Pan Alley and Currier and Ives. Early May, not the vernal equinox, announced the end of winter, though black icebergs lingered in parking lots. The first day outdoors without a jacket felt like virtue rewarded.

Sunday was the 38th anniversary of the killings at Kent State University, 30 miles from where I grew up, as the crow flies. That year, on May 4, I was a month from high-school graduation. The deaths of people not much older than me seemed a rude entrée to impending adulthood. I would work that summer, read, save money, then go away to the big state university. I was the first person in my family to do so, and it would be the first time I, at 17, would live away from home. In my discrete calendar, May signals beginnings and conclusions. My father entered the world and departed it in May. Emerson began his 1857 lecture on “Memory” with these words:

“Memory is a primary and fundamental faculty, without which none other can work; the cement, the bitumen, the matrix in which the other faculties are imbedded; or it is the thread on which the beads of man are strung, making the personal identity which is necessary to moral action. Without it all life and thought were an unrelated succession. As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump, or flowing in waves.”

Without memory, human identity vanishes, “flowing in waves,” and we’re left with random sensations. For Emerson, memory is hopeful and precious:

“Memory is not a pocket, but a living instructor, with a prophetic sense of the values which he guards; a guardian angel set there within you to record your life, and by recording to animate you to uplift it. It is a scripture written day by day from the birth of the man; all its records full of meanings which open as he lives on, explaining each other, explaining the world to him and expanding their sense as he advances, until it shall become the whole law of nature and life.”

Appropriately, Emerson was born in May, on the 25th in 1803. Starting around 1870, his fabled memory began eroding, perhaps as the result of Alzheimer’s disease. Pitifully, he described himself in those final years as “a man who had lost his wits.” The most articulate of men, he suffered from aphasia – the inability to produce or understand language. He died April 27, 1882. In “Shame” (“after Pessoa”), collected in The Incentive of the Maggot, Ron Slate writes:

“My coworker says, The nice thing
about all this is you can’t miss
what you can’t remember.
Suppose you had Alzheimer’s.
You’d stare at the phone
And it would mean less than nothing.”

`It's a Nice Life'

One of the four moving company men who hauled half our belongings to a storage unit on Tuesday and the rest to the house we’ve rented bore an undeniable resemblance to the late, great Curly Howard (né Jerome Lester Horwitz). Mike told me he’s heard that for most of his 35 years, just as I’ve heard the question he asked me: "You read all those books?" I answered with a falsely modest "Most of them," and instead of it ending the conversation, as it customarily does, Mike told me the history of his life with books. This was going on as I checked the numbers labeled on each unloaded box and chair against the inventory sheet, and Mike and the other guys were carrying furniture and wheeling dollies into the house.

Mike was born in Alaska and described himself as "a special ed. kid." He could remember nothing he read. In his teens that changed with his discovery of Jack London. White Fang and The Call of the Wild he read obsessively – dozens of times and, for years, no other books tempted him. In his twenties his tastes grew to include Stephen King, Dean Koontz and W.E.B. Griffin. He shares the reading habits of millions of Americans but for one aberration: He goes months, even a year, unable and unwilling to read anything, and then, abruptly, the drive returns and he orders stacks of books. Mike made an observation that suggested we might have something in common: "I get word-hungry all over again."

I feel the same except my "word-hunger" – a splendid phrase – never abates. I still periodically run a mental-movie, one I’ve screened since childhood: I’m in a prison cell with bare gray walls and no reading matter, ever. I tickle myself with desolation in this private act of masochism, and I don’t know why I do it except that it feels good when I remember I can reach over and pull Catullus or Henry James off the shelf.

Two years ago, Marilynne Robinson gave a wide-ranging interview (supplied by Brain Sholis) at Eastern Washington University in Spokane. Asked about her reading habits, Robinson says:

"That is so mysterious. I get something in my mind or I pick up a book that seems to call my name [Mike said Jack London’s books were "calling my name"], and I read something I didn’t know before or something that makes a better text, a better fabric of something I had known for some other reason. And it just feels good. It’s an enormous pleasure to me. If I could, I would just read and read and read. All kinds of strange things. Difficult things that make me feel that my perspective is richer than it was before. As far as writing goes, every once in a while I feel like I have to write something. I am the driven slave of these two impulses. It’s a nice life."

`As My Back Knows'

Once the “Lettuce Capital of the World,” Kent, Washington, is today lush only with warehouses. It’s a space filled with spaces in which people store their stuff while moving between other spaces – in other words, moving companies and storage units, businesses consisting mostly of organized space. I spent Monday morning in one of them, and it’s a humbling experience to see one’s earthly possessions neatly packed away in six wooden crates, each about the size of Thoreau’s cabin. I was there to divide our goods into two piles: those that go to the house we’ve rented for the next 12 months, and those that will be stored in another, smaller, climate-controlled space elsewhere in the former “Lettuce Capital of the World.”

The moving company is admirably efficient. Everything was boxed, labeled and inventoried in Houston and unloaded, undamaged, in Kent. I had the unexpected pleasure of watching a forklift driver hoist our plastic-wrapped living room couch – heavy, long and perfect for reading – and set it deftly atop three stacked crates, 30 feet above the floor. With the aid of two young warehouse workers, one of whom was studying to be a police officer, I removed one side of each crate and evaluated the contents piece by piece. Only their forbearance and straight-faced professionalism kept my embarrassment within bounds as we uncovered snorkels, plastic bins of underwear and bras, wicker baskets of plastic Easter eggs, a Spiderman scooter and boxes of outdoor Christmas lights – life’s guilty detritus, the sight of which always prompts me to ask: Why do I own all this crap?

The prize, of course, was not the antiques or crystal but my books, stowed in dozens of tape-sealed cardboard boxes redundantly labeled “BOOKS” by the movers. Even boxed, books are recognizably denser than towels and dishes, and their heft implies substance and worth to some of us, or at least pain in the lumbar region. I lifted the lid on one box to reassure myself the contents remained intact after their 2,400-mile journey from Texas, and felt the way I do at night when I check on the kids in their beds. On top were the two volumes of The Wings of the Dove in the New York Edition – a good omen, for those are books I’ve been hauling around and rereading for more than 35 years. Stacked in a lopsided cube, awaiting transport to the rental house, my boxes of books looked like a burden and a blessing, and I was reminded of Thoreau’s famously self-deprecating observations in his journal on Oct., 28, 1853:

“For a year or two past, my publisher, falsely so called, has been writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of the copies of ‘A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers’ still on hand, and at last suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. So I had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived to-day by express, filling the man's wagon, -- 706 copies out of an edition of 1000 which I bought of Munroe four years ago and have ever since been paying for, and have not quite paid for yet. The wares are sent to me at last, and I have an opportunity to examine my purchase. They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. Of the remaining two hundred and ninety and odd, seventy-five were given away, the rest sold. I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.”

`A Grief Without a Pang'

On page 4, the second page of text, the book lifts out of the merely interesting into some “wider realm”:

“My work attunes me to the versatility of words. I like language that’s allusive but solid enough to allow comic somersaults within its gravity, while meaning radiates from its premises to wider realms.”

These are sentences that enact precisely what they articulate. The book, A Step from Death by Larry Woiwode, ostensibly belongs to a genre I never read -- the contemporary memoir – one I associate with scandal, victimhood and rancid prose. But I remember with pleasure his 1975 novel, Beyond the Bedroom Wall, and the splendid review John Gardner gave it and the remarkably stupid and condescending review it received from Gilbert Sorrentino. Bill Kauffman reviewed A Step from Death two months ago in the Wall Street Journal, and ever since I’ve wanted to read it. Kauffman writes:

“North Dakota's apartness has been a blessing, the author says, in part because it emboldens him to reject consumer- and pop-culture: `I don't need a new car to enhance my identity, and don't have to go shopping to certify I exist, and don't watch with slavish addiction a version of the nightly news, which more and more is a fictional construct.’”

That quote from the book cinched it for me, but it’s also misleading, for A Step from Death is in no sense a tract, and Woiwode recognizes the vulgarity and essential futility of rant. He writes his memoir in the form of a letter to his only son, Joseph, a helicopter pilot serving in Iraq. Like Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, which is framed as an extended letter from a 76-year-old pastor in Iowa to his young son, the book is rooted in history, family, religious faith and the rural Midwest. In 2005, a momentary act of carelessness on his North Dakota farm nearly cost Woiwode his life. As he works to unjam the hay baler behind his tractor, his jacket snags in the mechanism. His account of the two hours he struggled to free himself ranks with the most compelling narratives I’ve read in years -- suspenseful, funny (in the middle of his suffering, he thinks, aptly, of a line from King Lear), humbling and un-heroic. He hobbles away with cuts, bruises and broken ribs.

City dwellers have little sense of the routine dangers faced by farm workers. Woiwode’s ordeal reminds me of an accident the happened near Richmond, Ind., in 1984. I was a newspaper reporter there, and casually friendly with a guy about my age who worked in the backshop and also ran a dairy farm. His wife one day was backing up the family tractor and failed to see their six-year-old son behind the machine. He was killed instantly. Many of us from the newspaper attended the funeral. The casket was open and beside the little boy, whom I had never met in life, was a toy tractor – his favorite toy, I was told. I was three years away from being a father for the first time, but the sight of the toy and the motionless body caused me, and most of the others present, to weep. Woiwode interrupts his description of the accident to write what might stand as his writerly credo:

“I’ve always enjoyed the company of working people, including writers who record the existing world to reshape or better it, rather than those so enmeshed in writing they’re overwhelmed, nearly speechless, at their significance.”

His devotion is always to “the existing world,” to creation and the convolutions of the human heart. Some of the most moving pages I’ve read thus far in A Step from Death concern the late William Maxwell, the novelist who edited Woiwode’s early work at The New Yorker. They shared another bond: Both lost their mothers while they were still boys – a loss always at the heart of Maxwell’s fiction. When they first speak of the unhealed rupture in their lives, Maxwell begins, “To lose a mother at that age --,” and stops. Woiwode writes:

“It’s all he says, and we sit in the resonance you feel in the air after a church bell rings in the steeple next door, and then a tear slides from a corner of his eye – the right the most prone to spill – and although he has said it to me, I know he’s referring to himself, too, and his mother, who died when he was ten, and he doesn’t say a word more. We attend to the resonance like tuning forks vibrating at the same frequency. He is sixty, resilient, cheerful, the only person I know who can speak with joie de vivre while tears runs, but he’s never been able to accept her death.”

The knowledge of unexpected death, injury and disease hover as a theme throughout the book, especially when the memory of Woiwode’s son, a soldier in a war zone, returns. I started reading A Step from Death in the park near our apartment where I took my younger sons Sunday morning. While they ran around the playground, unmindful of mortal matters, I sat reading at a picnic table. A woman in her mid-thirties and a boy of about 10 walked by me and sat on a nearby bench. The boy held his left hand flat against his throat as though stanching blood. His gait was twisted, his face fixed in a toothy rictus. His body, like my sons’, produces more energy than it consumes but his was turned inward, causing him to writhe and twist even as he sat. He never seemed to hear his mother’s soft voice. She walked him to the women’s restroom and they walked away. When I looked again at my kids tearing about on the playground, I was shamed by my complacency in the face of such good fortune. Early in his recovery, Woiwode remains in pain regardless of how he arranges his body. He sleeps at his desk for an hour at a time, head on his folded arms, amid reproachful piles of manuscript. He can read only when standing up:

“The only book that holds my attention above the pain is Early Visions, the first volume of a biography of Coleridge by Richard Holmes. I like Holmes’s wit and precision of language and his take on the dark side of Coleridge’s opium addiction, which I sympathize with in my daze of hydrocodone-muted pain. It’s no help to rise up and try to pace away the discomfort of sitting, so I read standing up. I move to the second volume, Darker Reflections, and finish the thousand pages of both in a week.”

Holmes’ life of Coleridge is among the supreme literary biographies, and I too, without the prod of pain, read both volumes in a single great swallow. Woiwode is in no sense Coleridgean, but he shares an aptitude for expressing the theme sounded by Coleridge in “Dejection: An Ode”:

“A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear…”

Only in precise, artfully chosen and arranged language.

`The Epistemology of Loss'

Thanks to Ron Slate for reminding me of John Berryman’s “The Imaginary Jew,” one of the five stories posthumously published in The Freedom of the Poet. Set in the steamy summer of 1940 in New York City, after the fall of France and more than a year before Pearl Harbor, the story is plain in style, without the pyrotechnics of Berryman’s later poetry, and redolent of the nineteen-thirties, famously condemned by Auden as “a low dishonest decade,” not unlike our own. The narrator is young, educated, neurotic and, like the world in 1940, living in suspension, awaiting apocalypse, a state distilled by Berryman’s friend Saul Bellow in his first novel, Dangling Man (1944).

I say the story’s style is “plain,” but that’s misleading. The prose is clear, precise and resonant, with a hint of middle-period Henry James and none of Hemingway (the dominant prose influence of the day – the story first appeared in The Hudson Review in 1945). Here’s the complete passage excerpted by Slate:

“The story I have to tell is no further a part of that special summer than a nightmare takes its character, for memory, from the phase of the moon one noticed on going to bed. It could have happened in another year and in another place. No doubt it did, has done, will do. Still, so weak is the talent of the mind for pure relation – immaculate apprehension of K alone – that everything helps us, as when we come to an unknown city: architecture, history, trade practices, folklore. Even more anxious our approach to a city – like my small story – which we have known and forgotten. Yet how little we can learn! Some of the history is the lonely summer. Part of the folklore, I suppose, is what I now unwillingly rehearse, the character which experience has given to my sense of the Jewish people.”

The narrator’s shifts in understanding – from “everything helps us” to “Yet how little we can learn!” – read like precursors of the slippery multiple voices and identities Berryman perfected in The Dream Songs. Berryman once boasted he was master of the pronoun, and few writers have packed so much density of meaning into the first-person singular. The shifts mirror the narrator’s evolving understanding of “the Jewish people.” He begins as an innocent, puzzled by the casual anti-Semitism of his university classmates. After a late-night political argument in Union Square, during which he is accused of being a Jew (“Are you cut?”), this non-Jew, in an act of imaginative solidarity, accepts his “Jewish” identity. Here is the final paragraph:

“In the days following, as my resentment died, I saw that I had not been a victim altogether unjustly. My persecutors were right: I was a Jew. The imaginary Jew I was was as real as the imaginary Jew hunted down, on other nights and days, in a real Jew. Every murderer strikes the mirror, the lash of the torturer falls on the mirror and cuts the real image, and the real and the imaginary blood flow down together.”

I’m reminded of the scene late in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, when Garrett, after killing his old friend, shoots his own image in a mirror. Like many of us, Berryman was afflicted with Judeophilia – a love of things Jewish. Among his dearest friends were Bellow and Delmore Schwartz. Alan Severance, the protagonist of the poet’s posthumously published novel, Recovery, is a Catholic who contemplates converting to Judaism – like Berryman himself. In an essay included in The Freedom of the Poet, “The Mind of Isaac Babel,” he writes of Jews: “They suffer because they are human beings.”

For Berryman, empathetic projection into the lives of others is a moral obligation. The narrator of “The Imaginary Jew,” rather than reacting violently to his thuggish tormentors or turning bitter and cynical, deepens his moral understanding and grows in humanity. As Berryman wrote in an early work, “The Ball Poem”:

“He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up …”