`Other People's Words'

Few newspaper reporters get wealthy by writing the news but the job offers less tangible, non-negotiable benefits. Chief among them is the opportunity to meet people you admire. My press pass gained me entrée to Count Basie, William Gass, Ralph Ellison, Elvin Jones, Dave McKenna, William Gaddis and B.B. King, among others. I met and interviewed more famous people (I sat across the table from Dan Quayle at a pancakes-and-prayer breakfast in Richmond, Ind.) but none pleased me as much as these writers and musicians. By that standard, Israel Shenker, a longtime reporter for Time magazine and the New York Times, had the most enviable job in the world.

For some reason I had never seen Words and Their Masters, his overstuffed 1974 collection of interviews, profiles, and odds and ends of a career in journalism. The volume serves as Shenker’s commonplace book too (chapters are interlarded with quotations from such luminaries as Louis Armstrong and Dean Acheson), and is illustrated with Jill Krementz’s photographs of the subjects. Here’s a sampling of the people Shenker meets and writes about: Nabokov, Borges, Beckett, Bellow, Naipaul, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Cheever, Groucho Marx and S.J. Perelman. Duds make appearances too: Lillian Hellman, Kurt Vonnegut (Krementz’s husband), Isaac Asimov, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Gore Vidal. In his preface, Shenker says the pieces represent his “preoccupation with other people’s words.” Here’s a sample, starting with Nabokov:

Shenker: “What are the literary virtues you seek to attain – and how?”

Nabokov: “Mustering the best words, with every available lexical, associative, and rhythmic assistance, to express as closely as possible what one wants to express.”

Shenker quoting Borges:

“Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.”

And Beckett:

“The Kafkaen hero has a coherence of purpose. He’s lost but he’s not spiritually precarious, he’s not falling to bits. My people seem to be falling to bits. Another difference. You notice how Kafka’s form is classic, it goes on like a steamroller – almost serene. It seems to be threatened the whole time – but the consternation is in the form. In my work there is consternation behind the form, not in the form.”

And Groucho:

“I read a piece about Ruskin or maybe it was Racine who had ten kids, and every time he passed them he took a swing at them. Racine couldn’t have been that bad. They named a town after him.”

Company like this beats politicians, captains of industry and even Dan Quayle.

`The Ludicrous Account'

This will be loose and serendipitous. I’ve thought much about butterflies lately, why their appearance seldom fails to make me happy. It’s their colors, I suppose, and their flickering motions. You would never mistake a butterfly for a bird, nor do birds reliably make me happy the way butterflies do. But there’s something else: Butterflies are evanescent, a virtual symbol of transience. Their fragility in time increases their beauty.

Western Washington has been overcast and mostly dry of late, meaning few butterflies. To compensate I’ve been skimming Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (2000), edited and annotated by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle. Among its 782 pages is a brief exchange from an interview Nabokov granted Israel Shenker of the New York Times in June 1971, and published in the New York Times Book Review on Jan. 9, 1972:

Shenker: “What struggles these days for pride of place in your mind?”

Nabokov: “Meadows. A meadow with Scarce Heath butterflies in North Russia, another with Grinnell’s Blue in South California. That sort of thing.”

That’s a lovely response from a 72-year-old novelist/lepidopterist, and the linking of summer meadows and butterflies is seductive. But it was the interviewer who caught my attention. In 1982 I read Shenker’s In the Footsteps of Johnson and Boswell: A Modern Day Journey Through Scotland, an account of the great pair's tour of Boswell’s homeland in 1773. I remember the book fondly but knew little else about Shenker. An online search uncovered the Times’ obituary of Shenker who died June 7, 2007, at the age of 82, almost precisely 30 years after Nabokov. Remembering Shenker by way of Nabokov, Boswell and Johnson reminded me, of course, of Boswell’s account of Johnson’s cat Hodge in his Life of Johnson:

“I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature. I am, unluckily, one of those who have an antipathy to a cat, so that I am uneasy when in the room with one; and I own, I frequently suffered a good deal from the presence of this same Hodge. I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson's breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, `Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;’ and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, `but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’

“This reminds me of the ludicrous account which he gave Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young Gentleman of good family. `Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats.’ And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favorite cat, and said, `But Hodge shan't be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.’”

Hodge’s renown grew after Nabokov used the second of Boswell’s paragraphs as his epigraph to Pale Fire. The passage distinguishes the characters of Boswell and Johnson. Boswell admits having an “antipathy” to cats, while Johnson, like any good-hearted person, feels only “indulgence” for Hodge, and experiences “a sort of kindly reverie” when thinking of him. The English have commemorated a bronze statue of Hodge in front of the house he shared with Johnson.

A simple thought about butterflies inspired a digressive journey, with entertaining visits along the way for Nabokov, Shenker, Boswell and Johnson, which brings me back to butterflies. In The Idler #64, published July 7, 1759, Johnson writes:

“…in time I grew weary of being hated for that which produced no advantage, gave my shells to children that wanted play-things, and suppressed the art of drying butterflies, because I would not tempt idleness and cruelty to kill them.”

`Blue Snow'

I remember the thrill I felt in junior high school when I first came to some understanding of binomial nomenclature, the system devised by Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) to identify each species of plant and animal with two Latin words. The economical beauty of it was breathtaking. Like every human scheme to master creation, of course, the Linnean system of taxonomy is flawed and often in need of fine tuning, but there’s comfort in knowing Passer domesticus will always be a house sparrow, never a tree sparrow, in Yonkers or Burkina Faso. Consider this passage:

“A score of small butterflies, all of one kind, were settled on a damp patch of sand, their wings erect and closed, showing their pale undersides with dark dots and tiny orange-rimmed peacock spots along the hindwing margins; one of Pnin’s shed rubbers disturbed some of them and, revealing the celestial hue of their upper surface, they fluttered around like blue snowflakes before settling again.”

The proper name blows the anonymity but in this passage from Pnin, Nabokov is doing something unique in literature: As a novelist he is rendering in fiction a species he named as a scientist -- Lycaeides melissa samuelis, the endangered Karner Blue. Nabokov published Pnin in 1957, 14 years after naming the butterfly. Its common name derives from a hamlet of Karner, also almost extinct, in the Albany Pine Bush in upstate New York. When I moved to Albany as a newspaper reporter in 1985, what little I knew of the region was literary -- William Kennedy’s novels, Melville’s residence there in his pre-seafaring days, William and Henry James’ summers at their grandparents’ house near the Hudson River -- and Nabokov’s butterfly. As a journalist I often wrote about the Karner blue and its diminishing habitat. Shortly before I arrived, a chunk of the Pine Bush had been lost to a shopping mall. This peculiar ecosystem, rooted in deposits of glacial sand, is surrounded by pricey real estate. Standing in the middle of blue-stemmed grass, blue lupines, dwarf and prairie willows, blueberries, huckleberries, bush clover, goat’s rue, horse mint, pitch pine and scrub oak, you can hear the drone of traffic on the adjacent New York State Thruway.

To see Nabokov’s “blue snowflakes” for the first time, flitting among the lupine, was exquisite and unrepeatable pleasure, a potent blending of literary, scientific and purely aesthetic pleasures. Nabokov was no aesthete, as a writer or lepidopterist. His scientific specialty was taxonomy, which translated into observing, describing and classifying thousands of butterfly specimens according to what he called the “sculpturesque” shape of their genitalia. He said in a 1964 interview:

“Frankly, I never thought of letters as a career. Writing has always been for me a blend of dejection and high spirits, a torture and a pastime -- but I never expected it to be a source of income. On the other hand, I have often dreamt of a long and exciting career as an obscure curator of lepidoptera in a great museum.”

Even more revealing is a poem Nabokov published in The New Yorker in 1943, the year he named the Karner blue and three years after he and his family immigrated to the United States from Europe. Here is “On Discovering a Butterfly”:

“I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer -- and I want no other fame.

“Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.

“Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.”

Mourning Cloak

I collected butterflies and moths for many summers as a kid, with varying degrees of seriousness, and I’m certain the attraction was more aesthetic than scientific, though the distinction remains fuzzy. Monarchs and viceroys both are beautiful but the latter’s mimicry of the former is adaptation at the highest level of aesthetic accomplishment.

I can name with certainty my favorite butterfly, in part because its attraction is rooted in another sort of mimicry – the pun. For a long time I mistook the mourning cloak (Nymphalis antiopa) for the “morning cloak.” In the morning I would take my net and follow a path along a ridge that paralleled the creek behind our house. The path was narrow and densely shaded. At the elbow where it turned to the northwest was a room-sized clearing among the oaks, wild cherries, poplars and black locust. If the sun shone, the mourning cloak fluttered about in the light, 10 or 12 feet off the ground, making him difficult to capture. I have never seen a more beautiful creature – purple-black wingtops with bright yellow piping at the outer edges. In the purple-black but near the yellow ribbon runs a line of iridescent blue spots. It’s a sublime combination of colors that, in clothing or home decoration, would look hideous. This hybrid of unlikely beauty, elusiveness and mistaken, evocative name insures I remain partial to the mourning cloak, and ought to make it inviting for poets and other writers.

According to Nabokov scholars, the mourning cloak shows up clandestinely in Pale Fire and perhaps elsewhere. I note that in England, the morning cloak is known as the Camberwell beauty, a name it shares with a 1974 collection of stories by V.S. Pritchett. In Iconographs, her 1970 book of “word-pictures” – poems arranged typographically to resemble the object they describe – May Swenson devotes “Unconscious Came a Beauty” to the mourning cloak. It’s not a good poem and hardly looks like a butterfly, but the first lines have charm: “Unconscious/came a beauty to my/wrist/and stopped my pencil,/merged its shadow profile with/my hand’s ghost…”

I found another poem, “Mourning Cloak,” in Joan Murray’s Looking for the Parade, but it too is dull and prosy. It goes on for more than two pages, but here’s the beginning, which captures the butterfly’s attraction to warmth and light:

“Because there was light
On the east side of the barn this morning,
The mourning cloak keeps beating himself
On the fixed panes of the window.”

In the March 2003 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Christina Pugh published “Mourning Cloak,” with the butterfly’s Latin name as subtitle:

“How it burdens, under glass:
the gray shingles of the wings
pressed from flight, slate
or wood grain
once thinned to buoyancy
when this butterfly
peppered streams,
its cloak hemmed
in near glint, grief
worn as lightness,
its crape wild
in the open air
between two sleeps.”

I return to Cleveland to visit my brother and his family later this week. The clearing where I chased the mourning cloak years ago grew shaded with tall trees, and is no longer a clearing and no longer a sanctuary for the butterfly.

`Eadie Was a Lady'

My mother was born Edith Hayes, a neither unusual nor common name for an Irish-American female in 1920. On the radio this week my brother heard a song, “Eadie Was a Lady,” performed by Cab Calloway and His Orchestra. The first verse goes like this:

“Maud and Mabel, seated at a table
Talking over bygone days
Mabel sporty, fat and over forty
Said, `Remember Edith Hayes.’”

The song, from the Broadway musical Take a Chance, is credited to Richard Whiting, Nacio Herb Brown and Buddy De Sylva. It opened at the Apollo Theater on Nov. 26, 1932, and after 243 performances closed July 1, 1933. It’s jarring to discover one’s mother’s name in a song that premiered when she was 12 years old. Perhaps I should posthumously reexamine my origins, especially in light of the second verse:

“Eadie was a sucker for a bottle and glass
But in spite of everything that gal had class
Then one winter, she wed a Chinese printer
Struck her with refined like ways.”

Go here for Calloway’s version, and here for Lillian Roth’s. The latter is from the 1933 film of Take a Chance.

`The Humbug of Being Unbiased'

“And there is another form of priggishness, too, with which we can dispense – the humbug of being unbiased. No one can grow to adult age without forming a set of opinions; heredity, environment, education and experience all condition us; the happiest are those who have allowed their opinions and beliefs to grow naturally; the unhappy are those who accept intellectually a system with which they are out of sympathy.”

I came upon these lines in Evelyn Waugh’s Robbery Under Law (1939), his account of two months spent touring Mexico, and promptly applied them to my own experience with reader comments: “This does sort of devolve into prejudice without much to support it.” Better interesting prejudice than bland open-mindedness. I’m in good company. Theodore Dalrymple devotes an entire book, In Praise of Prejudice, to the subject:

“Good and bad, beautiful and ugly, are built into the very structure of our thoughts, and we cannot eliminate them any more than we can eliminate language, or a sense of time.”

ADDENDUM: Dave Lull suggests this epigram by J.V. Cunningham:

"This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained
Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained."

`Almost to Spirit'

On Thursday we celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. We married in Nova Scotia at a place euphoniously named Murder Point, on Mahone Bay, southwest of Halifax. I had never visited Nova Scotia and have never returned. Its beauty and stony starkness have turned to myth in my imagination. We swam two or three times a day off a rocky beach in cold clear water, and ate seafood daily. We married on a bluff above the water. I read George Santayana’s The Realms of Being throughout our week in Nova Scotia, but my guidebook was Elizabeth Bishop.

She was born in Worchester, Mass., in 1911, and her father died when she was eight months old. Her mother grew mentally ill and was institutionalized in 1916. Elizabeth went to live with her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, which shows up by name and implicitly in her poetry, often representing the first part of the title of her first book, North & South (1946). We never visited Cape Breton but in her poem of that title (from her second collection, A Cold Spring, 1956) Bishop describes a landscape I looked for and found in the southern part of Nova Scotia:

“The same mist hangs in thin layers
among the valleys and gorges of the mainland
like rotting snow-ice sucked away
almost to spirit; the ghosts of glaciers drift
among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack –
dull, dead, deep peacock-colors,
each riser distinguished from the next
by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge,
alike, but certain as a stereoscopic view.”

`The Hill of Summer'

One of the few indelible books I’ve read in the last year – a book that goes on nagging and comforting like an old friend -- was The Peregrine by J.A. (John Alec) Baker, the almost anonymous English librarian who seems to have evaporated out of existence. Even his death is uncertain. Go here to read what I wrote about The Peregrine, published in 1967 and returned to print in 2005. Baker’s only other book was The Hill of Spring (1969), which I’ve just started to read. It, too, is peculiar and beautiful, like an unfamiliar species spotted in the field but not found in the field guide.

One finishes reading The Peregrine assuming Baker had nowhere to go. He wished to become a hawk, and he did. The book is structured as a quest, with the bird as grail. In the end, Baker seems to merge with it. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Hill of Spring is that it was written at all. In a weird sense, it is posthumous, and the weirdness starts with the title, which Baker takes from the first line of A Shropshire Lad XXXV. He uses the first two lines as his epigraph:

“On the idle hill of summer,
Sleepy with the flow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.

“Far and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth go by,
Dear to friends and food for powder,
Soldiers marching, all to die.

“East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
None that go return again.

“Far the calling bugles hollo,
High the screaming fife replies,
Gay the files of scarlet follow:
Woman bore me, I will rise.”

In isolation, the first two lines betray no hint of the military theme to follow, nor do the first 20 pages of Baker’s book. Typically, Housman’s poem withholds a blunt statement of theme. To call it anti- or pro-war, or even patriotic, is presumptuous, though it appears to have been written after the start of the Boer War. This may serve Baker’s purpose. Like Housman, he’s a poet of oblique moves. Like a magician, he encourages us to look at one thing while he works on another.
The book’s 12 chapters run April through September – summer in the broadest sense. Here’s the first paragraph of the first chapter, “April: Woods and Field”:

“The hill slopes steeply down through the green woodland mist, the uncertain haze of spring. The air above seems slowly to descend. A footpath gleams and dwindles between plantations of dense fir, dark reluctant trees in sombre strata, where poplars faintly shine. The pale coppery-yellow poplar leaves are still uncurling. Under the soft grey of the early morning clouds, they shine with their own perpetual sunlight. They are large enough now to flutter vaguely in the rising breeze, moving on their flattened stalks like bronze-colored butterflies.”

One of Baker’s stylistic trademarks is unexpected word choice. “Uncertain,” “plantations,” “reluctant” and “perpetual” all surprise. I particularly like “uncertain haze” and “footpath gleams and dwindles.” This is tricky. A rare or exotic word comes off as self-conscious and distracting, but Baker is a careful judge of his own style. This opening has the effect of a curtain rising on a scene. It’s muted, Chekhovian. No animals, only plants, appear but for the butterfly-imitating poplar leaves.

The book consists exclusively of Baker and the natural world in East Anglia. All the biology is Baker’s own. He never refers to biologists or their books. In passing, he mentions his bicycle. He observes a ruined house reclaimed by nature. It’s the home of a barn owl. Baker never speculates about the humans who once lived there. His use of the first-person singular is spare. The effect, despite Baker’s attention to detail and obvious skill as an amateur naturalist, is to render his world dreamlike. The sighting of a kestrel passes for plot. Thus far the book’s only structure is the cycle of the seasons. One wonder’s if Baker’s apparent lack of interest in humanity is related to his silence after The Hill of Spring. Is a biographer working on his life? A brief "About the Author" note at the end of the book reports:

“From an early age, Mr. Baker’s one ambition was to be a writer, but it was not until he happened to see a peregrine hawk `stoop’ above a coastal estuary in East Anglia, and wrote his first book, The Peregrine, that his two obsessions, nature and writing, were fused."

`So Dashed Competent in Every Respect'

“Miserable as our century is, we can still boast that for seventy-five years of it we had P.G. Wodehouse, the Meander of our time…”

I thought of Guy Davenport’s generous assessment on Tuesday when a reader confessed he was unable to read Wodehouse, finding him alien, off-putting and, most slanderously, not funny. I’ve not read Wodehouse lately. One reads him medicinally and I’ve felt rather well of late. I remember a difficult spell in 1995 when I was able to read only two writers – Wodehouse and Samuel Beckett. An unlikely pair, perhaps, but with at least two qualities in common: perfect ears for English prose and a reliable gift for making readers laugh.

On my shelf is a plump orange volume published in 1932 by the Garden City Publishing Company: Nothing But Wodehouse, edited by Ogden Nash. It collects bits of six earlier titles, including samples from Bertie and Jeeves, the Ukridge and Mulliner stories, and the novel Leave It to Psmith. I found it years ago in a now-defunct used book store on Central Avenue in Albany, N.Y. Someone using a fountain pen wrote “Lots of laughter! – Cassy” inside the front cover. The first story in the book, “Jeeves Exerts the Old Cerebellum,” begins like this:

“`Morning, Jeeves,’ I said.

“`Good morning, sir,’ said Jeeves.

“He put the good old cup of tea softly on the table by my bed, and I took a refreshing sip. Just right, as usual. Not too hot, not too sweet, not too weak, not too strong, not too much milk, and not a drop spilled in the saucer. A most amazing cove, Jeeves. So dashed competent in every respect.”

Old Wodehouse hands have already settled in for the duration. For a different sort of early morning, here’s a bit from Beckett’s Molloy:

“The sky was that horrible colour which heralds dawn. Things steal back into position for the day, take their stand, sham dead. I sat down cautiously, and I must say with a certain curiosity, on the ground. Anyone else would have tried to sit down as usual, offhandedly. Not I.”

Old Beckett hands etc., etc. There’s a comfort in familiar humor, even when one knows the joke. The rhythms of both passages are so distinctive, unlikely to be mistaken for any other writer’s. The earnest fellows in the academy have tried to wring all the fun out of Beckett and turn his books into a colony of French philosophy, though they’ve mostly left Wodehouse and his 96 titles alone.

Here’s the remainder of the Davenport paragraph I started with, taken from his introduction to the Selected Stories of O. Henry (Penguin, 1993) and collected in The Hunter Gracchus:

“…and for ten years O. Henry. There have been many others, of course, but none, with the possible exception of the exotic and manic S.J. Perelman and the gentle, whimsical James Thurber, whose whole art was cast in the masterfully styled puppetry of New Comedy.”

`Perhaps Even Pleasure in Difference'

Friendships, in my experience, are mysterious and defy expectations. Opposites attract and so do kindred spirits. Irving Howe and J.V. Cunningham number among the former, and fashioned one of the least likely literary friendships I know. Howe (1920-1993) was a literary critic and anti-communist socialist, the son of Jewish immigrants in New York City and co-founder of Dissent. Cunningham (1911-1985) was an Irish-Catholic poet and scholar who grew up in Montana. In A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (1982), Howe devotes two out of 382 pages to Cunningham but concludes by calling him “the one colleague whom I regarded as my teacher.”

They met at Brandeis University, where Howe taught from 1953 to 1961. Cunningham started the same year and remained at Brandeis until his retirement in 1980. They shared working-class backgrounds – a seemingly trivial circumstance I know sometimes to be a deep source of mutual understanding. Howe writes:

“Prickly, contentious, rudely charming, he was a determined plebian. If I had a New York dress presser for a father, he had a Montana carpenter, and we both felt warmth for the unions to which our fathers had belonged, both despised the genteel pretensions of many academics. Cunningham was not an easy man to be near. Inner torments could make him savage (as they could make me sullen). The way to preserve a friendship with him was to keep a certain distance.”

This rings true to life. Nor will readers of Cunningham’s stringently witty poetry, written in the classical plain style reminiscent of Ben Jonson, be surprised by Howe’s characterization. Here’s an untitled poem from Trivial, Vulgar, and Exalted (1959):

“I had gone broke, and got set to come back,
And lost, on a hot day and a fast track,
On a long shot at long odds, a black mare
By Hatred out of Envy by Despair.”

Howe rightly notes: “The voice of his poems, though sometimes marred by an affectation of toughness, is severe, sardonic, and bruising.” He describes Cunningham as “an intellectual opponent of romanticism [who] struggled in his poetry, as in his life, with an ineradicably romantic temperament.” This is shrewd criticism and character analysis, and Howe goes on to praise the example Cunningham set for him as a critic, teacher, scholar and human being:

“Between Cunningham and me there was an enormous gap in experience, temperament, ideas. Yet we worked easily together, amused and pleased that we could. Being professional himself, he honored me with the presumption that I too could become professional. I learned, by being with him, the value of scraping against a mind utterly unlike one’s own, so that finally there could emerge between our two minds a conditional peace, perhaps even pleasure in difference.”

`Vacant for the Next Two Centuries'

We heard the unpleasantness before we saw it, a muted buzz like a mosquito at midnight in a zipped-up tent. Two blocks away, men with chainsaws were leveling a line of cedars, each a good 40 or 50 feet tall, for no sensible reason I could see.

Three years ago on Easter morning in Houston, we discovered a vertical crack in the outer wall of our youngest son’s bedroom. Only then did we notice the 75-foot post oak outside his window leaning against the house. In its slow-motion fall it had squashed the gutter and eave, and come to rest like an oversized drunk against the edge of the roof. We called a tree-cutting crew who spent 10 hours dismantling an organism that had taken most of a century to assemble, and I still feel remorse.

My point is, I’m not opposed in principle to cutting down trees, but one must have sufficient cause. Is any sight bleaker than a newly built subdivision in which the developer has leveled mature trees and, as a pathetic after-thought, replaced them with spindly saplings? You can rattle off the ecological reasons for preserving trees, but the most convincing is also the most personal: Trees are a joy and a comfort to have as company, particularly in one’s neighborhood.
More than a century and a half ago, Thoreau had an experience similar to mine. Let me quote at length his journal entry for Dec. 30, 1851:

“This afternoon, being on Fair Haven Hill, I heard the sound of a saw, and soon after from the Cliff saw two men sawing down a noble pine beneath, about forty rods off. I resolved to watch it till it fell, the last of a dozen or more which were left when the forest was cut and for fifteen years have waved in solitary majesty over the sprout-land. I saw them like beavers or insects gnawing at the trunk of this noble tree, the diminutive manikins with their cross-cut saw which could scarcely span it. It towered up a hundred feet as I afterward found by measurement, one of the tallest probably in the township and straight as an arrow, but slanting a little toward the hillside, its top seen against the frozen river and the hills of Conantum. I watch closely to see when it begins to move. Now the sawers stop, and with an axe open it a little on the side toward which it leans, that it may break the faster. And now their saw goes again. Now surely it is going; it is inclined one quarter of the quadrant, and, breathless, I expect its crashing fall. But no, I was mistaken; it has not moved an inch; it stands at the same angle as at first. It is fifteen minutes yet to its fall. Still its branches wave in the wind, as it were destined to stand for a century, and the wind soughs through its needles as of yore; it is still a forest tree, the most majestic tree that waves over Musketaquid. The silvery sheen of the sunlight is reflected from its needles; it still affords an inaccessible crotch for the squirrel’s nest; not a lichen has forsaken its mast-like stem, its raking mast,—the hill is the hulk. Now, now’s the moment! The manikins at its base are fleeing from their crime. They have dropped the guilty saw and axe. How slowly and majestic it starts! as it were only swayed by a summer breeze, and would return without a sigh to its location in the air. And now it fans the hillside with its fall, and it lies down to its bed in the valley, from which it is never to rise, as softly as a feather, folding its green mantle about it like a warrior, as if, tired of standing, it embraced the earth with silent joy, returning its elements to the dust again. But hark! there you only saw, but did not hear. There now comes up a deafening crash to these rocks , advertising you that even trees do not die without a groan. It rushes to embrace the earth, and mingle its elements with the dust. And now all is still once more and forever, both to eye and ear.

“I went down and measured it. It was about four feet in diameter where it was sawed, about one hundred feet long. Before I had reached it the axemen had already divested it of its branches. Its gracefully spreading top was a perfect wreck on the hillside as if it had been made of glass, and the tender cones of one year’s growth upon its summit appealed in vain and too late to the mercy of the chopper. Already he has measured it with his axe, and marked off the mill-logs it will make. And the space it occupied in upper air is vacant for the next two centuries. It is lumber. He has laid waste the air. When the fish hawk in the spring revisits the banks of the Musketaquid, he will circle in vain to find his accustomed perch, and the hen-hawk will mourn for the pines lofty enough to protect her brood. A plant which it has taken two centuries to perfect, rising by slow stages into the heavens, has this afternoon ceased to exist. Its sapling top had expanded to this January thaw as the forerunner of summers to come. Why does not the village bell sound a knell? I hear no knell tolled. I see no procession of mourners in the streets, or the woodland aisles. The squirrel has leaped to another tree; the hawk has circled further off, and has now settled upon a new eyrie, but the woodman is preparing [to] lay his axe at the root of that also.”

This is a magnificent piece of prose, one of Thoreau’s finest. In a cubist painting, the artist gives us multiple, simultaneous views of a subject – front, back and sides. Thoreau does something similar, but with time – past, present and future. He writes of the cut-down tree: “And the space it occupied in upper air is vacant for the next two centuries.” I count three tenses, three temporal planes, in 15 words. That’s majesty worthy of the pine it describes.

`Are You All Ready to Feel Bad?'

Drunks are afflicted with a disorder of the self. It’s never rightly proportioned, being too big or too small. You might argue this is true of all humans, drunks or not, and I would answer, yes, drunks are like everyone else -- only more so. They are difficult to ignore even when not drinking. A drunk’s ego, like nature, abhors a vacuum. He fills it with charm or vitriol or murderous rage. A drunk is never content merely to be.

My brother found videos of John Berryman talking and reading. I’ve heard recordings of him reading Dream Songs, but had never seen him on film, and the experience, for a reader who has known and loved his work for 40 years, is sad and disturbing. Clearly, he is drunk but not incoherently so, and probably he’s convinced he’s perfectly sober. His gestures and speech are histrionic. He over-enunciates in order not to slur. He lectures when he might as easily converse.

The film was shot for the BBC in Dublin in 1967, when he was as much a celebrity as a poet can be. During the same visit he spent four days in the company of the journalist Jane Howard, who wrote a story about him, “Whiskey & Ink,” for Life magazine. The interview is with A. Alvarez, the English poet and critic who championed Berryman’s work. In the first video, Berryman talks about Anna Karenina and his biography of Stephen Crane. At one point he says, “Things so ghastly that you cannot respond to them directly,” then reads “Dream Song 14”:

“Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) `Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

“Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

“who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.”

In the other video, Berryman sounds a bit drunker as he reads “Dream Song 29”:

“There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry's ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

“And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

“But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.”

His reading is agonizingly slow. You wait for him to – what? Collapse, weep (as he almost does on “weeping”), scream? The “thing” that sits on Henry/John’s heart is the suicide of Berryman’s father when the poet was 12. The membrane between Berryman and Henry, if it ever genuinely existed, seems to have dissolved. His reading is masterful but almost too painful to watch, like Lear’s lines after Cordelia’s death. But Berryman’s humor, in this case very black wit, as always, burns through. In his introduction to Henry’s Fate (1977), the posthumous collection of previously unpublished Dream Songs and other poems, John Haffenden quotes Berryman’s introduction to a reading of “Dream Songs” at Harvard in 1966:

“Prepare to weep, ladies and gentlemen. Saul Bellow and I almost kill ourselves laughing about the Dream Songs and various chapters in his novels, but other people feel bad. Are you all ready to feel bad?”

On Fantasy

I’ve been trying to understand why I feel indifference and sometimes repugnance for most fantasy literature, whether H.G. Wells, Tolkien, Lovecraft, Rowling, or so-called “magic realism” (Garcia Marquez is insufferable, and not just for his politics). Fantasy feels like a cheat, an evasion, a con game for stunted children. I read to know the world, in particular the human world, even to celebrate it, not to slum in another. Ours feels sufficiently mysterious and wonder-filled, so ghosts, witches, aliens and magic spells come off as kitschy, redundant gimmicks. This builds on what I posted Saturday about V.S. Pritchett, who described “the restless mingling of poetry, sharp realism and wit” in the novels of José Maria de Eça de Queiroz. That trio of literary virtues distils up what I look for in fiction and what I find absent in most fantasy.

In the second volume of his memoirs, Midnight Oil, Pritchett writes, “Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.” On one level he’s describing the bottomless human capacity for dissatisfaction and delusion. On another, Pritchett pinpoints the attraction of fantasy for some – its romance with elsewhere. Again, creation is already baffling, and that’s part of it beauty. Fantasy merely seeks to tart up what is already fantastic.

I’m guided here by my taste, where pleasure leads me, not an ideologically rigid sack of theories. Some writers dabble in fantasy, as they dabble in realism, and I’d be a fool not to love their work: Henry James, Kafka, Borges, Bruno Schulz and Cynthia Ozick come to mind. Likewise, realism is supple enough to contain Balzac and Beckett (the ultimate realist), Sterne and Stead. Clearly, Pritchett shares my proclivity for what James Wood calls “comic realism.” “The Five Towns,” his essay on Arnold Bennett (a much-neglected novelist I admire but don’t over-value), begins like this:

“It is a long time now since the earth seemed solid under the feet to our novelists, since caprice, prophecy, brains and vividness meant less than the solid substance of time and place.”

This is an exquisitely balanced sentence, one that sets us up to admire what is best in Bennett without making exaggerated claims for his gifts. We and the novel have moved on, to Joyce and beyond. To honor Bennett, to recognize his accomplishments in The Old Wives’ Tale and Riceyman Steps, there’s no need to repudiate the Modernists -- and vice versa. This is from the conclusion of Pritchett’s Bennett essay:

“…the virtues of Bennett lie in his patient and humane consideration of the normal factors of our lives: money, marriage, illness as we have to deal with them. Life, he seems to say, is an occupation which is forced upon us, not a journey we have chosen, nor a plunge we have taken. Such a view may at times depress us, but it may toughen us. Bennett really wrote out of the congenital tiredness of the lower middle class, as [H.G.] Wells wrote out of its gambling spirit and gift for fantasy…”

`Eloquent, Cunning, Unremitting Words'

“Eccentricity is, in fact, practical madness. It is resorted to, Henry Adams said in his severe and shrewd New England way, by those who are up to something shameful or stupid or muddle-headed. And, in England, most of us are.”

That’s the late V.S. Pritchett ostensibly writing about Laurence Sterne. Pritchett was so generously gifted with memory, humor and human feeling he could craft an aphorism, throw in a pertinent wisecrack from Adams and self-deprecatingly generalize about a nation’s character – all on deadline, in 40 words, in a putative review of a new study of an 18th-century novelist. That’s why he’s my favorite critic and one of my favorite story writers. When I think of Pritchett, I think of a phrase he used in a story he wrote, I believe, when already in his seventies. I no longer recall which one but the phrase is “dreary Methodistical town.” As with the passage cited above, much is compacted into little.

By happy coincidence, I had taken The Maias by José Maria de Eça de Queiroz out of the library on Wednesday, wanting to reading the new translation by Margaret Jull Costa. It was on Pritchett’s recommendation that I first read his novels more than 25 years ago. Before that I knew almost nothing of Portuguese literature. On Thursday, Nige wrote about finding a collection of Pritchett’s essays which included the gem on Eça de Queiroz. I sometimes feel, in this age of alienation, a disturbing kinship with Nige. He writes:

“Pritchett is not exactly collected. Nor, I imagine, is he much read - which is a great pity, as he was a very good writer, with a sharp eye and mind, a sense of humour and (which probably did for his reputation) the common touch. He's immensely readable - try his memoirs, if you haven't -- and his work is pitched at that species now deemed extinct, the 'common reader'.”

Lovely. Pritchett was born with the last century and died in 1997. His Complete Collected Essays, at 1,320 pages, tips the scale at almost five pounds, and his Complete Short Stories is comparably beefy. He wrote one wonderful novel, Mr. Beluncle, two of my favorites memoirs (A Cab at the Door, Midnight Oil) and several travel books (The Spanish Temper is perfect), but it’s as an essayist, a journalist among books, that I most cherish Pritchett. His reviews are learned but without pedantry or axe-grinding. They have nothing in common with the plot-summary-plus-superlatives that pass for reviews in newspapers and magazines. Pritchett never intrudes egotistically in his essays, yet his sensibility suffuses them – skeptical, humorous and seasoned by the world. If he had politics, they were the only politics worthy of a man of letters, a mingling of intelligence and enthusiasm. What follows is a Pritchett sampler drawn from the 203 essays in his Complete Collected volume. I've chosen from among his pieces on some of my favorite writers, starting with Beckett:

“Why is Beckett interesting as a writer? As a contemporary phenomenon, he is one more negative protest against the world going to the slaughterhouse, one more protest on behalf of privacy, a voice for myopia. He is a modern Oblomov, fretful and apathetic, enclosed in private fantasy, dropping off into words instead of sleep. They are eloquent, cunning, unremitting words.”

On Flann O’Brien:

“When, a year before he died, I was told I’d probably meet him somewhere on the street between O’Connell Street and Trinity, he seemed to me to be a vapour. We stood in the usual drizzle. His voice was soft and courteous, he had a look of pride and shy appeal in his small reddened eyes. Then he vanished: goodness knows where; down the Quays or into oblivion among his illnesses?”

On Henry Green:

“[He] loved the obstinacy, the strangeness, the monotone of the deeply emotional [working class] culture which ran alongside his one cool one. Human repetitiousness was a sort of poetry for him. It also defined the inner territory of obscure rights, wrongs and blind stubbornness to which our devious self-interest or our waywardness cling like creeper.”

On Isaac Babel:

“In story after story Babel worked until he hit upon the symbol that turns it from anecdote into fives minutes of life. He was not a novelist. By 1937 he was being semi-officially questioned about not writing on a large scale like Tolstoy or the very bien vu Sholokov. It was being insinuated that he was idle and not pulling his weight. Poor devil! Short story writers are poets.”

On Ford Madox Ford:

“He succeeded in only three remarkable stories – The Good Soldier, the Fifth Queen trilogy and Parade’s End. They vindicate his happy yet tortured incapacity to go straight from a starting-point, for he had none. They put his lack of self-confidence, his shortness of spiritual breath, his indolence, to use. They brought out and exploited with full resource the price he had to pay for his extraordinary cleverness; the emotion of anguish.”

On Chekhov:

“Like a great many, perhaps all Russian writers of the nineteenth-century, Chekhov caught people at the point of idleness and inertia in their undramatic moment when time is seen passing through them and the inner life exposes itself unguardedly in speech. He caught people in their solitudes.”

It would be great fun to go on quoting Pritchett but here he is, finally, back with Eça de Queiroz:

“The making of this novel [The Illustrious House of Ramires], and indeed all the others, is the restless mingling of poetry, sharp realism and wit. Queiroz is untouched by the drastic hatred of life that underlies Naturalism: he is sad rather than indignant that every human being is compromised; indeed this enables him to present his characters from several points of view and to explore the unexpectedness of human nature.”

`The Novel Is Alive, Of Course'

In the Fall 1978 issue of the literary journal Ploughshares, Roger Sale published an audacious essay, “The Golden Age of the American Novel,” which begins like this:

“The novel is alive, of course, was never even close to dead, and seems now to be enjoying something very much like a golden age, a period that people in fifty or a hundred years can look back on as we now do on Victorian fiction, or English Renaissance drama. Since I cannot possibly prove this, however, I can only try to say what I think such later evaluators might find in our fiction to praise or even to envy.”

The context here is critical. Thirty years ago, “Theory” was in its ascendancy in the academy and even, sadly, among readers and non-academic critics. “Post-” proliferated. Good sense, scholarship and the joys of reading and writing were already in jeopardy. Sale was working hard to be a celebrator, not an elegist, and he argues a good case. He overestimates the worth of some writers, particularly Mailer, Heller, Pynchon and Robert Stone, but recognizes Bellow as “our finest living novelist” and lauds good novels by less-well-known writers, including Thomas Berger’s Crazy in Berlin, Richard Stern’s Golk, Theodore Weesner’s The Car Thief and Larry Woiwode's Beyond the Bedroom Wall.

Sale is no fuddy-duddy in his tastes. He defines two loose categories – “imperial” (close to James Wood’s notion of “hysterical realism”) and “realistic” – and drums up enthusiasm for both modes. Clearly, his sympathies lie with the latter:

“My suspicion is that one reason realistic fiction has never received the attention it deserves is that it is not easy to describe its ways and means, and that the more obviously eccentric, experimental, high flying fictions often make and keep their lofty critical status because they are easier to describe and appreciate. One is always tempted to say that a realistic novel is just there.”

Which is why such writers as William Maxwell and Shirley Hazzard have been ignored by a certain sort of critic or read with incomprehension. The obsession with novelty and self-conscious “experimentalism” (what could be more subtly, deftly “experimental” than Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow?) has blinded some readers to the sublimity of first-rate realistic fiction. Sale again:

“What I'd like to suggest is that the great vitality of the novel at present does not lie simply in those novels which are distinctly different from earlier novels, but in its way of being "realistic" as well, so that the plainest and most straightforward realistic fiction of the last fifteen years or so can be seen as being both distinctly different from earlier realism and allied to the more obviously unrealistic imperial fiction.”

With some sadness I reread Sale’s essay, reprinted in his 1979 collection On Not Being Good Enough. In part, the sadness is personal: I’ll never again read contemporary fiction with the sense of elated discovery I did in the 1960s and 1970s. So many novels and stories seemed new and exciting, in part because my timing was superb. The sadness, however, is also historical: I would have a difficult time mustering a list comparable to Sale’s for the subsequent 30 years. Sale was courageously correct in his assessment of American fiction circa 1978 but – I’m reluctant to say – no longer. The exceptions – Marilynne Robinson, Cynthia Ozick, Roth’s 15-year renaissance, a few others – are sadly solitary.

There was a time when I bought new works of fiction by many writers in hard cover as soon as they were published – Nabokov, Bellow, Beckett, Malamud, Singer, Guy Davenport, Pynchon, Gass, sometimes Roth and Updike. No longer. Most are dead or my tastes evolved beyond recognition. I regret sounding gloomy and have tried to find solace in sentences taken out of context from another essay in On Not Being Good Enough, “Mumford and Fuller,” a review of books by and about Lewis Mumford and R. Buckminster Fuller. He admires Hugh Kenner’s Bucky but with reservation about Fuller’s thinking:

“Having long ago decided that life is not simply a matter of despairing and gloomy occasions, I do not feel moved to decide to live in a world of instances of hope and synergetic pattern either…One can admire them, and live at the heart of empire too, and yet not necessarily want to join in the chorus.”

Any chorus.

`The Point of Style is Character'

In elementary school they graded us “A” through “E” in the major subjects – Reading, Arithmetic, Science – and “S” (“Satisfactory”) and “U” (“Unsatisfactory”) for the minors – Physical Education, Art and Writing. The last referred to handwriting or penmanship, and was the only subject in which I consistently earned awful grades, a long line of “U’s.” My mother sat me at the kitchen table with the day’s Cleveland Press (R.I.P., 1982), and had me transcribe the front page in longhand with a pencil. Despite her efforts, I became a newspaper reporter and my handwriting remains wretched. Naturally, I take pride in my illegibility, detest those who possess a calligrapher’s hand and can’t help but sympathize with my 8-year-old whose penmanship is even more aesthetically offensive than mine.

My wife has hired a handwriting tutor for Michael. She visits for an hour once a week and I supervise the daily exercises, feeling like a hypocrite. Michael inscribes his letters and numbers from the bottom up – bad form, apparently – so my job is to reinforce the down stroke. Habit is hard, even at 8. He asks, “Who cares? Why’s it so important?” I tell him he’ll be judged by his handwriting, as we’re judged by our manner of speaking. If the teacher can’t read what you’ve written, etc., etc. I don’t believe it either but we’ve entered into a conspiracy of contemptuous resignation and have agreed to play along with the game. This, too, is an important lesson for children.

Howard Nemerov looks at it otherwise. In “Writing,” from his 1958 collection Mirrors and Windows, he celebrates elegant handwriting – and by extension, all writing – as an aesthetic/moral/spiritual exercise, at least for the purposes of his poem:

“The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice. Being intelligible,
these winding ways with their audacities
and delicate hesitations, they become
miraculous, so intimately, out there
at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world
and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
balance against great skeletons of stars
exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
by echo alone. Still, the point of style
is character. The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger's to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the 'Slender Gold.' A nervous man
writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on.

“Miraculous. It is as though the world
were a great writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing: continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.”

This is a beautiful poem, one of Nemerov’s best, though his conceit means more to me than the acts of writing he describes. Those final four lines remind me of Keats’ “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” I’ve never skated or watched others do so, except in movies and on television. The notion of incisions left by skates on ice as a form of script is new to me, but apparently not to others. In the title poem from his 2003 collection The Calligrapher’s Shop, Ben Downing writes:
“As if on ice
A figure skating rubricant had mapped

“his arabesques with slathered blades, the rise
and roller-coaster dip of letters swelled
even past my ignorance; my eyes

“alone could estimate, yet not quite melt,
The igneous devotion frozen there.”

Sometimes, a metaphor possesses more beauty and meaning than its referent. For that to be true and for the poem to remain beautiful and meaningful, as it is with Nemerov’s and Downing’s, seems like an unlikely triumph.

There’s too much to learn and enjoy to worry about trifles. I’m pleased Michael is writing stories and drawing comic strips (he posts a new episode of “Space Man Stiff” every day on the bulletin board in the kitchen), and don’t care that I can’t decrypt some of them because of his handwriting. Before we were married, my wife and I worked for the same newspaper, and she interviewed a handwriting analyst who requested writing samples from three co-workers. Mine came back described as “bulbous,” which was gratifying because it reminded me of Captain Beefheart’s line on Trout Mask Replica: “A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast ‘n’ bulbous. Got me?” Despite all that we celebrate our 10th anniversary next week.

`Distant Plangencies'

My 8-year-old and I, as usual, arrived at his school too early so we sat on the floor outside his classroom, reading and waiting for the teacher. Michael had finished rereading one Harry Potter novel in the car and brought along another, as he put it, “for backup.” I, too, was rereading: Guy Davenport’s “Ernst Machs Max Ernst,” in The Geography of the Imagination.

After a few minutes, another kid sat beside me, pulled a book from his backpack, opened it in his lap and started to read. I couldn’t see the cover but it appeared to be an adult book from the public library. Another boy, one I already knew to be a Harry Potter enthusiast, walked up to Michael, thrust out his arm and cast a flamboyant spell. Michael responded in kind and it turned into a spell-casting version of a jazz “cutting contest” – two adepts trying to outdo each other – though they soon exhausted their repertoire of spells and were reduced to almost, but not quite, hitting each other with spell-casting gestures.

Out of nowhere, the first kid, the one reading the adult library book, exploded with a Potter spell of his own and vaporized the other two, or something. He smiled and went back to his book. I asked what he was reading.

“Chinese history,” he said.

I asked to see his book: The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han by Mark Edward Lewis (Harvard University Press, 2007). I asked why he was reading it and he shrugged and answered like a true booklover:

“I like it. I like Chinese history.”

Obviously, he wasn’t fooling. I returned the book and he effortlessly re-entered it. Here was an 8-year-old Chinese-American kid who already knows more about Chinese history than I will ever know. And he finds time for Harry Potter.

In the second-to-last paragraph of “Ernst Machs Max Ernst” (and of The Geography of the Imagination), Davenport writes:

“If I have a sensibility distinct from that of my neighbors, it is simply a taste, wholly artificial and imaginary, for distant plangencies and different harmonies in which I can recognize as a stranger a sympathy I could not appreciate at my elbow: songs of the Fulani, a ntumpan, male and female, of ceremonial elephant drums of the Asantehene, dressed in silk, under a more generous sun and crowding closer upon the symbolled and archaic embroidery of the skirts of God, the conversations of Ernst Mach and William James, Basho on the road to the red forests of the North, Sir Walter Scott at dinner with Mr. Hinze, his cat, sitting by his plate.”

The world is both bigger and smaller than we suspected, stranger and more familiar, so we might as well make ourselves at home. Elsewhere in his essay Davenport writes:

“The self, in any case, is a vacuum: nothing until it is filled. Continuity of perception, Mach said, is all we can call mind.”

`An Idea Is a Mouth That Sells'

I recognized the type: young, smiling and earnest. They were seated behind a card table in front of the post office. They might have been Mormons but for the hand-lettered sign: “Can Bush’s I.Q. drop any lower?” One avoids such people as one does the insane but the closer of the pair rose to meet me and asked, “Sir, do you realize the entire financial structure has collapsed? Do you know what this means?”

A few minutes later, as I was driving my kids to the library and had time to evaluate my response, I thought of a line from “Life Cycle of Ideas” by the great Australian poet Les Murray:

“An idea is a mouth that sells
as it sucks.”

That’s it: Proselytizing is salesmanship, never altruism. This young man, transcendentally certain of his sentiments, believed he had something for me, a gift of enlightenment, when, in fact, he wanted something from me – membership in the flock. How I resent recruitment for any cause. It’s not in the Bill of Rights, I know, but the most precious right is the right to be left alone.

I ought to have kept quiet, smiled, perhaps said, “No thank you.” Instead (in my defense, I had spent the morning in the dentist’s chair), I said, “I don’t give a shit,” and stepped into the post office. In our box, with the Pottery Barn catalog and another 20-percent-off coupon from Bed, Bath and Beyond, was a letter from Barack Obama. I walked out with the catalog and wished the young man a good day.

`Concentrated and Nutty'

I favor a style simultaneously forthright and reticent, giving while withholding. This tension energizes sentences and keeps readers moving along, while never discouraging us from pausing to reread and savor. Rereading is commonly thought of as consuming a book once consumed, but good writers encourage us to reread phrases, sentences, paragraphs and more as we move through a book the first time or the fourth. There ought to be no unintentional vagueness, affectation, confusion, padding or euphemism. Say it once, say it squarely but don’t tell us everything you know. This is a common failing among bloggers, who lack nuance and a sense of play in their prose. Their sins are impatience and earnestness, resulting in a shotgun approach to discourse. Thoreau identified this failing in the work of Thomas De Quincey. In an Aug. 22, 1851, journal entry he writes:

“It is the fault of some excellent writers – De Quincey’s first impressions on seeing London suggest it to me – that they express themselves with too great fullness and detail. They give the most faithful, natural, and lifelike account of their sensations, mental and physical, but they lack moderation and sententiousness. They do not affect us by an ineffectual earnestness and a reserve of meaning, like a stutterer; they say all they mean. Their sentences are not concentrated and nutty. Sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not merely report an old, but make a new, impression; sentences which suggest as many things and are as durable as a Roman aqueduct; to frame these, that is the art of writing.”

Of course, most bloggers, most writers generally, are untroubled by the absence of art in their prose. Among newspaper editors of my acquaintance, there was an understanding that well-written copy (artful but not pretentious), sentences that transcend subject-verb-object, that play a bit with irony, that hint rather than holler, are suspiciously effete. Thoreau continues in his journal:

“Sentences which are expensive, towards which so many volumes, so much life went; which lie like boulders on the page, up and down or across; which contain the seed of other sentences, not mere repetition, but creation; which a man might sell his grounds and castles to build. If De Quincey had suggested each of his pages in a sentence and passed on, it would have been far more excellent writing. His style is nowhere kinked and knotted up into something hard and significant, which you could swallow like a diamond, without digesting.”

A frequent writer of diamonds in the blogosphere is Nige, proprietor of Nigeness. His posts are brief and usually erected around some everyday event. Last Friday, Nige saw a butterfly and called his post “On Paying Attention.” He could have turned his observations into self-congratulatory nature swooning, Instead, he considered the significance of being able to identify what we see – with the caveat that over-reliance on identification can turn into yet another human cul-de-sac. He even pulls off the extra-human feat of usefully and accurately citing an episode in A la recherche du temps perdu:

“There's a famous passage in Proust, where the narrator, anxious about his grandmother, races to Paris to see her. When he arrives, she is not expecting him and he witnesses, as it were, his own absence. In that absence, what he sees, shockingly, is not his grandmother but a florid-faced, mad old woman, sitting in a chair reading. Momentarily, he has not identified her, in the act of loving attention in which she is, not that mad old woman, but his beloved grandmother. Loving (ideally) attention is what makes us what we are - what, in every sense, distinguishes us - and without it, as King Lear demonstrates with horrific vividness, we are no more than bare forked animals.”

Read the entire post to appreciate how casually and without portentousness Nige leads us to his conclusion. His writing is, to use Thoreau’s words, “concentrated and nutty.” He doesn’t throw everything at us, and what he throws is generally worth catching.

Another blogger worthy of attention is elberry, who tends The Lumber Room (“flotsam and jetsam from a broken world”). Like Nige, one of his pals, he’s English, and on Sunday he gave us his version of that venerable form, the travelogue: “Oxford.” He’s acerbic, notices details and is consistently funny. What does elberry read while visiting the ancient university town?:

“i find a copy of Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable trilogy for £3 and read it in various dens, pubs, cafes and restaurants escaping from the rain. Sample glories from Molloy:

“`The more things resist me the more rabid I get. With time, and nothing but my teeth and nails, I would rage up from the bowels of the earth to its crust, knowing full well I had nothing to gain. And when I had no more teeth, no more nails, I would dig through the rock with my bones.’”

There’s a fine companion, grumbling about ugly Americans, reading the great trilogy, posting a picture of the most savory breakfast I’ve seen in decades, and quoting Theodore Dalrymple with approval. Despite Thoreau on De Quincey, the English seem to do some things better.

Memento Mori

Saturday morning we climbed Little Si, which a guidebook has the nerve to call a “hill.” Little Si stands beside Mount Si, in North Bend, Wa., and both are named for the homesteader Josiah “Uncle Si” Merritt. Round trip, the trail measures only five miles but most of it is vertical, a series of rocky switchbacks. When you reach the summit you’ve gained 1,500 feet in elevation. Our 5- and 8-year-olds accompanied us.

The lower trail is flanked by wildflowers, and that’s where I unexpectedly spied a memento mori – St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforate). The plant is raggedy and worthy of notice only for its bright yellow, five-petalled flowers. The common name comes from its traditional day of flowering – June 24, Midsummer and St. John the Baptist’s Day. In folklore, the plant is used to ward off evil, depression and other ailments, and today it’s on the “alternative medicine” shelf in the drugstore. In England: The Four Seasons, Ronald Blythe calls the herb “an all-purpose remedy for sickness, body and soul.”

I know a little about St. John’s wort because I spent much of the summer of 1995 harvesting it in upstate New York. I worked with a woman, a fellow reporter, whose husband had an accelerating case of multiple sclerosis. I never saw Mark walk, though a year before I met him he was still able to crawl up the stairs to the living room in his house. He used a high-tech wheel chair and had grown almost entirely dependent on others for the mundane tasks of living.

Mark looked for hope in the least likely places. He ordered a device that delivered electric shocks, the idea being to kill the parasitic flukes reputed to cause M.S. His kitchen counter was a cluttered pharmacy. He bought an expensive German food processor for making herbal remedies – among them, a tincture composed largely of St. John’s wort and 100-proof vodka. He bought the latter in one-gallon, plastic jugs and I collected the former in fields around Albany and Schenectady, stuffed it in plastic trash bags and stored it in the refrigerator in Mark’s garage.

I assumed these strategies were Mark’s way of boosting morale. I never took them seriously as medicine but neither did I try to dissuade him. Hope is for the hopeless. Mark, not yet 50 years old, died in 2001. His memory returns when I see the homely yellow flower. Here’s what Thoreau noted in his journal on Aug. 19, 1856:

“The small hypericums have a peculiar, smart, somewhat lemon-like fragrance, but bee-like.”

`Anything Awful Makes Me Laugh'

William Hazlitt married his first wife, Sarah Stoddart, on May 1, 1808, at St. Andrew’s Church, Holburn. Sarah was already pregnant with their son. In attendance were Hazlitt’s friends Charles and Mary Lamb, who had helped arrange the marriage. In Characters and Their Landscapes, Ronald Blythe writes:

“Lamb, for whom Hazlitt’s sex life was the only thing about his friend he could never take seriously, laughed so much during the wedding that he was nearly turned out of church.”

Seven years later, Lamb, a lifelong bachelor, wrote in a letter to Robert Southey:

“…I am going to stand godfather; I don’t like the business; I cannot muster up decorum for these occasions; I shall certainly disgrace the font. I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.”

Hazlitt is the superior writer, I suppose, though I cast a sentimental vote for Lamb, a lovable man and essayist. Speaking of Hazlitt’s friends, including Coleridge and Wordsworth, Blythe writes:

“Among these was Charles Lamb, Hazlitt’s senior by only three and a half years, but in whose (much tried) relationship there was a stable, protective element suggesting a much older man. The great difference, in fact, between Lamb and Hazlitt was that the former seemed to have received the gift of perpetual early middle-age and the latter, with his moodiness, his iconoclasm, his physical energy, his hero-worship, his passionate love and his general recklessness, appeared to have been cursed with everlasting youth. To outgrow innocence – one’s initial reflexes to important matters – was for Hazlitt a sin.”

Hazlitt was brilliant and his prose, at its best, is almost peerless, but he compromised his gifts with politics and emotional immaturity, and spent his final years writing a four-volume life of Napoleon. Better a fatherly man without children who could write “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig” and misbehave at funerals.

`Well Versed in Terminus'

Since learning of Tom Disch’s death by suicide on July 4, and particularly since seeing this obituary in The Independent, I’ve been reading his poetry with death in mind and finding it everywhere. John Clute puts it like this in his obit:

“As the author of a large number of death-haunted science-fiction novels and stories, and of several Gothic tales which treat modern America as a land of the dead, and of a huge body of poetry much of which danced with death in formal measure, Disch could from the first have been described as a writer well versed in terminus.”

I can’t speak of Disch’s science fiction, which I haven’t read in decades, though I note he titled a 1973 story collection Getting Into Death. With Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poems (1989) and About the Size of It (2007) on my desk, I began tallying poems with death as a theme but quickly lost count. Instead, consider some representative titles: “Symbols of Love and Death,” “At the Grave of Amy Clampitt” (written almost a decade before her death), “In Defense of Forest Lawn,” “The Art of Dying,” “At the Tomb of the Unknown President,” “How to Behave when Dead” – and that’s just Yes, Let’s. About the Size of It includes “Death Wish IV” but also “The Vindication of Obesity,” with this memorable simile -- “cheeses rank/as death” and this final line: “With news of the deliciousness of death.”

I won’t perform a literary post-mortem on Disch, a search for clues to explain what appears to have been a lonely death in Manhattan. His unhappiness – I won’t say “depression,” a word and condition I no longer understand -- is well documented. Besides, a writer’s frequent probing of mortality is no reliable predictor of self-destruction. Much of what we know about death we owe to Dante, Shakespeare and Beckett, and none was a suicide.

Look at these titles from the last month of Disch’s suggestively named online journal, Endzone: “Letters to Dead Writers,” “Back from the Dead!” “In Memoriam,” “Why I Must Die: A Film Script,” “Tears the Bullet Wept,” “Ding-Dong! The witch is dead!” Most of the entries, poetry and prose, are like jottings in a public notebook, at best works-in-progress. They make for sad and funny reading, but Disch’s gifts as a poet lie elsewhere. Consider another “In Memoriam,” this one published in About the Size of It:

“Nothing, no one, gives me rest
I have put it to the test
And it is not an idle jest
The life I live must lead to death
An emptiness and end of breath
Though still my heart beats in my breast
Nothing, no one, gives me rest

“The streets are filled with criers crying
No end of them, nor yet of dying
Some men may smile a little while
If sellers sell and some are buying
But they will join the rank and file
Who decorate our ancient Nile
No end of them, nor yet of dying

“Memorials are built and then
Time silts a river, builds a fen
And tells its immemorial jest
To the worst as to the best
The world will be as it has been
I am feeling so depressed
Nothing, no one, gives me rest”

For now, put aside Disch’s death and read this strictly as poetry, representing neither the best nor the worst of his work. The meter is heavily iambic and befits nursery rhymes and “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Disch’s strategy, I’m guessing, is to undercut self-pity with child-like echoes. The same applies to his mix of demotic and archaic – “rank and file” and “Though still my heart beats in my breast,” respectively. The poem works because it’s so straightforward and traditional in sound and sense. It reminds me of “He Resigns,” by John Berryman (another death-haunted poet), written early in 1971 while he was sober but severely depressed. It was published posthumously in Delusions etc. after his suicide on Jan. 7, 1972:

“Age, and the deaths, and the ghosts.
Her having gone away
in spirit from me. Hosts
of regrets come & find me empty.

“I don’t feel this will change.
I don’t want any thing
or person, familiar or strange.
I don’t think I will sing

“any more just now;
ever. I must start
to sit with a blind brow
above an empty heart.”

Berryman’s poem is more desolate – and greater -- than Disch’s. Its power is in his reliance on stripped-down colloquial bluntness. No Hopkins-derived syntactical contortions, as in The Dream Songs. And yet, Berryman rhymes. It’s as though his misery was so complete, so close to a scream or mutter, only ABAB could turn it into poetry. Berryman and Disch deserve devotion and study not because they ended their lives (or in Disch’s case because he was a victim of “the system,” as some have claimed) but because their poetry endures.

ADDENDUM: Thanks to Dave Lull for passing on this remembrance of Disch by his friend Bruce Bawer.

Happy Birthday, Oliver Sacks

Happy birthday to Oliver Sacks, who turned 75 on Wednesday. Years ago I read that Sacks, the great polymathic neurologist and friend of W.H. Auden, enjoyed reading the Oxford English Dictionary in bed with the aid of a magnifying glass, something I have also done. That sparked a sense of kinship I have always felt with Sacks and his books. Now I see he has resumed piano lessons after 60 years, an effort that reminds me of I.F. Stone taking up Greek in his seventies -- the triumph of hope. Here's Sacks:

"One of my own birthday resolutions, then, is to start every morning with one of the [Bach] preludes or fugues. Much as I delight in listening to Bach, there is no pleasure like actually playing, or trying to play, music — even if it is completely beyond one. One discovers new details and delights that may not be apparent with simple listening. And I am heartened to find that one can learn new pieces and acquire new skills, even well into one’s eighth decade."

ADDENDUM: A reader tells me of a fine profile of Sacks at Seed magazine.

`A Dome of Kindness'

I woke earlier than usual Wednesday morning. The kids were sleeping and my wife had already left for the gym. I sat on the couch with the first cup of coffee, cat on my shoulder, feeling unusually bright-eyed, and opened Guy Davenport’s The Cardiff Team to the title story:

“If it happens that Nature, when we get up one morning and start our day, hands us exactly what we were of a mind to do, our praise comes readily, and the world looks like a meadow in the first week of creation, green, fresh, and rich in flowers.”

Lovely, like a posthumous imprimatur stamped on my day by the author. Out the window I saw buttercups and ivy in the yard and firs and aspens across the street, swaying in the breeze. Davenport’s blessing held. Later in the morning, I walked a block in downtown Bellevue lined with sycamores, scabby-trunked trees signifying city life. They thrive, like us, in noise and filth, and as their bark flakes off the flawless under-bark invites graffiti. Among sycamores, psoriasis is a symptom of growth and good health. James Schuyler, a city man, never pretended to be a naturalist but was good at minute observations of the natural world. In “Hymn to Life” he writes:

“`I need you,’ tree, that dominates this yard, thick-waisted, tall
And crooked branched. Its bark scales off like that which we forget:
Pain, an introduction at a party, what precisely happened umpteen
Years or days or hours ago.”

Already buoyed by urban greenery, I turned the corner and walked along a line of straight-trunked tulip trees, their hand-shaped leaves dappling sunlight on the sidewalk. Even errands no longer seemed odious. A rather full empty lot bloomed with dandelions, knapweed and a tall, spindly cousin of dandelion, the name of which I don’t know. Schuyler again:

“I hate fussing with nature and would like the world to be
All weeds. I see it from the train, citybound, how the yuccas and chicory
Thrive. So much messing about, why not leave the world alone? Then
There would be no books, which is not to be borne. Willa Cather alone is worth
The price of admission to the horrors of civilization. Let’s make a list.”

And I did, mentally, for the rest of the day. On the list went Louis MacNeice, whose Collected Poems I’ve been rereading. At dusk I thought about “Evening in Connecticut,” written in the terrible fall of 1940. It begins:

“Equipoise: becalmed
Trees, a dome of kindness;
Only the scissory noise of the grasshoppers;
Only the shadows longer and longer.”

`I Want to Be Someone Else'

Borges, a master reader, often read us – citizens of the United States, I mean -- more acutely than we have read ourselves. Our inheritance is to be a nation of shape-shifters. Don’t like who you are? Reinvent yourself: Go back to school. Change jobs. Move to the other end of the continent, “the Territory ahead.” Borges knew something about fluid identities, and in “Borges and I” he writes: “The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to.” When writing about American writers, he often concentrated on their willingness to change, to become another. “Emerson” is a sonnet from The Self and the Other (1964), translated by Mark Strand:

“Closing the heavy volume of Montaigne,
The tall New Englander goes out
Into an evening which exalts the fields.
It is a pleasure no less than reading.
He walks toward the final sloping of the sun,
Toward the landscape’s gilded edge;
He moves through darkening fields as he moves now
Through the memory of the one who writes this down.
He thinks: I have read the essential books
And written other which oblivion
Will not efface. I have been allowed
That which is given mortal man to know.
The whole continent knows my name.
I have not lived. I want to be someone else.”

The last line sounds Jamesian. So bookish and cloistered a New Englander, Emerson longed to experience every occupation he encountered – sailor, soldier, fisherman -- and in his florid imagination, he did. Borges has Emerson close a book (by one of his masters and the subject of one of his best essays) to venture outdoors, to follow the setting sun (“but a morning star”) as though he were emulating his testy friend Thoreau. In Emerson, Borges sees a restlessness and discontent shared by many of his countrymen. From the same collection comes “Camden, 1892,” translated by Alastair Reid:

“The smell of coffee and the newspapers.
Sunday and its lassitudes. The morning,
and on the adjoining page , that vanity –
the publication of allegorical verses
by a fortunate fellow poet. The old man
lies on a white bed in his sober room,
a poor man’s habitation. Languidly
he gazes at his face in the worn mirror.
He thinks, beyond astonishment now: that man
is me, and absentmindedly his hand
touches the unkempt beard and the worn-out mouth.
The end is close. He mutters to himself:
I am almost dead, but still my poems retain
life and its wonders. I was once Walt Whitman.”

This is Horace Traubel’s Whitman, a garrulous, ailing old man living in a cluttered room in New Jersey. To the end – he died March 26, 1892 – he contained multitudes, even former selves, and at least one of them gave us Leaves of Grass. Always mercurial, he made it the defining national trait. He deserved to stand among Emerson’s representative men, an emblematic American, like Louis Armstrong and Sherwood Anderson, self-recreators all. In a prologue he wrote in 1969 for a Spanish translation of Whitman – Hojas de hierba – Borges says:

“Whitman was already plural; the author resolved that he would be infinite.”

`The Strange Seeing-In'

It seems inevitable Kay Ryan would eventually get around to writing a poem about the Dutch still-life painters of the 17th century. Like hers, their canvases are small, densely detailed and carefully lit. Their cardinal virtues, like hers, are concision and precision, though none is so imaginatively impoverished as to be a “minimalist.” Rather, they did more with less and managed to be simultaneously explicit and suggestive. No one reads a Ryan poem once, or rushes past a still life by Floris van Schooten or Floris Claesz van Dijck. Ryan has six poems in the summer issue of The American Scholar, with a brief introduction, “Confluence of Sound and Sense,” by the journal’s poetry editor, Langdon Hammer. None is available online but here, from the print edition, is “Finish”:

“The grape and plum
might be said to
tarnish when ripe,
developing some
sort of light dust
on their finish
which the least
touch disrupts.
It is this that
the great Dutch
still lifes catch,
the brush as
much in love
with talc as
with polish.
Also with the
strange seeing-in
you notice when
a bruise mars
a fruit’s surface.”

To see the phenomenon Ryan describes – the glow of ripeness accompanied by “light dust” (with “light” possessing at least two meanings) -- go here to view “Laid Table with Cheeses and Fruit” (c. 1615) by Floris Claesz van Dijck, in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After you stop salivating, observe the dish of grapes to the left. Even in low-resolution the dust is visible, as is the sheen on the skins of the fruit. Only gifted artists, in any medium, can render both. The poem’s final five lines are its saddest and most intriguing. The grape is bruised, yes, but so is a poem, or any work of art. And don’t we involuntarily reveal something, to others and ourselves, through a “strange seeing-in,” when we bruise? Nothing is so tender as innocence. Hammer writes in his introduction:

“Ryan’s poems reflect back on their own activity in ways that make the poem itself a model of the experience or idea it investigates.”

Ryan, I think, is honoring the still-life painters for their gift of seeing beauty in the humble, revelation in the commonplace. Another admirer of the great Dutch masters is Zbigniew Herbert, whose poetry shares concision and comedy with Ryan’s. In “The Price of Art,” collected in Still Life with a Bridle, he writes:

“They affirmed visible reality with an inspired scrupulousness and childish seriousness, as if the order of the world and the revolution of the stars, the permanence of the firmament, depended on it.

“Let such naïveté be praised.”

`Live, Live!'

Grandparents, I suppose. They were seated thigh-to-thigh at a picnic table in the park -- prosperous, well-groomed, tense -- holding a newborn of indeterminate sex. They cupped the child like a Ming vase, away from their bodies. I sat on a nearby bench, watching two shows – seniors and baby to the left, my kids falling off playground apparatus to the right. The old couple seemed to be staging an allegory of obscure significance – Consternations of Age? – when the man abruptly shifted the baby to his partner and stood, revealing a dark patch on the front of his pressed khakis. Louder than you world expect of a mature fellow who looked like a banker, he said, “Shit!” and stomped off to the men’s room.

Out of feigned politeness I returned to my book. When was the last time a poem made you laugh out loud? I was reading A Trick of Sunlight by Dick Davis, a poet born in England and now professor of Persian at Ohio State University. Joshua Mehigan introduced me to Davis’ work several years ago. This collection, from 2006, hovers around the ineffable subject of happiness, and as a result it’s peppered with grim humor. Included is “Small Talk,” a cycle of 12 poems, none longer than six lines, some as brief as two. The title of the third, “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to,” is familiar:

“Of course, to recognize
This quote, and more, its truth
Means your myopic youth
Was spent quite otherwise.”

Bull’s eye! right down to “myopic.” Lambert Strether’s exhortation to “little Bilham” in Gloriani’s garden is a peak in human evolution, and I’ve spent two-thirds of a lifetime contemplating it. Here’s Strether’s complete outburst:

“`Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had? I'm too old—too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don't, like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now I'm a case of reaction against the mistake. Do what you like so long as you don't make it. For it was a mistake. Live, live!’”

Once I deemed Strether pathetic – a dried-up husk. Now I see him as a hero – like his creator – of human consciousness. And he’s not too old. Davis’ joke is a good one – and superbly ambiguous.

I closed the book when my 8-year-old showed me where he had sat on a fresh patch of bird shit. He’s fastidious and was almost in tears. I told him to go the men’s room and clean it up while I watch his little brother fall off the apparatus again. He disappeared inside and I returned to Davis. When I looked up minutes later, there was Michael at the drinking fountain, shooting water on his khakis. Beside him was his brother, doing the same. Both were soaked and laughing in a way Lambert Strether never laughed.

Tom Disch, R.I.P.

Dave Lull gives me the sad news that novelist and poet Tom Disch took his own life on July 4 -- a grim Dischian irony. Go here, here and here for more information and tributes. I first read his science fiction as a teenager and fondly remember Camp Concentration. I've written about his poetry several times, and his final collection, About the Size of It (2007), is superb. Included in that book is "A Gravedigger's Soliloquy," which closes like this:

"Allow the gnashing
Of your teeth and his, lipless, tonguless, but
Not yet incommunicado. Accept the kiss of Death."

`Learning from Lexington'

Thanks to Brian Sholis for alerting me to a brief reminiscence of Guy Davenport, “Learning from Lexington,” by Marjorie Perloff in the July/August issue of Poetry. Here’s how she concludes:

“Writing, for Davenport, was its own best pleasure. And, in any case, he quipped, writing poetry is much easier than reading it.”

`Keeping Our Wits Warm'

On a library shelf devoted to books about Washington – true crime, cookbooks, travel guides – I noticed an oversized paperback with a black-and-white photograph of a tree on the cover. It was austere enough to attract my attention, and reminded me of old New Directions covers. The title was Palouse Country, which meant nothing to me (France?), and the author was George Bedirian, which also meant nothing. Inside are 130 beautiful duotone images of the prairies of eastern Washington and north central Idaho – a stark landscape of rolling hills, big sky and abandoned barns and other buildings. Many structures have since been demolished so the world Bedirian documents is gone or going. In their straightforward elegance, his photographs recall the work of Walker Evans, Wright Morris, Russell Lee and Dorthea Lange – the classic, no-nonsense, often elegiac tradition of American photography.

The first edition of Palouse Country was published in 1987 by the Whitman County (named after Marcus, not Walt) Historical Society. The expanded second edition, the one I found, came out in 2002 and is published by Washington State University Press. Bedirian’s images are so rich, so classically balanced, I’ve been studying them as one studies a memorable poem or passage of prose. The cover photo, the one that caught my eye, is labeled “Apple tree, Steptoe Butte, Whitman County, Washington,” and can be viewed here. Bedirian includes a note about the picture on the copyright page. It’s the only image in the book singled out for commentary. He writes:

“…the butte offers riches of its own to those who take the time to find them. Such is the case with this apple tree, one of many scattered across the butte’s lower slopes. My discovery of the tree one autumn afternoon was part of a convergence in which the tree, the season, the weather, and the hour conspired to produce a moment of ineffable beauty…I value this photograph for two reasons. First, it stands in my mind as the perfect representation of `Palouseness’: that combination of light, air, and landscape that can only be found in the Palouse. Second, it speaks to me of the efficacy of `being there’; of keeping our wits warm, to paraphrase the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, to the things that are; of truly seeing the world around us.”

I share Bedirian’s love of the visually stark and commonplace. Prairies and deserts are more pleasing to look at than mountains, which tend to seem rather melodramatic. This suggests one of those primal taxonomic divides among humans – mountain people and plains people.
The first two-thirds of Bedirian’s book, I’m surprised to find, is devoted to human habitations – schools, churches, houses and businesses in town or former towns with names like Farmington, Endicott, Starbuck and Oakesdale. Only the final third, the part that touched me most when I first opened the book, is uninhabited landscape. Trees are rare and precious in Bedirian’s work, as they are in the Palouse region and in the work of the writer who most often comes to mind as I look at these photographs – Willa Cather, a poet of trees, though she grew up in Nebraska and set her best novels on its sparsely wooded prairies. In O Pioneers! (1913) is a sentence Bedirian might have used in his book:

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.”
And in the first chapter of My Ántonia (1918):

“There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

Cather’s prose is limpid and seems effortless, and never calls attention to itself, so its poetry is time-released. Later in My Ántonia she writes:

“As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.

“In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.”

The measured rhythm and plainness of that final paragraph sound the way George Bedirian’s photographs of Palouse Country look.

`The Search Was the Thing'

In April 1992 I interviewed the fiction writer Robert Coover in his motel room in Albany, N.Y. He was in town to present an award to a writing student and to read from his work. We talked for several hours, mostly about contemporary writers, and with few exceptions our tastes were incompatible. He admired the work of Angela Carter, Cormac McCarthy, Donald Barthelme, Joseph McElroy and the usual postmodern suspects. When I asked what he thought of Guy Davenport, Coover said, “The essay guy? He doesn’t really interest me.”

I was naively shocked. I still, at age 39, thought of writers as belonging to tribes. Davenport and Coover were members of the “experimental,” “postmodern” or “metafictional” tribe. By expressing dismissive indifference to Davenport, Coover was being disloyal. I took it personally because by that time I had been corresponding with Davenport, on and off, for almost four years. I had visited him at his house in Lexington, Ky., and, most importantly, read his work and incorporated it into how I perceived not just books but the world.

Today, my naiveté seems almost touching. Coover is still best known for his pornographic cartoon of a novel, The Public Burning (1977), in which Uncle Sam sodomizes Richard Nixon. In my company, Coover was courteous, witty and cordial. As a writer he is an intelligent, sophisticated, politicized barbarian. Davenport, in contrast, was a man of civilization. In his life and work he embodied civility. For him, art was attention paid to detail. His essay “Finding” begins as a remembrance of afternoons spent looking for arrowheads with his family in South Carolina and turns into a celebration of attentiveness, ritual, history, good humor and imagination – precisely the qualities that help constitute a civilized life.

Did Wyatt Mason purposely post his tribute to Davenport and The Geography of the Imagination in Harper’s on Independence Day? What better way to celebrate American culture? Mason even includes the entire text of “Finding,” though I also note a Coover story in the same issue. I bought The Geography of Imagination and Eclogues in New York City in 1981, soon after they were published by the late, lamented North Point Press, and read the essays during my flight back to Cleveland. Never has air travel passed so painlessly, and never have I so resented arrival. Most of the essays date from the nineteen-seventies and are studded with critical asides aimed at Nixon and his cronies – just in case anyone thinks I’m setting up a simple-minded liberal/conservative, Democrat/Republican pissing match between Coover and Davenport. The latter played no favorites, remained independent in a very old-fashioned American way, blurred and ignored categories, and published in the National Review and the New York Times. Davenport had deeply felt and reasoned values, not politics. He learned from Ezra Pound’s example, and would have felt more at home with Thoreau and Whitman, I’m certain, than Robert Coover. Consider this seemingly thrown-away sentence from “Finding,” which might serve as the germ of a comprehensive aesthetic or ethics:

“Our understanding was that the search was the thing, the pleasure of looking.”

“Pleasure” is a critical word (in both senses) for Davenport. He is a writer who reliably gives pleasure, which may prove the reason for his eventual survival as a literary artist of the first rank. Artists, even the greatest, do not passively endure. Uncommon common readers, more than critics or academics, keep them alive and sustain their spirit in the culture by reading and rereading their work and talking about it – not proselytizing but sharing their pleasure. In an admirably generous gesture, Mason says he and other Davenport acquaintances have tried to spread the word “not as an act of friendship to Davenport but to readers that we might try to see that his work continue to find them.” The effort is not without precedent. In an essay in The Geography of the Imagination devoted to the neglected art of Charles Ives (whose Fourth Symphony I listened to, as usual, on the Fourth of July), Davenport writes:

“How long it took us to see Melville! We still have no notion of Poe’s greatness. Our Whitman and our Thoreau are not Whitman and Thoreau. We have a wrong, vague, and inadequate appreciation of Stephen Foster. And the great Formalist painter Grant Wood, who in Europe would have founded a school.”