A Musical Interlude

In defiance of cooler nights and scarcer insects, orb weavers go on crafting webs among the trees and shrubs around the yard. The spindly lilac bush is home to three. In gratitude, here's "On Removing Spiderweb" by Les Murray:

"Like summer silk its denier
but stickily, oh, ickilier,
miffed bunny-blinder, silver tar,
gesticuli-gesticular,
crepe when cobbed, crap when rubbed,
stretchily adhere-and-there
and everyway, nap-snarled or sleek,
glibly hubbed with grots to tweak:
ehh weakly bobbined tae yer neb,
spit it Phuoc Tuy! filthy web!"

Spell-check fails to recognize 11 words in Murray's 10 lines. Lovely.

`We Were Walking Anthologies'

“A single allusion, to a familiar book or poem, could create affinity.”

The speaker is Shirley Hazzard in the interview she granted The Believer in 2004. Hazzard refers to literature’s currency among educated people in the days before television. In Greene on Capri she relates her first meeting with Graham Greene. He was seated with a friend in a café on Capri, reciting Browning’s “The Lost Mistress” but unable to recall the final line. As she was leaving, Hazzard supplied it – “I will hold your hand but as long as all may,/Or so very little longer!” -- and thus sparked their friendship.

I’ve known similar experiences from both sides -- as the one making the allusion and as its recipient. After failing out of sheer laziness to respond to several letters from a recent acquaintance, I started my postponed response with three honest, guilt-ridden words – “I’m a fool.” He recognized them as the title of a story by Sherwood Anderson, whom we both admired and had discussed, and friendship ensued. That was in 1975.

Several years later, I was sharing a table in a Toledo, Ohio, restaurant with several acquaintances. I took the senior member of our group for a farmer, as he wore brown overalls, flannel shirt and baseball cap. In fact, he had founded and was soon to sell a pharmaceutical company. He dropped a line from “Lycidas” as a sort of test, which I passed. I learned he had two bookish and seemingly incompatible enthusiasms – Milton and William Carlos Williams – and had even published articles about the latter.

The third such “affinity,” as Hazzard calls it, was the happiest and briefest. As a reporter, I had several times spoken with a professor of English at a university in New York. He was vastly well read and unexpectedly humble, and complimented several things I had written. I was seated in his office one afternoon when I realized he was testing me but trying to disguise the fact. The clincher came when he mentioned a novel about an artist who created scarecrows. He was cannily vague about details of nationality and era. I suggested Dog Years by Günter Grass, and he was delighted I knew the book, one of his favorites. This was 13 years before Grass admitted his youthful membership in the Waffen-SS.

I’m sad to say the first friend has disappeared (I last heard of him 15 years ago) and the others are dead. So, what remains of our affinities? By one reckoning, nothing, or nothing but memories. I’m comforted by the certainty that books and a bookish nature – “the intersection of books and life,” to coin a phrase -- can, despite the dedicated reader’s reputation for maladjusted solitude, bloom into the rare affinity (literally, “bordering on,” a sort of kinship by proximity). Hazzard again, later in the interview:

“Through reading, I grew up. I am still hoping to grow up through reading, through music, through experience. When I was sixteen, living in Hong Kong, I went to work in an office of British Intelligence. The young English officers there knew Asian languages, had fought in the war, were clever and amusing. The only card I had to play was literature. They were full of poetry, and so was I. We were walking anthologies. That was a great happiness and, in those times, not unusual.”

`A Master'

Thanks to Dave Lull for passing along an interview with Stephen Dixon in 3:AM Magazine. The interviewer is dim and Dixon is irascible but he has this to say about Chekhov:

"Chekhov could be the greatest writer who ever lived. And I don’t say that because my wife is a Chekhov scholar (his stories) and teaches him. I’m always reading Chekhov…so, always rereading him because I think I’ve read all the published stories in English. I’m amazed sometimes the things he pulls off. Language and character and dialog and story and the endings, those superb endings, and the great scenery—brushstrokes, quick but intensely visual…a master."

`It Was in Reading that One Could Truly Live'

Seldom do I pace myself when reading. If the book is rich and strong enough to induce self-forgetting and I remain otherwise undisturbed, I move at a comfortable jog, unaware of effort and the passage of time. A bad book hobbles me and soon I give it up. A difficult but worthy book is slower and perhaps sweatier, with occasional breaks to savor or decrypt a passage, but such persistence carries its time-delayed reward. Then there’s the rarest book of all, the sort one parcels out in disciplined increments in order to prolong one’s pleasure and postpone the anxiety of contemplating the final page. Last week, Levi Stahl at the University of Chicago Press passed along such a book, one that moved me to impose a chapter-a-day regimen -- Shirley Hazzard’s Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples.

Best known for her novels The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire, Hazzard is a writer whose acuity of perception, moral rigor and fineness of sensibility invite the flattering but misunderstood label “Jamesian.” Earlier this year, Bryan Appleyard rightly called her “the greatest living writer on goodness and love.” Ancient Shore, too, concerns love – for a city, a culture, a way of life – while suggesting the potency of Hazzard’s love for her late husband, Francis Steegmuller, the Flaubert scholar and translator of Madame Bovary and the incomparable letters. Ancient Shore includes Steegmuller’s “An Incident at Naples,” published in The New Yorker in 1986.

An Australian by birth, Hazzard is a citizen of Great Britain and the United States, with an apartment in New York City and a 50-year part-time residency in Italy. As a child she lived in Hong Kong, Japan and New Zealand. In her internationalism (she once worked for the United Nations), Hazzard (now 77) recalls another great Australian-born novelist, Christina Stead (as well as, again, the bi-continental Henry James). In her introduction to Another Shore, “Italian Hours” (James again), she writes of her early Italian experiences:

“I was warned – as are all who pursue their dream – by those who define reality as a sequence of salutary disappointments that `reality’ would soon set in. I was reminded that immemorial outsiders had followed that same cisalpine path. Yet we trusted to the private revelation.”

The Jamesian note resounds again. The first chapter, “Pilgrimage,” begins as seemingly straightforward autobiography, tracking Hazzard’s youthful travels with her father, a diplomat. She speaks of the thinness of culture in Australia:

“What we did have was literature, which came through our British forebears. It was in reading that one could truly live: in one’s mind, in books, in the world. A form of pilgrimage.”

This theme of literature as a means of expanding consciousness, of preparing one for the world, and the co-dependent nature of the real and bookish realms, is a recurrent theme:

“The contemporary Western world, grappled to its explanations, sets itself to ignore the accidental quality of our existence. For the expression of chance mysteries, we must turn to literature, to art.”

As these excerpts suggest, one need not know Naples or Italy to savor Hazzard’s book. My own experience is limited to a single blurry afternoon in Torino in the Watergate-distracted summer of 1973. She reassures us: “The moment comes: we intersect a history, a long existence, offering it our fresh discovery as regeneration.” Another Shore is peppered with allusions to writers who preceded Hazzard in her devotion to Italy – Pliny, Gibbon, Goethe, Byron, James, Auden. Her lesson is continuity – that a culture as ancient and storied as Italy’s invites, even demands, our investigation, however tentative. A park in Posillipo holds the tombs of Virgil and Leopardi. Nearby is buried the Renaissance poet Jacopo Sannazaro, James visited here in 1880 and 17 years later Wilde completed “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” Of her bookishness Hazzard writes:

“Life, for me, has been a succession of such destined accidents, when what was latent in the reading mind and in the aroused imagination acquired reality in daily life. Thus one wasn’t completely unprepared for extraordinary places, unpredictable events. The variety and interest of existence had struck us, through literature, as being more real than our factual origins. It was thus that pilgrimage had been set in motion.”

ADDENDUM: A reader passes along this story:

“I was visiting my older sister, Shirley, in Florida a few years ago and she had a copy of THE GREAT FIRE. I read it with great pleasure, sitting on her balcony, and somebody snapped a photo of the two of us together. Shirley died suddenly last January, and her daughter, as she was cleaning out her apartment, came upon the photo and sent it to me. Shirley and I are together, looking very happy, and it's a wonderful photo to have. What makes it really special is that I'm holding Hazzard's book and the word SHIRLEY is clearly visible in huge letters. I don't know what to call this--a living memorial? The picture is framed and faces me on my bureau.”

`Lived in Another's Story for a Short While'

Chekhov’s “Gooseberries,” written in 1898, less than six years before his death, is about the deluded seductiveness of happiness. Ivan Ivanych tells the story of his brother, Nikolai Ivanych, a government bureaucrat who longs for a comfortable life in the country, a vision distilled in his single-minded wish to raise gooseberries. He marries “an ugly old widow for whom he felt nothing” simply to get her money. After three years she dies, Nikolai Ivanych inherits her money, buys 300 acres and at last plants his gooseberry bushes.

Ivan Ivanych visits his brother who has “grown old, fat, flabby; his cheeks, nose and lips thrust forward – he looks as if he were about to grunt into the blanket.” He has turned into a parody of a country squire. With tears in his eyes he serves his brother his first crop of gooseberries, extolling their flavor. Ivan Ivanych says:

“They were tough and sour, but as Pushkin said, `Dearer to us than a host of truths is an exalting illusion.’ [a misquotation from “The Hero,” according to Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the translators] I saw a happy man, whose cherished dream had so obviously come true, who had attained his goal in life, had gotten what he wanted, who was content with his fate and with himself.”

At this point Chekhov gives the story his distinctive twist. Ivan Ivanych tells his listeners he is just like his brother. He too, is pompous and free with unsolicited advice, and wishes he were young again. He tells Alekhin, the owner of the estate where he is staying:

“…don’t settle in, don’t let yourself fall asleep! As long as you’re young, strong, energetic, don’t weary of doing good! There is no happiness and there shouldn’t be, and if there is any meaning and purpose in life, then that meaning and purpose are not at all our happiness, but in something more intelligent and great. Do good!”

This sounds like nothing so much as Lambert Strether’s revelatory outburst to Little Bilham in The Ambassadors: “Live all you can!” Alekhin’s reaction is to feel “a strong desire to sleep.” W.H. Auden told Josef Brodsky that of all the great Russian writers only Chekhov had what he called “common sense.” If Nikolai Ivanych and his brother are Chekhov’s way of satirizing Tolstoyan back-to-the-land idealism, Alekin is a real farmer who possesses precisely that quality:

“…farming got him up early, before three in the morning, and his eyes kept closing, but he was afraid that the guests would start telling something interesting without him, and he would not leave. Whether what Ivan Ivanych had said was intelligent or correct, he did not try to figure out; his guests were not talking of grain, or hay, or tar, but about something that had no direct bearing on his life, and he was glad and wanted them to go on…”

In The Pear as One Example: New & Selected Poems 1984-2008, Eric Pankey includes an early poem, “Reading in Bed”:

“Chekhov writes of a man
who loved gooseberries so much
that little else mattered.
His devotion was simple,
complete, yet involved loss,
the way the lack of foliage
in the midst of winter
allows the mind to imagine
the abstraction of a line.
In the story, as now, a sudden rain
taps the window.
As we both sit up reading tonight,
the light from our individual lamps
sets us apart,
the room somehow larger
in the evening's diminishing clarity.
Months from now I will remember
everything I did not say tonight
--how it is possible to love,
how the air at the beginning
of any season smells the same,
the sky different
only in the number of birds
cutting the frail arc of blue . . . .
Once I believed that in touching
there was a language that outlives loss.
But now, as you turn out your light,
I am glad I have said nothing
and have instead lived
in another's story for a short while.
I could say I am happy
but I know what I am feeling
is no more permanent
than the narrowness of a road
where it becomes a point on the horizon,
and if I walked down that road
the trees on either side
would grow larger and separate,
detailed, though bare.”

This is not the sort of poem I care for normally. Its rhythms are slack and prose-like. Its sincerity and self-regard are cloying, and I think the poem misrepresents the complexity of Chekhov’s multi-voiced story. But I like these lines, which attest to the powerful attraction of fiction:

“I am glad I have said nothing
and have instead lived
in another's story for a short while.”

And I like the final line, “detailed, though bare,” as a description of landscape and of the lives led by the brothers in “Gooseberries.” Theodore Dalrymple shows deeper insight in a 1999 essay, also titled “Gooseberries,” published in The New Criterion:

“The point of `Gooseberries’ is the ironic contrast between Nikolai Ivanovich's mean-spirited pursuit of his goal and the smug satisfaction to which its attainment gives rise. For the sake of his triumphal but petty enjoyment of a few gooseberries -- both sour and unripe, according to the narrator -- he has inflicted suffering not only upon himself but upon others. In having sacrificed for so long enjoyment of the present for a thoroughly worthless vision of the future, he has become so desiccated and devoid of human feeling that the pleasure he takes is as appalling as the cruelties he has inflicted.”

Dalrymple reminds us of another work by Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle,” and John Marcher’s “arid end.” An interesting anthology – one which no one would publish – might be devoted to works illustrating the wages of self-centeredness.

`Quaintly Circumstantial'

In Are You There, Crocodile?: Inventing Anton Chekhov, Michael Pennington lovingly describes his visit to Melikhovo, the estate Chekhov bought in 1892 after his return from Sakhalin Island. He’s thrilled to have stood on the steps where the dandyish-looking Chekhov was famously photographed holding Quinine, his dachshund:

“He wears a double-breasted coat and a cap even though it is May, but he looks healthy enough: his face is open and friendly and far more relaxed than it would have been for Braz [Josef Braz, who painted his portrait, which Chekhov said made him look as though he had been “eating grated horseradish”]. Whoever took the picture was trusted, or perhaps a lover of dogs: It is hard to imagine a great writer looking more easy and natural.”

Chekhov was a physician and named his dog after a drug used in his day to treat advanced cases of tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his brother Nikolai in 1889 and would take his life in 1904. Chekhov always fancied dachshunds, and named Quinine’s brother Bromide (a sedative as well as a cliché). Here’s where the story Pennington tells gets especially interesting and turns into oblique literary criticism. Bromide had a grandson named Box II (for unexplained reasons) that a few years later became the pet of Vladimir Nabokov. Box II ended his days in Prague with Nabokov’s widowed mother. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov describes his dachshund in his final days as “an émigré dog in a patched and ill-fitting coat.” Pennington picks up the Chekhov/Nabokov connection:

“In a way the two writers represent extremes in Russian sensibility – Nabokov, the privileged intellectual from western-looking Petersburg (he never once visited Moscow) and Chekhov, who rather disliked Petersburg, from the peasant stock to which intellectuals owed an obligation. Nabokov shares with Chekhov a fanatical eye for detail and a gift for letting it bloom on the page, but he is a far more self-conscious, more Proustian writer, working in complex English, while Chekhov perfects native understatement.”

Pennington speculates that Chekhov would have appreciated Nabokov’s “ability to find comedy in the cruelest situation,” but would have disapproved of the lepidopterist killing so many butterflies. We know how Nabokov felt about Chekhov:

“… in spite of his tolerating flaws which a bright beginner would have avoided, in spite of his being quite satisfied with the man-in-the-street among words, the word-in-the-street, so to say, Chekhov managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was.”

Pennington again:

“Most connections between the two great stylists are as quaintly circumstantial as the matter of the dog: as a boy of five Nabokov was on holiday with his parents in Wiesbaden while further up the Rhine Chekhov was dying at Badenweiler. More to the point, Nabokov records a meeting between his great aunt Praskovia, one of the earliest women doctors in Russia, and Chekhov, at which the latter was surprisingly uncouth: Praskovia, a pioneer of psychiatry and women’s education, was later dismissed by him as not only `a non-doctor’ but `a lump of meat – if you stripped her and painted her green she’d look like a frog.’”

Such connections, however attenuated, ought to be cherished. They remind us that coincidences, however abhorrent in art, are reality’s consolation prizes.

`To Paint the Dreams of His Manhood'

All books are one book in the hands of attentive readers. Late last year, while I was rereading Shakespeare, Buce at Underbelly introduced me to Michael Pennington, an English actor who has written useful books about Hamlet and some of the other plays. Last month in Portland, I bought the Oneworld edition of Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island. Listed in the bibliography was a title new to me: Are You There, Crocodile?: Inventing Anton Chekhov – by Pennington, who has written and performed a one-man show about the Russian writer. I ordered a copy through interlibrary loan and it arrived this week from Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

I’ve only just started to read it but Pennington mentions one of his traveling companions in Russia, the American poet Lucien Stryk, whom I had never heard of, and excerpts one of his poems, “Chekhov in Nice”:

“Were he less the son, he’d have come
Here twenty years ago. Before those
Germs, swarming, had carved
A kingdom of his chest, before
The flame had risen from his bowels
To fan within his head. Were he less the son…”

That was enough for me to order his collected poems, but on the library shelf I found Heartland: Poets of the Midwest, an anthology Stryk edited in 1967. Much of it is awful (Robert Bly, James Tate, James Wright) but I discovered a familiar name in the table of contents: Frederick Eckman, co-founder of the creative writing program at Bowling Green State University in 1968. I was a freshman there two years later, majoring in English, but I never took a creative writing class. I remember Eckman as Lincolnesque – tall, raw-boned, bearded – but never knew him. In 1966, one of his sons had been among the victims of Charles Whitman, the sniper on the tower at the University of Texas.

Stryk includes seven of Eckman’s poems in his anthology. Most are third-generation William Carlos Williams -- skinny and undernourished. But “To Sherwood Anderson, in Heaven” is different. It’s not a great poem but its eight prosy stanzas tell a good story about Eckman, his father and Clyde, Ohio, where Anderson lived as a boy and which served as his model for Winesburg. Clyde is about an hour east of Bowling Green, and I’ve written several times about my connection with it, most recently here. This is from Eckman’s poem:

“Damn it, Sherwood, this is my country too!
You & my father cannot have it all. Like you,
I know the look of ponds at sunset on the edges
of small Ohio towns; county fairs are more real
to me than art galleries or seminar rooms; I too
have smoked cornsilk in cool dark barns; I have been
a poor boy with a newspaper route; I have heard
the old veterans, spitting and droning around
a pot-bellied stove in the general store; I too
had a gentle weary mother who died young.
Let me in, Sherwood! Let me in, Father!
All three of us have whooped drunkenly in village streets
through the sexual explosion of Ohio spring. Let me in!”

This amounts to a pastiche of Whitman at his most declamatory. It’s simple, sincere and sentimental – not unlike much of Anderson, whose poetry is terrible. The poem’s appeal is extra-literary: celebrating Anderson and recounting a region in north central Ohio where I once lived, where the place names are a Midwestern hymn: Clyde, Fremont, Sandusky, Continental. Eckman was born in Continental, 35 miles southwest of Bowling Green and 50 miles southeast of Montpelier, where, in my first newspaper job, I was editor of the weekly Leader-Enterprise. I left Montpelier in 1980, the year Fred Eckman retired from teaching. He died in 1996.

The stories in Winesburg, Ohio, are loosely held together by George Willard, the young man, Anderson’s stand-in, who inspires trust in other characters. They talk to him. In the last chapter, “Departure,” George boards a westbound train and leaves Winesburg. Here’s the final paragraph:

“The young man’s mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.”

Gossamer

Gossamer is a word lovely in its music and etymology. Dating from the early 14th century, it’s a melding of the Middle English gos (goose) and somer (summer). The Swedes have sommertrad – summer thread. As a noun, gossamer refers to shimmering strands of spider silk or, as Webster’s Third ploddingly puts it: “a fine filmy substance consisting of fragments or strands of cobweb often seen floating in air in calm clear weather or caught on grass or bushes.”

Our forebears in English fashioned folk poetry by fancying a resemblance between spider silk and goose down. Geese are migrating as orb weavers spin their webs to cash in on the late-summer insect glut. Etymologists speculate that gossamer may have once referred to the warm spell after the first frost we call Indian summer. The Germans call it mädchensommer – girl’s summer. After a century or so, the noun morphed into “anything light or flimsy.” The word shows up twice in Shakespeare, both times in reference to spider silk. In King Lear (Act IV, Scene 6), Edgar says:

“Hadst thou been aught but gossamer, feathers, air,
So many fathom down precipitating,
Thou'dst shiver'd like an egg; but thou dost breathe;
Hast heavy substance; bleed'st not; speak'st; art sound.”

In Romeo and Juliet, Friar Laurence (Act II, Scene 6) says of Juliet:

“Here comes the lady: O, so light a foot
Will ne'er wear out the everlasting flint:
A lover may bestride the gossamer
That idles in the wanton summer air,
And yet not fall; so light is vanity.”

The adjective, meaning “infinitely or exquisitely light, delicate, or tenuous,” appeared early in the 19th century. My reflex is to use gossamer as an adjective, which is how it came to mind on Wednesday. For the last week or so, a spider has been building a new web each morning between the shed behind our house and a pine. It’s about six feet off the ground – face-level for me – and, counting the anchoring strands on the tree and shed, it measures almost 10 feet across. Another daily web has appeared at the front of the house, outside my 5-year-old’s bedroom window, between the house and a rhododendron. In the morning when the sun breaks over the wall of conifers, the gossamer glistens conspicuously and turns invisible when the clouds move in. Both webs are studded with anonymous creatures wrapped in silk. On the day the second web opened for business, I had been reading Thoreau’s accounts of autumn in his journal. This dates from Nov. 13, 1858:

“It is wonderful what gradation and harmony there is in nature. The light reflected from bare twigs at this season, that is, since they began to be bare, in the latter part of October, is not unlike that from gossamer, and like that which will erelong be reflected from the ice that will incrust them. So the bleached herbage of the fields is like frost, and frost like snow, and one prepares for the other.”
`

`My Ideal Scenery'

My 5-year-old was looking at the photographs of my hometown in Cleveland: The Flats, the Mill, and the Hills, taken by Andrew Borowiec in 2002 and 2003. Brian Sholis had mailed it to me and David was quietly studying its 87 duotone plates in back seat of the car. He said little until he finished: “Three people and two puppies. That’s all I saw.” It’s a fairly accurate tally. Borowiec’s Cleveland is almost deserted. He won’t show you the crowds at Severance Hall or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His book is a post-mortem of the Industrial Age in a once-great industrial city.

The one persistent survivor of that time is the all-too-symbolically-named Terminal Tower, which shows up in nine of Borowiec’s photos, always in the distance, as though by accident. When completed in 1930, it was the second-tallest building in the world; today, it’s not even the tallest in Cleveland.

Borowiec concentrates on abandoned steel mills, salvage yards, warehouses, boarded-up bars (“Pat’s in the Flats”) and groceries, piles of rubble and slag, empty parking lots, machine shops and houses built a century ago within blocks of the mills where their occupants worked. By 1976, David Thomas and his band Pere Ubu were performing in the Flats in John D. Rockefeller’s first warehouse – then called Pirate’s Cove, a bar. Thomas boasted that Pere Ubu hailed from “the ruins of the industrial Midwest.” Their first single was “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”/”Heart of Darkness,” and their 1985 album was Terminal Tower.

To my knowledge, no fiction writer or poet has adequately documented this world. It never had its Zola. The introduction to Borowiec’s book was written by Les Roberts, whose mystery novels are set in Cleveland. Every word, starting with the first sentence (“Cleveland is a tough town.”), is clichéd -- hard-boiled and soft at the center. In 1951, the novelist Herbert Gold, a Cleveland native, wrote of the Flats, the industrial area along the Cuyahoga River:

“By day this area is covered with an acrid pall. By night the sky is violet, throbbing and flaring with the reflection from the blast furnaces.”

The nightly pyrotechnics are long gone, and I’m uncomfortable with the nostalgia I feel for them, though Borowiec’s photos trigger my nostalgia and deliver its antidote simultaneously. I could easily have ended up working in one of those mills, and to some degree would have counted myself fortunate. It’s one of several unhappy fates I’ve avoided.

Though Auden was born in York, his family moved to Harborne, Birmingham, when he was a toddler. All his life he recalled with great fondness the limestone landscape of the moors and the declining lead mines of the North. In “Letter to Lord Byron” (1937) he wrote:

“Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,
That was, and still is, my ideal scenery.”

`I Could Not Love It Enough'

Almost 20 years before her death, Louise Bogan published an oddly valedictory poem, “After the Persian,” in the Nov. 3, 1951, issue of The New Yorker. Her biographer, Elizabeth Frank, tells us Bogan originally had titled it “From the Persian” but the magazine’s fact-checkers objected, noting that readers might mistakenly assume the poem was a translation – not that “After the Persian” is much of an improvement in that regard. Frank says the poem is based on Bogan’s longtime devotion to the Persian art collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston:

“The details of `After the Persian’ are thus distillations of visual memory. The vines and moths, the hunt and fountain and pool, have been gazed at and entered into.”

Out of these fragments and memories of another culture’s art, Bogan fashioned one of her loveliest and most obliquely autobiographical poems. For instance:

“I am the dweller on the temperate threshold,
The strip of corn and vine,
Where all is translucence (the light!),
Liquidity, and the sound of water.
Here the days pass under shade
And the nights have the waxing and the waning moon.
Here the moths take flight at evening;
Here at morning the dove whistles and the pigeons coo.
Here, as night comes on, the fireflies wink and snap
Close to the cool ground,
Shining in a profusion
Celestial or marine.”

Bogan paints an Edenic sanctuary, a vision rare in her work. One senses we are reading a personal mythology – lovely but intentionally muted and cryptic. Some of the lines are long and the rhythm is stately yet simple, like heightened prose, as in Whitman and some of the Psalms. Her exclamation “(the light!)” recalls Goethe’s final words: “More light!” (Bogan co-translated his Elective Affinities and The Sorrows of Young Werther) and some of the longer, looser lines might be the work of her former lover, Theodore Roethke. The poem’s culmination is piercing:

“Goodbye, goodbye!
There was so much to love, I could not love it all;
I could not love it enough.

“Some things I overlooked, and some I could not find.
Let the crystal clasp them
When you drink your wine, in autumn.”

Like Prospero, the speaker seems to be renouncing her art – prematurely – and readying herself for death. Often blocked and desolate, Bogan continued to write poems sporadically until her death in 1970. “There was so much to love,” and yet expressing it adequately was so difficult. In 1941, she wrote a letter to her friend Morton D. Zabel describing the renewal and intensification of her friendship with William Maxwell, the novelist and fiction editor for The New Yorker. She describes listening to Schubert and Mahler with him (“he is the most wonderful record-listener I have ever met”) and writes:

“Maxwell is really an exquisite human being; and I wish there was something between love and friendship that I could tender him; and some gesture, not quite a caress, I could give him. A sort of smoothing. I may be able to work out something along these lines later! Seriously, I simply love him like a brother.”

`I Was There'

Of Sakhalin Island, Chekhov’s account of his journey to a penal colony in Siberia, the great Irish essayist Hubert Butler writes:

“…it is in conflict with the accepted Chekhov legend. It is not wistful, resigned and full of subdued melancholy. It is blazing with certainty and indignation, and because of that, in spite of its tragic contents it is perhaps the most hopeful and optimistic of all his writings. He believed that it was worthwhile to be passionately indignant about remediable injustice and that to remedy injustice was not the task of the statistician, the trained welfare officer, the experienced committeeman, it was the task of every man of sensibility and integrity.”

Chekhov was a doctor and writer, not a professional do-gooder. He was compassionate, not self-righteous. He had emotions and thoughts, not political schemes. He was neither utopian nor reactionary. In short, he was a writer, a self-appointed vocation inimical to the left and right of his day and ours. That he often chronicles suffering is inarguable; that his intent was didactic is ridiculous.

For the first time I’ve noticed how often Chekhov depicts the suffering of children. In “Vanka,” a story from December 1886, a 9-year-old orphan apprenticed to a shoemaker writes a letter to his grandfather at Christmas. The grandfather, a night watchman in a village, is his only living relative. In Moscow, the shoemaker drags Vanka by the hair, beats him with a belt and knocks him out with a blow on the head from a shoe last. In his letter the boy says how much he misses his dogs, Chestnut and Eel, and adds:

“And I also send greetings to Alyona, to one-eyed Yegorka, and to the coachman, and don’t give my harmonica away to anybody. I remain your grandson, Ivan Zhukov, dear grandpa, come.”
Vanka bought an envelope for a kopeck and asked the clerks at the butcher shop how to mail a letter. He addresses the envelope “To Grandpa in the Village,” then adds “Konstantin Makarych.” Without postage, without a return address, he drops the letter in a mailbox so it can be “carried all over the world on troikas of post-horses with drunken drivers and jingling bells.” An hour later, Vanka is sleeping, dreaming of his grandfather reading the letter to the kitchen maids.

In the Richard Pevear-Larissa Volokhonsky translation, “Vanka” is less than four pages long and that is the secret of its power. This is still early Chekhov. He was 26 and writing sketches for newspapers, trying to support his family. If the story veers occasionally into the maudlin – it is a Christmas story written for a popular audience – the author quickly corrects its course with an objective tone and devotion to homely detail. The story is so brief and concentrated, so vigorously aimed in a single direction (the undeliverable letter), it can’t linger in the mawkish.

Just a year later, in January 1888, Chekhov published “Sleepy,” slightly longer than “Vanka” and significantly darker and more sophisticated. Varka is a 13-year-old nanny. She is exhausted, almost hallucinating, rocking the cradle of a crying baby. She, too, is an orphan, also working for a shoemaker, and her late mother, like Vanka’s, was named Pelageya. The shoemaker twists the girl’s ear. His wife shouts and accuses her of giving the baby the evil eye. These accounts blur into Varka’s dreams and memories – her father dying of a painful hernia, a highway covered with liquid mud. The details are as phantasmagorical and disturbing as Dostoevsky’s, minus the melodrama and mysticism.

Out of her mind with exhaustion, Varka concludes the baby is “the enemy that keeps her from living.” In the story’s final sentence, she strangles the baby and “quickly lies down on the floor, laughing with joy that she can sleep, and a moment later is already fast asleep, like the dead…”

This represents a new sense of democracy in fiction. Every character, regardless of wealth or social position, is worthy of empathy. “Varka is still a long way from “Gooseberries,” “The Lady with the Little Dog,” “In the Ravine” and “The Bishop,” but already we see Chekhov’s remarkable growth as a writer, particularly in the way he blurs inner and outer states. I like the second paragraph, which in a lesser writer might serve as mere scene-setting. Instead, Chekhov renders a prose photograph, all the elements of which recur as motifs throughout the story:

“A green oil lamp is burning before an icon; a rope is stretched across the whole room from corner to corner, with swaddling clothes and large black trousers hanging on it. A big green spot from the icon lamp falls on the ceiling, and the swaddling clothes and trousers cast long shadows on the stove, the cradle, and Varka… [Chekhov’s ellipsis] When the icon lamp begins to flicker, the spot and the shadows come alive and start moving as if in the wind. It is stuffy. There is a smell of cabbage soup and shoemaker’s supplies.”

This passage, so densely and objectively detailed, reminds me of similar passages in Whitman, especially in “Song of Myself.” This comes from the eighth section:

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

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

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

In Chekhov (1860-1904) and Whitman (1819-1892) we see a mingling of realism and compassion new to literature. What Whitman wrote elsewhere in “Song of Myself” might have been written by either of them in prose, poetry or life: “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.”

`The Daughter of a Noble House Dressed for a Fancy-Ball'

It never occurred to me as a boy that trees would remain central to my personal mythology. We lived beside a dense second-growth woods in the suburbs – ash, elm, wild cherry, poplar, crab apple and a scattering of maple and oak. It was where we played and learned, haphazardly, the rudiments of biology. It was also sanctuary, away from the tensions and uncertainties of home. Parents seldom ventured into the woods, as though life were an inverted fairy tale. Home versus nature: an appealing but not-so-simple dichotomy, for home also represented books and writing – an alternative sanctuary. To this day I feel uncomfortable carrying a book on a hike, fearing it will be soiled or soaked, and nagged by the sense I will blur incompatible realms.

In any landscape I look first for the trees. Writing about autumn maples, I once described them as “sugar factories,” shorthand for photosynthesis. The phrase also connotes sweetness – in the vernacular, “eye candy.” But it’s more than beauty. Richard Wilbur comes close in “Green” to articulating the seductiveness of trees: “A green with no apparent role, unless/To be the symbol of a great largesse.” That’s it: largesse, bounty, generosity. In The American Scene, when he visits New England in the autumn after 20 years abroad, Henry James suggests the immense solace, beauty, dignity and pathos of a forest, without indulging in nature mysticism:

“It might be an ado about trifles--and half the poetry, roundabout, the poetry in solution in the air, was doubtless but the alertness of the touch of autumn, the imprisoned painter, the Bohemian with a rusty jacket, who had already broken out with palette and brush; yet the way the colour begins in those days to be dabbed, the way, here and there, for a start, a solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy-ball, with the whole family gathered round to admire her before she goes.”

This amounts to a great Jamesian hurly-burly in the woods. Like a young woman “dressed for a fancy-ball,” a forest embodies hope – in the nitrogen cycle, in biological adaptation, in subsequent generations, in beauty. In the “Prologue” to his poem-in-progress “Time’s Covenant,” Eric Ormsby isn’t writing about trees. He’s visiting a one-time utopian settlement in Tennessee where his grandmother and her siblings grew up, but he expresses the way I feel when I go home and walk among the hopeful trees of childhood:

“I think I hoped to travel to another time
When there was still a future, when time lay
virginal and open and each chime
of the brass-bound mantel clock above the fire
echoed into a prospect of desire.
I wanted to taste the future when it was still
All future and still ours to spend...”

`All the Respect in the World for Reality'

Bryan Appleyard talked with Marilynne Robinson at her home in Iowa City, and gives us a splendid account of his visit in The Sunday Times. Here's something she told him:

“The assumptions of realism as it has been practised are simply wrong. People bring a great deal of memory and also a sense of present experience to everything that they do. If you see someone doing a simple action like hanging sheets on a line, there is absolutely no reason in that person’s perception that there is anything simple about it at all. I have all the respect in the world for reality, but I think the general assumptions about it are wrong.”

`The Music in the Night'

Only this week did I notice the absence of the dark-eyed juncos. I’ve come to think of them as the state bird of Washington though the legislature favors the willow goldfinch (also known as the American goldfinch). The juncos were jumping between the shrubs and roof while the moving men unloaded our possessions in May, simultaneously bold and shy. Their minimalist call – tick, tick, tick – reminds me of Count Basie’s sparse piano. In his chapter on September in The Rural Life, what Verlyn Klinkenborg writes of another species applies to our juncos:

“…when it sings, the catbird distills shadows into music, the way the nightingale does in English poetry. There’s a faintly mechanical quality to its song, as though the notes were produced by small bells or the operation of intricate machinery.”

They’re gone though all the books say juncos spend their winters here. The autumnal equinox comes on Monday and perhaps our resident pair has answered some melody unheard by humans.

I was saddened to learn from Terry Teachout of Richard Sudhalter’s death. He was a trumpet player, described by Whitney Balliett as “an elegant, if sometimes brittle, Beiderbecke admirer,” but more of us knew him as one of our finest writers on jazz and American popular music. I recommend Bix: Man and Legend (1975); Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz, 1915-1945 (1999); and Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael (2002). Lost Chords, in particular, is a masterwork of scholarship and truth-telling.

I don’t own any of Sudhalter’s music but I have a recording of Hoagy Carmichael singing his songs and accompanying himself on piano. Sudhalter, in his biography, calls “Skylark” a “Carmichael masterwork,” with lyrics by the great Johnny Mercer. Read this verse, or sing it, and pause to remember Richard M. Sudhalter, the birds and summer:

“And in your lonely flight
Haven't you heard the music in the night?
Wonderful music,
Faint as a will o' the wisp,
Crazy as a loon,
Sad as a gypsy serenading the moon.”

After writing this I had an e-mail from Ron Slate in which he mentioned Donald Justice’s “Psalm and Lament,” written in memory of his mother. The final verse seems especially appropriate:

“Sometimes a sad moon comes and waters the roof tiles.
But the years are gone. There are no more years.”

`They Are Outside Time'

The late Donald Justice is one of those writers – Henry James, among the poet’s favorites, is another – whose work probably holds scant attraction for young readers. It’s an understandable and easily forgiven lapse, for the young are unlikely to appreciate a quiet, memory-driven poet like Justice whose sensibility is intimated by a selection of his titles: “Sadness,” “Thinking About the Past,” “Nostalgia and Complaint of the Grandparents.” To my mind, Justice accomplishes the almost-impossible feat of writing about evanescence and the bittersweetness of memory without lapsing into sentimentality. Consider “October: A Song,” a poem I read because of its seasonal interest before spending another hour or more with the Collected Poems:

“Summer, goodbye.
The days grow shorter.
Cranes walk the fairway now
In careless order.

They step so gradually
Toward the distant green
They might almost be brushstrokes
Animating a screen.

“Mists canopy
The water hazard.
Nearby, a little flag
Lifts, brave but frazzled.

“Under sad clouds
Two white-capped golfers
Stand looking off, dreamy and strange,
Like young girls in Balthus.”

Seldom is clarity so winningly coupled with wistfulness. Strong emotion (even strong, subdued emotion) has a way of gumming up language, particularly in writers whose first medium is emotion, not language. Justice’s poem is almost Imagistic in its declarative forthrightness, and the reference to the painted screen confirms he had East Asian art in mind. The poetic method may be borrowed from classical Chinese poetry (via Pound and Amy Lowell), but the scenes, especially of the golfers, are reminiscent of Hokusai (and, ridiculously, the opening of The Sound and the Fury – Benjy at the golf course). Justice was a master of the artfully, comically unexpected – in this case, Balthus, another artist noted for clarity. What comes to mind are two middle-aged men in funny clothes lolling about like pubescent girls. It’s funny but it works, and Justice has prepared us – “careless order,” “brave but frazzled,” “dreamy and strange.” Guy Davenport wrote in The Balthus Notebook:

“Balthus’s children have no past (childhood resorbs a memory that cannot yet be consulted) and no future (as a concern). They are outside time.”

`Bright Enough for a Breast Pin'

At lunchtime three crows stood around one of the mushrooms growing in the grass in front of the house. Like partygoers circa 1973, stabbing forks in the fondue pot, the birds took turns pecking at the cap of the mushroom. On the outside, the fungus is brown, about the color of a walnut shell, but as the crows picked it apart they exposed the white, tofu-like meat inside. After several minutes, they knocked over the mushroom and tore into the stalk and the underside of the cap. I had to pick up the boys from school and the crows flew to a power line across the street when I walked to my car. As I drove off I saw them return to the fungus buffet.

A few hours later I picked up the mushroom remains to get a closer look, Attached to the base of the stem was a clump of moss that looked like green dreadlocks. Viewed from above the cap resembled a slightly overbaked Kaiser roll. This species – Can anyone identify it, based on my description? -- doesn’t have the usual vented gills on the underside of the cap. Rather, it looks like a sponge with tiny holes, like a brain with spongiform disease. It’s quite beautiful and almost invites you to take a bite, though I’ve never been mistaken for John Cage.

I like the idea of one scorned organism, the crow, enjoying another, the mushroom.
Crows, like us, crows are omnivores. Mushrooms, too, feed off their close-at-hand surroundings. I once saw mushrooms growing on the head and inside the abdomen of a cow that had wandered off and died in a forest. Come to think of it, we associate crows and mushrooms with death. Both, in a sense, are carrion-eaters. Not surprisingly, Thoreau was fond of them. Of mushrooms he wrote in his journal for Sept. 1, 1856:

“We go admiring the pure and delicate tints of fungi on the surface of the damp swamp there, following up along the north side of the brook. There are many, very beautiful lemon-yellow ones of various forms, some shaped like buttons, some becomingly scalloped on the edges, some club-shaped and hollow, of the most delicate and rare but decided tints, contrasting well with the decaying leaves around them. There are others, also, pure white, others a wholesome red, others brown, and some even a light indigo-blue above, and beneath and throughout. When colors come to be taught in the schools, as they should be, both the prism (or the rainbow) and these fungi should be used by way of illustration and if the pupil does not learn colors, he may learn fungi which is perhaps better. You almost envy the wood frogs and toads that hop amid such gems, -- some pure and bright enough for a breast pin. Out of every crevice between the dead leaves oozes some vehicle of color, the unspent wealth of the year which Nature is now casting forth as if it were to empty herself.”

That’s Thoreau at his most fancifully exacting – a mushroom breast pin. He also couldn’t get enough of crows. They show up often in his journal. He was a close observer of their food-gathering and dealings with other species. Here he records their “buffeting” of a hawk, from the journal entry for April 6, 1856:

“As I am going along the Corner road by the meadow mouse brook, hear and see, a quarter of a mile northwest, on those conspicuous white oaks near the river in Hubbard’s second grove, the crows buffeting some intruder. The crows had betrayed to me some large bird of the hawk kind which they were buffeting. I suspected it before I looked carefully. I saw several crows on the oaks, and also what looked to my naked eye like a cluster of the palest and most withered oak leaves with a black base about as big as a crow. Looking with my glass, I saw that it was a great bird. The crows sat about a rod off, higher up, while another crow was occasionally diving at him, and all were cawing. The great bird was just starting. It was chiefly a dirty white with great broad wings with black tips and black on other parts, giving it the appearance of dirty white, barred with black. I am not sure whether it was a white-headed eagle or a fish hawk. There appeared much more white than belongs to either, and more black than the fish hawk has. It rose and wheeled, flapping several times, till it got under way; then, with its rear to me, presenting the least surface, it moved off steadily in its orbit over the woods northwest, with the slightest possible undulation of its wings, -- a noble planetary motion, like Saturn with its ring seen edgewise. It is so rare that we see a large body self-sustained in the air. While crows sat still and silent and confessed their lord. Through my glass I saw the outlines of this sphere against the sky, trembling with life and power as it skimmed the topmost twigs of the wood toward some more solitary oak amid the meadows.”

One of the great charms of Thoreau’s journal is his chronicling of obscure, otherwise unrecorded events like this, more than 150 years ago. I’m reminded of J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine. Without their close observation and meticulous fitting of word to event or object, these moments might as well never have happened. Crows are probably eating mushrooms all over the world, though I’ve never seen it before and perhaps you haven’t either, but now we can remember their meal.

`Imagining Prodigious Honesties'

Driving along a suburban street I saw in the distance a very unsuburban sight: Dense morning fog lingering over a distant valley. The fog was framed by the ridge of conifers behind it, creating the pleasing illusion of a bridge (green-black structure, white road passing beneath it). My brain registered bridge, finding a familiar pattern in an unfamiliar alignment of objects. Then, as in one of those perceptual tests – two faces or vase? elegant young woman or crone? -- the two realities seemed to ooze in and out of each other. Then the brain and its rage for order took over – Ordnung! – and I saw a conventional juxtaposition of fog and trees. The bridge had evaporated. Nabokov was the great contriver and savorer of such phenomena in prose and life. Do you remember this moment from Transparent Things?:

“A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish.”

Svelte Transparent Things (1972) after elephantine Ada (1969) is full of marvels. During a description of Hugh Person’s alpine hike, I came upon this rendering of the fog/forest combination:

“He almost reached timberline – but there the weather changed, a damp fog enveloped him, and he spent a couple of hours shivering all alone in a smelly shippon, waiting for the whirling mists to uncover the sun once more.”

I’m surprised to learn my copy of Transparent Things is a first edition. I remember receiving it as a Christmas present from a former girlfriend in 1972, along with some Charles Mingus albums. The event is isolated in memory, suspended in temporal amber. Memory, too, creates diverting illusions. Can one see or remember an illusion clearly? I think we can but such things occupy a weird epistemological category. Consider the first stanza of Richard Wilbur’s “Clearness,” from Ceremony and Other Poems (1950):

“There is a poignancy in all things clear,
In the stare of the deer, in the ring of a hammer in the morning.
Seeing a bucket of perfectly lucid water
We fall to imagining prodigious honesties.”

The last line is worth a lifetime’s contemplation: “imagining prodigious honesties.” Wilbur turned 87 earlier this year. He was born nine days before my father, who died more than three years ago – in my mind, as much a trompe-l'œil juxtaposition as the one I described above. And in the final stanza, Wilbur works in a fog reference and another to “Thule,” half the title of what was to have been Nabokov’s final Russian novel (Solus Rex), now a story -- “Ultima Thule”:

“But this was Thule of the mind’s worst vanity;
Nor could I tell the burden of those clear chimes;
And the fog fell, and the stainless voices faded;
I had not understood their lovely words.”

`To Be Moving As Well As to Be Ingenious'

Over the weekend I talked at length with my oldest friend, now a German teacher in Denver. We met as sophomores in high school and roomed together in college. One of our shared enthusiasms – virtually a hobby for non-athletes like us -- was the work of Thomas Pynchon. When we came to know each other Gravity’s Rainbow was still years away but both of us had read V. and The Crying of Lot 49. Mike called to tell me, a little sheepishly, that he hasn’t yet read Against the Day, though it was published almost two years ago. Without sheepishness I told him I hadn’t read it either and didn’t expect to any time soon.

Fortunately, tastes and priorities change. Pynchon is a young person’s writer. By that I mean little life experience – as opposed to intelligence and an elastic sense of humor – is needed to read and appreciate his fiction. In contrast, few teens and young adults are emotionally equipped to comprehend, enjoy and learn from What Maisie Knew and The Ambassadors. Pynchon’s early books happened to coincide with my early reading years. I was ready for him and now I have outgrown him. Pynchon is not a “bad” writer. Mike and I laughed over favorite bits from V. and Gravity’s Rainbow, just as we might have recalled choice skits by Monty Python.

When I reviewed Gravity’s Rainbow for an “underground” magazine 35 years ago, I noted that I had reveled in Pynchon’s “sheer word-walls.” I still have a taste for richly metaphorical prose – in Moby-Dick, for instance, and Gilead – but Pynchon no longer supplies the other qualities I expect of fiction – life knowledge, recognition of moral complexity and seriousness (not the same as the absence of humor). Like much so-called postmodern fiction, Pynchon’s novels ultimately represent an evasion and a cul-de-sac, albeit a sometimes brilliant and amusing cul-de-sac.

On Sunday I started reading The Things that Matter (2006) by Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor and editor of the poet’s work. Mendelson’s subtitle – What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life – and his core assumptions about literature clarify some of my feelings about Pynchon and how my tastes in fiction have changed. In his introduction Mendelson writes:

“Anyone, I think, who reads a novel for pleasure or instruction takes an interest both in the closed fictional world of that novel and in the ways the book provides models or examples of the kinds of life that a reader might or might not choose to live. Most novels of the past two centuries that are still worth reading were written to respond to both these interests, They were not written to be read objectively or dispassionately, as if by some nonhuman intelligence, and they can be understood most fully if they are interpreted and understood from a personal point of view, not only from historical, thematic, or analytical perspectives. A reader who identifies with the characters in a novel is not reacting in a naïve way that ought to be outgrown or transcended, but is performing one of the central acts of literary understanding.”

Few serious common readers – the truest arbiters of literature – could argue with this, and I’m not certain any non-sociopathic reader experiences a novel “objectively or dispassionately.” Mendelson’s argument grows more provocative and inspired:

“The standard map of modern literature, taught in schools and taken for granted everywhere, places Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce on the highest slopes, with other writers arrayed in lesser and outlying positions. This account is based on the intellectual prejudice, shared by its three heroes , that archetypes are more real than individuals, that myths are more true than observations, that a vision of grand patterns matters more than any attempt to integrate the local particulars of individual lives. Hidden within this account is a deeper prejudice, which is that the shape and complexity of a work is the test of its greatness, that a work of art need not be emotionally moving except to the degree that its structure and patterns inspire inarticulate awe.”

That final sentence sums up the critical/academic championing of Pynchon and many of his postmodern contemporaries. Does anyone find Tyrone Slothrop “emotionally moving?” Isolated moments in Gravity’s Rainbow can be read with feeling, but Pynchon isn’t interested in delineating human characters, and might even deny their existence: Slothrop dissolves and scatters. “Grand patterns” virtually defines Pynchon’s aesthetic – and ruined Joyce’s late work. Mendelson continues:

“Museums and concert halls and anthologies are filled with the unfortunate consequences of this assumption, but that does not make it any less mistaken. When you remember that all the great art of the past seems to have been created to be moving as well as to be ingenious, and that the same measure of greatness can still be applied to modern literature, the map of modern literature begins to look different from the version taught in schools. Virginia Woolf, who understood human life in terms of its changes through time, rather than in terms of permanent archetypal states, takes the central place in modern fiction, as W.H. Auden takes the central place in modern poetry, and Samuel Beckett – far more of a defender of individuality, far more of a moralist, than almost anyone other than his biographers recognizes – takes the central place in modern drama.”

That’s breathtaking, and Mendelson invites us to disagree with his reshuffling of literary Modernism. I can’t abide Woolf’s fiction, and would substitute Proust – or Joyce, whose Ulysses remains unsullied by the inspired botch of Finnegans Wake. Auden’s inclusion is arguable but I wouldn’t argue too hard. Beckett’s place is uncontested. In fact, if he had written more poetry you could make a case for awarding him Mendelson’s Triple Crown. He concludes his introduction by writing:

“And I don’t expect you to agree with everything I say about books, but I hope our disagreements, when they occur, can provide the comforts of both heat and light.”

`Quite Simply, a Sadness'

Ron Slate has written and posted a poem, “Four Roses,” with the circumstantial density of a good short story. It’s rooted in memory and family, but swings open from the personal to the universal on a beautiful hinge (several, actually):

“Unlike a bartender, a man selling liquor isn’t compelled to console
his clientele. Yet each time he sees the stumpy fingers
of a longshoreman when the palm opens for change,
he feels, quite simply, a sadness.”

I’ve tended bar and worked in a low-end beer and wine shop, and though I was drinking at the time and my impressions are not entirely reliable, that’s where I became a taxonomist of sadness. Sadness among drinkers is deeper and more nuanced than mere depression, and there’s more to it than biochemistry. Someone said a drunk passes through three stages -- bellicose, lachrymose, comatose – but that’s only the beginning and isn’t true of every drunk. Alcohol is a corrosive and dissolves whatever it touches, if it touches it often enough. Auden knew something about “The Sorrows of Gin,” to borrow a Cheever title, and he was more than qualified to write feelingly about Falstaff. This is from his essay on Henry IV, “The Prince’s Dog,” in The Dyer’s Hand:

“The drunk is unlovely to look at, intolerable to listen to, and his self-pity is contemptible. Nevertheless, as not merely a worldly failure but also a willful failure, he is a disturbing image for the sober citizen. His refusal to accept the realities of this world, babyish as it may be compels us to take another look at this world and reflect upon our motives for accepting it. The drunkard’s suffering may be self-inflicted, but it is real suffering and reminds us of all the suffering in this world which we prefer not to think about because, from the moment we accepted this world, we acquired our share of responsibility for everything that happens in it.”

Ron’s poem suggests his father knows something about that sort of responsibility. And for the uninitiated: Four Roses is a brand of bourbon.

`Thinking and Thanking Became One'

Let’s agree to call it happiness, a much-abused word. Contentment is closer – balance, equipoise, not having to wrestle after inner ease. Whatever the word, the state seems unattainable without gratitude. If I could vaccinate my kids with one virtue it would be a robust sense of thankfulness, a medicine that quiets our self-centered demands on the world. In a remembrance of his friend W.H. Auden, Oliver Sacks says “a genius for appreciation, for affection and gratitude, lay at the very centre of Wystan’s whole being.” That’s one of the reasons I reread Auden. Much current poetry assumes an immense sense of aggrieved entitlement – for understanding, appreciation, sympathy, love -- a baby’s litany. Auden’s instinct was to offer thanks for the gifts he, like all of us, had done nothing to deserve.

Auden’s final book of poems, published posthumously in 1974, is Thank You, Fog. It contains a poem titled “Thanksgiving,” and the volume’s best-known line is from “Lullaby”: “Let your last thinks all be thanks.” In his Auden and Christianity, Arthur Kirsch says this sentence “could be an epigraph for the later years of Auden’s life.” Conventional wisdom slights Auden’s later poems and accepts 1939, the year he immigrated to the United States, as the beginning of a long poetic slide. For a long time I foolishly accepted this notion. No portion of a poet’s life which includes “In Praise of Limestone” and “Horae Canonicae” can signify a decline. Consider these lines from “Precious Five” (1950), addressed to the poet’s senses:

“I can (which you cannot)
Find reasons fast enough
To face the sky and roar
In anger and despair
At what is going on,
Demanding that it name
Whoever is to blame:
The sky would only wait
Till my breath was gone
And then reiterate
As if I wasn’t there
That singular command
I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing?”

Sacks says of his friend: “Wystan’s mind and heart came closer and closer in the course of his life, until thinking and thanking became one and the same.”

`Life Dances Upon Life's Grave'

Much of the Japanese portion of the Bellevue Botanical Garden is cool, shaded and damp. Moss and lichens cover stones, trees and benches. Flowers and insects are scarce. The Yao Garden is dense with cedars, pines, rhododendrons, azaleas, viburnums and beautiful Japanese maples, and feels like a pocket of seclusion within the larger garden. Most of the foliage remains green. Friday morning we climbed a curving stone stairs and entered a golden light. The leaves of the locust tree above us have turned buttery yellow, the sunlight pouring through them and – what? the first word that came to mind was the somewhat fusty “burnished.” The leaves and light burnished us and the path, and for a moment our sun-mottled corner felt enchanted. I thought of “Autumn,” one of four poems that make up R.S. Thomas’ “The Seasons”:

“Happy the leaves
burnishing their own
downfall. Life dances
upon life’s grave.
It is we who inject
sadness into the migrant’s
cry. We are so long
in dying – time granted
to discover a purpose
in our decay? Could
we be cut open,
would there be more than
the saw’s wound, all
humanity’s rings widening
only towards ageing?
To creep in for shelter
under the bone’s tree
is to be charred by time’s
lightning stroke. The leaves
fall variously as do thoughts
to reveal the bareness
of the mind’s landscape
through which we must press on
towards the openness of its horizons.”

This is late Thomas, from Mass for Hard Times (1992), and dazzling: “Life dances/upon life’s grave.” Autumn rivals spring for the tonnage of fuel it lends clichés, but Thomas fashions a leafy cascade of metaphors that sounds faintly Japanese in my ear – perhaps colored by Yao Garden. Earlier we had watched an orb weaver wrapping a bee in silk. The insect twitched as its white cocoon grew thicker and more opaque. I blew on the web and the spider ignored me and went about his business. Matsuo Bashō writes:

"What voice,
What song, spider,
In the autumn?”

`That Eye-on-the-Object Look'

In the park with the kids Thursday morning, on the eighth day of the teachers’ strike, I read these familiar lines:

“You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,

you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.”

They are the opening lines of “Sext,” the third section of the seven-part “Horae Canonicae,” written by Auden between 1949 and 1954. The overall title refers to the canonical hours of the day when specific prayers are said, and Auden’s section titles refer to these offices: “Prime,” “Terce,” “Sext,” “Nones,” “Vespers,” “Compline,” and “Lauds.” One need not be a Christian or believer of any sort to find the poems beautiful and moving. In fact, I read the passage cited above in a distinctly secular and uncharitable context: I was doubting that many of the striking teachers possess Auden’s “eye-on-the-object look.” In the 17 years of my formal education, I met seven or eight with the gift of “forgetting themselves in a function,” all fondly remembered. Nor am I picking on teachers. The same may be said of plumbers and poets.

In the afternoon, Dave Lull passed along a link to a Times Literary Supplement review by Sean O’Brien of the third volume of prose published as part of The Complete Works of W.H. Auden. In it, O’Brien mentions “Horae Canonicae” and other poems from the same years. This was a pleasing coincidence but O’Brien, a fine English poet, has something disturbing to say, as suggested by the TLS headline: “How the serious, reasonable prose of a dead poet shames the living.” Hard words, but true:

“It is hard nowadays to name a single author who can demonstrate the same breadth of competence or wield the same authority as Auden in his time, or who can make serious matters look like the natural occupation of the intelligent general reader. Auden was of course sui generis, but the world has changed, and the subjects at the centre of his concerns, religion, history, philosophy, music and (most of all) poetry, have undergone developments of their own. More than that, in some probably unquantifiable way they no longer occupy the same securely central place in contemporary discourse. Many of those who in earlier generations would have felt some obligation to attend to such matters no longer feel it, and in any case no longer have the confidence to engage without the aid of a screen of simplification.

“The lack of confidence extends to the expert, too: before it does anything else,
seriousness is likely to have to apologize for itself and don the guise of Fun.”

I was hooked when O’Brien lamented our age’s absence of a writer “who can make serious matters look like the natural occupation of the intelligent general reader.” My kneejerk reaction was unqualified agreement until I remembered Geoffrey Hill and Les Murray (neither an American). But I’ll put aside such obvious nominations as impossibly utopian.

“The guise of Fun” is priceless. A plague of knowing whimsy infects American poetry and much of the rest of our literary world. Small minds with small gifts imitate pop culture and retreat into Chinese boxes of irony – a refusal to engage the world that becomes internalized as a species of cowardice. Readers, in turn, lower or abandon expectations. Here’s O’Brien:

“In a period when more than ever readers are apparently inclined to use the ability to `identify’ with fictional characters as more or less the only basis of literary judgement, such a disinterested approach as Auden’s seems unlikely to claim many votes, but time and again Auden’s responses to his reading are simply more interesting and more committed than those of his successors. He makes literature sound less like property and more like a challenge.”

O’Brien begins his review with a mention of Auden’s “The Poet and the City” (collected in The Dyer’s Hand) and I’ll finish this post with a sentence from the same essay:

“It is difficult for a modern artist to believe he can make an enduring object when he has no model of endurance to go by; he is more tempted than his predecessors to abandon the search for perfection as a waste of time and be content with sketches and improvisations.”

Auden – who died almost 35 years ago, on Sept. 29, 1973 -- is too kind.

`A Casual Glimpse of Something Very Ordinary'

Thanks to Dave Lull for passing along the new Paris Review interview with Marilynne Robinson. The novelist says:

“You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as `beauty.' Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning—that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting like Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! or Look at the human being! These are instances of genius. Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it’s not Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.”

`A Wall of Glass'

Between 1983 and 1987, Ecco Press published in paperback The Tales of Chekhov in 13 volumes. They contain the 201 stories Constance Garnett translated and published between 1916 and 1922. As a bonus, Ecco added Notebooks of Anton Chekhov and The Unknown Chekhov in the same uniform design. All were priced at $8.50 or $9.50, so one could own the essential core of Chekhov’s work (the set is not complete) for less than $150, though I remember Steven Millhauser saying he found the full set in a used bookstore in Cincinnati for a fraction of that.

I accumulated the Ecco edition incrementally. Many I found in The Golden Notebook, a bookstore in Woodstock, N.Y. The volumes are showing their age. A few are sun-bleached and the spines are glued not stitched so they creak when opened. No pages have yet fallen out. The books are particularly precious because each comes with a blurb on the back cover written by a contemporary writer: Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Hardwick, Leonard Michaels, Robert Stone, Cynthia Ozick, Susan Sontag, John Barth, Richard Howard , Robert Hass, William Maxwell, Harold Brodkey, Russell Banks, William Trevor, Eudora Welty and Raymond Carver.

Most of these writers are of little literary significance and the appearance of some (Hardwick, Michaels, Stone, Sontag, Brodkey, Banks, Carver) is embarrassing, but it’s good to have the testimonials of Ozick, Maxwell and Welty, especially as the latter two have subsequently died. Maxwell’s, not surprisingly, is the briefest and most rapturous. Here’s what he wrote for the back of Volume 10, The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories. He might be writing about himself:

“It seems to be part of the human condition that a wall of glass separates one life from another. For Chekhov it did not exist. Though no Church has seen fit to canonize him, he was nevertheless a saint. The greatest of his stories are, no matter how many times reread, always an experience that strikes deep into the soul and produces an alteration there. The reader who has lived through `Ward No. 6’ knows forever after that his own sanity is only provisional. As for those masterpieces, `The Lady with the Dog,’ `The Horse-Stealers,’ `Sleepy,’ `Gooseberries,’ `Above Love,’ `In the Ravine,’ – where else do you see so clearly the difference between light and dark, or how dark darkness can be?”

`To Start a Conversation Within You'

After long absence, a brief return to Cultural Amnesia. Here’s how Clive James concludes his chapter on the aphorist Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg:

“No writer, not even Chekhov in his short stories, can be Vermeer. A painter can leave you with nothing left to say. A writer leaves you with everything to say. It is the nature of his medium to start a conversation within you that will not stop until your death, and what he is really after is to be among the last voices you will hear.”

My first reaction was to refute a portion of James’ point: A painter – Matisse, say, or Hopper – can leave us with plenty to say. Hopper invites us to fill in the shadows or sun-lit blanks with stories, explanatory narratives from our own shadowed or sunny lives. But James is right. A painting is finite in a way literature is not, at least for print-minded people.

James’ choice of Chekhov is shrewd. In his stories, the Russian colonizes our imaginations as few writers do (Shakespeare, Henry James, Tolstoy, Proust, who else?). His people mingle with ours – that is, those we’ve known in life. From the shelf I pulled at random a book of Constance Garnett’s translations of the stories. It’s Volume 11, The School-Master and Other Stories. I open it to – a minor disappointment from 1886 – “Hush!” Early “humorous” Chekhov, the writer of sketches for Moscow newspapers. I remember it, though – a four-and-a-half-page comic portrait of a writer as tyrannical egotist. We know the type. Here is Ivan Yegoritch Krasnyhin in his own words:

“Shattered, soul-weary, a sick load of misery on the heart….and then to sit down and write. And this is called life! How is it nobody has described the agonizing discord in the soul of the writer who has to amuse the crowd when his heart is heavy or to shed tears at the word of command when his heart is light?”

It’s clownish, of course, but Chekhov (he was 26) is making fun of himself and others who choose to live by the pen then whine about their thankless task. Surely his Russian readers – and fellow writers – got the joke. My favorite moment comes in the middle of the night when Krasnyhin is trying to write but a “monotonous whispering” disturbs him. It’s his lodger in the next room praying:

“`I say!’ cries Krasnyhin. `Couldn’t you, please, say your prayers more quietly? You prevent me from writing!’

“`Very sorry…’ Foma Nikolaevitch answers timidly.”

I hope the last voice I hear is comically stoic like Chekhov’s (or Beckett’s), fully aware of life’s tedium, loneliness and heartbreak, and armed with a joke or well-aimed irony. V.S. Pritchett, addressing Chekhov’s insistence that his plays are not only comedies but farces, writes:

“He is asserting that life is a fish that cannot be netted by mood or doctrine, but continually glides away between sun and shadow.”

Yezzi on Disch

The late Tom Disch is remembered with affection and gratitude by David Yezzi in the September issue of The New Criterion. Yezzi's praise is heartfelt and formidable:

“Tom Disch was a true original, like Guy Davenport or … who? There are so few. It’s not that one agrees with everything such writers think and say (they can be, by their very natures, contrary and provocative). Rather, one admires the cast of mind that refuses to mince or recycle prepackaged notions and emotions. Tom Disch’s novels and poems may be applied as touchstones against cant and mealy-mouthed self-deception. Vigilance will be much harder with him gone.”

Oysters

Eight times in his 15-page story “The Beginning of an Idea,” the late John McGahern inserts these sentences, always italicized:

“The word Oysters was chalked on the wagon that carried Chekhov’s body to Moscow for burial. The coffin was carried in the oyster wagon because of the fierce heat of early July.”

Their author is Eva Lindberg, an unhappy theater director who wishes to write a novel or play about Chekhov’s life. The oyster anecdote is true but she never moves beyond those 32 words. She alludes to “Oysters,” a story Chekhov wrote in 1884, 20 years before his death, and which McGahern paraphrases. A man recalls an event that occurred in Moscow when he was 8 years old. He and his father are starving. They stand in front of a restaurant, the father working up the courage to beg. The boy sees a sign inside printed with the word “Oysters.” He asks what it means and his delirious father gives a confused explanation. The boy concludes an oyster is a monstrous frog. The father begs for money from “two gentlemen in top hats,” and the boy repeats “Oysters!” The men are amused and, in a hallucinatory scene, take the boy into the restaurant and buy him a plate of oysters for 10 rubles. Chekhov writes:

“I sat at a table and ate something slimy, salt with a flavour of dampness and mouldiness. I ate greedily without chewing, without looking and trying to discover what I was eating. I fancied that if I opened my eyes I should see glittering eyes, claws, and sharp teeth.”

The boy is so hungry and ignorant, he chews on the oyster shells and the crowd in the restaurant laughs at the spectacle. He passes out and wakes up thirsty in bed. His father is raving. He passes out again, wakes, and here are the story’s final words:

“At midday I was awakened by thirst, and looked for my father: he was still walking up and down and gesticulating.”

That’s it. Chekhov leaves everything in suspension, unresolved. We’re left to wonder what happened to the father and how the boy survived to tell his story. Eva is attracted to the story for the ironic symmetry it lends her two sentences about Chekhov’s body in the oyster wagon. She seems unmoved by the horror and comedy of the starving father and son, and the amusement they provide the diners in the restaurant. Eva is having an unhappy affair with a married man who likes his vodka -- aren’t they always unhappy? She quits the theater, resolves to dedicate herself to writing the Chekhov book, and a friend loans her a house in Spain. On the train she observes the sea from her compartment:

“At least it would not grow old. Its tides would ebb and flow, it would still yield up its oyster shells long after all the living had become the dead.”

I won’t spoil the ending though nothing good, of course, happens. Eva writes nothing. Oysters, their taste and smell, the idea of oysters – vulnerable living things encased in shells – are never far away. Eva remains self-involved and self-destructively credulous. In the end she peers out a train window, looking for a wagon with Oysters chalked on it. All she sees is an old Spanish woman in a black shawl “smiling on her.”

I thought again of McGahern’s story while reading Sakhalin Island. Even when engaged in medical inspections in the penal colony, gathering data for his reports, or enduring the tedium of travel, Chekhov is telling stories. On a ship he goes below deck and meets his fellow passengers. Among them is a woman not at all like Eva:

“Our lady travelling companion, the wife of a naval officer, had fled Vladivostok, having taken fright at the cholera there, and now, somewhat reassured, was returning. She had an enviable disposition. The very slightest reason was enough for her to go off in fits of the most unaffected, bubbling and joyous laughter, till her side ached, till she was in tears; she would begin to tell you something in her regional burring accent, and suddenly the laughter and gaiety would come gushing up like a fountain, and, looking at the lady, I would begin to laugh as well…”

Randall Jarrell might have had Chekhov, one of his favorite writers, in mind when he wrote: “Man is the animal that likes narration.”

`His Dictionary is Poor'

“His dictionary is poor, his combination of words almost trivial – the purple patch, the juicy verb, the hothouse adjective, the crème-de-menthe epithet, brought in on a silver tray, these were foreign to him. He was not a verbal innovator in the sense that Gogol was; his literary style goes to parties clad in its everyday suit. Thus Chekhov is a good example to give when one tries to explain that a writer may be a perfect artist without being exceptionally vivid in his verbal technique or exceptionally preoccupied with the way his sentences curve.”

That’s Nabokov explaining why Chekhov is not Nabokov and yet somehow remains a genius. A few sentences later in Lectures on Russian Literature, Nabokov says the great story writer “managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was.”

Style is not filigree stitched from the outside, a superfluous afterthought like sequins on a sweater. The best styles, gaudy or stringent, are those that express the matter at hand most effectively. Reading Sakhalin Island, I’m struck by the deftness and economy of Chekhov’s prose, which permits him to remain straight-faced while quietly satirical, as he often is in his stories. These qualities are evident even through the scrim of translation (by Brian Reeve, in the edition I’m reading).

The subject, a Russian penal colony in Siberia late in the 19th century, is grim but Chekhov, because of his complex vision and the elasticity of his prose, can be variously angry, compassionate, clinical and funny in a hellish world. He’s never binary in his judgments, do-gooder or reactionary. Imagine a book written today about American prisons – hectoring, self-righteous, without nuance or literary worth; in short, without style. Here’s a passage describing a driver he meets during his 11-week journey across northern Russia:

“Out of boredom I strike up a conversation with my elderly driver, and learn that he has been married sixteen years, that he has had eighteen children, of whom only three have died, and that his father and mother are still alive; that his father and mother are kirzhaks, that is to say, religious dissenters, that they do not smoke and have never seen a single town in their lives except for Ishim, but that he, the old driver, as a young man, allowed himself to mess around a bit, and smoked.”

If Chekhov were writing sociology, this incident would never be included, but our author/doctor can’t resist his fellow humans. He looks at a peasant or noble and sees a story. His storytelling compulsion reveals Chekhov as a democrat. He recognizes distinctions in social class but they mean nothing. His gift is for empathy and understanding. Remember, too, he was sick with the tuberculosis that would kill him at age 44. In his beautifully digressive essay “Chekhov in Sondrio” (included in Journey to the Land of The Flies), Aldo Buzzi places Sakhalin Island in the Russian context (lice, roaches, ice, vodka), along with Chekhov’s great stories, and reminds us of his heroism:

“Chekhov made this journey in 1890, over a hundred years ago, at the age of thirty. Already ill since ’84, he must have dealt with discomforts and fatigues of every kind.”

Even if you’re an old Chekhov hand, I suggest you read Sakhalin Island. It’s a beautiful book, a portrait of pre-Revolutionary Russia and in some ways a precursor of the so-called New Journalism. I’ll leave you with another bit of Chekhov:

“On pulling into the bank, the first thing the oarsmen do is to set abusing each other. They swear with malevolence, for no reason at all, and obviously in a half-asleep state. Listening to their choice vituperation, you might think that not only my driver, the horses and they themselves, but even the water, the ferry and the oars, have mothers.”

In his note to the passage Reeve tells us:

“Most Russian terms of abuse either relate to parts of one’s mother’s anatomy, or else take the form of injunctions to depart and perform intimate acts with one’s mother or the mother of the Devil.”

`Wedded For Ever'

The sky above the cloudiest city in the United States was blank and blue on Saturday as we cruised Elliott Bay, the blue-green harbor around which Seattle is built. We stood on the top deck of the tour boat admiring the skyline, the ships and the sense of immense, concentrated wealth. I began the one-hour tour with Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break” clanging in my head but soon moved on to a grander work from the 19th century.

A crew member on the P.A. system was our guide. His spiel was boosterish but studded with factoids, as they’re known. For instance, the tallest building in Seattle, the 76-story Columbia Center, is home to more lawyers than all of Japan. Casually, our host noted that Seattle was formally settled on Nov. 13, 1851, when Arthur A. Denny and company arrived and stayed, becoming the first permanent white settlers.

I had to double-check but that date sounded familiar. Sure enough, one day later, on Nov. 14, 1851, Harper and Brothers in New York City published Moby-Dick; or, The Whale – the first American edition. Robert Bentley of London had published an English edition a month earlier. What to make of this? It’s an amusing and meaningless near-convergence of events, nothing more, the sort of thing one thinks about while pondering the blue-green waters of Elliott Bay. As Ishmael says:

“Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.”

`A Lifetime of Autumns'

I read this passage from Louise Bogan’s 1961 journal –

“The long late light, in childhood. Autumn desolation. The windy raw autumn afternoon, with light and dark alternating over the hills and fields, and great sweeps of gray cloud giving the light its silence, its feeling of tears, of sorrow, of desperation. The light that would return, over a lifetime of autumns.”

-- and flashed on an autumn afternoon 40 years ago, a Sunday around the time of my 16th birthday. I had gone with my father to the lake where we spent our summers. He had work to do and I walked to the far side of the water and through an abandoned apple orchard. The light was as Bogan describes it, alternately brilliant -- shadows were long -- and diffused by high clouds. The remaining apples were hard and green or soft and brown. I wore a brown sweater and brushed my sleeve against a burdock, leaving stickers on the wool. I was a junior in high school and already some things seemed impossible.

I recall this otherwise trivial memory only because Bogan’s words brought it back to me with vividness and emotion. She is among the “special writers” I’ve described elsewhere, and this recollection is not the first her words have triggered in me. I already knew who she was that day in 1968 (she lived until 1970) because I read The New Yorker and I think I had read Alan Seager’s life of Theodore Roethke, Bogan’s one-time lover. Her work attracted me immediately and more lastingly than Roethke’s. I also loved or would eventually love some of the writers she loved – Thoreau, Henry James, Chekhov, Yeats, Colette, Elizabeth Bowen, Rilke, William Maxwell, Auden. In an exchange of e-mails with Ron Slate on Friday, he echoed some of my experience:

“I love Bogan too. The Elizabeth Frank bio made me so sad. Those years way, way up on the upper west side, grinding it out, the poems coming so slowly if at all. I'd give all of Bill Gates' money to write a poem as good as `Simple Autumnal.’ That line in the essay -- `the poem is always the last resort.’ It was so true for her -- and violated by almost all of us other practitioners.”

I’m glad Ron reminded me of “Simple Autumnal”:

“The measured blood beats out the year’s delay.
The tearless eyes and heart, forbidden grief,
Watch the burned, restless, but abiding leaf,
The brighter branches arming the bright day.

“The cone, the curving fruit should fall away,
The vine stem crumble, ripe grain know its sheaf.
Bonded to time, fires should have done, be brief,
But, serfs to sleep, they glitter and they stay.

“Because not last nor first, grief in its prime
Wakes in the day, and hears of life’s intent.
Sorrow would break the seal stamped over time
And set the baskets where the bough is bent.

“Full season’s come, yet filled trees keep the sky
And never scent the ground where they must lie.”

Bogan’s work will probably remain a minority taste. The sonnet suggests her customary method -- emotional volatility constrained by form. Bogan knew desolation, grief and immense sadness, but she knew the demands of art. To read her merely as a precursor of the “confessional” poets, a sort of proto-Anne Sexton, is a radical misunderstanding. She labored at her craft of artfully arranging words. As late as 1948 when she was 53, Bogan wrote in a letter to an aspiring book reviewer:

“This `writing with the ear’ is really the best technical practice you can give yourself. Remember that the reader’s attention span is usually v. short I cut and cut my sentences, right up to the last version; always keeping the adjectives down to the minimum and the adverbs practically to zero. The verb can do so much!”

This is from her 1934 journal:

“Whatever I do, apart from the short cry (lyric poetry) and the short remarks (journalism), must be in the form of notes. Mine is the talent of the cry or the cahier.”

`The Decisive Aspect of Things'

“I wonder where all of the carefully observed objects have gone in poetry – the willingness to let a poem hinge on the decisive aspect of things.”

That’s the poet Ron Slate in his review of Francis Ponge’s Mute Objects of Expression, posing a question I’ve asked myself, and not just of poetry. The taste is personal. I enjoy the work of writers who render creation – objects, yes, but cats, clouds, flowers, beaches, barns and children, too. It’s a measure of their engagement with the world and their attentiveness even to familiar detail. Paradoxically, devotion to the appearance of the physical world, to “the decisive aspect of things,” is a spiritual impulse. Hopkins’ “dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon” is more than a bird but it is a bird.

Louise Bogan shared this devotion. After reading Updike’s Rabbit, Run in 1960, the poet and longtime poetry critic for The New Yorker wrote to a friend: “And the flashes of weather and of the `American scene’: drugstores, highways, main streets, factories, used car lots!” For once, I endorse the use of an exclamation point. Updike, at his best, is a superb observer of objects. In A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, editor Mary Kinzie includes a selection from Bogan’s journals, “The Time of Day.” It begins with a passage from Thoreau’s journal, dated Feb. 5, 1855, that Bogan transcribed into her own in 1933:

“In a journal it is important in a few words to describe the weather, or characters of the day, as it affects our feelings. That which was so important at the time cannot be unimportant to remember.”

Thoreau’s caveat – “in a few words” – is critical. My father was the world’s worst storyteller. He had no sense of pacing or of his listeners’ patience. Every story, even a retelling of the route he followed to a friend’s house, was hobbled by needless detailing of wrong turns, sights seen and unseen, and estimates of gas consumption. Bogan’s detail selection is generous but judicious. In a journal entry from 1934 she writes:

“The month, the time of day; children are coming indoors from roads bordered by orchards heavy with apples, into rooms with looped-back curtains, and old mirrors. Among the dahlias and asters of the lots gardens, their mothers pull the dried clothes from the line, reaching their arms above their heads so that their cotton dresses under the shawl thrown about their shoulders are pulled tightly upward from the thin apron string binding their waists. The wind rattles the lattice over the wellhead; the house smells of freshly baked bread. It is already dark; the month goes on; the apples will be gathered tomorrow.

“The age when one looks at the date on pennies, watches people’s eyes and mouths, believes that something marvelous may go on in a shuttered house.”

No fuzzy impressionism, vague generalities or Thomas Wolfe windiness -- only particulars, with feeling. This is from Bogan’s journal of 1932:

“The early darkness in September comes as the most blessed relief in the year. Pale green celery tops sprout out of bags in the delivery boys’ carts and a mottled light falls over the shady side of the street, reflected from the windows in high buildings. Early morning in September.”

This is Edward Hopper in prose. In a 1951 poem Bogan writes of a catalpa tree: “Only the long pods remained; the tree was drained like a sieve.” This is precise, not precious, because catalpa pods resemble green beans washed in a sieve or colander. In “The Dragonfly” (1961) she describes the insect as “made of almost nothing / But of enough / To be great eyes / And diaphanous double vans.” Entomologists tell us 90 percent of a dragonfly’s brain is devoted to visual perception – like an ideal poet’s.

Not surprisingly, Slate wrote about A Poet’s Prose last year, and reproduces an early Bogan essay, “The Springs of Poetry,” omitted by Kinzie from her collection. In it, she refers to Yeats’ late work as “poems terribly beautiful, in which the hazy adverbial quality has no place, built of sentences reduced to the bones of noun, verb, and preposition.” Precision is somehow reliant on concision. We’re back to Thoreau’s “in a few words.”

I bought a new dress shirt on Thursday, and as I removed it from the plastic wrapper and detached the label and its loop of string from a button, I found myself looking forward to pulling out the pins with their egg-shaped heads, the cardboard backing, the folded sheet of tissue paper and the cardboard collar giving crisp form to the fabric – all the familiar details of a mundane and beautiful collection of objects. Let me borrow something else from Slate -- a passage about Ponge from Italo Calvino’s Why Read the Classics?:

“Taking the most humble object, the most everyday action, and trying to consider it afresh, abandoning every habit of perception, and describing it without any verbal mechanism that has been worn by use. And all this, not for some reason extraneous to the fact in itself (for, say, symbolism, ideology or aesthetics), but solely in order to reestablish a relationship with things as things."