`The Sunniest Russian Book Ever Written'

Konstanin Paustovsky (1892-1968) threads the theme of books as solace and sustenance throughout The Story of a Life, his account of a remarkably motley existence in Russia and the Soviet Union. His curriculum vitae sounds like one of those hard-knocks biographies concocted by publishers to make a writer sound “romantic.” This classmate of Bulgakov and friend of Babel worked as a tram conductor, military orderly, boiler factory worker, fisherman, novelist, poet, war correspondent, editor and screenwriter.

I learned of Paustovsky in the best possible way – from a book-loving friend. In the summer of 1975 he gave me a copy of The Story of a Life but I was reluctant to read it, expecting another dreary Soviet whitewash. I read it the following year and felt foolish for having waited so long. The proprietor of Neglected Books Page put it like this last year:

“The Story of a Life is, with Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, perhaps the sunniest Russian book ever written. Paustovsky seems to have possessed an almost inexhaustible stock of optimism. Sitting in a lonely room on a dark winter’s night, nearly penniless, a teenager whose family has fallen apart and scattered far from him, he notes, `I began to notice that the more unattractive reality looked, the more strongly I could feel all the good that was hidden in it.’”

That captures Paustovsky’s good-natured temperament precisely. There’s little of what Western readers still seem to expect from Eastern European writing -- stereotypical Slavic brooding. Paustovsky enjoys life and always returns to books as a reliable source of pleasure and comfort. Of his school days in Kiev he writes:

“We were carried away by poetry and literature. But an understanding of Russian literature, in all its classical clarity and depth, came to us later than our understanding of the lighter literature of the West. We were young, and Western writing attracted us by its elegance, its calm, and the perfection of its design. The cold and gloomy Mérimée was easier for us than the tortured Dostoievsky. Everything in Mérimée or Flaubert was as clear as a summer morning, while Dostoievsky came on us like a thunderstorm with all its terror and a desire to hide under any sheltering roof. And Dickens knew no doubts. Nor Hugo. Nor Balzac.”

In Kiev again, after the Revolution, he writes:

“To keep my own sanity, I went back to rereading some of my favorite books: Turgenev’s Torrents of Spring, Boris Zaitsev’s The Blue Star, Tristan and Isolde, Manon Lescaut. These books really shone like imperishable stars in the dim twilight of those Kiev evenings.”

Stripped of his specifically Russian context, Paustovsky reminds us that literature is written to be enjoyed. It’s a marvelous arrangement: Writers write, readers read and everyone is happy. No prerequisites, no tests to take or loyalty oaths to sign. Paustovsky’s example recalls something Robert Conquest, the great historian of the Soviet Union, writes in The Dragons of Expectation:

“Literature exists for the ordinary educated man, and any literature that actively requires enormous training can be at best of only peripheral value. Moreover, such a mood in literature produces the specialist who only knows about literature. The man who only knows about literature does not know even about literature.”

Iron in the Heart

“But if all you want is to look in a mirror, why read books?

“Once upon a time, on a nudist beach, I saw a man sitting, naked, delightedly engrossed in an issue of Playboy.

“Just like that man, on the inside, not on the outside, is where the good reader ought to be while reading.”

That’s how Amos Oz concludes The Story Begins, his collection of lectures (translated from the Hebrew by Maggie Bar-Tura) about the beginnings of 10 novels and stories by, among others, Fontane, Gogol, Kafka and Chekhov. What I like about these three sentences, apart from their distinctly Jewish humor, is Oz’s faith in a “real” world behind a story’s artifice. Most of us already inhabit a house of mirrors and spend our lives preening. Superior fiction is one antidote to self-absorption and stunted imagination – a way, at least temporarily, to peer over the mirrors at the human swarm beyond. For so long as I dwell within Effi Briest, Major Kovalyov, the Country Doctor or Yakov Ivanov (the protagonists of the stories Oz cites by the writers above), living their triumphs and trials, foolishness and grace, I am at least tentatively letting go of smug self-importance. For that charmed moment, I am self-less. The moral sense begins in imagination.

Take a story not cited by Oz -- Isaac Babel’s “Guy de Maupassant.” It’s 1916 and the 20-year-old narrator, penniless and with a forged passport, is scraping by in Petersburg. He’s hired by Bendersky, a Jewish banker-lawyer who owns a publishing house, to help his wife translate Maupassant’s stories. Raisa’s French is hideous but her erotic allure is powerful. The narrator takes her “loose and lifeless” version and cuts through “the tangled undergrowth of her prose.” Clearly speaking for Babel, the young man writes:

“A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.”

This stands, at least by implication, as Babel’s artistic credo. He was a master not of the muscular O. Henry twist, or even of Chekhov’s muffled twist, but of the “almost invisible twist,” that subtle pinch of spice thrown in the soup. When the narrator returns his revision of Raisa’s translation, she’s stunned by the deft revitalization he has given her “loose and lifeless” words. Next comes the most famous sentence Babel ever wrote. On my shelves are three translations of the story. The first, by Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Solski, dates from the 1960 Meridian Books edition of The Collected Stories, with Lionel Trilling’s introduction. This is the version I first read, about 40 years ago, and here’s the sentence:

“No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”

Next is David McDuff’s 1994 translation included in the Penguin edition of Collected Stories:

“No iron can enter the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.”

Finally, here is Peter Constantine’s version from The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (2002):

“No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.”

Clearly, McDuff’s is the muddiest (“full stop?”), the most blunted and least forceful, but even he makes it clear Babel is audaciously extending his credo by updating the old “pen-mightier-than-sword” chestnut. No spoilers here, but Raisa and the kid embrace, and together work on Maupassant’s “L’Aveu,” another tale of seduction. The narrator, however, later reads a biography of the great French writer and learns he went mad and died, age 42 (Babel, incredibly, made it to 45), of congenital syphilis. Babel’s narrator concludes the story like this:

“My heart contracted as the foreboding of some essential truth touched me with light fingers.”

New Criticism be damned, I can’t read “Guy de Maupassant” outside the shadow of Babel’s life and death. Early on the morning of Jan. 27, 1940, he was the first of 16 innocents shot by a firing squad in Butyrki Prison, Moscow. Had he written only “Guy de Maupassant,” with its trope of a pierced heart and its dense layers of meaning, he would still number among the great writers. Even in translation, his prose verges on poetry without turning rancidly “poetic.” Cynthia Ozick calls the story “a cunning seriocomic sexual fable fixed on the weight and trajectory of language itself.” This is true so far as it goes but Babel’s story goes further, fulfilling fiction’s capacity for magically extending a self into other selves, as described by Oz:

“In every one of these stories we are permitted something that is not allowed `outside’: not just a reflection of our familiar world and not just a journey into the unknown, but also the very fascination with touching the `inconceivable.’ Whereas, inside a story, it becomes conceivable, accessible to our senses and our fears, to our imagination and our passions.”

`Words are Sounds'

In A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton reports her friend Henry James saying:

“Summer afternoon -- summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”

Whenever I hear James’ charmed pair I think of the opening of The Portrait of a Lady, particularly this sentence:

“The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country house, in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon.”

Somewhere, Faulkner said the most evocative English word, if not the most beautiful, was twilight. A friend whom I haven’t seen in more than 20 years said his favorite words, because they set off in him a mysterious reverie, were Land’s End. This was long before the catalog, and my friend’s sensibility was not poetic. When I knew him he managed a Lane’s drugstore in Bryan, Ohio, and he later worked as a tour guide in Washington, D.C. But as a young man he had served in the navy and was stationed in San Diego. For him, Land’s End suggested the terminus of the continent, the sun setting on the Pacific. I can’t say I have a favorite word, though the one I most enjoy pronouncing is molybdenum.

In a 1929 entry from The Notebooks of Robert Frost, the poet writes a brief dialogue between Boy and Man. Boy asks Man to choose his favorite word and Man says he doesn’t have one. Boy replies:

“My favorite words are silver and twilight. Some people think pavement is the most beautiful word in the language. Pav-e-ment – pav-e-ment. A boy at the Poetry Society last night had a set of poems all full of the words silver and twilight and frosted. I never heard anything I liked better.”

Man says: “The first thing frosted taken alone brings into my head is cake.”

Boy says: “Don’t!”

I like Frost punning on his own name and puncturing Boy’s romantic swoon. The editor of The Notebooks, Robert Faggen, gives a useful footnote for “pav-e-ment,” from Arnold Bennett’s Literary Taste: How to Form It (1909):

“When you read a book there are only three things of which you may be conscious: (1) The significance of the words, which is inseparably bound up with the thought. (2) The look of the printed word on the page – I do not suppose that anybody reads any author for the visual beauty of the words on the page. (3) The sound of the words, either actually uttered or imagined by the brain to be uttered. Now it is indubitable that words differ in beauty and sound. To my mind one of the most beautiful words in the English language is `pavement.’”

That the author of Riceyman Steps, the poet of the ordinary, is moved by pavement is no surprise. I like it, too: A trochee that starts with a buzzing nothing and ends incisively, like Dr. Johnson kicking the stone. By their sounds alone, words are powerful medicine, as Eric Ormsby suggests in “Poetry as Isotope” (collected in Facsimiles of Time):

“Poetry is made up of words and words are sounds. Poetry is sound before it is anything else. This is easy to forget. Indeed, this little fact is more usually forgotten than remembered by poets themselves, and it is why much of our contemporary poetry is so unmemorable.”

`The Gemlike Flame'

The kids and I stayed in the park long enough Thursday afternoon for me to finish reading “The Gemlike Flame,” a 1953 story by Louis Auchincloss about four Americans in Venice. The setting and themes will be familiar to readers of James and Wharton. The narrator is an Auchincloss-like fiction writer who meets his expatriate cousin, Clarence, long estranged from the family, and introduces him to a college friend who has deserted his wife and children in the States. Of the cousin, Auchincloss renders this wicked aperçu:

“He attached himself to me with all the pertinacity of the very shy when they do not feel rebuffed, and I began, perhaps ungraciously, to see that he might become a problem.”

An unlikely intimacy, never confirmed as homosexual, takes place between Clarence and Ned, the boyish friend. The relationship is gleefully sabotaged by the narrator’s Aunt Maud, his cousin’s mother. As it was for James and many others, Venice in Auchincloss’ story is both a holy place of European culture and an invitation to perfidy and worse. The mother (“Propped up in her seat she looked as neat and brushed and clean as a big doll sitting in the window of an expensive toy store.”) is a monster, a wealthier, more vulgar descendent of James’ Madame Merle. In a scene reminiscent of Strether Lambert’s belated insight into his nephew Chad in The Ambassadors, Clarence learns his mother has stolen Ned. It’s the night of a society ball, and Clarence sees them together on the canal. In his final sentence, the narrator writes:

“[Clarence] barely turned his head to bid me goodnight as he continued his resolute stride away from the lighted palace and the gondolas that swarmed about it like carp.”

The last word is an aural and moral bon mot: a rude-sounding name for an ornamental fish. By this point we feel a hard-earned compassion for Clarence, a difficult, self-centered but essentially harmless man. We’re left contemplating the frivolity, silliness and cruelty of humanity – the sadistic mother and the mindlessly opportunistic Ned. I closed The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss feeling satisfied. In 20 pages, Auchincloss condenses James’ Roderick Hudson and reminds us that from our fellow humans we ought to expect almost anything.

As I had been reading at a picnic table in the park, a young man unfolded a large wooden mat on the sidewalk next to the playground and set up his boom box. To salsa music he began dancing rather stiffly and self-consciously. Clearly, he wanted attention, whether applause or derision. Most of the children and young mothers ignored him.

`It All Ended Predictably'

“At least six hundred published authors were arrested during the Great Terror, that is, almost a third of the members of the Union of Soviet Writers. They are all to be pitied as human beings. There weren’t all that many major writers among them; many of the figures were party workers first and foremost, `moonlighting’ as writers. The cultural damage, however, cannot be calculated only by the number of arrested and executed geniuses; the corrosive atmosphere of omnipresent fear, suspicion, uncertainty, and epidemic levels of informing and self-censorship of the Great Terror fatally poisoned the moral climate.”

This is from the recently published The Magical Chorus: The History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn by Solomon Volkov. It covers the grand, dispiriting arc of Russia’s artists in literature, painting, music, dance, theater and film from the reign of Tsar Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin’s ascension eight years ago. Through happy serendipity, I read the words above shortly after paying one of my periodic visits to Poets Against War. On its home page appears a commentary by the group’s founder, Sam Hamill, who writes:

“As any reasonable student of history must admit, the United States government is, and for more than a century has been, the world’s most accomplished terrorist organization.”

A few paragraphs later he writes:

“It is time to declare an end to `the American century,’ time to face our own history of demagoguery and hegemony. We who are poets are among the most literate people of our nation. We owe it to our country and to the world to become better citizens of this world, to stand for truth and compassion in the face of terror and mass murder.”

I count four factual errors in those three sentences. Most annoyingly self-congratulatory is the second, which a cursory look at PAW’s poetry archive quickly refutes. Sputtering self-righteousness is not poetry. Osip Mandelstam is poetry. Volkov writes of him:

“It all ended predictably: a repeated arrest (on the denunciations of zealous colleagues) and a martyr’s demise in the camps, where the crazed Mandelstam, dressed in rags and plagued by lice, offered to read his anti-Stalinist poetry to prisoners for a hunk of bread.”

`People You Can Read About in Books'

Once again, the phrase “public art” has been proven sadly oxymoronic. Hanging in the lobby of the Bellevue, Wa. Regional Library are 12 enameled-steel panels titled “Historic Portraits.” The figures depicted, a curious mélange of excellence and mediocrity, are Le Corbusier, Marie Curie, Duke Ellington, Gandhi, Frida Kahlo, J.D. Salinger, Golda Meir, Joan Miro, Sappho, Igor Stravinsky, Walt Whitman and Sarah Winnemucca. Obviously, the selection had more to do with identities-du-jour (sexual, racial, ethnic) than with the actual accomplishments of most of the subjects. The library publishes a pamphlet describing the art works in and around the building, and of “Historic Portraits” it says:

“The subjects were chosen because they are people you can read about in books, but who are not necessarily literary figures.”

I’m not certain what that means but the same might be said of Richard Speck, Pol Pot, and Karen and Richard Carpenter. The pamphlet goes on:

“The subjects may not be familiar to everyone, but the library is the right place to find out more about them [Ditto: Richard Speck, etc.]”

Arranged horizontally, the panels measure 45 by 45 inches and resemble wanted posters for obscure cartoon characters. If they had not been identified, most of the figures would remain unrecognizable. The drafting gifts of the artist, Garth Edwards, are severely limited. His bald-headed Whitman looks like Charles Darwin, and Sappho like Yogi Berra after a severe head injury. Le Corbusier is a double for Peter Lorre, and you’d swear Stravinsky was actually Foucault.

Edwards’ work permits bureaucrats with public money to luxuriate in a warm bath of virtuous feeling. The portraits are crude and gaudily colored. The choice of subjects does not represent “the best that has been thought and said.” There’s no Aquinas, Milton, Spinoza, Bach, Pasteur, Dickinson, Proust or Matisse. Library patrons, particularly credulous young people, might assume Salinger, Kahlo and Winnemucca are significant figures – because the library said so. They might also never learn that Aquinas defined beauty as id quod visum placet – “that which being seen pleases.”

`Books Think for Me'

I’m blessed with thoughtful, book-loving, independent readers. A Canadian in his mid-thirties writes that after almost a decade in “construction and other blue collar endeavours,” he returned to the university with the intention of deepening his love of literature by studying it systematically:

“Yet in the literature classes I took I found what to me was a disturbing tendency to focus either on identity politics or historical contextualization. The actual study of the literature as artistic or aesthetic creations was often absent. I feared that if I continued my studies in Literature I would lose my passion in a fog of theory and pedantry. Therefore I switched to the study of history and found myself thriving.”

Like the ninth-grade biology teacher who helped extinguish my budding career as a field biologist, the instructors my reader encountered devoted themselves to wringing the joy out their discipline. Illness forced him to leave school prematurely. He’s still recovering, while caring for a family member, but he recently read Flannery O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood, which reminded him, he said, of John Donne:

“And while I no longer subscribe to a particular religious belief, I still treasure his poetry. I enjoy his secular work, but his Holy Sonnets still reward my mind and my soul. So for the last several weeks, then, I've read Donne's poetry often - either at home or at the park…

“Donne, however, sent me back to Whitman. I find similarity in the ferocity with which they assert themselves. And although tempered by moments of doubt and pause, there is a conviction and certainty to their work (regardless of subject) that for me links them in a way I can appreciate. So I have my complete Whitman off the shelves as well.”

By the way, he’s also reading Herzog, which is “proving to be more enjoyable than I was prepared for.” Here’s a man who appears to read as I do, with pleasure and intensity. He trusts in serendipity and the vagaries of his own tastes, and permits them to plot his course of reading. A note from a reader in Texas arrived the same day as the one from Canada:

“I'll have you know that you are responsible for one more trip to the library later this afternoon to check out their one book by Herbert Morris, someone unknown to me until I read about him in your blog.”

I would blog even if such readers had never existed but it’s reassuring and invigorating to know people are still reading for the same reasons as Charles Lamb. In “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” he writes:

“I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.”

`The Wild Circus of Thought'

On a Greyhound bus traveling from Youngstown to Cleveland, Ohio, I once tried to read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. It was a local run, stopping at most of the rural crossroads in Northeast Ohio, which I had chosen purposely as a form of enforced discipline. Most of my fellow passengers were blacks or service men in uniform. When the driver braked abruptly, you could hear wine bottles rolling under the seats. The experience – trying to read Hegel, I mean – was usefully humbling. At age 20, I had learned I wasn’t cut out for philosophy in any professional sense. It remained my minor but only because nothing else interested me enough, besides English literature (my major), to pursue with dedication.

That’s when I became a philosophical dilettante, reading what interested me, avoiding some crucial thinkers entirely – Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger and most other Germans – and returning to others regularly for decades – the Scholastics, Spinoza, Hume and William James. I found support for my philosophy-as-buffet approach in A Stroll with William James by Jacques Barzun:

“I am not the fortunate sort of person who can feed his mind and guide his moral conduct with the aid of a single book or author. I am naturally polytheistic and fastidiously (I hope) promiscuous. When I read philosophy, or to put it more modestly, red in philosophy, whether gymnastically for muscle tone or hedonistically for the wild circus of thought, I am as likely to pick up Montaigne as Aquinas, Rousseau as Pascal, Berkeley as Whitehead.”

Except for the mention of Rousseau, I could sign my name to this passage. As a magpie, I have no interest in constructing inclusive, internally consistent systems. Strictly speaking, Montaigne is no philosopher, nor are Samuel Johnson, Coleridge and Emerson, but all are thinkers and all have contributed to my thinking – and living. A passage in, say, Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer (to pick two Hegel antagonists), can serve as a tool for understanding (or “equipment for living,” as Kenneth Burke referred to literature). And Santayana was a great prose stylist. So, not only am I a dilettante, I’m an aesthete. If a man can’t write with grace and clarity, I tend to assume he’s not worthy of our attention ( Hegel again). Here’s how Barzun completed the paragraph I quoted above:

“What then is the difference when I go back to James? The answer is that his ideas, his words, his temperament speak to me with intimacy as well as force. Communication is direct; I do not `derive benefit’ from him, he `does me good.’ I find him visibly and testably right – right in intuition, range of considerations, sequence of reasons, and fully rounded power of expression. He is for me the most inclusive mind I can listen to, the most concrete and the least hampered by trifles. He is moreover entirely candid and full of gaiety, lovable through his words as he was in life to his friends. As if this were not enough, he helps me to understand what his contemporaries and mine were and are doing. I stroll with him again and again because he knows better than anyone else the material and spiritual country I am traveling through.”

I’m likelier to spend time with a philosopher whose life and humanity I can perceive, at least sketchily, through the screen of his words. I’m not after answers so much as new ways to pose questions – a James specialty. Leo Shestov, in In Job’s Balances: On the Sources of the Eternal Truths, contrasted the thought of Spinoza and Pascal:

“Philosophy sees the supreme good in a sleep which nothing can trouble….That is why it is so careful to get rid of the incomprehensible, the enigmatic, and the mysterious; and avoids anxiously those questions to which it has already made answer. Pascal, on the other hand, sees in the inexplicable and incomprehensible nature of our surroundings the promise of a better existence, and every effort to simplify or to reduce the unknown to the known seems to him blasphemy.”

`The Dismantling of a Library'

A reader in British Columbia informs me that AbeBbooks is selling “The Herbert Morris Collection,” the personal library of the American poet who died in 2001. My Canadian friend writes:

“There is something sad in the dismantling of a library, but even more so when the library belonged to an individual deserving of recognition and study. Ideally, this library would have remained intact.

“The remaining questions about Herbert Morris's life are many: Why did he wait so long to publish his first collection?; How did he support himself?; Why was his library dismantled after his death? I suspect many of these questions will have to remain unanswered. As you pointed out in your email to me, he may have just wanted it that way.”

Browsing the online catalog, I, too, felt sad, as well as avaricious and a little ghoulish. Morris has been among my favorite poets since I discovered his work, belatedly, in 2000, when Counterpoint published What Was Lost. Born in 1928, he was 55 when his first book with a major publisher, Peru, came out in 1983. His career in poetry (a phrase I suspect he would have abhorred) was brief and largely unheralded. I check for his name in books of and about recent American poetry, and never find it.

Among the volumes for sale are five by Morris – Little Voices of the Pears (1989), Dream Palace (1986, the same paperback first edition I have, priced at $90), two copies of Afghanistan (1984) and one of Nine Iridescent Figures on a Vase (1978). The latter two titles are new to me. Both had small press runs with small presses. Nineteen titles by James Merrill, to whom Morris dedicated Dream Palace and who died in 1995, show up in the library. Merrill’s The Inner Room (1988) is inscribed “For Herb from James with love always,” and Recitative (1986) is signed “Christmas in November but love all year round to Herb from James 1986.” This is unspeakably sad.

Among other writers in the collection, Henry James has 18 titles; Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf, 15; James Joyce, nine; John Berryman, eight; Anthony Hecht, five; Auden, one. Many of the books include reviews and stories, mostly clipped from the New York Times. When a writer’s public identity is so sketchy and obscure, and his artistic identity so indelible, I scavenge for clues. I first saw Morris’ name around the time What Was Lost came out, probably online. I ordered it and looked unsuccessfully in libraries for the earlier titles. In a messy, haphazard second-hand book store in Troy, N.Y., I found Dream Palace. The cover price is $8.95. I paid $1.49. The second poem in the collection, “Boardwalk,” is among Morris' finest, a speculative memory of his parents.

I associate Morris with Joseph Cornell, another wayward artist obsessed with the past. The painter Fairfield Porter wrote an essay about Cornell in 1966, in which he quotes Albert Beguin on Gérard de Nerval, one of Cornell’s Romantic heroes. I will quote Porter quoting Beguin on Nerval to describe Cornell, to describe Morris:

“Like all true poets, he invites us to see things in a light in which we do not know them, but which turns out to be almost that one in which we have always hoped one day to see them bathed.”

Radio Days

Imagine a time when a professor of classics at Columbia University was given a weekly radio show and the only stipulation was that he confine himself to “books of a high standard or else open up some question of broad literary or social interest.” The time was 1952, the professor was Gilbert Highet (1906-1978) and the show was broadcast Tuesday evenings at 9:05 p.m. on WQXR in New York City. It aired on hundreds of stations in the U.S. and Canada, picked up by the Voice of America and BBC, and ran through 1959. Highet edited his radio talks into essays and published them in five volumes: People, Places, and Books (1953), A Clerk of Oxenford (1954), Talents and Geniuses (1957), The Powers of Poetry (1960), and Explorations (1971).

His best known book is probably The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (1949), but the one I remember most fondly is Poets in a Landscape (1957). On an impulse I took the first three volumes of Highet’s radio essays from the library and have been pecking through them in search of subjects that interest me but also trying to project myself into the mind of a radio listener in 1952 (the year I was born) who tuned in to such fare. Even as edited for print, Highet’s essays are conversational, not scholarly. There’s a suggestion of educated folksiness about them, but he never condescends and often makes flattering assumptions about listeners’ literacy that would never work today.

Friday was the first day of summer, so I started with “Summer Reading” from Talents and Geniuses. Without identifying them further, Highet mentions Tolstoy, Mann, Hemingway, Céline, Malaparte, Spengler and Toynbee, among others. All are names most common readers would have recognized in the nineteen-fifties, even without having read their work. I confess the notion of “summer reading” has never made sense to me, but Highet ignores my bafflement. He assumes summer means leisure: “Peaceful evenings. Lazy week-ends. And, sometimes, quite long periods of emptiness. Vacant days,” and so on. I’ve never experienced anything like that in my life.

Highet moves on to an anecdote. He and his wife took a house on Cape Cod one summer, and the only book he packed contained the complete works of “an interesting Roman poet whom I had never really read.” It was a rainy summer and Highet claims he first read 20 years’ worth of Readers Digest he found in the house – all 240 volumes. Who in the book-chat business today would admit such a lapse? Then he took up his Roman poet, whom he read start to finish without explanatory notes or criticism:

“…it is also valuable to push directly through the works of a good author, trying to see them as a single creation, appreciating their wholeness and their uniqueness and leaving the details for later study.”

This is marvelous advice which I have followed only a few times (Shakespeare, Proust). Highet recommends it to his listeners/readers seeking suggestions for summer reading: Choose an “important author” and read all of his or her work. He argues that such a regimen helps readers to “escape from themselves.” As an alternative, he suggests reading about “one single important and interesting subject: for instance, the paintings of the cave men; or the agony of modern music; or the rebirth of calligraphy; or recent theories of the creation and duration of the universe.” Also excellent advice, but I’ve never been able to follow it for long. I get diverted and follow tributaries and leave the Mississippi behind. Here’s his third idea:

“…we might read a large selection of poems and prose passages selected in order to illuminate one single aspect of the world. One such volume would go into a pocket or a handbag and yet last all summer.”

For me, this poses the same difficulty as Highet’s second suggestion. I enjoy a good anthology but I pursue the selections that interest me to the exclusion of others. A dollop of, say, Swift or Coleridge, only stimulates my appetite for more. Highet’s final suggestion:

“…one might decide to spend the summer with a single great or at least a single interesting man. For example, every doctor should know The Life of Sir William Osler by Harvey Cushing, and after reading that fine book he would enjoy himself if he went on to read Osler’s own writings. Osler never tired of complaining that most doctors had minds too limited and too confined to the physical symptoms which they observed in the routine of their practice. He kept trying to enlarge his own mind and spirit, and his books will therefore enlarge the mind and spirit of his readers, whether they are of the medical profession or not.”

I like this idea best. Take note of the grand assumptions, almost unthinkable today, that Highet casually makes: “Every doctor should,” “he would enjoy himself,” “his books will therefore,” and so forth. Highet lived in a happier, healthier world in which scholars could safely assume substantial numbers of common readers sought pleasure and “self-improvement” in the books they read, and that they would find it. My own resolution for summer reading is Osler and Cushing, and we’ll see which tributary I end up following.

`Spreading Mars Bars'

Almost 40 years ago, on Dec. 10, 1968, Thomas Merton was electrocuted by an electric fan as he stepped from his bath in Bangkok, Thailand. Judging from his books, from the many photos of him I’ve seen, from biographies, and from Guy Davenport’s reminiscences, written and in conversation, Merton was an earthy, deeply human man, not a sanitized saint. In photos, particularly those taken by his friend Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Merton resembles Eric Hoffer, the writer and longshoreman. They share a working man’s slouch, animated eyes, powerful smiles and the impression of physical strength. Meatyard wrote of Merton that he “dressed like a stevedore and reminded me of the look of Picasso.” Here are photos of Davenport, Meatyard and Merton taken by the late Jonathan Williams (thanks to Dave Lull).

I recommend Father Louie: Photographs of Thomas Merton, the Meatyard collection published in 1991. The volume includes a preface by the editor, Barry Magid; an essay by Davenport (later collected in The Hunter Gracchus); a reminiscence of Merton by Meatyard (who died in 1972); and a selection of the Meatyard-Merton correspondence. What I especially prize, however, is the brief eulogy Meatyard wrote about his friend. It was published three days after Merton’s death in The Kentucky Kernel, the student newspaper at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where Meatyard and Davenport lived. Meatyard, one of our best photographers, was not a professional writer but his words are precise and filled with earned emotion:

“I am a Protestant. Father Louie, Thomas Merton, was closer to God than anyone I ever met in my life. He exuded goodness and graciousness. He was not a holier-than-thou religious person. He was not out of this world, but very much with it.”

I was leafing through Father Louie again Thursday morning after mowing the lawn. It occurred to me, almost as a surprise, that Merton, Meatyard and Davenport are dead, and I envied the brief, intense friendship they shared for less than two years, in 1967-1968. These brilliant men shared something else: an immense capacity for enjoying life on their own terms. How many people do you know with this gift? For some, I suppose, it means casinos and Coors, but I’m referring to those who find amusement and pleasure, not numbness or distraction, in engaging the world.

I met such a person on Thursday. I had volunteered to help at my second-grader’s end-of-year party at his school, and ended up scooping ice cream. The teacher’s husband, Kevin Shannon, was also there. He’s general manager of Scarecrow Video in Seattle, which bills itself as the largest video store in the Northwest, though Shannon claims it’s probably the largest in the Western Hemisphere. For an hour we talked about movies and he knew every one I mentioned – among others, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Stevie, One-Eyed Jacks, Cockfight, Utu, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Ulysses’ Gaze and the great Westerns Budd Boetticher made with Randolph Scott. Shannon calls himself a “film geek” but what impressed me was less his encyclopedic knowledge than his enthusiasm: he still loves movies and gets excited talking about them. He’s not burned out or jaded and, by nature, he impresses me as a natural-born celebrator. Meatyard, in his eulogy for Merton, was describing a guy like Shannon:

“Tom this past summer [1968, when Merton was 53] was re-examining Camus, Joyce, Blake and concrete poetry. His favorite of his own books was The Way of Chuang Tzu. I think his best was Cables to the Ace. I hope Tom spreads Mars bars (his name for the good things of the material world, especially a drink with friends, which his poverty denied him) from one end of Heaven to the other. If such a place deserved to exist, it deserves it for Tom Merton to be free in.”

`A Visceral Distaste"

Theodore Dalrymple, I'm happy to learn, is as baffled by the enormous appeal of sports as I am. Even as a kid I recognized there was something suspect about taking pleasure in chasing a ball or trying to hit one with a stick, or watching others who were doing so. The first time I met William Gaddis, an English professor was gushing about a novel devoted to baseball. Gaddis shook his head and muttered, "Fucking morons." In his latest "Global Warning" column in The Spectator, Dalrymple writes:

"Since my youth, I have developed a visceral distaste for sport, not as an activity for amateurs, but as a spectacle that occupies the thoughts, raises the hopes and stimulates the emotions of millions. I try to understand why it does so, but try as I might, I cannot."

Give Thanks

Remain conscious and reasonably aware and undemanding, and life delivers unsought gifts. Here is some of what Wednesday brought:

Art Pepper’s “Blues In” and Paul Desmond and Jim Hall’s “When Joanna Loved Me” on the car radio.

Another chilly, overcast day with an abrupt explosion of sunshine late in the afternoon – enough to coax the morning glories open.

A mural in a neighborhood bakery with these words from William Cobbett, author of the wonderful Rural Rides, painted on it: “Without bread all is misery.”

Rereading Basil Bunting and finding these unremembered lines:

“Wind shakes a blotch of sun,
Flatter and tattle willow and oak alike
Sly as a trout’s shadow on gravel.”

Penne lisce with pesto.

This passage, marked during a previous reading, in The Autobiography of Charles Darwin:

“…and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

`House of Words'

A writer must work hard in the age of celebrity to remain quietly, contentedly obscure and not become famous for not wishing to be famous. If that sounds convoluted, consider the fate of American fiction’s Howard Hughes, J.D. Salinger. I refer, instead, to Herbert Morris, author of four books of exquisite poetry, about whom I know almost nothing. He has had worthy admirers – Anthony Hecht, Cynthia Ozick, James Merrill, John Hollander, judging from blurbs – but I have been unable to learn anything of his vitals -- age, place of residence, occupation. Judging from internal evidence in the poems, he was born in the Northeast, probably in or around New York City. Unlike many contemporary American poets, he appears not to be associated with a university and actually works for a living. We know of Morris all he wishes us to know: the poems, published in Peru (1983), Dream Palace (1986), The Little Voices of the Pears (1989) and What Was Lost (2000). I own the second and fourth volumes, and neither includes an author photo or biography. I’ve never even seen the other two and have never met another reader who recognized Morris’ name.

I first heard of Morris when Counterpoint published What Was Lost with “Portland Place, London, 1906,” a photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn, on the cover. The first poem in the collection, “House of Words,” is narrated by Henry James shortly after Coburn had photographed him at Lamb House, in Rye. James included some of Coburn’s prints in the New York edition of his work (“Portland Place” shows up in James’ masterpiece, The Golden Bowl), and it was the James connection that initially attracted me to Morris.

Little seems to have been written about him until, in the April 2004 issue of The New Criterion, Eric Ormsby published “Of Lapdogs & Loners: American Poetry Today.” The essay is largely a reasoned assault on the poetry industry—workshops, prizes, foundations, the Poet Laureate and the other high-minded silliness that surrounds the art. Ormsby eviscerates Rita Dove, Robert Bly, Sam Hamill, Lucille Clifton, Jorie Graham and other non-poets, largely because of their career-building narcissism and the “weird sameness of tone” he hears in their work:

“Earnestness is a splendid virtue; while essential to social workers and scoutmasters, it is, however, of limited value to poets who usually prove to be better writers when they are shifty, unscrupulous, and shamelessly insincere--in matters, that is, unconnected with their craft. Earnestness, by contrast, deadens; it homogenizes the sentiments; it may flirt with irony but never dangerously so; it subordinates magic to agenda; it seeks to please rather than to charm; it hankers after acceptance and respectability, however much it may squawk the opposite--and was any great or good poem ever truly respectable? “

As a counter-example to this depressing trend, Ormsby cites Morris as an almost anonymous, quietly hard working practitioner of the craft:

“Though he favors the dramatic or interior monologue, Morris is difficult to categorize. Eschewing rhyme and metaphor, his verse gives an unadorned impression; at the same time, it is musical and densely textured. His true Penelope, we might say, is Henry James, and, like James, he accumulates clauses within clauses, like some sly lasso virtuoso, to achieve his unusual effects, at once Ciceronian and Prufrockian. Overlapping repetitions, variations on phrases, spilling rivulets of hesitancy, and asseveration, lend serpentine momentum to his lines. The result is a kind of verbal impasto which, fused with an uncanny ear for cadences, creates an incantatory, rather mesmerizing pattern.”

Ormsby declares “House of Words” and another poem from What Was Lost, “To Baden,” masterpieces. I concur but would put “Opera” and perhaps a few others in the same category. The distinctive quality of Morris’ poetry is difficult to convey in brief quotations. He’s not an aphorist, not conventionally “quotable,” in part because of the “verbal impasto” Ormsby mentions, and because most of his poems are densely woven monologues. Given what preceded it, the final stanza of “Opera,” filled with the “variations on phrases” Ormsby notes, is sad and powerful. In isolation it is merely beautiful:

“…that sea Father would have us hold a glimpse of,
If we are to hold anything, light pouring,
Broadway darkened, stations shuttered, gas rationed,
The Italian dense, rich, resplendent, flowing.”

It’s probably not necessary to point out that the final four adjectives neatly describe Morris’ verse. “House of Words,” a 657-line dramatic monologue, is a nightmare of regret. James has examined proofs of his portrait taken by Coburn. He is depressed. At age 63, he suspects his best work is finished. Since the turn of the young century he has written and published The Sacred Fount, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl and The American Scene (to be published in book form in 1907). James has a dream: he is in the 1880s again, the early years of his London life. He boards a carriage, assuming it bound for a dinner party in Mayfair. Instead, he enters a hellish London, the “City of Regret,” a reimagining of Eliot’s Unreal City. Morris uncannily echoes James’ halting, obsessively qualified syntax as the Master questions the decades he has dedicated to words:

“I, finder of refuge, maker of refuge,
in words. Whose life, indeed, was spun of words,
spun and respun, spun once more, then respun,
a life which has itself become a refuge
(words, in a world bordered by blood, on one side,
by the tumult of passion on the other;
the thinness, yes, the thinness of one’s life:
what has one built if not a house of words?,
ill-at-ease in the presence of that mingling,
those lights, that clamor, that life of the streets,
yet has not once flinched from such confrontation,
not once, on behalf of those many figures
of one’s invention, social creatures each,
however great the distance from the center
at which their author stood, preferred to stand…”

Even for readers unfamiliar with James’ prose, the effect is hypnotic and immensely moving. Like one of James’ late protagonists – Lambert Strether, John Marcher – Morris’ James questions the worth of the life he has lived. Like most writers, he regrets, at least for this moment, “the thinness of one’s life.”

ADDENDUM: A Canadian reader who wishes to remain anonymous tells me Herbert Morris, born in 1928, died in 2001. R.I.P.

`The Scent of the Past'

Eric Ormsby is a poet, critic, translator, scholar of Islamic intellectual history, and now professor and chief librarian at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. One might say he is an amateur and professional lover of books who understands their critical importance to cultural well-being. In 2001, he contributed “The Battle of the Book” to a New Criterion series on “The Survival of Culture.” Ormsby’s and nine other essays were published in 2002 as a book of the same title. Part of me thinks it peculiar, even perverse, that a writer should feel compelled to defend the centrality of books and learning to civilization, but as Ormsby writes:

“…for the survival of culture, we need all the help we can get, whether in words baked on ancient tablets, set in cold type, or amid the pixels of the scanner and the computer screen.”

The barbarians breeched the gates long ago and many were born within the walls. Ormsby draws up a scorecard in the war between defenders of the book and partisans of digitalized information. His own reasonable position is that books and computers are both essential, though clearly his sympathies lie with the printed page – literally:

“A book is intensely physical, even sensuous. Reading is not a disincarnate, cerebral activity but a solidly physical process in which we deploy almost all our senses, and no doubt a Freudian pleasure-principle is at work while we read. After all, we are at least subliminally conscious of the weight of the book in our hands, the design and layout of the pages engage our eye, the typeface is pleasing or annoying or diverting, marginalia or underscorings may arrest our attention, we can smell the ink at times, and graze the texture of the pages, the binding, the dust jacket with our fingertips.”

Ormsby’s words returned to me as I was looking for a passage in Boswell’s Life of Johnson. I own four copies, printed in three centuries. The one I use most often is the recent Everyman’s edition. I like its pleasingly zaftig, hand-filling squatness, its brick-like heft and its index. But the one I most enjoy using is the oldest, edited by the Right Honourable John Wilson Croker and published by John Murray of Albemarle Street, London, in 1847 – 56 years after its first publication, 63 years after its subject’s death. My brother gave it to me several years ago. The leather binding is scuffed and worn but solidly intact. The end papers are marbled. A typed, homemade bookplate, about the size of a magazine label, is glued to the inside cover: “H.E. Handerson, 784 Lexington Ave., New York City.” The typing is flawless and the three, double-spaced lines are indented four spaces in from the preceding line. Its 874 pages are printed in two columns and remain glossy and only sparingly foxed, though after 161 years they’ve turned the color of weak tea. There are no markings in the book, which smells pleasantly of leather and must, with a chemical hint of ink if you place your nose in the valley where the pages meet. This sensory bundle suggests Johnson, lexicographer and son of a book seller, and some Platonic essence of bookness as no paperback ever could. Its age – its first reader could have walked the London streets with Boswell and Johnson – and antiquated appearance, coupled with its sturdiness, nicely reflect the uncertain future of all books. Ormsby continues:

“No doubt I am biased, but it strikes me that a covert complicity exists between book and reader that does not obtain between computer and user. Reading a book becomes an experience in one’s life in a way that consulting a computer cannot be (or, at least, cannot be yet). The computer is unsurpassable for the transmission of facts, of raw information, as well as for its miraculous indexing properties, but it does not – again, perhaps, does not yet – engage our imaginations and intellects in quite the same way a book does.”

To demonstrate the true worth of digital technology, I Googled the name of the former owner of the Life of Johnson open on my desk – H.E. Handerson. Among other things I learned he was the author of at least one book, Gilbertus Anglicus: Medicine of the Thirteenth Century, published posthumously, in 1918, by the Cleveland Medical Library Association. Handerson was a doctor and Civil War veteran and prisoner of war, and if you go here you can read his book and more about him, and see his picture. He was born in 1837and died on Shakespeare’s birthday in 1918. So, now I feel a connection, no matter how tenuous, with Johnson and a doctor from my home town, Cleveland. Ormsby writes:

“When we open an old book, or one we read in childhood, the scent of the past that rises up can bring back whole Proustian realms in its gust.”

`Wing'd Purposes'

Whitman was a master of portraiture. Section 13 of “Song of Myself” begins with the speaker (Whitman, or a reasonable facsimile) admiring the grace of a black man at the reins of four horses pulling a stoneyard wagon – difficult, dangerous work almost certainly never before celebrated in literature. Also unprecedented is a black lauded for “polish’d and perfect limbs,” whose “glance is calm and commanding.” Whitman goes on to say he “love[s]” the driver, “and I do not stop there,/I go with the team also.” Next, Whitman described himself as “the caresser of life” – any life, animal or plant (leaves of grass), human or nonhuman, male or female. The pose is extraordinary, though we know from letters and conversations that Whitman was hardly an unambiguous Abolitionist. The cause of the Civil War for Whitman as for Lincoln was principally preservation of the Union not opposition to slavery. Section 13 moves from workman and horses to another beast of burden, oxen. Of them he writes:

“…what is it that you express in your eyes?
It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”

Now comes the passage that occurred to me on Saturday, late in the afternoon, when an astonishing bird showed up in our backyard:

“My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and day-long ramble,
They rise together, they slowly circle around.

“I believe in those wing'd purposes,
And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,
And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional,
And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,
And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,
And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.”

Through the sliding glass doors at the back of the house I saw something dark land on the patio. The bird was larger than a robin, slightly smaller than a crow and had a tufted crest. Its head and upper breast were crow-black and the rest of him was a deep iridescent blue that reminded me of Christmas ornaments. With the raggedy tuft it looked like a kingfisher, but we live miles from water. This bird had come to feed on the mix of cracked corn and seed I put out for the squirrels, crows and juncos.

An online search revealed the belted kingfisher is the only member of that family found in the Northwest, and the beauty in my yard looked nothing like it. After more poking about I made a positive identification: Steller’s jay. Its behavior was blue jay-like – bold and taunting but nervous and revved-up, given to quick, jerky motions. Take a look at the Steller’s jay page at All About Birds, maintained by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The second photo, near the bottom, resembles the bird I saw.

Whitman writes: “And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me.” His use of “gamut” is musically precise. In English the word dates from the early 16th century and originally meant the “lowest note in the medieval musical scale.” Within a century the figurative sense of "entire scale or range" of anything is first recorded. Like Whitman, the bird has had no formal training in making songs but “trills pretty well.”

Whitman goes beyond mere Romantic appreciation of organisms as varied as a black laborer, oxen, ducks, a jay and a bay mare; he projects himself into these beings, becomes them in all his polymorphous perversity. When I look at the Steller’s jay, I’m moved most by its difference from me, and the remarkable variation among species. I understand the ultimate commonality of the gene pool, the fractional but all-important difference between chimpanzees and homo sapiens, and I’m proud of my other primate cousins, but I cherish our difference more than our likeness. When I hear the raucous call of the Steller’s jay, I think not of Whitman but Wallace Stevens, a line from “Madame la Fleurie”:

“It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.”

`Substantial Literary Nourishment'

Imagine a place and time when a father, packing his son’s luggage for a journey overseas, includes four volumes of Idler and Rambler essays. I often carry Johnson when I travel, for the reassurance of the familiar on alien turf, but even I pare him down to a single volume, and sometimes substitute a compact Boswell, the Oxford or Everyman’s edition. Not so for John James Ruskin, an English wine merchant packing for little John in the eighteen-thirties. In his peculiar memoir, Praeterita, that son, John Ruskin, notes that “had it not been for constant reading of the Bible, I might probably have taken Johnson for my model of English.” He goes on to recall his early travels:

“On our foreign journeys, it being of course desirable to keep the luggage as light as possible, my father had judged that four little volumes of Johnson – the Idler and the Rambler – did, under names wholly appropriate to the circumstances, contain more substantial literary nourishment than could be, from any other author, packed into so portable compass. And accordingly, in spare hours, and on wet days, the turns and returns of reiterated Rambler and iterated Idler fastened themselves in my ears and mind; nor was it possible for me, till long afterwards, to quit myself of Johnsonian symmetry and balance in sentences intended, either with swordsman’s or paviour’s blow, to cleave an enemy’s crest, or drive down the oaken pile of a principle.”

Later in the same paragraph Ruskin writes:

“I valued his sentences not primarily because they were symmetrical, but because they were just, and clear; it is a method of judgment rarely used by the average public, who ask from an author always, in the first place, arguments in favour of their own opinions, in elegant terms…”

I also value Johnson’s sentences because they are “just, and clear,” and it was Johnson who helped school me in such values. Dead almost 224 years, he remains the mentor I’ve never had in the flesh. In his life of Thomas Gray, Johnson says he “rejoice[s] to concur with the common reader” regarding Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” that it “abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.” That’s the great beguiling strength of Johnson, who coined the phrase “common reader,” adopted by Virginia Woolf. He was a great writer, perhaps a genius, whose dimensions we recognize as human, our own. He is us, only more so. I echo what Ruskin says of him:

“…Johnson was the one author accessible to me. No other writer could have secured me, as he did, against all chance of being misled by my own sanguine and metaphysical temperament. He taught me carefully to measure life, and distrust fortune…”

`You Can See the Wind'

The facility in which we stow impedimenta is a labyrinth of narrow lanes and anonymous, one-story, bunker-like units. During a recent visit, we saw drifts of tufted cottonwood seeds in corners and along the base of the buildings. On wings of white thread, millions of miniscule seeds drift for miles. Each tree bears male or female flowers, and their scent is pungently distinctive. A naturalist I know in upstate New York likens it to “freshly laundered linen.”

While I was stacking boxes in our unit, I heard the kids yelling for me from the car. Outside, in a corner, was a chest-high vortex of cottonwood seeds, spinning and wobbling on its axis but remaining in one spot. The wind was stiff enough to whistle and it frightened my 5-year-old. “Twister,” he said, a tad melodramatically. Like electricity, wind is invisible and powerful. We see only what it carries – snow, dust or cottonwood fluff. Twice as a reporter in the Midwest, when I was young and even more foolish, I chased tornadoes with a camera and notebook. Wind, more than rain or sunshine, is my favorite aspect of weather. Seeing the fuzzy tornado reminded me of a lovely passage in Geoffrey Hill’s The Triumph of Love, Section XI:

“On chance occasions –
And others have observed this – you can see the wind,
As it moves, barely a separate thing,
The inner wall, the cell, of an hourglass, humming
Vortices, bright particles in dissolution,
A roiling plug of sand picked up
As a small dancing funnel. It is how
The purest apprehension might appear
To take corporeal shape.”

Let that final sentence sink in, and think about it the next time you observe a gyre of dead leaves or dust.

`A Kind of Living Death'

When William Maxwell agreed to be interviewed by Barbara Burkhardt, who was preparing to write his biography, he made a peculiar stipulation: She could interview him in person but Maxwell would answer for the record only with his typewriter. What an odd scene it must have made – Burkhardt seated across from the novelist, carefully posing her questions; Maxwell mutely turning to his Coronomatic and writing his replies in silence, sometimes typing for as long as five minutes. He told her, “I think better on the typewriter than I do just talking.” I understand the wish to articulate one’s thought with the utmost care, and anyone familiar with Maxwell’s understated prose knows he left no room for sloppiness or unintentional ambiguity. Still, what was Burkhardt thinking while Maxwell, already 82 when she met him, silently addressed her queries? Did she ever grow frustrated with the way he subverted intimacy? As a reporter I’ve interviewed thousands of people, and my experience is that the best interviews, the most spontaneous, unguarded and revealing, turn into conversations.

To the credit of both writers, Burkhardt elicited brilliant, revealing responses from Maxwell. She uses one of the best as the final paragraph of William Maxwell: A Literary Life (2005):

“`I think it is somehow unimaginative to consider the universe as the product of chance,’ he told me. He paused a moment, looked over his tortoise shell glasses, and then continued to type: `I am inclined to say that it is the product of God knows. The evidence offered in Nature is so astonishing and so consistently on the side of an Intention. I did not escape the influence of seven or eight years of Sunday School, and believe we ought to help each other when it is possible, that the self-centered life is a kind of living death, that life on any terms is a privilege and that we ought to be grateful for it and use it to our best ability, and not be frightened or frantic when we reach the end of it. But instead stand, accepting, like a flower that has gone to seed.’”

I thought of these words as I watched Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (1962) for the first time in many years. Tomas Ericsson, played by Gunnar Björnstrand, is a pastor losing his faith and humanity . What hit me forcefully on this viewing was Ericsson’s profound self-centeredness: “The self-centered life is a kind of living death.” When a parishioner, Jonas Persson (Max von Sydow), confides that he is contemplating suicide, Tomas responds with platitudes and self-pity. Almost his first words are: “Everyone feels this dread to some extent.” Honestly enough, Jonas asks: “Why do we have to go on living?” Tomas has no answer. Jonas leaves the church and kills himself.

The stark northern landscape, the cold interiors and Tomas himself remind me of R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet-priest. Readers of The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas, will recognize Thomas in Tomas. Both were impossible men, abusively self-absorbed. When Tomas despairs of “God’s silence,” he sounds one of Thomas’ great themes, as in “Via Negativa” from H’m (1972):

“Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes
We follow, the footprints he has just
Left. We put our hands in
His side hoping to find
It warm. We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them, too: but miss the reflection.”

Tomas’ failing is not strictly psychological, as contemporary viewers might believe (as though Prozac would turn the Rev. Ericsson into the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale) , but starts in that shadowy region in all of us where the moral, emotional and spiritual overlap. Tomas’s mistress, Märta Lundberg, played by Ingrid Thulin, writes a long letter to her lover. As Tomas reads it, Bergman has Thulin, in one of the great performances in film, read the letter aloud directly at the camera – a sort of inversion of Maxwell typing his answers to Burkhardt. A school teacher and nonbeliever, Märta writes, “You have a lot to learn.”

Maxwell suggests that an unwillingness to help others, the life-in-death of unfettered self-centeredness and the failure to treat “life on any terms” as a privilege are linked to the denial of “Intention” in the design in the universe. Egotism ensures suffering. As Märta jokes, “Another Sunday in the Vale of Tears.”

`Clearest, Purest, Straightest'

I read more poetry than prose, and more nonfiction than fiction, and this comes as a surprise. Without realizing it, my reading habits have evolved dramatically over the decades. I no longer read newspapers though I spent much of my life working for them. Is there something about fiction that specifically attracts adolescents and young adults? Roughly 35 years ago I read almost nothing but novels, current titles and what is now dismissed as the canon. Does anyone remember Tom McHale? I read and admired Principato (1970) and Farragan’s Retreat (1972) as they were published. McHale committed suicide in 1982 and his reputation is largely eclipsed, but he was a superbly funny writer, somewhat in the school of Evelyn Waugh. If a comparably gifted fiction writer appeared today, I probably would miss him, and yet I feel no compulsion to look for the next McHale. What happened?

Age, of course, is part of it. When I read fiction, most often I’m rereading writers deeply familiar to me – Chekhov, Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, Henry James, Bellow, Christina Stead, William Maxwell. I resent wasting time on lousy writers. I’m no longer reluctant to give up on a mediocre book after five or 10 pages, or even one, but I’m less likely than ever to even start a book by a writer new to me. (Recent exceptions include Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses and Richard Bausch’s Peace.)

With poetry it’s different. Granted, as with fiction, most of what I read is an old friend – Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert (George, Zbigniew), Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins, Eliot, Berryman, Geoffrey Hill and so on. Still, I tend to assume that most poetry, even more so than fiction, is rubbish. Among human endeavors, only music (composition, performance) may be more exceedingly difficult than writing great or even good poetry. I trust my ability to recognize bad poems and I close the book without remorse.

In the broadest sense, what attracts me to a poem is precision and concision of language. I like words densely packed with meaning and music, words that don’t surrender their mysteries after repeated readings. A good poem nags even after you read it and read it again. It hints at something sacred, something bigger than the poet and his reader. Try “History as Poetry” from Hill’s second collection, King Log (1968):

“Poetry as salutation; taste
Of Pentacost’s ashen feast. Blue wounds.
The tongue’s atrocities. Poetry
Unearths from among the speechless dead

“Lazarus mystified, common man
Of death. The lily rears its gouged face
From the provided loam. Fortunate
Auguries; whirrings; tarred golden dung:

“`A resurgence’ as they say. The old
Laurels wagging with the new: Selah!
Thus laudable the trodden bone thus
Unanswerable the knack of tongues.”

An e-mail from my brother on Tuesday prompted this post. Earlier I had read Hill’s “Alienated Majesty: Gerard M. Hopkins,” in his new volume, Collected Critical Writings. This passage in particular, in which Hill echoes the Jesuit motto (“Ad majorem Dei gloriam”) struck me as beautiful and acute:

“There are ways of offering up commonplace to the greater glory of God. Hopkins and in his way Whitman can do this; as Lincoln can. Others cannot.”

My brother is not a literary guy, any more than I’m a painterly guy, as he is. I suspect he’s never read Hopkins or Hill, but what impresses me about him is his autodidact’s gift for taking on most anything that attracts him. If he gets around to reading Hopkins or Hill, the results will be worth hearing. He’s not interested in textual history or critical context. He’s a poetic Protestant -- just him and the text. Here’s what he wrote to me:

“Thanks to you I have one more thing on my list of subjects of which I will never know enough, Poetry. Thanks a lot.

“Starting with [Zbigniew] Herbert in the winter of 2006 through [Kay] Ryan last month. Some of their poems have stopped me dead in my tracks and given me pause to observe some of the clearest, purest, straightest lines imaginable. (It's the Welsh in me.) [Our ancestry, in fact, is Polish and Irish.]

“The surge in my graphic output is absolutely linked to you and your daily ramblings.”

Those are some more of the reasons I read poetry.

`I Still Like Making Sentences'

“Because I actively enjoy sleeping, dreams, the unexplainable dialogues that take place in my head as I am drifting off, all that, I tell myself that lying down to an afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity is not something to be concerned about. What spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when people are dead they don’t read books. This I find unbearable. No Tolstoy, no Chekhov, no Elizabeth Bowen, no Keats, no Rilke. One might as well be –

“Before I am ready to call it quits I would like to reread every book I have ever deeply enjoyed, beginning with Jane Austen and Isaac Babel and Sybille Bedford’s The Sudden View and going through shelf after shelf of the bookcases, until I arrive at the autobiographies of William Butler Yeats.”

That’s from William Maxwell’s essay “Nearing 90,” one of the saddest and most beautiful pieces of writing I know. I first read it in The New York Times Magazine in 1997, in a hotel room in Chicago. It was Sunday morning and I was killing time before my flight back to New York. In such a setting, who expects to be lastingly moved by something published in a newspaper? The only similar circumstance I can imagine is reading, unawares, the obituary of a loved one. Of course, Maxwell was, by all accounts, a loveable man, and certainly a loveable writer, and he died on July 31, 2000, three weeks short of his 92nd birthday. We know from Annabel Davis-Goff and Shirley Hazzard that the last book he read, or had read to him, was War and Peace.

Friends and colleagues, including Larry Woiwode, have described Maxwell’s emotional transparency, the ease with which he wept, yet he was no crybaby or depressive, and ranks among the least histrionic of writers. Both capacities – expressiveness and understatement – may be traced to the death of his mother when he was 10 years old. Hazzard, whose work Maxwell edited at The New Yorker, described her friend like this:

“The human encounter came always fresh to Maxwell. Singularity was intrinsic to his own nature and to his sense of other lives. He knew the world deeply, yet remained accessible to it, detached from the contemporary trend toward exposition and pronouncement. That he kept faith with the wound of his early knowledge helped him, I think, to become a happy man.”

The most heartbreaking part of Maxwell’s essay is the perfectly modulated conclusion. The wording is natural and plain-spoken. A Midwestern Prospero drowns his books, or resigns himself to their drowning:

“`Are you writing?’' people ask -- out of politeness, undoubtedly. And I say, `Nothing very much.’ The truth but not the whole truth -- which is that I seem to have lost touch with the place that stories and novels come from. I have no idea why. I still like making sentences.

“Every now and then, in my waking moments, and especially when I am in the country, I stand and look hard at everything.”

Have five words ever sounded sadder?

“I still like making sentences.”

`A Small, Metaphysical Quiver'

On Monday, when I picked up a stack of books and DVDs I had ordered from the library, the clerk took a second look at the case containing Winter Light, Ingmar Bergman’s 1962 film. I had read a brief essay about it in The New Yorker, written by Tobias Wolff, and decided to watch it again. On the case holding the DVD is a stark black-and-white still of the tormented pastor in the film, Tomas Ericsson, played by the late Gunnar Björnstrand. The clerk stared at the picture and asked, “What’s this about?” I stammered something about faith, doubt and existential anxiety, and added, “It’s a pretty serious movie.” I immediately wondered whether I had sounded condescending, but then she said, “So, it’s not Seinfeld, huh?” She laughed and said she would put a hold on it for herself.

This brief exchange reminds me how much I’ve enjoyed the company of librarians, including our own Dave Lull. Most, even if not formidably well-read, possess an old-fashioned respect for books and what used to be known, without a hint of irony, as “culture.” True, I’ve also known a few, particularly since the metastasis of the computer, who remain as doltish as, say, a Seinfeld enthusiast.

Last week, Mike Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti asked if I had ever read anything by the poet Baron Wormser. That’s a name I would have remembered (I said he sounded like “a scion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire”), so I was certain I had not. At Mike’s suggestion I ordered from the library one of Wormser’s poetry collections, When, and a prose work, The Road Washes Out in Spring. The latter is a memoir of the almost 25 years Wormser and his family lived in a house in Maine without electricity or running water. Early in the book, not long after my serendipitous conversation with the library clerk, I read the following passage:

“The great Borges had been a librarian. It was easy to see why. Although librarians in America were as keen on whiz-bang technology as anyone else, there remained a certain literal dustiness to the vocation, a fascination with the mind’s alleyways, boulevards, and dead ends. Even a dull book was the product of some species of imagination. And the relations among the books, the strange neighbors that libraries created, the fraught decisions that my students made each day in choosing books and that I made in selecting them gave off a small, metaphysical quiver.”

Talking to the library clerk about Bergman, skirting matters of ultimate seriousness while trying to sound casual and friendly, that’s about what I felt – “a small, metaphysical quiver.”

`Home to Roost'

My brother, Mr. Ken Kurp, send me a link to a video of Kay Ryan reading and discussing her poem "Home to Roost":

“The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small ––
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost –– all
the same kind
at the same speed.”

`A Theology of Language'

The book of the year arrived in the mail on Saturday – Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Critical Writings. At 816 pages, 236 of them notes and indexes, the volume tips the scale at almost five pounds. Published by Oxford University Press, it brings together The Lords of Limit (1984), The Enemy’s Country (1991), Style and Faith (2003), and 13 previously uncollected essays and lectures. The editor, Kenneth Haynes, notes that the latter pieces were originally intended as discrete volumes titled Inventions of Value and Alienated Majesty. Those familiar with the earlier published volumes know Hill’s prose is learned, fierce, allusive and crabbed, not unlike much of his poetry. Hill takes language seriously and expects readers to follow his example. This is from a 1998 lecture, “Language, Suffering, and Silence”:

“Language under the kind of extreme pressure which the making of poetry requires, can, on occasion, push the maker beyond the barrier of his or her own limited intelligence. If I were to consider undertaking a theology of language, this would be one of a number of possible points of departure for such an exploration: the abrupt, unlooked-for semantic recognition understood as corresponding to an act of mercy or grace.”

In Hill, style and faith, as the title of his previous prose collection suggests, are mingled and interdependent, which makes his work deeply unpopular in some quarters. For most contemporary poets and their readers, he might as well be writing in a foreign language. Hill returns to the notion of a “theology of language,” and proposes how it might be established:

“This would comprise a critical examination of the grounds for claiming (a) that the shock of semantic recognition must be also a shock of ethical recognition; and that this is action of grace in one of its minor, but far from trivial, types; (b) that the art and literature of the late twentieth century require a memorializing, a memorizing, of the dead as much as, or even more than, expressions of `solidarity with the poor and the oppressed.’ Suffering is real, but `suffering’ is a sing-song, that is to say, cant. If a poet or painter were to inquire of such a theology how, in this case, `solidarity’ could still be shown, the answer which I should hope to hear would be `give alms.’”

Hill illustrates what he means by “giving alms” by quoting from an 1879 letter Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote his friend Robert Bridges, after he had already suggested prayer:

“I have another counsel open to no objection and yet I think it will be unexpected. I lay great stress on it. It is to give alms…this is, for instance, you might know of someone needing and deserving an alms to give which would require you in prudence to buy no books till next quarter day or to make some equivalent sacrifice of time.”

Hill reiterates:

“One sees how Hopkins brings the point home to the place where this particular recipient, a book-lover, will be galled: give till it hurts, and in your special case this may involve the sacrifice of your treasured monthly book-allowance.”

Hill, you’ll notice, is a serious man with a serious sense of humor. In the same essay, he points out that Yeats accepts a premise of Matthew Arnold’s “while he struts and preens around it like a D’Annunzio in Irish tweeds.” Serious book-lovers (that is, lovers of serious books) will be pleased to learn that he devotes essays to, among others, Hopkins, Isaac Rosenberg, Emerson (the phrase “alienated majesty” is his), Whitman and Eliot. A book to read and live with for life.

`On the Shore of an Immensity'

“Although a great reader, he disliked flaunting a too-visible wardrobe of learning; yet how could his intensive, extensive reading not enter the writing? Reading is passed down to others the way parents pass down their traits. One may even wonder if there have ever been great readers who did not go on to write in one form or another. He was an omnivorous reader.”

This is Anne Atik writing of her friend Samuel Beckett in How It Was. The coexistence of the will to read and to write would seem self-evident, though I’ve known at least one novelist who had read little and proclaimed, rather insistently, indifference to literary tradition. That he was not a very good novelist is probably coincidental. Of the few “great readers” I have known, all were nominal writers, whether poets or professors.

Somewhere, Emerson writes of wishing to be a doctor in the company of doctors and a soldier with military men. As a boy and young man, any book I enjoyed I longed to have written. I willed myself into imagining I had written it, savoring the accomplishment of creating a book but also looking at it from the author’s vantage. The act of claiming it as “mine” oddly made the book seem new and strange again, and often enabled me to quickly reread it – with new eyes, as it were. I no longer do this, though annotations, reviews, notebooks, commonplace books and blog posts may represent the same impulse transformed. Perhaps writing has roots in envy. Leon Wieseltier writes in Kaddish:

“It is in the hall of study we pray. The beauty of the room is owed to its homeliness. It is decorated only with books. When I stand by the wall of books, I feel as if I am standing on the shore of an immensity.”

`A Great Largesse'

Washington is the greenest place I’ve ever lived in at least two senses, though I’m referring to the color. Houston, where we lived until April, is in a protracted drought while, as of this writing, the rain in greater Seattle has paused only momentarily in the last 48 hours. NE Eighth Street, which runs east-west between our neighborhood and downtown Bellevue, is a long, rolling green tunnel. The saplings in the median are the color of iceberg lettuce. Flanking the street are the darker hues of conifers, oaks, ashes, a few maples and, unexpectedly, tulip trees with their geometrically straight trunks. The effect, in the cloud-diffused light of late afternoon, is of a vast theme park devoted to photosynthesis. I’ve read evolutionary explanations for the soothing qualities possessed by green. I don’t know about that, though I know that massed quantities of green buoy my spirits. I associate it in some pre-rational way with solace and contentment. In “Green,” Richard Wilbur calls it “a great largesse”:

“Tree leaves which, till the growing season’s done,
Change into wood the powers of the sun,

“Take from that radiance only reds and blues.
Green is a color that they cannot use,

“And so their rustling myriads are seen
To wear all summer an extraneous green,

A green with no apparent role, unless
To be the symbol of a great largesse

“Which has no end, though autumns may revoke
That shade from yellowed ash and rusted oak.”

Latches, Not Buckles

See the June/July issue of Policy Review for Henrik Bering’s “The Ultimate Literary Portrait,” an essay on James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Bering is not a graceful writer and he presents no new information for seasoned readers of Johnson and Boswell, but the piece is a useful reminder of the unlikely creation of the greatest biography in the language:

“Elsewhere Boswell had frequently complained about the inadequacy of words in conveying our impressions: `Words cannot describe our feelings. The finer parts are lost, as the down upon a plum.’ And he had expressed his intense envy of painters and their medium: `With how small a speck does a painter give life to an eye.’ What he particularly admired were the Flemish painters, with their almost photographic attention to detail, mapping out the wrinkles of a face or the folds and embroideries of a piece of clothing.

“Translated to the realm of the written word, this means a search for the characteristic detail in a person’s manner of speech, his gestures or way of walking. As Boswell had learned from Adam Smith, whose lectures he had attended in Glasgow, the reader takes pleasure in knowing tiny details about great men, like say, the fact that Milton wore latches instead of buckles on his shoes.”

`Alive Because We Look and Grieve'

I’ve visited Gettysburg many times, starting in 1963, shortly after the centennial of the battle. It’s among those rare places, like certain cemeteries and churches, that feel charged with significance. One speaks and walks softly. Talking too loudly would seem indecent. Antietam I’ve visited only once, in March of 1986. I was driving back to upstate New York after visiting a friend in Washington, D.C., and decided on a whim to walk the site of the bloodiest day (Sept. 16, 1862) in American military history. The afternoon was cold and windy, the trees still bare. Except for a park ranger, I was the only person at the battlefield. The sun was already low in the sky, and I didn’t have time for a full tour. The ranger, a black man, showed me the fabled cornfield. He spoke so softly, I wondered if he ever got angry enough to holler, but he seemed pleased to be talking again after a long quiet day. He knew the battle and battlefield deeply. I thought of him as I read this poem by W.S. Di Piero, “1864,” collected in Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems:

“Like true believers elated by what they’ve seen,
as if at the end of days, raptured away
like millions more of undying credence,
this Union soldier’s ankles crossed,
his ditch-mate’s demure arms folded
like an Annunciation angel’s,
others flank to flank, mouths catching flies –
how candid and unharmed they look,
these teens in O’Sullivan’s snapshot,
grimy mother-of-pearl faces
aspiring to another life or way or time,
who see where we don’t. Who among us can say
(we the quick, fattened, fed, sheltered,
alive because we look and grieve)
what they saw, what stiff promise
their brains made or erased,
or what millions today on TV will see
in empty combat boots spread on a lawn,
far from their desert, clownish and collapsed
for lack of feet they never fit quite right?”

“O’Sullivan” is Timothy O'Sullivan, a photographer who worked for Mathew Brady and was commissioned as a first lieutenant during the Civil War. His most famous image, “The Harvest of Death,” was taken within days of the Battle of Gettysburg. I’ve searched several photographic databases, looking for the picture most resembling the one described by Di Piero. I found one, titled “Spotsylvania Court House, Va., Bodies of Confederate Soldiers Near Mrs. Alsop’s House,” that was close, though Di Piero specifies a Union soldier. The youth of the dead men is obvious. Photos of Civil War dead seem not gruesome but deeply sad. Any photo captures a fleeting, unrepeatable shard of a second, and has poignancy built into it. O’Sullivan’s pictures and others from the Civil War are too heartbreaking to contemplate for long.

Di Piero renders this sense through most of his poem. Untouched by the immediate horror of the war, we look at these nameless men who died 144 years ago. We are “alive because we look and grieve,” and that is our duty. The poem’s last four lines fail because they can’t bear the weight of historical linkage Di Piero heaps on them. The strain turns the conclusion false and vaguely indecent. He comes close to betraying the dead, in a way O’Sullivan does not.

`Before Me Nothing, Therefore'

For some of us, the present is an impertinence we tolerate only because it so quickly becomes the past. We are the sum of all pasts, and beware of those who stake a claim on the future. They probably are utopians – that is, barbarians willing to sacrifice anyone for the sake of their purified future. Theodore Dalrymple cites modern architecture, specifically the monstrosities of Le Corbusier, as his inspiration for similar thoughts in this week’s “Global Warning” column in The Spectator:

“Where did this hatred of the past come from? A large part of it is sheer egotism consequent upon the death of religion, an inability to contemplate with equanimity the supposedly humiliating fact that a civilisation is bigger than oneself or one’s own glorious part in it. Before me nothing, therefore; and after me nothing either.”

Such thoughts, of course, are nothing new. G.K. Chesterton has a chapter titled “The Fear of the Past” in What’s Wrong With the World (1910), in which he observes:

“But there is one feature in the past which more than all the rest defies and depresses the moderns and drives them towards this featureless future. I mean the presence in the past of huge ideals, unfulfilled and sometimes abandoned. The sight of these splendid failures is melancholy to a restless and rather morbid generation…”

`The Human Sweetness'

Unexpected pleasures are the truest. We had an impromptu dinner in the food court of a nearby shopping mall, an improvised menu of Thai and Italian. A high-school band was tuning up behind us – 25 kids in white shirts, black slacks and skirts. After a nervous, wordy intro from the teacher, the reed section heaved into “In the Mood,” a note-for-note clone of Glenn Miller’s arrangement. The acoustics were terrible, the command of rhythm uncertain and the sound system plagued with feedback. The shoppers never stopped gabbing, nor did mall management turn off the Muzak, but the music was great. The kids and I danced in our seats. Philip Larkin described his undergraduate reaction to hearing Fats Waller’s “Dream Man” and Rosetta Howard’s “If You’re a Viper” as “grinning, jigging wordlessness, interspersed with a grunt or two at especially good bits.” That was us.

Next up was “I Wanna Be Like You” from The Jungle Book soundtrack. Not bad but I would have chosen another rave-up, maybe “Sing, Sing Sing,” something to keep the feet moving. The third number was a serious misstep, a Gershwinesque tone poem with shifting tempos and too much clarinet. The musicians were shaky and lost their way in the murk. The band director, who probably selected the piece, was grimacing. We left before the end of the song but I still felt exhilarated by “In the Mood.” I don’t even like Glenn Miller, but sometimes it’s best to drop the critical stance, relax a little and enjoy. Sometimes sophistication and analysis can be a real drag. My pleasure was heightened by the unexpected appearance of a jazz band in a suburban mall, on a Friday evening after a long week – a gift utterly gratuitous. The Scottish poet Iain Crichton Smith, in “Two Girls Singing,” knew when to be merely human and enjoy it:

“It neither was the words nor yet the tune.
Any tune would have done and any words.
Any listener or no listener at all.

“As nightingales in rocks or a child crooning
in its own world of strange awakening
or larks for no reason but themselves.

“So on the bus through late November running
by yellow lights tormented, darkness falling,
the two girls sang for miles and miles together

and it wasn’t the words or tune. It was the singing.
It was the human sweetness in that yellow,
The unpredicted voices of our kind.”

`Air Rinsed After Rain'

Perhaps it’s a function of age, of having seen much but accepting that I will never see everything, that moves me to devote more attention to the natural world, particularly the humble parts unworthy of a watercolorist. It’s the transitoriness that draws me and triggers a pang. A sprawling magnolia grows to the west of our house, across from trashcans and recycling bins. Because of the constant shade, little grass grows there. When the magnolia’s waxy yellow leaves fall to the black, hard-packed soil, I’m mute before the useless beauty. These are not occasions for philosophizing. Crows strut around the yard, flashing blue iridescence in their wings. I had set a trash bag outside the sliding glass doors, not wishing to go out in the rain. Within seconds, a crow landed six feet away, cocked his head, cakewalked up to the plastic sack and drilled it with his beak. I stopped him only because the sack held about seven pounds of cat litter.

On that note, I reintroduce Father Hopkins, who reminds us to see the inscape of such scenes – their unprecedented, one-of-a-kind bundle of qualities, their haecceity or thisness. I thought of him on Tuesday. Rain was falling when we woke and fell through the day until late afternoon, when a wind blew through and cleared the clouds and the sun shown for a few minutes. Then the rain resumed. A splendid June day. On Oct. 27, 1867, Hopkins writes in his journal:

“Stormy rain in morning, blowing in feathers from the spouts; in afternoon fine with ropes of clouds – and some wet, they say.”

The adhesion of sound to sight, of word to image, is pleasing. On July 18 of the same year, during a visit to France, he notes: “At sunset the air rinsed after rain.” Four of seven words deliciously burr with “r.” Best of all is this tour de force of sound and sense, from Jan. 23, 1866, when Hopkins was 21 years old and flexing his poetic muscle:

“Drops of rain hanging on rails etc seen with only the lower rim lighted like nails (of fingers). Screws of brooks and twines. Soft chalky look with more shadowy middles of the globes of cloud on a night with a moon faint or concealed. Mealy clouds with a not brilliant moon. Blunt buds of the ash. Pencil buds of the beech. Lobes of the trees. Cups of the eyes. Gathering back the lightly hinged eyelids. Bows of the eyelids. Pencil of eyelashes. Juices of the eyeball. Eyelids like leaves, petals, caps, tufted hats, handkerchiefs, sleeves, gloves. Also of the bones sleeves in flesh. Juices of the sunrise. Joins and veins of the same. Vermilion look of the hand held against a candle with the darker parts as the middles of the fingers and especially the knuckles covered with ash.”

Seemingly a random chain of associations, but he begins and ends with fingers, as though he always held the bag of images in his hand.

`Everything is Interesting'

Could anything be duller than a book that presumes to teach one how to write? Perhaps a how-to manual on being funny. Somewhere, about 10 years ago, I read that a volume dedicated to “writing classic prose” had been published and its authors held up A.J. Liebling as a model of clarity and stylishness. No writer, except perhaps Whitney Balliett, has had so practical and decisive an impact on my own work as Liebling, so I overcame my distaste and read Clear and Simple As the Truth, by Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, published by Princeton University Press in 1994. The book’s effect was not so much to teach me something new about writing; rather, it prodded me to rededicate myself to what I already had learned from decades of writing and reading: Strive ruthlessly for clarity, concision and exactitude. Eliminate the needless and self-indulgent, and keep it interesting, vigorous and true. Thomas and Turner are not school marms, as this excerpt from their book demonstrates:

“Classic style, a general style suitable for presenting the truth of anything, conceived as discrete and self-contained, has no continuing evolutionary history. It can be found in its perfect form in Thucydides, in Madame de Sévigné, in Jane Austen, in A.J. Liebling. It is not the style to which all previous writing aspires. Classic style is one style among many mature and consistent styles. Its virtues follow from its particular stand on the elements of style. They include the clarity and simplicity that come from matching language to thought on the motive of truth. Other styles have other virtues.”

Liebling is in fine if unaccustomed company here. Thomas and Turner append “The Museum” to their book – samples of prose from diverse sources, many not literary, that illustrate their notion of prose written in the classic style. Among the authors cited are Jefferson, Borges, Tanizaki, Michael Oakeshott, Milton, Alan Greenspan, Philip Larkin and The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, Eastern Region. I recommend Thomas and Turner’s book not as a quick-fix to lousy prose but as a useful mental tonic.

So I was pleased to learn Thomas has not lost his appreciation for Liebling: In the May/June issue of Humanities, he writes less a review than an essay based on his reading of World War II Writings, recently published by the Library of America. It is, in effect, applied epistemology. Thomas seeks to distinguish journalism from history, and not to the detriment of either. He contrasts Liebling’s eye-witness account of the Allied invasion with historian John Keegan’s Six Armies in Normandy, published 38 years after D-Day. Thomas describes Keegan’s book as “a masterpiece of military and political analysis juxtaposed with a compelling narrative of events.

“What Liebling writes about is limited to what happened when he was there. This means that the resulting story cannot have the scale and coherence of history. In his afterword [to Mollie & Other War Pieces, written shortly before his death in 1963] Liebling says, `I have been advised to write an epilogue to this book to ‘give it unity’ and ‘put it in perspective,’ but I find this difficult because war, unlike drama, has no unities classical or otherwise. It is discursive, centrifugal, both repetitive and disparate.’”

Thomas quotes this passage with approval. I would add that “discursive, centrifugal, both repetitive and disparate” is also an apt description of Liebling’s method, or rather his style, and of such prose masters as Burton, Browne, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Lamb and Melville. It’s a style that to the naïve seems simple to ape but proves unforgivingly difficult. Liebling never bemoans his limitations as a limited observer. He revels in them. Unlike the historian armed with hindsight and documentation, Liebling relies on his intelligence, experience and moxie. Thomas writes:

“His account of the Normandy Invasion is pretty much limited to a single cross-channel trip by a single landing craft. Its art is almost the inverse of Keegan’s. It begins in boredom, unacknowledged anxiety, uncertainty; its later moments of danger and violence are realized largely after the fact. It is so small a fragment of the gross event that it has almost no significance in the success or failure of the invasion. Liebling later found out that of the ten landing craft that were part of the group with which he went in, four were sunk before they had unloaded the men they were carrying, `a high proportion of whom were killed.’ It is an account that claims nothing but referential accuracy. The writer’s tacit claim is, `This is what you could have experienced had you been there; I know because it is what I experienced when I was there.’”

The glory days of conventional journalism are long past. The nation will never again make a hero of an Ernie Pyle. But nonfiction in other forms, some as yet unborn, will soon take advantage of the new technologies. Journalism, essays and other nonfictions, in the hands of gifted writers, inevitably will mutate into something new and powerful. Thomas’ final paragraph is worth reading and rereading in toto:

“Liebling’s war reporting, along with his postwar work as a press critic, have come to lend him a certain cultural respectability. The Second World War is, of course, an officially interesting subject—as is the institution of the American press—and it is possible to think that Liebling’s claims to our attention are based upon his subjects, as if certain subjects somehow carry their own interest. In reading about officially interesting subjects, we sometimes overlook how much the writer’s perception and judgment are what we are following. The strung-together clichés that make up the worst sort of newspaper `coverage’ can make any subject trivial because they create separate `significant’ stock events, made false by their discontinuity with the nature of ordinary experience. Subject matter does not determine style; a writer’s conception of truth, presentation, scene, cast, and the relationship between thought and language determine style, and style, in this rigorous sense, creates interest. Held in close focus, by a concentrated intelligence, everything is interesting.”