Thanks to Levi Stahl, the Mills Brothers’ version of “Paper Doll” has been lilting in my head for a week. For readers unfamiliar with the singers and song, I’ll turn it over to Gary Giddins:
“Their biggest hit, the weirdly fetishist `Paper Doll,’ was the third biggest hit of the ‘40s, after `White Christmas’ and `Rudolf, the Red Nosed Reindeer’…They had velvety voices, impeccable diction, dreamy harmonies, supple time, and – especially in their early, more jazz-oriented years – a remarkable gimmick: they imitated instruments (trumpet, trombone, sax, tuba) so well that they subtitled their act Four Boys and a Guitar to stress the cleverness of their mimicry. When they muted their vocal brass effects, their riffs suggested the Ellington band. But straight as they were honest, they allowed their later work to be subsumed in a blandness that bespoke too many chic nightclubs and hacked-out arrangements.”
There’s some justice in the harshness of Giddins’ final judgment. If you listen to the Mills Brothers’ hits chronologically, from the early thirties to the late sixties, you’ll notice the spareness of the arrangements, emphasizing the virtuosity of the brothers’ voices, giving way to over-production. Some of the late recordings with Count Basie’s orchestra are tight and swinging but their last big hit, “Cab Driver” from 1968, is arranged like lounge music. Their voices, still strong and smooth, are drowned in schmaltz.
Levi inspired me to find a copy of The Mills Brother Story, a video documentary from 1986 built around a 1981 concert in Copenhagen. The vintage films are the best, including a black-and-white short (a sort of early music video) of the brothers singing “Paper Doll.” One of them sits apart, staring at a picture of Dorothy Dandridge. He cuts it out with scissors and she comes alive dancing, surrounded by the kneeling brothers who look as though they’re shooting craps. It’s hokey but wonderful and, as Giddins says of the song, “weirdly fetishist.”
In an interview, the brothers mention that “Paper Doll” was originally a B-side of “I’ll Be Around,” Alec Wilder’s gorgeous standard – a surprise to me. “Paper Doll” is irresistible fluff, impossible to imagine without the Mills Brothers; “I’ll Be Around,” from 1942, is wispily powerful and haunting. Here’s what Whitney Balliett wrote of it and Wilder’s other standards, including “It’s So Peaceful in the Country” and “While We’re Young”:
“His songs have an airy, elusive quality quite unlike that of any other American songwriter. The melodic lines flicker and turn unexpectedly, moving through surprising intervals and using rhythm in a purposeful, agile, jazz-based manner. The songs have a sequestered, intense gentleness, a subtle longing for what was and what might have been that eludes most ears and that demands singers of the rank of Mabel Mercer and Frank Sinatra and Mildred Bailey and Blossom Dearie.”
I’m unable to locate Wilder’s assessment of the Mill Brothers’ version of “I’ll Be Around,” even in Desmond Stone’s Alec Wilder in Spite of Himself: A Life of the Composer. The brothers and Sinatra both recorded the song in 1943, and Sinatra rerecorded it in 1955 for inclusion on In the Wee Small Hours. Stone reports the title of the song came to Wilder first, while he was riding in a cab in Baltimore. Several days later he found the words on a crumpled envelope and composed the song in 20 minutes, though the lyrics took longer. Stone writes:
“Here again, in `I’ll Be Around’ the melodic line is smooth and strong [like the Mills Brothers' vocal technique], and the leaping intervals have no trace of awkwardness. The song also shows Wilder’s penchant for working always a little off center, always a step or two away from the trodden path.”
In American Popular Song (1972), co-written with James T. Maher, Wilder writes of Irving Berlin’s “It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow” and Harold Arlen’s “My Shining Hour”: “I should like to add here that I find the latter touches me more profoundly. I believe that both songs eminently achieve the objective of, let us say, sexless innocence and distilled simplicity.”
The same can be said of “I’ll Be Around.” What I love about the song is its bitter-sweetness (hardly unusual in popular music) and understatement (almost nonexistent). Balliett said Wilder’s songs “form a parallel oeuvre – brainier, more original – to the songs of Gershwin and Berlin and Rodgers and Arlen.” That’s an audacious claim but to my taste an accurate one, just as the recordings of the Mills Brothers create a “parallel oeuvre” often superior to that of Billie Holiday and other highly touted jazz singers.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Thursday, October 30, 2008
`Spiritual Repasts'
I’m enjoying a favorite meal of fried fish, couscous and carrots. My kids like it too, in part because the youngest calls the side dish “goose-goose.” They thank me dutifully as I serve, as they’ve been taught, and unexpectedly I too wish to express gratitude for good food, family and friends, my books, the blog, the pumpkins we carved, the golden maple in the back yard, the whole damned thing. Mine is the dilemma of a thankful non-believer, but long ago a friend suggested that gratitude, if it’s nothing more than another precious, self-regarding “feeling,” is perfectly worthless. He suggested, instead, that I try to behave gratefully, and I’ve concluded that thankfulness-in-action is the foundation of a suitable life.
Charles Lamb wondered why people customarily reserve the saying of grace as a prelude to meals. In “Grace Before Meat” he writes:
“I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, these spiritual repasts -- a grace before Milton -- a grace before Shakspeare [sic] -- a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen? -- but, the received ritual having prescribed these forms to the solitary ceremony of manducation [“The act of chewing.”], I shall confine my observations to the experience which I have had of the grace, properly so called; commending my new scheme for extension to a niche in the grand philosophical, poetical, and perchance in part heretical, liturgy, now compiling by my friend Homo Humanus, for the use of a certain snug congregation of Utopian Rabelaesian Christians, no matter where assembled.”
This is Lamb in grand, prose-as-pyrotechnics form, and books as “spiritual repasts” is especially fine. Food and books are everywhere in Lamb’s life and work. Holbrook Jackson, who called Lamb an “epicure of letters,” also wrote that “Bibliophiles are gastronomes, gourmets, gourmands, epicures…”
In July 1998, my soon-to-be-wife and I were in the terminal of the Albany, N.Y., airport, waiting for a flight to Boston, where we would connect with another flight to Halifax, N.S., an hour’s drive from where we would marry in a few days. I watched a small plane taxi to the terminal and out stepped Daniel Berrigan, the poet and priest whom I had interviewed several times and gotten to know during weekend retreats in the Adirondacks. We shook hands and I introduced Dan to my fiancé. He thanked me for the “gift of meeting Sylvia.” That part I remember with precision. Then he offered a blessing, a sort of grace, something to do with the Marriage Feast at Cana. Sylvia and I were a little embarrassed but Dan plowed ahead. I’m certain he mentioned his old friend Thomas Merton and urged us to practice “mindfulness and thankfulness” – words he often used to close his letters. He walked away carrying a small satchel. In “Grace Before Meat,” Lamb writes:
“A short form upon these occasions [the saying of grace] is felt to want reverence; a long one, I am afraid, cannot escape the charge of impertinence. I do not quite approve of the epigrammatic conciseness with which that equivocal wag (but my pleasant school-fellow) C. V. L., when importuned for a grace used to inquire, first slyly leering down the table, `Is there no clergyman here?’ -- significantly adding, `thank G---.’”
Charles Lamb wondered why people customarily reserve the saying of grace as a prelude to meals. In “Grace Before Meat” he writes:
“I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, these spiritual repasts -- a grace before Milton -- a grace before Shakspeare [sic] -- a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen? -- but, the received ritual having prescribed these forms to the solitary ceremony of manducation [“The act of chewing.”], I shall confine my observations to the experience which I have had of the grace, properly so called; commending my new scheme for extension to a niche in the grand philosophical, poetical, and perchance in part heretical, liturgy, now compiling by my friend Homo Humanus, for the use of a certain snug congregation of Utopian Rabelaesian Christians, no matter where assembled.”
This is Lamb in grand, prose-as-pyrotechnics form, and books as “spiritual repasts” is especially fine. Food and books are everywhere in Lamb’s life and work. Holbrook Jackson, who called Lamb an “epicure of letters,” also wrote that “Bibliophiles are gastronomes, gourmets, gourmands, epicures…”
In July 1998, my soon-to-be-wife and I were in the terminal of the Albany, N.Y., airport, waiting for a flight to Boston, where we would connect with another flight to Halifax, N.S., an hour’s drive from where we would marry in a few days. I watched a small plane taxi to the terminal and out stepped Daniel Berrigan, the poet and priest whom I had interviewed several times and gotten to know during weekend retreats in the Adirondacks. We shook hands and I introduced Dan to my fiancé. He thanked me for the “gift of meeting Sylvia.” That part I remember with precision. Then he offered a blessing, a sort of grace, something to do with the Marriage Feast at Cana. Sylvia and I were a little embarrassed but Dan plowed ahead. I’m certain he mentioned his old friend Thomas Merton and urged us to practice “mindfulness and thankfulness” – words he often used to close his letters. He walked away carrying a small satchel. In “Grace Before Meat,” Lamb writes:
“A short form upon these occasions [the saying of grace] is felt to want reverence; a long one, I am afraid, cannot escape the charge of impertinence. I do not quite approve of the epigrammatic conciseness with which that equivocal wag (but my pleasant school-fellow) C. V. L., when importuned for a grace used to inquire, first slyly leering down the table, `Is there no clergyman here?’ -- significantly adding, `thank G---.’”
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
`The Secret Ministry of Cold'
Sometimes the most valuable service a middling writer can perform is to lead us to the work of a more gifted writer, as when I came to Faulkner by way of Sherwood Anderson and to Baudelaire from Poe. In the summer of 1971, in the long-gone Publix Bookmart in Cleveland, I bought a recently published paperback of The Testing Tree by Stanley Kunitz (whom I came to by way of Theodore Roethke, thus bolstering my theory). After leaving the bookstore I walked to the Greyhound station and caught a bus for Youngstown (after a stop next door at Hernando’s Hideaway). Today, I can’t imagine what I saw in Kunitz’s poems. The early “neo-metaphysical” work is mannered and dull; the late poems are slack and sentimental. “Journal for My Daughter” falls into the latter category, but on the bus it grabbed me for reasons I can no longer remember. Here is the poem’s eighth and final section:
“The night when Coleridge,
heavy-hearted,
bore his crying child outside,
he noted
that those brimming eyes
caught the reflection
of the starry sky,
and each suspended tear
made a sparkling moon.”
I didn’t know the source of the Coleridge anecdote, but it was enough to get me interested in reading more than the “greatest hits” I knew from high school. As I read more deeply, I came to associate the story in Kunitz’s poem with “Frost at Midnight,” the greatest of Coleridge’s “conversation poems.” In it, the poet sits by the fire with his sleeping infant son, Hartley, beside him. Unlike the Kunitz version, in Coleridge’s poem the father and child remain indoors (to do otherwise in February constitutes child abuse), nor is there mention of reflecting eyes. In the final lines, however, the moon makes its appearance:
“Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.”
The poem is sublime, of course, but that’s where the Kunitz-Coleridge linkage remained in my mind until I read Early Visions, 1772-1804, the first volume of Richard Holmes’ magisterial biography of Coleridge. In it, he explains that the version of “Frost at Midnight” we know is the product of a decade’s tinkering by its author, resulting in what Holmes calls “many alterations and refinements.” The original version, however, from 1798, “gives a more touching picture,” Holmes says. Here is the conclusion of the original poem:
“Or whether the secret ministry of cold
shall hang them up in silent icicles,
quietly shining to the quiet moon;
like those, my babe! which ere tomorrow's warmth
Have capp’d their sharp keen points with pendulous drops,
Will catch thine eye, and with their novelty
Suspend thy little soul; then make thee shout
And stretch and flutter from thy mother's arms,
As thou would'st fly for very eagerness.”
Now Hartley’s mother, Sara, enters the picture, as do the baby’s eyes reflecting drops from the melting icicles. And the moon. I’m not convinced this is Kunitz’s source for his own poem about a child. Perhaps a closer reader of Coleridge’s voluminous poetry and prose, or one more familiar than I with Kunitz’s work, can suggest the true source. My point is that Kunitz, 37 years ago on a Greyhound bus bound for Youngstown, inadvertently inspired my love of Coleridge – particularly his prose – and for that I’m grateful. This story is circuitous and incomplete, I know, as most good stories are, but that reminds me of Laurence Sterne, whom Coleridge in a lecture ranked with Rabelais as “the great writers of wit and humour.” What follows is a gloss on the post you are reading and on what this blog often attempts to do, and it comes is from Tristram Shandy:
“For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can by no means avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly; he will moreover have various
Accounts to reconcile:
Anecdotes to pick up:
Inscriptions to make out:
Stories to weave:
Traditions to shift:
Personages to call upon:
Panegyricks to paste up at this door;
Pasquinades at that: -- All which both the man and his mule are quite exempt from.”
“The night when Coleridge,
heavy-hearted,
bore his crying child outside,
he noted
that those brimming eyes
caught the reflection
of the starry sky,
and each suspended tear
made a sparkling moon.”
I didn’t know the source of the Coleridge anecdote, but it was enough to get me interested in reading more than the “greatest hits” I knew from high school. As I read more deeply, I came to associate the story in Kunitz’s poem with “Frost at Midnight,” the greatest of Coleridge’s “conversation poems.” In it, the poet sits by the fire with his sleeping infant son, Hartley, beside him. Unlike the Kunitz version, in Coleridge’s poem the father and child remain indoors (to do otherwise in February constitutes child abuse), nor is there mention of reflecting eyes. In the final lines, however, the moon makes its appearance:
“Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.”
The poem is sublime, of course, but that’s where the Kunitz-Coleridge linkage remained in my mind until I read Early Visions, 1772-1804, the first volume of Richard Holmes’ magisterial biography of Coleridge. In it, he explains that the version of “Frost at Midnight” we know is the product of a decade’s tinkering by its author, resulting in what Holmes calls “many alterations and refinements.” The original version, however, from 1798, “gives a more touching picture,” Holmes says. Here is the conclusion of the original poem:
“Or whether the secret ministry of cold
shall hang them up in silent icicles,
quietly shining to the quiet moon;
like those, my babe! which ere tomorrow's warmth
Have capp’d their sharp keen points with pendulous drops,
Will catch thine eye, and with their novelty
Suspend thy little soul; then make thee shout
And stretch and flutter from thy mother's arms,
As thou would'st fly for very eagerness.”
Now Hartley’s mother, Sara, enters the picture, as do the baby’s eyes reflecting drops from the melting icicles. And the moon. I’m not convinced this is Kunitz’s source for his own poem about a child. Perhaps a closer reader of Coleridge’s voluminous poetry and prose, or one more familiar than I with Kunitz’s work, can suggest the true source. My point is that Kunitz, 37 years ago on a Greyhound bus bound for Youngstown, inadvertently inspired my love of Coleridge – particularly his prose – and for that I’m grateful. This story is circuitous and incomplete, I know, as most good stories are, but that reminds me of Laurence Sterne, whom Coleridge in a lecture ranked with Rabelais as “the great writers of wit and humour.” What follows is a gloss on the post you are reading and on what this blog often attempts to do, and it comes is from Tristram Shandy:
“For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can by no means avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly; he will moreover have various
Accounts to reconcile:
Anecdotes to pick up:
Inscriptions to make out:
Stories to weave:
Traditions to shift:
Personages to call upon:
Panegyricks to paste up at this door;
Pasquinades at that: -- All which both the man and his mule are quite exempt from.”
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
`So There Is This Pink and Yellow Colour'
“Colours are what drive me most strongly, colours in painted pictures, but, most strongly of all, colours out of doors in the fresh cool air, the colours I see when I am walking in London streets, in the country or by the sea. In this northern suburb where I have lived all my life, the colours are exquisite.”
I share Stevie Smith’s penchant for vibrant color (the first of her three novels was Novel on Yellow Paper) as she outlines it in “What Poems Are Made Of.” Color is especially pleasing when surrounded by drabber shades, browns and grays, of which there are infinite gradations. In our neighborhood and much of greater Seattle conifers dominate, though their green is not uniform. Some of the cedars, for instance, are marbled with yellow-green and reddish-brown. In fall, maples are the chief color source – yellows, yellow-browns and reds. The only deciduous tree in our yard is a species new to me because it’s a Pacific native – the bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum). The leaves, some 12 inches or more across, turn yellow on the tree, then splotchily brown, then fall. On the ground they resemble crustaceans, especially when a breeze skitters them across the pavement. Also littering the ground are hundreds of pinecones, convincing replicas of dog turds.
I became aware of color’s capacity to heighten mood and sometimes induce euphoria in the fall of my freshman year at college. I had discovered Paul Klee, his paintings and diaries, on my own in the library. He favored a yellow palette, as some of his titles suggest -- “Cityscape with Yellow Windows,” “Landscape with Yellow Birds,” “Signs in Yellow.” His use of the color seems very un-Swiss and suggests a landscape in the Middle East or Southwestern U.S. At the time I fell for Klee, a black locust tree was growing outside the window of my dormitory room. Locust leaves are pinnate with oval leaflets, and turn buttery yellow in the fall. The color seemed extraordinarily vivid, on the tree and the wet sidewalk, and Klee and locust leaves are forever fused in my memory.
One of the reasons I’ll never grow bored enough to contemplate suicide is the proliferation of color in the world. Yellow in particular boosts morale, as do pale green, orange and most of the blue spectrum. Even certain rich grays, the color of slate, for instance, lift me. Colors I would never tolerate in clothing, furniture or wallpaper – pink, chartreuse, magenta – are thrilling in nature. Consider a field of purple loosestrife in the late summer. Or this from another Smith essay, “A London Suburb”:
“In the high-lying outer northern suburb the wind blows fresh and keen, the clouds drive swiftly before it, the pink almond blossom blows away. When the sun is going down in stormy red clouds the whole suburb is pink, the light is a pink light; the high brick walls that are still left standing where once the old estates were hold the pink light and throw it back. The laburnum flowers on the pavement trees are yellow, so there is this pink and yellow colour, and the blue-grey of the roadway, that are special to this suburb. The slim stems of the garden trees make a dark line against the delicate colours. There is also the mauve and white lilac.”
I share Stevie Smith’s penchant for vibrant color (the first of her three novels was Novel on Yellow Paper) as she outlines it in “What Poems Are Made Of.” Color is especially pleasing when surrounded by drabber shades, browns and grays, of which there are infinite gradations. In our neighborhood and much of greater Seattle conifers dominate, though their green is not uniform. Some of the cedars, for instance, are marbled with yellow-green and reddish-brown. In fall, maples are the chief color source – yellows, yellow-browns and reds. The only deciduous tree in our yard is a species new to me because it’s a Pacific native – the bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum). The leaves, some 12 inches or more across, turn yellow on the tree, then splotchily brown, then fall. On the ground they resemble crustaceans, especially when a breeze skitters them across the pavement. Also littering the ground are hundreds of pinecones, convincing replicas of dog turds.
I became aware of color’s capacity to heighten mood and sometimes induce euphoria in the fall of my freshman year at college. I had discovered Paul Klee, his paintings and diaries, on my own in the library. He favored a yellow palette, as some of his titles suggest -- “Cityscape with Yellow Windows,” “Landscape with Yellow Birds,” “Signs in Yellow.” His use of the color seems very un-Swiss and suggests a landscape in the Middle East or Southwestern U.S. At the time I fell for Klee, a black locust tree was growing outside the window of my dormitory room. Locust leaves are pinnate with oval leaflets, and turn buttery yellow in the fall. The color seemed extraordinarily vivid, on the tree and the wet sidewalk, and Klee and locust leaves are forever fused in my memory.
One of the reasons I’ll never grow bored enough to contemplate suicide is the proliferation of color in the world. Yellow in particular boosts morale, as do pale green, orange and most of the blue spectrum. Even certain rich grays, the color of slate, for instance, lift me. Colors I would never tolerate in clothing, furniture or wallpaper – pink, chartreuse, magenta – are thrilling in nature. Consider a field of purple loosestrife in the late summer. Or this from another Smith essay, “A London Suburb”:
“In the high-lying outer northern suburb the wind blows fresh and keen, the clouds drive swiftly before it, the pink almond blossom blows away. When the sun is going down in stormy red clouds the whole suburb is pink, the light is a pink light; the high brick walls that are still left standing where once the old estates were hold the pink light and throw it back. The laburnum flowers on the pavement trees are yellow, so there is this pink and yellow colour, and the blue-grey of the roadway, that are special to this suburb. The slim stems of the garden trees make a dark line against the delicate colours. There is also the mauve and white lilac.”
Monday, October 27, 2008
`Few Men Have Been Less Metaphysical'
As I’ve been rereading Montaigne: A Biography by Donald M. Frame, who sketches the essayist’s life and thought with thoroughness and clarity, I have frequently been reminded of another writer,our contemporary and one of Montaigne’s leading successors, Theodore Dalrymple. Throughout the book, Frame pauses to distill Montaigne’s thought or the pattern of his life, and with striking regularity these capsules read like profiles of the Good Doctor. I’ve scanned Dalrymple’s work, in print and online, and found passing references to Montaigne but no extended treatment. Here are some of the pertinent excerpts I’ve noted in Frame’s biography:
“Montaigne’s central concern was always man and his life, why we behave as we do, how we should. Few men have been less metaphysical. His interest is in the here and now, not in the unknowable hereafter. A psychologist of curiosity and acumen, he is ultimately a moralist seeking to assess, as well as understand, his actions and those of others.” [page 148]
“For all his variability, Montaigne is basically conservative, not radical, an accepter, not a reformer, seeking harmony, not conflict, within.” [page 157]
“He was always fascinated by human motivation and behavior. His judgments of authors read before he began to write show the same curiosity as he feels about his ancestors. From the first the essays reveal his interest in `lofty and hazardous undertaking’ and his awareness of what it requires: `We must probe the inside and discover what springs set men in motion.’” [page 182]
“He likes his language just as it is, `dry and thorny, with free and unruly movements.’ His order need not be logical; it must be that of his mind: `I have no other marshal but fortune to arrange my bits….I want people to see my natural and ordinary pace, however off the track it is. I let myself go as I am.’ For the style must be part of the man and of his portrait.” [page 187]
“Writing at first to make his wandering mind behave, he had moved from compiling anecdotes to probing the ills that menace man and their possible remedies; from this to a skeptical rejection of presumptuous faith in reason; and from this to the study and portrayal of self, for which he developed the essay as a form and a method. After exposing his and our limitations, he had displayed our resources.” [page 201]
“I believe it is above all his sturdy, honest independence, his cheerful self-acceptance, that draws the crowd of readers to his book today. Our love of moral independence is ambivalent; our anxiety and sense of guilt make us often hanker rather for an `escape from freedom.’ And here we have a man, not the best that ever lived no doubt but assuredly far from the worst and better than most of us, who with scandalous serenity lays himself on the line and says in effect, quite simply, Here I am.” [page 323]
What these passages suggest is nothing so simple as “influence.” They hint at affinities that transcend culture and nationality between writers separated by four centuries. Both strive for honesty as the prerequisite virtue. Both question what Orwell called “smelly little orthodoxies.” Without narcissism, both look inward and judge themselves by the same vigorous standards they do their fellows. Both stir us to strive for comparable honesty.
Last week I linked to a brief essay in the British Medical Journal in which Dalrymple suggested would-be writers read the work of E. Spencer Shew, a one-time crime correspondent for the Daily Express, Dalrymple calls him “a master of concision, who could convey atmosphere and character in a few exquisitely chosen words,” and his books include A Companion to Murder (1960) and A Second Companion to Murder (1961). I found the American edition of the latter in the library. It’s written in the form of an encyclopedia. Each alphabetized entry is devoted to an English murder from the first half of the 20th century. The book is compulsively readable, as well-written accounts of depravity usually are. Dalrymple was right about Shew’s gift for concision. Consider two sentences from the four-and-half-page entry given Alma Victoria Rattenbury, accused with her lover of murdering her husband in 1935, and savor Shew’s descending chain of adjectives:
“Alma Rattenbury was an elegant, indeed beautiful woman. She was also a generous, kindly creature, artistic, gregarious, passionate, emotionally unstable, entirely amoral, faintly vulgar and rather silly.”
Montaigne and Dalrymple, I’m certain, would be intrigued by Mrs. Rattenbury, as Shew obviously is and as we are.
“Montaigne’s central concern was always man and his life, why we behave as we do, how we should. Few men have been less metaphysical. His interest is in the here and now, not in the unknowable hereafter. A psychologist of curiosity and acumen, he is ultimately a moralist seeking to assess, as well as understand, his actions and those of others.” [page 148]
“For all his variability, Montaigne is basically conservative, not radical, an accepter, not a reformer, seeking harmony, not conflict, within.” [page 157]
“He was always fascinated by human motivation and behavior. His judgments of authors read before he began to write show the same curiosity as he feels about his ancestors. From the first the essays reveal his interest in `lofty and hazardous undertaking’ and his awareness of what it requires: `We must probe the inside and discover what springs set men in motion.’” [page 182]
“He likes his language just as it is, `dry and thorny, with free and unruly movements.’ His order need not be logical; it must be that of his mind: `I have no other marshal but fortune to arrange my bits….I want people to see my natural and ordinary pace, however off the track it is. I let myself go as I am.’ For the style must be part of the man and of his portrait.” [page 187]
“Writing at first to make his wandering mind behave, he had moved from compiling anecdotes to probing the ills that menace man and their possible remedies; from this to a skeptical rejection of presumptuous faith in reason; and from this to the study and portrayal of self, for which he developed the essay as a form and a method. After exposing his and our limitations, he had displayed our resources.” [page 201]
“I believe it is above all his sturdy, honest independence, his cheerful self-acceptance, that draws the crowd of readers to his book today. Our love of moral independence is ambivalent; our anxiety and sense of guilt make us often hanker rather for an `escape from freedom.’ And here we have a man, not the best that ever lived no doubt but assuredly far from the worst and better than most of us, who with scandalous serenity lays himself on the line and says in effect, quite simply, Here I am.” [page 323]
What these passages suggest is nothing so simple as “influence.” They hint at affinities that transcend culture and nationality between writers separated by four centuries. Both strive for honesty as the prerequisite virtue. Both question what Orwell called “smelly little orthodoxies.” Without narcissism, both look inward and judge themselves by the same vigorous standards they do their fellows. Both stir us to strive for comparable honesty.
Last week I linked to a brief essay in the British Medical Journal in which Dalrymple suggested would-be writers read the work of E. Spencer Shew, a one-time crime correspondent for the Daily Express, Dalrymple calls him “a master of concision, who could convey atmosphere and character in a few exquisitely chosen words,” and his books include A Companion to Murder (1960) and A Second Companion to Murder (1961). I found the American edition of the latter in the library. It’s written in the form of an encyclopedia. Each alphabetized entry is devoted to an English murder from the first half of the 20th century. The book is compulsively readable, as well-written accounts of depravity usually are. Dalrymple was right about Shew’s gift for concision. Consider two sentences from the four-and-half-page entry given Alma Victoria Rattenbury, accused with her lover of murdering her husband in 1935, and savor Shew’s descending chain of adjectives:
“Alma Rattenbury was an elegant, indeed beautiful woman. She was also a generous, kindly creature, artistic, gregarious, passionate, emotionally unstable, entirely amoral, faintly vulgar and rather silly.”
Montaigne and Dalrymple, I’m certain, would be intrigued by Mrs. Rattenbury, as Shew obviously is and as we are.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
`A Book You'd Be Happy to Read Again and Again'
“For an instant Mr Newman succeeded in making it plain that he, like any man of his business experience, was meant for better things. A moment later, in an interesting ceremony which took place in his heart, Mr Newman surrendered his well-loved white collar. He knew that Mr Shanahan, with that dark vision peculiar to personnel men, had witnessed the whole thing.”
Do you hear echoes of Dubliners, its compacted language and shabby-genteel lives? J.F. Powers, dead almost 10 years, professed admiration for two fiction writers, Joyce and Evelyn Waugh, both Catholic and, like Powers, irrepressibly funny at their most serious. Into the waiting room Saturday, on the eve of my 56th birthday, I carried The Stories of J.F. Powers and reread “Renner” and “The Old Bird, A Love Story.” The passage above is from the latter. Both stories are priestless, rare in Powers’ small body of work – two novels, three collections of stories.
Mr Newman is old and unemployed, and his wife doesn’t work outside the home. He has always worked in an office. From a reference to “non-defense industries,” we know World War II casts a shadow across the story. Mr Newman is eager to please and his sense of pride is elastic. He surprises himself and gets hired and put to work immediately in the shipping room. He packs goods in boxes and binds them with twine:
“Mr Newman, gritting his false teeth, tackled his first assignment for the company: a half-dozen sets of poker chips, a box of rag dolls, 5,000 small American flags, and a boy’s sled going to Waupaca, Wisconsin.”
For the first time in his life, Mr Newman punches a time clock. He counts his change before spending 15 cents on a hamburger and coffee. The “vaultlike solemnity” of the washroom impresses him. He is an elderly man who often feels like a baffled child. He overhears his boss tell the personnel man:
“Yeah, when you said the old bird was handy with rope I thought, boy, he’s old enough to think about using some on himself. My God, Shanahan, if this keeps up we’ll have to draft them from the old people’s home.”
At home, Mr. Newman is ashamed and briefly testy with his wife. There’s no mention of hugs or kisses but they seem fond and respectful. She opens the organdie curtains and together they marvel:
“Snowflakes tumbled in feathery confusion past the yellow light burning in the court, wonderfully white against the night, smothering the whole dirty, roaring, guilty city in innocence and silence and beauty.”
Do you hear another echo from Dubliners, of “The Dead,” its final, resolving chords?:
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
But “The Old Bird, A Love Story” is not finished. Mr Newman half-brags, “I’ll bet you had no idea your husband was so handy with rope.” And then, “The people, the ones I’ve met at least – well, they all seem very nice.” Here’s the rest:
“`Then maybe they’ll keep you after Christmas, Charley!’
“He looked sharply at her and could tell she was sorry she’d said that. She understood what must follow. He opened his mouth to speak, said nothing, and then, closing his eyes to the truth, he said:
“`Yes. You know, I think they will. I’m sure of it.’
“He coughed. That was not the way it was at all. It had happened again. He was the bad actor again. His only audience smiled and loved him.”
In 13 pages, Powers renders the fear and shame of aging, the importance of work and the mutual dependence of a long-married couple – more than many novels, but gracefully, economically, without false sentiment. In his introduction to Powers’ Stories, Denis Donoghue says it better than I:
“A work of literature is a book you’d be happy to read again and again – like the book in your hand.”
Do you hear echoes of Dubliners, its compacted language and shabby-genteel lives? J.F. Powers, dead almost 10 years, professed admiration for two fiction writers, Joyce and Evelyn Waugh, both Catholic and, like Powers, irrepressibly funny at their most serious. Into the waiting room Saturday, on the eve of my 56th birthday, I carried The Stories of J.F. Powers and reread “Renner” and “The Old Bird, A Love Story.” The passage above is from the latter. Both stories are priestless, rare in Powers’ small body of work – two novels, three collections of stories.
Mr Newman is old and unemployed, and his wife doesn’t work outside the home. He has always worked in an office. From a reference to “non-defense industries,” we know World War II casts a shadow across the story. Mr Newman is eager to please and his sense of pride is elastic. He surprises himself and gets hired and put to work immediately in the shipping room. He packs goods in boxes and binds them with twine:
“Mr Newman, gritting his false teeth, tackled his first assignment for the company: a half-dozen sets of poker chips, a box of rag dolls, 5,000 small American flags, and a boy’s sled going to Waupaca, Wisconsin.”
For the first time in his life, Mr Newman punches a time clock. He counts his change before spending 15 cents on a hamburger and coffee. The “vaultlike solemnity” of the washroom impresses him. He is an elderly man who often feels like a baffled child. He overhears his boss tell the personnel man:
“Yeah, when you said the old bird was handy with rope I thought, boy, he’s old enough to think about using some on himself. My God, Shanahan, if this keeps up we’ll have to draft them from the old people’s home.”
At home, Mr. Newman is ashamed and briefly testy with his wife. There’s no mention of hugs or kisses but they seem fond and respectful. She opens the organdie curtains and together they marvel:
“Snowflakes tumbled in feathery confusion past the yellow light burning in the court, wonderfully white against the night, smothering the whole dirty, roaring, guilty city in innocence and silence and beauty.”
Do you hear another echo from Dubliners, of “The Dead,” its final, resolving chords?:
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
But “The Old Bird, A Love Story” is not finished. Mr Newman half-brags, “I’ll bet you had no idea your husband was so handy with rope.” And then, “The people, the ones I’ve met at least – well, they all seem very nice.” Here’s the rest:
“`Then maybe they’ll keep you after Christmas, Charley!’
“He looked sharply at her and could tell she was sorry she’d said that. She understood what must follow. He opened his mouth to speak, said nothing, and then, closing his eyes to the truth, he said:
“`Yes. You know, I think they will. I’m sure of it.’
“He coughed. That was not the way it was at all. It had happened again. He was the bad actor again. His only audience smiled and loved him.”
In 13 pages, Powers renders the fear and shame of aging, the importance of work and the mutual dependence of a long-married couple – more than many novels, but gracefully, economically, without false sentiment. In his introduction to Powers’ Stories, Denis Donoghue says it better than I:
“A work of literature is a book you’d be happy to read again and again – like the book in your hand.”
Saturday, October 25, 2008
`Such Books of Rubbish on Which Children Waste Their Time'
I trust we can believe Montaigne when, in “Of the Education of Children,” he professes that the first book he loved was Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
“For at about seven or eight years of age I would steal away from any other pleasure to read them, inasmuch as this language was my mother tongue, and it was the easiest book I knew and the best suited by its content to my tender age.”
In theory, there’s no reason a bright child of eight or even younger can’t read and enjoy Ovid, Swift, the fables of LaFontaine or Tolstoy’s parables. Around that age I inhaled a child’s edition of the Odyssey and Defoe’s straight-up version of Robinson Crusoe because I was naïve enough to mistake them for adventure stories, not literature. I thought of these early reading experiences Friday afternoon as were worked in the library of our sons’ grade school. The librarian appeared to be identical to the one I had at Pearl Road Elementary some 50 years ago in Cleveland. She wore her hair in the same tight perm, had the same glasses with rhinestone-encrusted frames and loudly told students to be quiet.
Our job was to alphabetize the shelves, first in fiction and then in the 500’s. In grade school, the 500’s attract a lot of attention, especially from male readers – dinosaurs, carnivorous plant, snakes, spiders, insects. The school is brand-new but many of the books are worn and out-of-date in their science. Others came from the cute school of kiddie lit – Barnacles Eat with Their Feet, Trout are Made of Trees, Extinction is Forever, Wonderful Pussy Willows. I left the library suspecting we underestimate the capacity of children to embrace a challenge, learn from it and wish to seek another. When we over-simplify and sugarcoat, kids learn to expect even less of themselves, and so we perpetuate a quiet, passive dumbness – ripe for video games and television. Here are Montaigne’s subsequent sentences [in Donald Frame’s translation]:
“For as regards the Lancelots of the Lake, the Amadises, the Huons of Bordeaux, and such books of rubbish on which children waste their time, I did not know even their names, and I still do not know their substance, so strict was my discipline…At that point, I happened by remarkable good fortune to come in contact with a tutor who was an understanding man, who knew enough to connive clearly at this frivolity of mine and others like it. For by this means I went right through Virgil’s Aeneid, and then Terence, and then Plautus, and some Italian comedies, always lured on by the pleasantness of the subject. If he had been foolish enough to break this habit, I think I should have got nothing out of school but a hatred of books, as do nearly all our noblemen.”
Earlier I mentioned Robinson Crusoe, which reminded me of a time about six years ago in upstate New York when I was tutoring high-school students in reading and composition. All were dull and without imagination but one boy was obstinately, pridefully so. My job was to usher him through Defoe’s novel, which I have always thought of as a model of irresistible plotting and transparent prose. Who can resist such a story? We read the book together, syllable by syllable, side by side, seated at a table in his school. I didn’t expect an explication de texte and would have settled for rudimentary comprehension and human identification with poor Crusoe. What I got was sullen, angry contempt – for the book, language, the school, me and for himself. He was no nobleman but, as Montaigne says, he got “nothing out of school but a hatred of books.”
“For at about seven or eight years of age I would steal away from any other pleasure to read them, inasmuch as this language was my mother tongue, and it was the easiest book I knew and the best suited by its content to my tender age.”
In theory, there’s no reason a bright child of eight or even younger can’t read and enjoy Ovid, Swift, the fables of LaFontaine or Tolstoy’s parables. Around that age I inhaled a child’s edition of the Odyssey and Defoe’s straight-up version of Robinson Crusoe because I was naïve enough to mistake them for adventure stories, not literature. I thought of these early reading experiences Friday afternoon as were worked in the library of our sons’ grade school. The librarian appeared to be identical to the one I had at Pearl Road Elementary some 50 years ago in Cleveland. She wore her hair in the same tight perm, had the same glasses with rhinestone-encrusted frames and loudly told students to be quiet.
Our job was to alphabetize the shelves, first in fiction and then in the 500’s. In grade school, the 500’s attract a lot of attention, especially from male readers – dinosaurs, carnivorous plant, snakes, spiders, insects. The school is brand-new but many of the books are worn and out-of-date in their science. Others came from the cute school of kiddie lit – Barnacles Eat with Their Feet, Trout are Made of Trees, Extinction is Forever, Wonderful Pussy Willows. I left the library suspecting we underestimate the capacity of children to embrace a challenge, learn from it and wish to seek another. When we over-simplify and sugarcoat, kids learn to expect even less of themselves, and so we perpetuate a quiet, passive dumbness – ripe for video games and television. Here are Montaigne’s subsequent sentences [in Donald Frame’s translation]:
“For as regards the Lancelots of the Lake, the Amadises, the Huons of Bordeaux, and such books of rubbish on which children waste their time, I did not know even their names, and I still do not know their substance, so strict was my discipline…At that point, I happened by remarkable good fortune to come in contact with a tutor who was an understanding man, who knew enough to connive clearly at this frivolity of mine and others like it. For by this means I went right through Virgil’s Aeneid, and then Terence, and then Plautus, and some Italian comedies, always lured on by the pleasantness of the subject. If he had been foolish enough to break this habit, I think I should have got nothing out of school but a hatred of books, as do nearly all our noblemen.”
Earlier I mentioned Robinson Crusoe, which reminded me of a time about six years ago in upstate New York when I was tutoring high-school students in reading and composition. All were dull and without imagination but one boy was obstinately, pridefully so. My job was to usher him through Defoe’s novel, which I have always thought of as a model of irresistible plotting and transparent prose. Who can resist such a story? We read the book together, syllable by syllable, side by side, seated at a table in his school. I didn’t expect an explication de texte and would have settled for rudimentary comprehension and human identification with poor Crusoe. What I got was sullen, angry contempt – for the book, language, the school, me and for himself. He was no nobleman but, as Montaigne says, he got “nothing out of school but a hatred of books.”
Friday, October 24, 2008
`Pure Contraption'
On the morning Nige wrote about his devotion to Bach, Gram Parsons and Schubert, I listened in my car to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Die Winterreise. An hour earlier I had suggested to a friend that he listen to the Mills Brothers. I love Schubert but I was using him, in part, prophylactically: I wanted to get “Glow Worm” out of my head. I’ve written about Schubert before, here and here, but Nige speaks for me when he writes:
“Unlike the cleverclogs who write the liner notes, I have little technical knowledge of music, so my responses are almost entirely emotional (very emotional -- music moves me to tears far more easily than any other art form).”
When music hits me – and often it doesn’t -- it’s unmediated, pre-rational and pre-critical, not at all the way I read King Lear or look at a Matisse. Music is to poetry and painting as the sense of smell is to the sense of sight. I’m musically ignorant enough to believe that music is about something, often something quite emotional. When listening to good jazz Larkin said he was reduced to “a grinning, jigging wordlessness, interspersed with a grunt or two at specially good bits.” Music inspires inarticulation. I’m at my least coherent listening to Casals playing Bach’s cello suites, The Band’s second album, middle-period Bill Evans, Dylan singing “I’ll Keep It with Mine” or Satie’s “Gymnopédies.”
This December 70 years ago Auden wrote “The Composer” (the same month he wrote “Musée des Beaux Arts,” “The Novelist,” “Rimbaud” and “A.E. Housman,” among other beauties):
“All the others translate: the painter sketches
A visible world to love or reject;
Rummaging into his living, the poet fetches
The images out that hurt and connect.
“From Life to Art by painstaking adaption
Relying on us to cover the rift;
Only your notes are pure contraption,
Only your song is an absolute gift.
“Pour out your presence, O delight, cascading
The falls of the knee and the weirs of the spine,
Our climate of silence and doubt invading;
“You, alone, alone, O imaginary song,
Are unable to say an existence is wrong,
And pour out your forgiveness like a wine.”
In his sonnet, Auden emphasizes the directness of music at the other end of the process -- for the composer, not the listener: “Only your notes are pure contraption.” Nothing seems more transcendentally difficult, nearly impossible, than musical composition and performance. For mere listeners, music is among the chief privileges of being human. As a college freshman, my roommate (the son of Austrian and Slovak immigrants) introduced me to Dvořák, Smetana and Janáček, and I introduced him to Miles Davis and An American in Paris. Once, with Gershwin on the stereo, Mike said: “I wish I could just listen to music for the rest of my life.” For now, listen to Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice:
“The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.”
“Unlike the cleverclogs who write the liner notes, I have little technical knowledge of music, so my responses are almost entirely emotional (very emotional -- music moves me to tears far more easily than any other art form).”
When music hits me – and often it doesn’t -- it’s unmediated, pre-rational and pre-critical, not at all the way I read King Lear or look at a Matisse. Music is to poetry and painting as the sense of smell is to the sense of sight. I’m musically ignorant enough to believe that music is about something, often something quite emotional. When listening to good jazz Larkin said he was reduced to “a grinning, jigging wordlessness, interspersed with a grunt or two at specially good bits.” Music inspires inarticulation. I’m at my least coherent listening to Casals playing Bach’s cello suites, The Band’s second album, middle-period Bill Evans, Dylan singing “I’ll Keep It with Mine” or Satie’s “Gymnopédies.”
This December 70 years ago Auden wrote “The Composer” (the same month he wrote “Musée des Beaux Arts,” “The Novelist,” “Rimbaud” and “A.E. Housman,” among other beauties):
“All the others translate: the painter sketches
A visible world to love or reject;
Rummaging into his living, the poet fetches
The images out that hurt and connect.
“From Life to Art by painstaking adaption
Relying on us to cover the rift;
Only your notes are pure contraption,
Only your song is an absolute gift.
“Pour out your presence, O delight, cascading
The falls of the knee and the weirs of the spine,
Our climate of silence and doubt invading;
“You, alone, alone, O imaginary song,
Are unable to say an existence is wrong,
And pour out your forgiveness like a wine.”
In his sonnet, Auden emphasizes the directness of music at the other end of the process -- for the composer, not the listener: “Only your notes are pure contraption.” Nothing seems more transcendentally difficult, nearly impossible, than musical composition and performance. For mere listeners, music is among the chief privileges of being human. As a college freshman, my roommate (the son of Austrian and Slovak immigrants) introduced me to Dvořák, Smetana and Janáček, and I introduced him to Miles Davis and An American in Paris. Once, with Gershwin on the stereo, Mike said: “I wish I could just listen to music for the rest of my life.” For now, listen to Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice:
“The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.”
Thursday, October 23, 2008
The Doctor Prescribes
The good doctor, Theodore Dalrymple, offers excellent advice to medical students and anyone else wishing to write:
“I had only three pieces of advice to give: firstly, that they should continue in the hospital for a few more years, because human nature was concentrated and distilled there as if for the express purpose of training writers; secondly, that on no account should they consort with academics of the humanities departments of any university, for to do so was the primrose path to stylistic perdition; and finally, that they should read a great deal.”
“I had only three pieces of advice to give: firstly, that they should continue in the hospital for a few more years, because human nature was concentrated and distilled there as if for the express purpose of training writers; secondly, that on no account should they consort with academics of the humanities departments of any university, for to do so was the primrose path to stylistic perdition; and finally, that they should read a great deal.”
`If Sack and Sugar Be a Fault'
“If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked! If to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned: if to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh's lean kine are to be loved. No, my good lord; banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins; but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant, being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish not him thy Harry's company, banish not him thy Harry's company: banish plump Jack, and banish all the world!”
Banish not Falstaff, indeed. It can’t be done. Without looking we see him daily walking and arguing with Don Quixote, Emma Bovary and Bellow’s Tommy Wilhelm – fictional characters so real and familiar they supplant some of their flesh-and-blood cousins. The lines above are from Henry IV, Part I, one of Orson Welles’ sources for Chimes at Midnight. I’ve watched it again just 16 months after the last time, which I wrote about here. It’s becoming one of my favorite films, certainly my favorite among Welles’, and much of this has to do with the character of Falstaff. I’m surprised how much I like him. He’s a prideful coward and liar, and endlessly sympathetic, perhaps because he’s big and round enough to remind us sooner or later of ourselves. Shakespeare almost dares us to like him, a dare made more difficult for a contemporary audience by Falstaff’s dimensions. We like our heroes steroidal or lean, not spherical.
I’m reading The Arts (1937) by the Dutch-American writer-illustrator Hendrik Willem Van Loon, who was much loved by Guy Davenport. The book is staggeringly ambitious – at 680 pages, of Falstaffian proportions -- and carries a formidable subtitle: The Story of Painting and Sculpture and Music as Well as All the So-Called Minor Arts from the Days of the Caveman Until the Present Time. Van Loon’s manner is not scholarly. He is confiding, intimate, conversational and gossipy, so I was not surprised to find this in his chapter on the Baroque:
“The period of the Baroque was the ideal age for fat people. Perhaps it would be better to call them heavy. For most of these men led very active lives. The extra weight they carried about with them was not an evidence of physical laziness. It was the result of heavy living, heavy eating, heavy drinking, of deep slumbers after heavy meals. All of which contributed to make this an ideal age for the portrait painter.”
This is Falstaff-as-burgher, veneered with respectability. Falstaff contains multitudes. So does Les Murray, the ample-figured Australian poet who celebrated his 70th birthday on Oct. 17. Watching Chimes at Midnight again reminded me of the final line of Fredy Neptune, Murray’s wonderful novel-in-verse. He might be speaking of Falstaff:
“But there’s too much in life: you can’t describe it.”
Banish not Falstaff, indeed. It can’t be done. Without looking we see him daily walking and arguing with Don Quixote, Emma Bovary and Bellow’s Tommy Wilhelm – fictional characters so real and familiar they supplant some of their flesh-and-blood cousins. The lines above are from Henry IV, Part I, one of Orson Welles’ sources for Chimes at Midnight. I’ve watched it again just 16 months after the last time, which I wrote about here. It’s becoming one of my favorite films, certainly my favorite among Welles’, and much of this has to do with the character of Falstaff. I’m surprised how much I like him. He’s a prideful coward and liar, and endlessly sympathetic, perhaps because he’s big and round enough to remind us sooner or later of ourselves. Shakespeare almost dares us to like him, a dare made more difficult for a contemporary audience by Falstaff’s dimensions. We like our heroes steroidal or lean, not spherical.
I’m reading The Arts (1937) by the Dutch-American writer-illustrator Hendrik Willem Van Loon, who was much loved by Guy Davenport. The book is staggeringly ambitious – at 680 pages, of Falstaffian proportions -- and carries a formidable subtitle: The Story of Painting and Sculpture and Music as Well as All the So-Called Minor Arts from the Days of the Caveman Until the Present Time. Van Loon’s manner is not scholarly. He is confiding, intimate, conversational and gossipy, so I was not surprised to find this in his chapter on the Baroque:
“The period of the Baroque was the ideal age for fat people. Perhaps it would be better to call them heavy. For most of these men led very active lives. The extra weight they carried about with them was not an evidence of physical laziness. It was the result of heavy living, heavy eating, heavy drinking, of deep slumbers after heavy meals. All of which contributed to make this an ideal age for the portrait painter.”
This is Falstaff-as-burgher, veneered with respectability. Falstaff contains multitudes. So does Les Murray, the ample-figured Australian poet who celebrated his 70th birthday on Oct. 17. Watching Chimes at Midnight again reminded me of the final line of Fredy Neptune, Murray’s wonderful novel-in-verse. He might be speaking of Falstaff:
“But there’s too much in life: you can’t describe it.”
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
`Darg'
My grasp of English geography is limited but as I read Theodore Dalrymple’s latest bemused report of an outrage in his homeland, I recognized the dateline: Bromsgrove is the birth place of Geoffrey Hill. A perfunctory search online uncovered the information I sought about Bromsgrove:
“Nail making was introduced by the French Huguenots in the 17th century and became a thriving industry. At one point Bromsgrove was the world centre of nail making. Mechanisation quickly put the industry into decline.”
This helps gloss an autobiographical digression Hill worked into Mercian Hymns (1977). In Section XXV he refers to Fors Clavigera, the peculiar and wonderfully readable series of letters John Ruskin addressed to the workers of England in the eighteen-seventies. Here’s Hill:
“Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.
“The nailshop stood back of the cottage, by the fold. It reeked stale mineral sweat. Sparks had furred its low roof. In dawn-light the troughed water floated a damson-bloom of dust –
“not to be shaken by posthumous clamour. It is one thing to celebrate the
'quick forge', another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire.
“Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.”
Darg is a marvelous word meaning “a day’s work.” It appears the burglars of Bromsgrove are busy earning their darg.
“Nail making was introduced by the French Huguenots in the 17th century and became a thriving industry. At one point Bromsgrove was the world centre of nail making. Mechanisation quickly put the industry into decline.”
This helps gloss an autobiographical digression Hill worked into Mercian Hymns (1977). In Section XXV he refers to Fors Clavigera, the peculiar and wonderfully readable series of letters John Ruskin addressed to the workers of England in the eighteen-seventies. Here’s Hill:
“Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.
“The nailshop stood back of the cottage, by the fold. It reeked stale mineral sweat. Sparks had furred its low roof. In dawn-light the troughed water floated a damson-bloom of dust –
“not to be shaken by posthumous clamour. It is one thing to celebrate the
'quick forge', another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire.
“Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.”
Darg is a marvelous word meaning “a day’s work.” It appears the burglars of Bromsgrove are busy earning their darg.
`A Parable About Imagination'
Dave Lull has discovered one of Chekhov’s gems, “The Student,” the author’s favorite among his stories. Less than four pages long, it dates from April 1894. With only 10 years left to live, Chekhov had entered his mature phase as a writer. He visited the penal colony on Sakhalin Island in 1890, and late in 1892 wrote two masterpieces, “Ward No. 6” and “An Anonymous Story.” Already in 1894 he had produced “The Black Monk” and “Rothschild’s Fiddle,” and was beginning work on The Seagull.
That Chekhov should write a story as seemingly simple and straightforward as “The Student,” so reminiscent of Tolstoy’s religious parables, seems remarkable. It’s as though he, a non-believer, needed to project himself imaginatively into a character he could never be – a devout and rather innocent seminary student – yet who in some ways resembled him. Ivan Velikopolsky and his creator share gentleness, compassion and a fondness for people and conversation.
It’s Good Friday and Ivan is fasting. He has been hunting woodcock and is walking home: “Needles of ice reached over the puddles, and the forest became inhospitable, forsaken, desolate. It felt like winter.” Growing up, we were almost the only non-Catholics in the neighborhood, and were not allowed to play outside between noon and 3 p.m. on Good Friday. My mother worried about offending the neighbors, and each year it felt like a grim three hours. Chekhov writes: “It seemed to him that this sudden onset of cold violated the order and harmony of everything, that nature herself felt dismayed…” That is, it’s the day of the Passion.
Ivan meets two widowed peasants, mother and daughter, and warms himself by their fire. The mother says they have attended the “Twelve Gospels.” In a note appended to the Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky translation (the link above is to the Constance Garnett translation), we learn the Twelve Gospels is part of the matins on Holy Friday, “a composite reading of twelve passages from the four Gospels describing the Crucifixion.” Out of enthusiasm, not a wish to proselytize, Ivan retells the stories of Peter denying Jesus three times and Judas’ betrayal. After nearly a page of Ivan’s story-within-a-story, the narrator resumes:
“The student sighed and fell to thinking. Still smiling, Vasilisa [the mother] suddenly choked, and big, abundant tears rolled down her cheeks. She shielded her face from the fire with her sleeve, as if ashamed of her tears, and Lukerya [her daughter], gazing fixedly at the student, flushed, and her expression became heavy, strained, as in someone who is trying to suppress intense pain.”
In Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, V.S. Pritchett says of “The Student”: “It is certainly one of his most tender, subtle and poetic allegories,” and I quibble only with Pritchett’s final word. Chekhov’s story characteristically suggests significance without preaching or teaching. It is free of didacticism. Pritchett says as much when he writes:
“Chekhov’s story takes a step far beyond trite religious insinuation, and if it is a parable, it is a parable about imagination.”
This is shrewd, but we might go farther and say “The Student” is a story about the power of stories, and thus about the possibility of hope. Leaving the women and their bonfire, Ivan turns to look at them again:
“The student thought again that if Vasilisa wept and her daughter was troubled, then obviously what he had just told them, something that had taken place nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present – to both women, and probably to this desolate village, to himself, to all people. If the old woman wept, it was not because he was able to tell it movingly, but because Peter was close to her and she was interested with her whole being in what had happened in Peter’s soul.”
We’re happy for Ivan. He has found his vocation and proved empirically what he already knew by faith. This is intensely beautiful, and one need not be a Christian or any sort of believer to be moved by the story and frame-story. One need only emulate Chekhov’s moral imagination, his gift for projecting into others unlike himself:
“And joy suddenly stirred in [Ivan’s] soul, and he even stopped for a moment to catch his breath. The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of the chain: he touched one end, and the other moved.”
By retelling the familiar story and observing its effect on Vasilsa, Ivan has watched his faith move from theory to practice. Now it’s real. He’s only 22 years old and “an unknown, mysterious happiness, gradually came over him, and life seemed to him delightful, wondrous, and filled with meaning.” Such undiluted states are as rare in Chekhov as they are in life.
That Chekhov should write a story as seemingly simple and straightforward as “The Student,” so reminiscent of Tolstoy’s religious parables, seems remarkable. It’s as though he, a non-believer, needed to project himself imaginatively into a character he could never be – a devout and rather innocent seminary student – yet who in some ways resembled him. Ivan Velikopolsky and his creator share gentleness, compassion and a fondness for people and conversation.
It’s Good Friday and Ivan is fasting. He has been hunting woodcock and is walking home: “Needles of ice reached over the puddles, and the forest became inhospitable, forsaken, desolate. It felt like winter.” Growing up, we were almost the only non-Catholics in the neighborhood, and were not allowed to play outside between noon and 3 p.m. on Good Friday. My mother worried about offending the neighbors, and each year it felt like a grim three hours. Chekhov writes: “It seemed to him that this sudden onset of cold violated the order and harmony of everything, that nature herself felt dismayed…” That is, it’s the day of the Passion.
Ivan meets two widowed peasants, mother and daughter, and warms himself by their fire. The mother says they have attended the “Twelve Gospels.” In a note appended to the Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky translation (the link above is to the Constance Garnett translation), we learn the Twelve Gospels is part of the matins on Holy Friday, “a composite reading of twelve passages from the four Gospels describing the Crucifixion.” Out of enthusiasm, not a wish to proselytize, Ivan retells the stories of Peter denying Jesus three times and Judas’ betrayal. After nearly a page of Ivan’s story-within-a-story, the narrator resumes:
“The student sighed and fell to thinking. Still smiling, Vasilisa [the mother] suddenly choked, and big, abundant tears rolled down her cheeks. She shielded her face from the fire with her sleeve, as if ashamed of her tears, and Lukerya [her daughter], gazing fixedly at the student, flushed, and her expression became heavy, strained, as in someone who is trying to suppress intense pain.”
In Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, V.S. Pritchett says of “The Student”: “It is certainly one of his most tender, subtle and poetic allegories,” and I quibble only with Pritchett’s final word. Chekhov’s story characteristically suggests significance without preaching or teaching. It is free of didacticism. Pritchett says as much when he writes:
“Chekhov’s story takes a step far beyond trite religious insinuation, and if it is a parable, it is a parable about imagination.”
This is shrewd, but we might go farther and say “The Student” is a story about the power of stories, and thus about the possibility of hope. Leaving the women and their bonfire, Ivan turns to look at them again:
“The student thought again that if Vasilisa wept and her daughter was troubled, then obviously what he had just told them, something that had taken place nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present – to both women, and probably to this desolate village, to himself, to all people. If the old woman wept, it was not because he was able to tell it movingly, but because Peter was close to her and she was interested with her whole being in what had happened in Peter’s soul.”
We’re happy for Ivan. He has found his vocation and proved empirically what he already knew by faith. This is intensely beautiful, and one need not be a Christian or any sort of believer to be moved by the story and frame-story. One need only emulate Chekhov’s moral imagination, his gift for projecting into others unlike himself:
“And joy suddenly stirred in [Ivan’s] soul, and he even stopped for a moment to catch his breath. The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of the chain: he touched one end, and the other moved.”
By retelling the familiar story and observing its effect on Vasilsa, Ivan has watched his faith move from theory to practice. Now it’s real. He’s only 22 years old and “an unknown, mysterious happiness, gradually came over him, and life seemed to him delightful, wondrous, and filled with meaning.” Such undiluted states are as rare in Chekhov as they are in life.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
`Extraordinary Performances'
The first famous writer I met – the first celebrity from any profession – was Anthony Burgess. This was in early April 1971, at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. I was 18, a freshman, and Burgess was approaching the zenith of his fame: Less than a year later Stanley Kubrick released A Clockwork Orange based on Burgess’ 1962 novel.
The week before his visit to campus, Burgess had appeared on Dick Cavett’s show, and I watched it with friends. At Bowling Green he read from his soon-to-be-published novel M/F and took questions from the audience. Someone asked, “What’s Dick Cavett [then at the zenith of his fame] really like?” and Burgess replied, “He has read all of Henry James.” The audience was filled with science fiction fans. At the time, Burgess, with Heinlein, Vonnegut, Hesse, Tolkien and a few others enjoyed vast, dope-driven popularity beyond the bookish ghetto, though Burgess was clearly the finest writer among them.
I remember almost nothing of the literary portion of the evening. I crashed a reception for Burgess, though I have no memory of where it was held, and got very drunk on free English Department liquor. On our way back to the dormitory, my roommate and I climbed to the top of the old football stadium, then being razed, and dropped glass bricks onto the adjacent parking lot from a height of about 25 yards. The crash and the accompanying Whoomp! were deeply satisfying and attracted the attention of the campus police. We were not apprehended.
I bring this up not as a tired war story but a reminder of the fickle nature of literary renown and the perils of memory. Burgess, more than most writers, was hugely prolific and much loved by readers. Since his death in 1993 his reputation has eclipsed. I read perhaps 10 or 12 of his books, most everything published through the early nineteen-seventies, including M/F and much of the nonfiction, and I remember almost nothing. I recall numerous scenes from Kubrick’s awful film and they seem to have displaced whatever I once retained of the book. In other words, I devoted hundreds of hours of my young life to Burgess, and what has it left me? I don’t say this out of despair or resentment, and I don’t feel cheated. I have a generalized memory of enjoying Burgess’ Joycean wordplay, particularly in the Enderby novels and M/F, but I can’t cite an example and probably couldn’t do so even with the books in hand.
Frank Wilson has often praised Earthly Powers (1980), most recently here. As an experiment I’ve ordered it through the library. I’m curious to see how, after more than three decades, I react to a writer I once prized so highly. For now I’m browsing through Burgess’ The Novel Now: A Guide to the Contemporary Fiction (1967) and Urgent Copy (1968). I read both almost 40 years ago and they helped introduce me to several English writers I learned to love (Waugh, Powell, Spark) and confirmed my love for some of the recent American masters (Bellow, Nabokov, Malamud). I found this Joycean credo in the final essay in Urgent Copy, “Epilogue: Conflict and Confluence”:
“I like my pie here and now. That’s why I trust the artist more than the Marxist or the theologian. That’s why I regard the artist’s trade not merely the most honourable but also the most holy. The vision of unity, which is what the artist sells, is preferable to any mere religious or metaphysical manifesto.”
An anonymous reader asked on Monday in regard to recent posts concerning Dr. Johnson, “how [do] you come across these quotes you post? Do you have that good of a memory, or are these things that you've come across in the last day or so?” Both. Like Burgess, I’m blessed with a large but capricious memory. Sometimes I remember only an image or sentiment, even a single word, and then I hunt for it, online or hard copy. Multiple readings over many years give me the advantage of reinforced familiarity – perhaps the secret of a reliable memory. That hasn’t been my experience with Burgess but it is with Dr. Johnson. About the transitoriness of reputation and renown, consider The Rambler #78, published Dec. 15, 1750:
“"That desire which every man feels of being remembered and lamented is often mortified when we remark how little concern is caused by the eternal departure even of those who have passed their lives with public honors, and been distinguished by extraordinary performances.”
The week before his visit to campus, Burgess had appeared on Dick Cavett’s show, and I watched it with friends. At Bowling Green he read from his soon-to-be-published novel M/F and took questions from the audience. Someone asked, “What’s Dick Cavett [then at the zenith of his fame] really like?” and Burgess replied, “He has read all of Henry James.” The audience was filled with science fiction fans. At the time, Burgess, with Heinlein, Vonnegut, Hesse, Tolkien and a few others enjoyed vast, dope-driven popularity beyond the bookish ghetto, though Burgess was clearly the finest writer among them.
I remember almost nothing of the literary portion of the evening. I crashed a reception for Burgess, though I have no memory of where it was held, and got very drunk on free English Department liquor. On our way back to the dormitory, my roommate and I climbed to the top of the old football stadium, then being razed, and dropped glass bricks onto the adjacent parking lot from a height of about 25 yards. The crash and the accompanying Whoomp! were deeply satisfying and attracted the attention of the campus police. We were not apprehended.
I bring this up not as a tired war story but a reminder of the fickle nature of literary renown and the perils of memory. Burgess, more than most writers, was hugely prolific and much loved by readers. Since his death in 1993 his reputation has eclipsed. I read perhaps 10 or 12 of his books, most everything published through the early nineteen-seventies, including M/F and much of the nonfiction, and I remember almost nothing. I recall numerous scenes from Kubrick’s awful film and they seem to have displaced whatever I once retained of the book. In other words, I devoted hundreds of hours of my young life to Burgess, and what has it left me? I don’t say this out of despair or resentment, and I don’t feel cheated. I have a generalized memory of enjoying Burgess’ Joycean wordplay, particularly in the Enderby novels and M/F, but I can’t cite an example and probably couldn’t do so even with the books in hand.
Frank Wilson has often praised Earthly Powers (1980), most recently here. As an experiment I’ve ordered it through the library. I’m curious to see how, after more than three decades, I react to a writer I once prized so highly. For now I’m browsing through Burgess’ The Novel Now: A Guide to the Contemporary Fiction (1967) and Urgent Copy (1968). I read both almost 40 years ago and they helped introduce me to several English writers I learned to love (Waugh, Powell, Spark) and confirmed my love for some of the recent American masters (Bellow, Nabokov, Malamud). I found this Joycean credo in the final essay in Urgent Copy, “Epilogue: Conflict and Confluence”:
“I like my pie here and now. That’s why I trust the artist more than the Marxist or the theologian. That’s why I regard the artist’s trade not merely the most honourable but also the most holy. The vision of unity, which is what the artist sells, is preferable to any mere religious or metaphysical manifesto.”
An anonymous reader asked on Monday in regard to recent posts concerning Dr. Johnson, “how [do] you come across these quotes you post? Do you have that good of a memory, or are these things that you've come across in the last day or so?” Both. Like Burgess, I’m blessed with a large but capricious memory. Sometimes I remember only an image or sentiment, even a single word, and then I hunt for it, online or hard copy. Multiple readings over many years give me the advantage of reinforced familiarity – perhaps the secret of a reliable memory. That hasn’t been my experience with Burgess but it is with Dr. Johnson. About the transitoriness of reputation and renown, consider The Rambler #78, published Dec. 15, 1750:
“"That desire which every man feels of being remembered and lamented is often mortified when we remark how little concern is caused by the eternal departure even of those who have passed their lives with public honors, and been distinguished by extraordinary performances.”
Monday, October 20, 2008
Dave McKenna, R.I.P.
I'm saddened to learn from Terry Teachout of the death of the great pianist Dave McKenna. I wrote about my closest encounter with McKenna here.
`The Multiplication of Books'
“One of the peculiarities which distinguish the present age is the multiplication of books. Every day brings new advertisements of literary undertakings, and we are flattered with repeated promises of growing wise on easier terms than our progenitors.”
Samuel Johnson wrote that almost a quarter-millennium ago, in The Idler for Dec. 1, 1759. He would be staggered and appalled by the tsunami of new titles, approaching 200,000, published annually in the United States, and even more in the United Kingdom. He would be more violently staggered and appalled by those who point to such statistics as evidence of flourishing literacy. This represents sheer cant, which his dictionary defines as “A whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms.” Also, “Barbarous jargon.” His next paragraph in the Idler essay makes it clear:
“How much either happiness or knowledge is advanced by this multitude of authors, it is not very easy to decide.”
Johnson, in fact, had no difficulty deciding. I was in one of the chain bookstores last week, shopping for board books for a colleague of my wife who recently had a baby. I relied on the taste of my sons when they were younger – Good Dog, Carl; Good Night, Gorilla; Good Night, Baby! ; Touch and Feel Farm.
I seldom visit such stores, or any bookstores for that matter. I wandered about, browsing with nothing in mind and finding precisely that – nothing. Not once was I tempted to make a purchase. I wondered at all the seeming bounty – tens of thousands of titles, and almost nothing worth reading. It was like visiting a friend who has cable television. It made me grateful for my home library which contains barely a fraction of the bookstore’s stock yet is so much deeper and more sustaining, a collection assembled across a life, lovingly tended like a garden, a work in progress, like its owner. Later in Idler #85, Johnson writes:
“The authors that in any nation last from age to age are very few, because there are very few that have any other claim to notice than that they catch hold on present curiosity, and gratify some accidental desire, or produce some temporary conveniency.”
Samuel Johnson wrote that almost a quarter-millennium ago, in The Idler for Dec. 1, 1759. He would be staggered and appalled by the tsunami of new titles, approaching 200,000, published annually in the United States, and even more in the United Kingdom. He would be more violently staggered and appalled by those who point to such statistics as evidence of flourishing literacy. This represents sheer cant, which his dictionary defines as “A whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms.” Also, “Barbarous jargon.” His next paragraph in the Idler essay makes it clear:
“How much either happiness or knowledge is advanced by this multitude of authors, it is not very easy to decide.”
Johnson, in fact, had no difficulty deciding. I was in one of the chain bookstores last week, shopping for board books for a colleague of my wife who recently had a baby. I relied on the taste of my sons when they were younger – Good Dog, Carl; Good Night, Gorilla; Good Night, Baby! ; Touch and Feel Farm.
I seldom visit such stores, or any bookstores for that matter. I wandered about, browsing with nothing in mind and finding precisely that – nothing. Not once was I tempted to make a purchase. I wondered at all the seeming bounty – tens of thousands of titles, and almost nothing worth reading. It was like visiting a friend who has cable television. It made me grateful for my home library which contains barely a fraction of the bookstore’s stock yet is so much deeper and more sustaining, a collection assembled across a life, lovingly tended like a garden, a work in progress, like its owner. Later in Idler #85, Johnson writes:
“The authors that in any nation last from age to age are very few, because there are very few that have any other claim to notice than that they catch hold on present curiosity, and gratify some accidental desire, or produce some temporary conveniency.”
Sunday, October 19, 2008
`Interest, Instruction, Amusement'
In his life of Samuel Johnson, John Wain describes The Lives of the Poets as “Johnson’s gentlest, most companionable work.” I learned this happy truth decades ago and keep my compact, two-volume Oxford University Press edition (1929) on the shelf beside my office door, so I’m never at a loss for an obliging companion. On Saturday, preparing to drive my middle son to ballet class, I grabbed the second volume to keep me company in the waiting room for 75 minutes. I’ve read six of Richard Stark’s wonderful Parker novels in recent weeks and felt the need for something a bit more substantial. Besides, a ballet school is an alien ecosystem to a person of my temperament and dimensions, and I knew I could rely on Johnson’s life of Pope:
“Pope was from his birth of a constitution tender and delicate; but is said to have shewn remarkable gentleness and sweetness of disposition. The weakness of his body continued through his life, but the mildness of his mind perhaps ended with his childhood.”
Johnson manages to be funny while expressing compassion for the enormously difficult Pope, who suffered from a form of tuberculosis that left his body stunted and malformed. According to his biographer Maynard Mack, Pope was no taller than 4 feet, 6 inches. Johnson again:
“By natural deformity, or accidental distortion, his vital functions were so much disordered, that his life was a long disease. His most frequent assailant was the headach [sic], which he used to relieve by inhaling the steam of coffee, which he very frequently required.”
One might argue that our life, regardless of health, is always “a long disease,” though that would have been difficult to accept as I watched my son and his fellow dance students explode from their studio and cavort down the hall to the waiting room where I was sitting. They looked at once tender and immortal. Back home I returned with gratitude to Wain’s life of Johnson:
“I have been reading the Lives of the Poets for thirty years, and can testify that in all that time I have never known the day or the hour when I failed to find interest, instruction, amusement, somewhere in their pages. Armed with the two modest volumes into which modern publishing has obligingly published them (there are two cheap editions and they are both in two volumes), the longest railway journey, the dreariest wet evening in a country hotel, have no terrors. Here is the fine flower of Johnson’s critical thinking; a showcase of his opinions about everything under the sun, and a wealth of personal reminiscences and striking vignettes. His vast range of anecdote supplies incident after incident that stay in the memory. Otway choking to death on a piece of bread! John Philips as a schoolboy having his hair combed `hour after hour!’ Dryden signing a contract to produce 10,000 lines of verse for £300 pounds! Gay, invited to read his poem to the Princess of Wales, approaching her with such a low bow that he stumbles and knocks over a Japanese screen, to the accompaniment of screams from the Princess and her ladies! Swift washing himself `with oriental scrupulosity’ to try to clear his `muddy complexion!’ Lyttleton with his `slender uncompacted frame’ and `meagre face!’”
“Pope was from his birth of a constitution tender and delicate; but is said to have shewn remarkable gentleness and sweetness of disposition. The weakness of his body continued through his life, but the mildness of his mind perhaps ended with his childhood.”
Johnson manages to be funny while expressing compassion for the enormously difficult Pope, who suffered from a form of tuberculosis that left his body stunted and malformed. According to his biographer Maynard Mack, Pope was no taller than 4 feet, 6 inches. Johnson again:
“By natural deformity, or accidental distortion, his vital functions were so much disordered, that his life was a long disease. His most frequent assailant was the headach [sic], which he used to relieve by inhaling the steam of coffee, which he very frequently required.”
One might argue that our life, regardless of health, is always “a long disease,” though that would have been difficult to accept as I watched my son and his fellow dance students explode from their studio and cavort down the hall to the waiting room where I was sitting. They looked at once tender and immortal. Back home I returned with gratitude to Wain’s life of Johnson:
“I have been reading the Lives of the Poets for thirty years, and can testify that in all that time I have never known the day or the hour when I failed to find interest, instruction, amusement, somewhere in their pages. Armed with the two modest volumes into which modern publishing has obligingly published them (there are two cheap editions and they are both in two volumes), the longest railway journey, the dreariest wet evening in a country hotel, have no terrors. Here is the fine flower of Johnson’s critical thinking; a showcase of his opinions about everything under the sun, and a wealth of personal reminiscences and striking vignettes. His vast range of anecdote supplies incident after incident that stay in the memory. Otway choking to death on a piece of bread! John Philips as a schoolboy having his hair combed `hour after hour!’ Dryden signing a contract to produce 10,000 lines of verse for £300 pounds! Gay, invited to read his poem to the Princess of Wales, approaching her with such a low bow that he stumbles and knocks over a Japanese screen, to the accompaniment of screams from the Princess and her ladies! Swift washing himself `with oriental scrupulosity’ to try to clear his `muddy complexion!’ Lyttleton with his `slender uncompacted frame’ and `meagre face!’”
Saturday, October 18, 2008
`Great Pride in His Appetite'
From the strip-mall parking lot the Indian restaurant resembles a dry cleaner’s or a dealer in wholesale plumbing equipment – mansard roof, hand-painted signs, dusty windows the size of pool tables. We came for the lunch buffet on Friday as the place was filling quickly with Microsoft workers. Both of us made two trips to the steam tables for vegetable pakora, chicken tikka masala, lamb saag, cucumber kootu, hariyali kofta curry and naan. Food was plentiful, amply spiced and delicious. I thought about A.J. Liebling because it was his birthday, and how much he would have loved the menu though I don’t remember him ever mentioning Indian food. His culinary predilection was French but he was no snob; rather, equal parts gourmand and gourmet. His friend and longtime colleague at The New Yorker, Philip Hamburger, wrote a marvelous foreword to Back Where I Came From when North Point Press reissued it in 1989. Of necessity, much of it is devoted to food:
“Elaborate preparations were always made when Joe was about to come to one’s own house for dinner. His culinary standards were high and vast. If chicken was to be the order of the day, a chicken was ordered for all the other guests, and two chickens for Joe. The same with lobsters: one each for the regulation size stomachs, and two and perhaps three doomed crustaceans for the honored guest. In a sense Joe expected this special attention. His self-esteem included great pride in his appetite. Hosts unaware of his peculiar talents in this department often were unaware of his keen disappointment if the table at which he sat was not laden to his complete satisfaction.”
How Liebling would have detested our nagging national obsession with cholesterol and carbohydrates. I’ve watched so many meals curdle as fellow-diners dissected every forkful and whined about their next penitential visit to the gym. Frank Wilson touched on this recently:
“…a preoccupation with one's own well-being equates to a preoccupation with self, and therefore practically precludes a capacity for love, which necessarily shifts attention away from the self toward the other. That's one reason I try to avoid people who spend too much time in the gym or at spas and who are always going on about what is healthy or what isn't, always in the thrall of some fad or other. Bloody self-centered bores.”
Read any page of Between Meals, one of Liebling’s masterpieces, for a reliable antidote to the food prigs:
“In the heroic age before the First World War, there were men and women who ate, in addition to a whacking lunch and a glorious dinner, a voluminous souper after the theater or the other amusements of the evening. I have known some of the survivors, octogenarians of unblemished appetite and unfailing good humor – spry, wry, and free of the ulcers that come from worrying about a balanced diet – but they had no emulators in France since the doctors there discovered the existence of the human liver.”
I’ve met two writers who knew Liebling in his later years – Tony Hiss and James Salter. Both acknowledged he was often depressed near the end of his life, but he remained a deeply amusing, generous, joy-giving, pleasure-loving man. He must have been first-rate company, as he still is in his books.
“Elaborate preparations were always made when Joe was about to come to one’s own house for dinner. His culinary standards were high and vast. If chicken was to be the order of the day, a chicken was ordered for all the other guests, and two chickens for Joe. The same with lobsters: one each for the regulation size stomachs, and two and perhaps three doomed crustaceans for the honored guest. In a sense Joe expected this special attention. His self-esteem included great pride in his appetite. Hosts unaware of his peculiar talents in this department often were unaware of his keen disappointment if the table at which he sat was not laden to his complete satisfaction.”
How Liebling would have detested our nagging national obsession with cholesterol and carbohydrates. I’ve watched so many meals curdle as fellow-diners dissected every forkful and whined about their next penitential visit to the gym. Frank Wilson touched on this recently:
“…a preoccupation with one's own well-being equates to a preoccupation with self, and therefore practically precludes a capacity for love, which necessarily shifts attention away from the self toward the other. That's one reason I try to avoid people who spend too much time in the gym or at spas and who are always going on about what is healthy or what isn't, always in the thrall of some fad or other. Bloody self-centered bores.”
Read any page of Between Meals, one of Liebling’s masterpieces, for a reliable antidote to the food prigs:
“In the heroic age before the First World War, there were men and women who ate, in addition to a whacking lunch and a glorious dinner, a voluminous souper after the theater or the other amusements of the evening. I have known some of the survivors, octogenarians of unblemished appetite and unfailing good humor – spry, wry, and free of the ulcers that come from worrying about a balanced diet – but they had no emulators in France since the doctors there discovered the existence of the human liver.”
I’ve met two writers who knew Liebling in his later years – Tony Hiss and James Salter. Both acknowledged he was often depressed near the end of his life, but he remained a deeply amusing, generous, joy-giving, pleasure-loving man. He must have been first-rate company, as he still is in his books.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Happy Birthday, Joe
From a reader comes a much appreciated reminder:
"Patrick: My calendar tells me that October 18, 2008 is A.J. Liebling’s 104th birthday. JVS"
In "Apology for Breathing" (in Back Where I Came From), Liebling writes:
"People I know in New York are incessantly on the point of going back where they came from to write a book, or of staying on and writing a book about back where they came from. Back where they came from, I gather, is the American scene (New York, of course, just isn't America). It is all pretty hard on me because I have no place to go back to. I was born in an apartment house at Ninety-third Street and Lexington Avenue, about three miles from where I now live. Friends often tell me of their excitement when the train on which they are riding passes from Indiana into Illinois, or back again. I am ashamed to admit that when the Jerome Avenue express rolls into Eighty-sixth Street station I have absolutely no reaction."
"Patrick: My calendar tells me that October 18, 2008 is A.J. Liebling’s 104th birthday. JVS"
In "Apology for Breathing" (in Back Where I Came From), Liebling writes:
"People I know in New York are incessantly on the point of going back where they came from to write a book, or of staying on and writing a book about back where they came from. Back where they came from, I gather, is the American scene (New York, of course, just isn't America). It is all pretty hard on me because I have no place to go back to. I was born in an apartment house at Ninety-third Street and Lexington Avenue, about three miles from where I now live. Friends often tell me of their excitement when the train on which they are riding passes from Indiana into Illinois, or back again. I am ashamed to admit that when the Jerome Avenue express rolls into Eighty-sixth Street station I have absolutely no reaction."
`A Cold Pudding of a Book'
A reader asks if I have read Finnegans Wake. I have – first, in increments, over decades, like most of its readers; then in toto, heavily armed with scholarship; of late, in increments again. I have no desire to reread all of Joyce’s final novel, one of literary history’s freakish cul-de-sacs, though I dip in occasionally for some of the set pieces, the Anna Livia Plurabelle section in particular.
Nabokov adored Ulysses but dismissed the Wake in his Lectures on Literature as “that petrified superpun” and “one of the greatest failures in literature.” In an interview with Alfred J. Appel Jr. he said:
“Ulysses towers over the rest of Joyce's writings, and in comparison to its noble originality and unique lucidity of thought and style the unfortunate Finnegans Wake is nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most aggravating to the insomniac I am. Moreover, I always detested regional literature full of quaint old-timers and imitated pronunciation. Finnegans Wake’s facade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity. I know I am going to be excommunicated for this pronouncement.”
That’s the heart of my Wake problem. I love it when Joyce breaks into song. At its best, the Wake is music – “heavenly intonations” -- but sadly one must wade through Vico, Jung and all the mythological nonsense. Recall that among the Wake’s early acolytes was Joseph Campbell, co-author of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, published five years after the novel.
When I finally read Joyce’s novel in its entirety in 1994, I used among other tools a heavily annotated copy of the Wake loaned to me by Harry Staley, professor emeritus of English at the state University of New York at Albany. It was a Viking hardcover edition held together with masking tape and rubber bands, interlarded with Harry’s supplemental annotations on note cards. The book it most resembled was my copy of Ulysses. I devoted about six months to the task of reading or decrypting the Wake, and it amounted to a guilt-driven chore interrupted by flashes of pleasure. It was unrelieved work for small return. I persisted because of a passing remark by Joseph Mitchell, the great nonfiction writer for The New Yorker and longtime member of the James Joyce Society in New York City. In his “Author’s Note” to Up in the Old Hotel, Mitchell describes his family’s storytelling tradition in North Carolina, and writes:
“I am an obsessed reader of Finnegans Wake – I must’ve read it at least a dozen times – and every time I read the Anna Livia Plurabelle section I hear the voices of my mother and my aunts as they walk among the graves in old Iona cemetery and it is getting dark.”
Go here to hear Joyce read from the “ALP” section, the part that begins:
“Well, you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you every telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing! My branches lofty are taking root. And my cold cher's gone ashley. Fieluhr? Filou! What age is at? It saon is late. 'Tis endless now senne eye or erewone last saw Waterhouse's clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh. When will they reassemble it? O, my back, my back, my bach! I'd want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Pingpong! There's the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew!”
Nabokov adored Ulysses but dismissed the Wake in his Lectures on Literature as “that petrified superpun” and “one of the greatest failures in literature.” In an interview with Alfred J. Appel Jr. he said:
“Ulysses towers over the rest of Joyce's writings, and in comparison to its noble originality and unique lucidity of thought and style the unfortunate Finnegans Wake is nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most aggravating to the insomniac I am. Moreover, I always detested regional literature full of quaint old-timers and imitated pronunciation. Finnegans Wake’s facade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity. I know I am going to be excommunicated for this pronouncement.”
That’s the heart of my Wake problem. I love it when Joyce breaks into song. At its best, the Wake is music – “heavenly intonations” -- but sadly one must wade through Vico, Jung and all the mythological nonsense. Recall that among the Wake’s early acolytes was Joseph Campbell, co-author of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, published five years after the novel.
When I finally read Joyce’s novel in its entirety in 1994, I used among other tools a heavily annotated copy of the Wake loaned to me by Harry Staley, professor emeritus of English at the state University of New York at Albany. It was a Viking hardcover edition held together with masking tape and rubber bands, interlarded with Harry’s supplemental annotations on note cards. The book it most resembled was my copy of Ulysses. I devoted about six months to the task of reading or decrypting the Wake, and it amounted to a guilt-driven chore interrupted by flashes of pleasure. It was unrelieved work for small return. I persisted because of a passing remark by Joseph Mitchell, the great nonfiction writer for The New Yorker and longtime member of the James Joyce Society in New York City. In his “Author’s Note” to Up in the Old Hotel, Mitchell describes his family’s storytelling tradition in North Carolina, and writes:
“I am an obsessed reader of Finnegans Wake – I must’ve read it at least a dozen times – and every time I read the Anna Livia Plurabelle section I hear the voices of my mother and my aunts as they walk among the graves in old Iona cemetery and it is getting dark.”
Go here to hear Joyce read from the “ALP” section, the part that begins:
“Well, you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you every telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing! My branches lofty are taking root. And my cold cher's gone ashley. Fieluhr? Filou! What age is at? It saon is late. 'Tis endless now senne eye or erewone last saw Waterhouse's clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh. When will they reassemble it? O, my back, my back, my bach! I'd want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Pingpong! There's the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew!”
Thursday, October 16, 2008
`O London With-the-Many-Sins!'
Unlike some of his friends, Charles Lamb was no nature lover. He was a London man, a lifelong dweller in the greatest city of his day, and it sufficed. Though a Romantic by chronology, his indifference to the natural world, like his prose style, suggests Lamb was a displaced native of the 17th or 18th century. Consider this passage from a letter he wrote his friend Thomas Manning on Nov. 28, 1800, when he was 25 years old:
“For my part, with reference to my friends northward, I must confess that I am not romance-bit about Nature. The earth and sea and sky (when all is said) is but as a house to dwell in. If the inmates be courteous, and good liquors flow like the conduits at an old coronation, if they can talk sensibly and feel properly, I have no need to stand staring upon the gilded looking-glass (that strained my friend's purse-strings in the purchase), nor his five-shilling print over the mantelpiece of old Nabbs the carrier (which only betrays his false taste). Just as important to me (in a sense) is all the furniture of my world, -- eye-pampering, but satisfies no heart.”
Lamb is only getting warmed up. At this point, he makes one of his patented prose zigzags – inspired digressions from a mind, like Sterne’s, incapable of linear progression – and pens one of the great paeans to city life:
“Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, shops sparkling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat sempstresses, ladies cheapening, gentlemen behind counters lying, authors in the street with spectacles, George Dyers (you may know them by their gait), lamps lit at night, pastry-cooks' and silversmiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic watchman at night, with bucks reeling home drunk; if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of `Fire!’ and `Stop, thief!’ inns of court, with their learned air, and halls, and butteries, just like Cambridge colleges; old book-stalls, `Jeremy Taylors,’ `Burtons on Melancholy,’ and `Religio Medicis’ on every stall. These are thy pleasures, O London with-the-many-sins! O City abounding in--, for these may Keswick and her giant brood go hang!”
Readers in England: What of this remains? Are traces of Lamb’s rambunctious London still discernable? What of the book-stalls? Taylor, Burton and Browne are tourist sites for Lamb, part of the urban landscape. He invokes them, his masters, by writing in their manner, a prose hommage. I’m always touched by Lamb’s eagerness to acknowledge his precursors, particularly Burton. In one of his Elia essays, “Mackery End, in Hertfordshire,” he lends his sister, “Mad” Mary Lamb, the persona of Bridget Elia, “my housekeeper for many a long year,” and contrasts their tastes in books:
“We are both great readers in different directions. While I am hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern tale, or adventure, whereof our common reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative teazes me. I have little concern in the progress of events. She must have a story -- well, ill, or indifferently told -- so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil accidents. The fluctuations of fortune in fiction -- and almost in real life -- have ceased to interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humours and opinion -- heads with some diverting twist in them -- the oddities of authorship please me most.”
Lamb freely tips his hand. He wants us to know where he comes from and where he’s gone to school, and he makes an excellent companion. I hope some day to visit London – in particular, what remains of Lamb’s London.
“For my part, with reference to my friends northward, I must confess that I am not romance-bit about Nature. The earth and sea and sky (when all is said) is but as a house to dwell in. If the inmates be courteous, and good liquors flow like the conduits at an old coronation, if they can talk sensibly and feel properly, I have no need to stand staring upon the gilded looking-glass (that strained my friend's purse-strings in the purchase), nor his five-shilling print over the mantelpiece of old Nabbs the carrier (which only betrays his false taste). Just as important to me (in a sense) is all the furniture of my world, -- eye-pampering, but satisfies no heart.”
Lamb is only getting warmed up. At this point, he makes one of his patented prose zigzags – inspired digressions from a mind, like Sterne’s, incapable of linear progression – and pens one of the great paeans to city life:
“Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, shops sparkling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat sempstresses, ladies cheapening, gentlemen behind counters lying, authors in the street with spectacles, George Dyers (you may know them by their gait), lamps lit at night, pastry-cooks' and silversmiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic watchman at night, with bucks reeling home drunk; if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of `Fire!’ and `Stop, thief!’ inns of court, with their learned air, and halls, and butteries, just like Cambridge colleges; old book-stalls, `Jeremy Taylors,’ `Burtons on Melancholy,’ and `Religio Medicis’ on every stall. These are thy pleasures, O London with-the-many-sins! O City abounding in--, for these may Keswick and her giant brood go hang!”
Readers in England: What of this remains? Are traces of Lamb’s rambunctious London still discernable? What of the book-stalls? Taylor, Burton and Browne are tourist sites for Lamb, part of the urban landscape. He invokes them, his masters, by writing in their manner, a prose hommage. I’m always touched by Lamb’s eagerness to acknowledge his precursors, particularly Burton. In one of his Elia essays, “Mackery End, in Hertfordshire,” he lends his sister, “Mad” Mary Lamb, the persona of Bridget Elia, “my housekeeper for many a long year,” and contrasts their tastes in books:
“We are both great readers in different directions. While I am hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern tale, or adventure, whereof our common reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative teazes me. I have little concern in the progress of events. She must have a story -- well, ill, or indifferently told -- so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil accidents. The fluctuations of fortune in fiction -- and almost in real life -- have ceased to interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humours and opinion -- heads with some diverting twist in them -- the oddities of authorship please me most.”
Lamb freely tips his hand. He wants us to know where he comes from and where he’s gone to school, and he makes an excellent companion. I hope some day to visit London – in particular, what remains of Lamb’s London.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
`I Must Start Reading This Man'
Here are the contents of an e-mail my brother sent me earlier this evening:
“Today on the way to work I spotted a pile of books in the trash. I pulled over, parked and got out of the car to inspect them. A light drizzle had started a few minutes before I reached the pile and I debated whether or not to stop, I'm glad I did. Among the usual glop one finds curbside there was a 1947 Scribner's edition of Henry James's The Art of the Novel. I grabbed it and several 1970's editions of Life and went on my way to the shop. After opening up and all the other usual morning rituals I sat down and randomly opened the James volume to the `Preface to Roderick Hudson.' The first words I read were enough: `Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.' In a nutshell, wow. I must start reading this man.”
Lucky dog.
“Today on the way to work I spotted a pile of books in the trash. I pulled over, parked and got out of the car to inspect them. A light drizzle had started a few minutes before I reached the pile and I debated whether or not to stop, I'm glad I did. Among the usual glop one finds curbside there was a 1947 Scribner's edition of Henry James's The Art of the Novel. I grabbed it and several 1970's editions of Life and went on my way to the shop. After opening up and all the other usual morning rituals I sat down and randomly opened the James volume to the `Preface to Roderick Hudson.' The first words I read were enough: `Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.' In a nutshell, wow. I must start reading this man.”
Lucky dog.
`Tenacious of the Obscure and Remote'
For three years in the nineteen-nineties I wrote a weekly column, “Here Comes Everybody,” for a newspaper in upstate New York. At the same time I was writing two or three features a week, and reviewing jazz concerts and the occasional book. I took the column’s Joycean title seriously: I strove to write about almost every person in our circulation area, my only prerequisite for inclusion being that they were obscure and anonymous, the opposite of celebrities. The city where I worked, once a prosperous company town, was hemorrhaging people and money. For decades, the company in question had been moving jobs south and overseas, and the city had turned into a sad place. Sad, yes; but for a writer of my temperament, ripe with stories. A friend on the copy desk called me “the poet of failure,” a title I liked very much.
I thought of those happy days and of the mostly unhappy people I was writing about as I came upon a passage in A Portrait of Charles Lamb by Lord David Cecil. The author is describing Lamb’s gift for attracting people from diverse backgrounds and classes:
“His circle were drawn mostly from the middle and professional ranks of society: academics, civil servants, journalists, art critics, a few actors. They were more often poor than rich; a few were successful, but more were unsuccessful. Lamb, sympathetic with human weakness, had an especially soft spot for the unsuccessful. Even when failure had a bad effect on a man and inclined him to sponge or soured his temper, Lamb regarded him with unillusioned indulgence.”
I’d like to think I, as a person and a writer, take people on their own merits. Self-centeredness, pretensions and what Dr. Johnson scorned as cant repulse me, not poverty or other external, inessential qualities. One of the reasons I no longer read newspapers is their growing reliance on “celebrities,” the wealthy, famous and powerful, and the way they ignore ordinary people except when they’re in trouble. This is a matter of temperament, not politics, and the same was true for Lamb. William Hazlitt writes of his longtime friend in “Elia, and Geoffrey Crayon,” a chapter from The Spirit of the Age: or Contemporary Portraits (1825):
“He does not march boldly along with the crowd, but steals off the pavement to pick his way in the contrary direction. He prefers bye-ways to highways. When the full tide of human life pours along to some festive shew, to some pageant of a day, Elia would stand on one side to look over an old book-stall, or stroll down some deserted pathway in search of a pensive inscription over a tottering door-way, or some quaint device in architecture, illustrative of embryo art and ancient manners.”
In my column I was self-consciously working in the lowlife tradition of Liebling and Mitchell at The New Yorker. They, too, identified with a self-chosen, ill-sorted cast of precursors, including Defoe, Stendahl, Dickens, George Borrow, Pierce Egan and especially Hazlitt, the proto-New Journalist who wrote “The Fight.” I suspect they also knew and appreciated Lamb, though his gifts were less strictly journalistic. Hazlitt writes:
“Mr. Lamb rather affects and is tenacious of the obscure and remote: of that which rests on its own intrinsic and silent merit; which scorns all alliance, or even the suspicion of owing any thing to noisy clamour, to the glare of circumstances. There is a fine tone of chiaro-scuro, a moral perspective in his writings. He delights to dwell on that which is fresh to the eye of memory; he yearns after and covets what soothes the frailty of human nature. That touches him most nearly which is withdrawn to a certain distance, which verges on the borders of oblivion: that piques and provokes his fancy most, which is hid from a superficial glance.”
This is Hazlitt the portraitist at close to his best, working in a tradition that seems nearly as extinct as the quill pen and the semi-colon.
I thought of those happy days and of the mostly unhappy people I was writing about as I came upon a passage in A Portrait of Charles Lamb by Lord David Cecil. The author is describing Lamb’s gift for attracting people from diverse backgrounds and classes:
“His circle were drawn mostly from the middle and professional ranks of society: academics, civil servants, journalists, art critics, a few actors. They were more often poor than rich; a few were successful, but more were unsuccessful. Lamb, sympathetic with human weakness, had an especially soft spot for the unsuccessful. Even when failure had a bad effect on a man and inclined him to sponge or soured his temper, Lamb regarded him with unillusioned indulgence.”
I’d like to think I, as a person and a writer, take people on their own merits. Self-centeredness, pretensions and what Dr. Johnson scorned as cant repulse me, not poverty or other external, inessential qualities. One of the reasons I no longer read newspapers is their growing reliance on “celebrities,” the wealthy, famous and powerful, and the way they ignore ordinary people except when they’re in trouble. This is a matter of temperament, not politics, and the same was true for Lamb. William Hazlitt writes of his longtime friend in “Elia, and Geoffrey Crayon,” a chapter from The Spirit of the Age: or Contemporary Portraits (1825):
“He does not march boldly along with the crowd, but steals off the pavement to pick his way in the contrary direction. He prefers bye-ways to highways. When the full tide of human life pours along to some festive shew, to some pageant of a day, Elia would stand on one side to look over an old book-stall, or stroll down some deserted pathway in search of a pensive inscription over a tottering door-way, or some quaint device in architecture, illustrative of embryo art and ancient manners.”
In my column I was self-consciously working in the lowlife tradition of Liebling and Mitchell at The New Yorker. They, too, identified with a self-chosen, ill-sorted cast of precursors, including Defoe, Stendahl, Dickens, George Borrow, Pierce Egan and especially Hazlitt, the proto-New Journalist who wrote “The Fight.” I suspect they also knew and appreciated Lamb, though his gifts were less strictly journalistic. Hazlitt writes:
“Mr. Lamb rather affects and is tenacious of the obscure and remote: of that which rests on its own intrinsic and silent merit; which scorns all alliance, or even the suspicion of owing any thing to noisy clamour, to the glare of circumstances. There is a fine tone of chiaro-scuro, a moral perspective in his writings. He delights to dwell on that which is fresh to the eye of memory; he yearns after and covets what soothes the frailty of human nature. That touches him most nearly which is withdrawn to a certain distance, which verges on the borders of oblivion: that piques and provokes his fancy most, which is hid from a superficial glance.”
This is Hazlitt the portraitist at close to his best, working in a tradition that seems nearly as extinct as the quill pen and the semi-colon.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
`This Is a Hardware Store'
An anonymous reader writes to say he was “deeply offended” by the X.J. Kennedy poems I posted on Friday. Fair enough, though no one compelled him to read them or to visit this blog. Humor is at least as personal as our sexual and culinary tastes. A joke that seizes me with laughter– and Kennedy’s poems qualify as a species of elegant joke -- may leave you grim-faced. In tune with the times, the reader took his complaint another step and called me “sexist” and “homophobic,” which will come as a surprise to my family and friends. I detected in his tone and phrasing not genuine offense, which might have moved me to offer a qualified apology, but a certain pleasure in righteous indignation. He seemed to enjoy feigning strong offense, a state that carries with it a certain intoxicating sense of moral superiority.
I’ve never been offended by a joke. Some good ones make me smile years after first hearing them, while leaving me a bit uncomfortable. These I might share only discreetly, with those whose sense of humor and emotional elasticity I trust and find compatible. That’s only common sense.
The best book I know on the subject is Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (1999) by Ted Cohen, professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. Most writers on humor, including Freud and Bergson, are deadly. Cohen is different. He likes humor and humorous people, and probably half of his slender volume (99 pages, counting the index) is composed of jokes, most of them at least good. The portion pertinent to my reader comes in the final pages, after Cohen describes a young white college student who feels guilty about the fear he experiences walking through a black neighborhood at night. Cohen assures him his fears are not symptomatic of incipient racism and that “it might well be a practical error not to have the feeling.” Then he applies the same reasoning to jokes that make some people uncomfortable:
“Wish there were no mean jokes. Try remaking the world so that such jokes will have no place, will not arise. But do not deny that they are funny. That denial is a pretense that will help nothing. And it is at least possible, sometimes, that the jokes themselves do help something. Perhaps they help us to bear unbearable affronts like crude racism and stubborn prejudice by letting us laugh while we take a breather.”
In the spirit of fairness and to show I can take it, let me relate a joke reported by Cohen. To give it the necessary context, understand that my paternal grandparents were born in Poland:
“A Polish man walks up to a counter and says, `I want to buy some sausage.’
“`You want Polish sausage?’ asks the clerk. `Kielbasa?’
“`Why do you think I want Polish sausage?’ replies the man indignantly. `Why wouldn’t I want Italian sausage, or Jewish sausage? Do I look Polish? What makes you think I’m Polish?’
"The clerk responds, `This is a hardware store.’”
I’ve never been offended by a joke. Some good ones make me smile years after first hearing them, while leaving me a bit uncomfortable. These I might share only discreetly, with those whose sense of humor and emotional elasticity I trust and find compatible. That’s only common sense.
The best book I know on the subject is Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (1999) by Ted Cohen, professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. Most writers on humor, including Freud and Bergson, are deadly. Cohen is different. He likes humor and humorous people, and probably half of his slender volume (99 pages, counting the index) is composed of jokes, most of them at least good. The portion pertinent to my reader comes in the final pages, after Cohen describes a young white college student who feels guilty about the fear he experiences walking through a black neighborhood at night. Cohen assures him his fears are not symptomatic of incipient racism and that “it might well be a practical error not to have the feeling.” Then he applies the same reasoning to jokes that make some people uncomfortable:
“Wish there were no mean jokes. Try remaking the world so that such jokes will have no place, will not arise. But do not deny that they are funny. That denial is a pretense that will help nothing. And it is at least possible, sometimes, that the jokes themselves do help something. Perhaps they help us to bear unbearable affronts like crude racism and stubborn prejudice by letting us laugh while we take a breather.”
In the spirit of fairness and to show I can take it, let me relate a joke reported by Cohen. To give it the necessary context, understand that my paternal grandparents were born in Poland:
“A Polish man walks up to a counter and says, `I want to buy some sausage.’
“`You want Polish sausage?’ asks the clerk. `Kielbasa?’
“`Why do you think I want Polish sausage?’ replies the man indignantly. `Why wouldn’t I want Italian sausage, or Jewish sausage? Do I look Polish? What makes you think I’m Polish?’
"The clerk responds, `This is a hardware store.’”
Monday, October 13, 2008
`Only the Facts Remain Fresh'
The most exalted moment I know in 20th-century literature took place in a conversation between two displaced Polish poets in Berkeley in 1967. The speaker is Aleksander Wat; the interlocutor, Czeslaw Milosz. In My Century, his posthumously published interview-transcript-as-memoir, Wat describes his time in Stalin’s Lubyanka prison:
“…the books I read in Lubyanka made for one of the greatest experiences of my life. Not because they allowed me an escape but because, to a certain extent, they transformed me, influenced and shaped me greatly. It was the way I read those books; I came at them from a completely new angle. And from then on I had a completely new understanding, not only of literature, but of everything.
“Literature is insight and synthesis, which means that poetry, ultimately, is heroic.”
Wat was reading Proust and Machiavelli in Lubyanka, not inspirational fluff. One can hardly imagine words more at odds with our age’s prevailing fashions of thought. The idea that books can sustain and transform lives, once tacitly assumed, now is scorned as naïve. As a young man, Wat became a Communist. After fleeing the Nazi invasion he was arrested by the Soviets and spent more than two years in various jails and prisons in Poland and the Soviet Union. A Jew, Wat converted to Catholicism. While in prison, he “trained [himself] in hatred and disgust for politics.” He earned his enlightenment honestly.
Not long ago I read online an interview with an academic who had forgiving, even admiring things to say about communism. Normally, such sentiments are expressed in easily decrypted code – “progressive,” “bourgeoisie,” “collective” – but this guy was perfectly forthright and self-congratulatory about the nature of his abhorrent politics. Mercifully I forgot about him until I picked up R.S. Thomas’ Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 again and read, among others, the final, untitled poem in the volume, published posthumously:
“The greatest language
the world has experienced,
and it is as though
tongue-tied before the challenge
of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot.
The adjectives are tired,
the verbs indecisive, only the facts
remain fresh, sprouting out of the ground
manured by victims.
Vocabulary is no longer the ladder
angels descend and ascend
on. It is flashed at us
too rapidly for us to cherish.
It is thrown away
when it no longer earns its keep
as an advertiser. Sex
is a word too short
to answer the requirements
of the literature of love.
The aircraft soar into
the upper air but have no odes
dedicated to them as to blithe spirits.”
“…the books I read in Lubyanka made for one of the greatest experiences of my life. Not because they allowed me an escape but because, to a certain extent, they transformed me, influenced and shaped me greatly. It was the way I read those books; I came at them from a completely new angle. And from then on I had a completely new understanding, not only of literature, but of everything.
“Literature is insight and synthesis, which means that poetry, ultimately, is heroic.”
Wat was reading Proust and Machiavelli in Lubyanka, not inspirational fluff. One can hardly imagine words more at odds with our age’s prevailing fashions of thought. The idea that books can sustain and transform lives, once tacitly assumed, now is scorned as naïve. As a young man, Wat became a Communist. After fleeing the Nazi invasion he was arrested by the Soviets and spent more than two years in various jails and prisons in Poland and the Soviet Union. A Jew, Wat converted to Catholicism. While in prison, he “trained [himself] in hatred and disgust for politics.” He earned his enlightenment honestly.
Not long ago I read online an interview with an academic who had forgiving, even admiring things to say about communism. Normally, such sentiments are expressed in easily decrypted code – “progressive,” “bourgeoisie,” “collective” – but this guy was perfectly forthright and self-congratulatory about the nature of his abhorrent politics. Mercifully I forgot about him until I picked up R.S. Thomas’ Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 again and read, among others, the final, untitled poem in the volume, published posthumously:
“The greatest language
the world has experienced,
and it is as though
tongue-tied before the challenge
of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot.
The adjectives are tired,
the verbs indecisive, only the facts
remain fresh, sprouting out of the ground
manured by victims.
Vocabulary is no longer the ladder
angels descend and ascend
on. It is flashed at us
too rapidly for us to cherish.
It is thrown away
when it no longer earns its keep
as an advertiser. Sex
is a word too short
to answer the requirements
of the literature of love.
The aircraft soar into
the upper air but have no odes
dedicated to them as to blithe spirits.”
Sunday, October 12, 2008
`Whole Catalogues of Volumes of All Sorts'
What can be so gratifying as watching a reader reading a book that obviously gives him pleasure? I witness such scenes every week in libraries and parks, and I remember years ago observing fellow passengers on city buses, books in hand, obliviously swaying and bumping with the stops and starts of the great stinking machine. Comparable pleasure can be had any time at Ivebeenreadinglately, the blog kept by Levi Stahl of Chicago. As he writes: “Most of what I do with my time is read, and that's what fuels this blog.” Lucky man.
I’m moved to mention Levi’s blog by his Saturday post, “Steps in the Dance.” Levi shares my admiration for the late Anthony Powell’s 12-novel cycle A Dance to the Music of Time, and gives a nice reading of a paragraph from the third novel, The Acceptance World (1955). This is literary criticism of a gentle, generous sort, and Levi goes on to quote a favorite paragraph from the same novel:
“I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some `ordinary’ world into which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.”
I also enjoy Powell’s enthusiasm for Robert Burton and his The Anatomy of Melancholy, one of the few essential books in the language. Powell found the title for his early novel, Afternoon Men, in The Anatomy: “They are a company of giddy-heads, afternoon men.”
The narrator of A Dance, Nick Jenkins, writes a book about Burton, as Powell wrote one about Burton’s younger contemporary, John Aubrey. In the second-to-last paragraph of the cycle’s final volume, Hearing Secret Harmonies, Powell has Jenkins write:
“For some reason one of Robert Burton’s torrential passages from The Anatomy of Melancholy came to mind:
“`I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, firs, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged, in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and suchlike, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. Today we hear of new Lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed. And then again of fresh honors conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned, one purchaseth, another breaketh; he thrives, his neighbor turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, &c.’”
Another paragraph follows at the close of A Dance, but you must have read the preceding 12 volumes to hear the no-longer-secret melodies and all the themes resolved. Levi is very good at inciting enthusiasm for Powell’s wonderful novels and “whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts.”
I’m moved to mention Levi’s blog by his Saturday post, “Steps in the Dance.” Levi shares my admiration for the late Anthony Powell’s 12-novel cycle A Dance to the Music of Time, and gives a nice reading of a paragraph from the third novel, The Acceptance World (1955). This is literary criticism of a gentle, generous sort, and Levi goes on to quote a favorite paragraph from the same novel:
“I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some `ordinary’ world into which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.”
I also enjoy Powell’s enthusiasm for Robert Burton and his The Anatomy of Melancholy, one of the few essential books in the language. Powell found the title for his early novel, Afternoon Men, in The Anatomy: “They are a company of giddy-heads, afternoon men.”
The narrator of A Dance, Nick Jenkins, writes a book about Burton, as Powell wrote one about Burton’s younger contemporary, John Aubrey. In the second-to-last paragraph of the cycle’s final volume, Hearing Secret Harmonies, Powell has Jenkins write:
“For some reason one of Robert Burton’s torrential passages from The Anatomy of Melancholy came to mind:
“`I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, firs, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged, in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and suchlike, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. Today we hear of new Lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed. And then again of fresh honors conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned, one purchaseth, another breaketh; he thrives, his neighbor turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, &c.’”
Another paragraph follows at the close of A Dance, but you must have read the preceding 12 volumes to hear the no-longer-secret melodies and all the themes resolved. Levi is very good at inciting enthusiasm for Powell’s wonderful novels and “whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts.”
Saturday, October 11, 2008
`An Art to Make Dust of All Things'
“Everything and everybody turns to dust. Regardless of what it’s made of, as long as it’s small enough to float around in the air, dust is dust. By definition, dust particles very in size from one-millionth of a millimetre to one millimetre. What you see in the sunlight at home are mostly cotton, wool and paper fibres. On the floor it's mostly sand and clay particles carried in from outside. But of the particles smaller than one-tenth of a millimeter, more than half come from us. More than 50 percent of the finest household dust is made up of flakes of skin.”
Of course, this is merely a science-minded restatement of what we already know from Genesis 3:19: “Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” I came upon this dust business while rereading The Way of All Flesh by Midas Dekkers, a Dutch writer and biologist. That was shortly before a long-deferred vacuum-cleaning beneath the bed. The nozzle sucked up a fuzzy memento mori of cat fur, human hair and human dust. While probing among the shoes and bins of sweaters stowed under the bed, something popped inside my right knee, reminding me two weeks before my 56th birthday that I’m limping ever dustward.
I looked into dust. It’s old, rooted in words meaning “smoke, vapour.” Shakespeare uses it 63 times in 27 plays, two sonnets and "The Rape of Lucrece." Everywhere, across centuries, dust signifies what is transitory and mutable. Consider Dickens, Eliot and Waugh. Consider Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia or Urne-Burial: “Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor Monuments.” And Krapp’s musings in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape:
“I suppose I mean those things worth having when all the dust has--when all my dust has settled. I close my eyes and try and imagine them.”
And please don’t forget Kansas. Now back to Dekkers:
“What kind of dust is it we return to? What’s in a person? It’s common knowledge that we consist mostly of water. You could make 66 pots of tea or coffee with the water from one body. After we die, that water evaporates. Dying is mostly evaporating.”
Of course, this is merely a science-minded restatement of what we already know from Genesis 3:19: “Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” I came upon this dust business while rereading The Way of All Flesh by Midas Dekkers, a Dutch writer and biologist. That was shortly before a long-deferred vacuum-cleaning beneath the bed. The nozzle sucked up a fuzzy memento mori of cat fur, human hair and human dust. While probing among the shoes and bins of sweaters stowed under the bed, something popped inside my right knee, reminding me two weeks before my 56th birthday that I’m limping ever dustward.
I looked into dust. It’s old, rooted in words meaning “smoke, vapour.” Shakespeare uses it 63 times in 27 plays, two sonnets and "The Rape of Lucrece." Everywhere, across centuries, dust signifies what is transitory and mutable. Consider Dickens, Eliot and Waugh. Consider Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia or Urne-Burial: “Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor Monuments.” And Krapp’s musings in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape:
“I suppose I mean those things worth having when all the dust has--when all my dust has settled. I close my eyes and try and imagine them.”
And please don’t forget Kansas. Now back to Dekkers:
“What kind of dust is it we return to? What’s in a person? It’s common knowledge that we consist mostly of water. You could make 66 pots of tea or coffee with the water from one body. After we die, that water evaporates. Dying is mostly evaporating.”
Friday, October 10, 2008
The Skeptical Doctor
Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels), one of the tutelary spirits of Anecdotal Evidence, at last has a web site and blog, The Skeptical Doctor.
`Few But True Words'
X.J. Kennedy is best known as a writer of light verse and poems for children -- forms neither identical nor mutually exclusive. My kids enjoy the jokes and wordplay, unaware they’re in the hands of a first-rate poetic technician gifted with a dirty mind. Kennedy favors the classical forms, like the limerick -- this one titled “A Faulkner Hero” (from Peeping Tom’s Cabin: Comic Verse 1928-2008):
“Hardly famous for moral perfection,
Popeye couldn’t erect an erection,
So instead of his knob
He’d use corn on the cob
As a means to express his affection.”
And one-liners, like “On the Decline of Psychoanalysis”:
“The Krafft is ebbing.”
And rhyming couplets, as in “Normalcy,” which starts as one thing and turns into quite another:
“Right-thinking eaters, you and I,
Sink fork first in a piece of pie
At its front point, unlike one queer
I know who entered from the rear
And, what was worse, the pie was mince.
He has been put away long since.”
These are trifles, amusing and forgettable like the jokes my barber in New York used to tell, but I think we can agree that Kennedy gives readers more pleasure and laughter than Charles Olson and Leroi Jones combined. Even in Kennedy’s more serious verse we find hints of the class clown. The only poetic tribute to J.V. Cunningham I’ve ever read is Kennedy’s “Terse Elegy for J.V. Cunningham,” first published in The New Criterion in October 1985, barely six months after Cunningham’s death:
“Now Cunningham, who rhymed by fits and starts,
So loath to gush, most sensitive of hearts --
Else why so hard-forged a protective crust? --
Is brought down to the unreasoning dust.
Though with a slash a Pomp’s gut he could slit,
On his own flesh he worked his weaponed wit
And penned with patient skill and lore immense,
Prodigious mind, keen ear, rare common sense,
Only those words he could crush down no more
Like matter pressured to a dwarf star’s core.
May one day eyes unborn wake to esteem
His steady, baleful, solitary gleam.
Poets may come whose work more quickly strikes
Love, and yet -- ah, who’ll live to see his likes?”
It’s not “Lycidas” but I’m touched by Kennedy’s commemoration of a poet more extravagantly gifted than himself – in fact, one of the great American poets of the last century. Kennedy gets the details right, though the sonnet’s final couplet is a letdown. I like “loath to gush,” “weaponed wit,” “rare common sense” and his tribute to Cunningham’s concision: “Like matter pressured to a dwarf star’s core.” It’s a fine elegy written not quite slavishly in the Cunningham manner. Here is Cunningham’s “Elegy for a Cricket, written when he was 22:
“Fifteen nights I have lain awake and called you
But you walk ever on and give no answer:
Therefore, damned by my sole, go down to the hellfire.
Spirit luminous and footstep uncertain,
You will pace off forever the halls of great Dis.
You there, caught in the whirling throng of lovers,
If you find in that fire her whom I loved once.
Say to her that I gave you few but true words.
Say to her that your dream as her dream held me,
Alone, waking, until your friend, the cock, slept.
Say to her, if she ask what shoe you wear now,
That I gave you my last, I have none other.”
The poem carries an epigraph from Catullus (3.13-14):
“at vobis male sit, malae tenebrae
Orci, quae omnia bella devoratis!”
Timothy Steele, editor of The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, gives this translation:
“But a curse on you, evil shadows
Of Orcus, which devour all this is beautiful.”
Kennedy, Cunningham, Catullus: “few but true words.”
“Hardly famous for moral perfection,
Popeye couldn’t erect an erection,
So instead of his knob
He’d use corn on the cob
As a means to express his affection.”
And one-liners, like “On the Decline of Psychoanalysis”:
“The Krafft is ebbing.”
And rhyming couplets, as in “Normalcy,” which starts as one thing and turns into quite another:
“Right-thinking eaters, you and I,
Sink fork first in a piece of pie
At its front point, unlike one queer
I know who entered from the rear
And, what was worse, the pie was mince.
He has been put away long since.”
These are trifles, amusing and forgettable like the jokes my barber in New York used to tell, but I think we can agree that Kennedy gives readers more pleasure and laughter than Charles Olson and Leroi Jones combined. Even in Kennedy’s more serious verse we find hints of the class clown. The only poetic tribute to J.V. Cunningham I’ve ever read is Kennedy’s “Terse Elegy for J.V. Cunningham,” first published in The New Criterion in October 1985, barely six months after Cunningham’s death:
“Now Cunningham, who rhymed by fits and starts,
So loath to gush, most sensitive of hearts --
Else why so hard-forged a protective crust? --
Is brought down to the unreasoning dust.
Though with a slash a Pomp’s gut he could slit,
On his own flesh he worked his weaponed wit
And penned with patient skill and lore immense,
Prodigious mind, keen ear, rare common sense,
Only those words he could crush down no more
Like matter pressured to a dwarf star’s core.
May one day eyes unborn wake to esteem
His steady, baleful, solitary gleam.
Poets may come whose work more quickly strikes
Love, and yet -- ah, who’ll live to see his likes?”
It’s not “Lycidas” but I’m touched by Kennedy’s commemoration of a poet more extravagantly gifted than himself – in fact, one of the great American poets of the last century. Kennedy gets the details right, though the sonnet’s final couplet is a letdown. I like “loath to gush,” “weaponed wit,” “rare common sense” and his tribute to Cunningham’s concision: “Like matter pressured to a dwarf star’s core.” It’s a fine elegy written not quite slavishly in the Cunningham manner. Here is Cunningham’s “Elegy for a Cricket, written when he was 22:
“Fifteen nights I have lain awake and called you
But you walk ever on and give no answer:
Therefore, damned by my sole, go down to the hellfire.
Spirit luminous and footstep uncertain,
You will pace off forever the halls of great Dis.
You there, caught in the whirling throng of lovers,
If you find in that fire her whom I loved once.
Say to her that I gave you few but true words.
Say to her that your dream as her dream held me,
Alone, waking, until your friend, the cock, slept.
Say to her, if she ask what shoe you wear now,
That I gave you my last, I have none other.”
The poem carries an epigraph from Catullus (3.13-14):
“at vobis male sit, malae tenebrae
Orci, quae omnia bella devoratis!”
Timothy Steele, editor of The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, gives this translation:
“But a curse on you, evil shadows
Of Orcus, which devour all this is beautiful.”
Kennedy, Cunningham, Catullus: “few but true words.”
Thursday, October 09, 2008
`Recover'd Greennesse'
Optimism, like an abrupt and fevered conversion to socialism or some other religion, is a reliable symptom of mental illness. In The Rambler #182, Dr. Johnson puts it this way:
“There are multitudes whose life is nothing but a continuous lottery; who are always within a few months of plenty and happiness, and how often soever they are mocked with blanks, expect a prize from the next adventure.”
But hope, as Johnson says elsewhere, “is necessary in every condition.” Even a meager share is sufficient to get us out of bed. Since moving to Washington almost six months ago I’ve worked as a freelance writer, mostly in science and engineering, but haven’t succeeded in finding a fulltime job. I had a good one in Houston and I miss the university library and colleagues who laughed at my nonsense. I’m not desperate but neither am I optimistic, fortunately. The economy stinks and while I’d like to be working with or writing about books, I’d be happy to write about cancer or sustainable energy, so long as it sustains my bank account.
In the last days I’ve read and read again George Herbert’s “The Flower,” marveling at its beauty and grace and remembering there was a time when I would have dismissed it as a fatuous fairy tale. Then I read these lines and see the long arc of my life:
“Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart
Could have recover’d greennesse?”
That is hope incarnate. So is this:
“the flowers in spring;
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.”
And this:
“And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write…”
Those two lines hit the hardest. When I spoke to a high school friend not long ago, he told me one of the brightest guys in our class, gifted in both humanities and sciences, had died several years ago. I didn’t know Mitch well. We ran with crowds that intersected only tangentially. He was more poised and better skilled than I was at dealing with adults and the looming adult world. He was a rare contemporary for whom I felt admiration shading into envy.
Oddly, I realize, everyone I most admire, without exception, is dead. I never met any of them and most were gone long before I was born. I’ve met and known scores of good, gifted people, famous and obscure, but none has entered that private pantheon. Strong admiration calls for humility, an acceptance that others accomplish things we prize and will never accomplish ourselves. Otherwise, admiration festers into envy and resentment. All of those I most admire are writers, and chief among them, topping even Henry James, Chekhov and Beckett, is Samuel Johnson, who knew something about money and the writing life. Today, as I follow a couple of job leads, I’ll keep in mind what he wrote in The Rambler #117:
“All industry must be excited by hope.”
“There are multitudes whose life is nothing but a continuous lottery; who are always within a few months of plenty and happiness, and how often soever they are mocked with blanks, expect a prize from the next adventure.”
But hope, as Johnson says elsewhere, “is necessary in every condition.” Even a meager share is sufficient to get us out of bed. Since moving to Washington almost six months ago I’ve worked as a freelance writer, mostly in science and engineering, but haven’t succeeded in finding a fulltime job. I had a good one in Houston and I miss the university library and colleagues who laughed at my nonsense. I’m not desperate but neither am I optimistic, fortunately. The economy stinks and while I’d like to be working with or writing about books, I’d be happy to write about cancer or sustainable energy, so long as it sustains my bank account.
In the last days I’ve read and read again George Herbert’s “The Flower,” marveling at its beauty and grace and remembering there was a time when I would have dismissed it as a fatuous fairy tale. Then I read these lines and see the long arc of my life:
“Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart
Could have recover’d greennesse?”
That is hope incarnate. So is this:
“the flowers in spring;
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.”
And this:
“And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write…”
Those two lines hit the hardest. When I spoke to a high school friend not long ago, he told me one of the brightest guys in our class, gifted in both humanities and sciences, had died several years ago. I didn’t know Mitch well. We ran with crowds that intersected only tangentially. He was more poised and better skilled than I was at dealing with adults and the looming adult world. He was a rare contemporary for whom I felt admiration shading into envy.
Oddly, I realize, everyone I most admire, without exception, is dead. I never met any of them and most were gone long before I was born. I’ve met and known scores of good, gifted people, famous and obscure, but none has entered that private pantheon. Strong admiration calls for humility, an acceptance that others accomplish things we prize and will never accomplish ourselves. Otherwise, admiration festers into envy and resentment. All of those I most admire are writers, and chief among them, topping even Henry James, Chekhov and Beckett, is Samuel Johnson, who knew something about money and the writing life. Today, as I follow a couple of job leads, I’ll keep in mind what he wrote in The Rambler #117:
“All industry must be excited by hope.”
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
`He Kept Finding His Sympathies Going to Widmerpool'
At Terry Teachout's urging I've been periodically reading the “Parker” novels of Richard Stark, one of the pen names used by the prolific, 75-year-old Donald Westlake. I wrote about the experience here, and was pleased to learn the University of Chicago Press is reissuing the Parker series starting with the first, The Hunter, from 1962. They’re unlike any other novels I know. The prose is spare but largely free of hard-boiled macho posturing. Parker is a thief and remains consistently intriguing because of his professionalism. We admire his competence. He doesn’t enjoy violence but will kill without hesitation when necessary. He’s largely amoral but not a nihilist. He is to stealing what Stark is to writing – pure, graceful efficiency.
Late Monday night I was reading Plunder Squad from 1972 – the 19th of the 28 Parker titles, as best I can tell. About two-thirds of the way through the novel we meet a series of new characters, each given his own brief chapter. We know a dubious art heist is in the works and the new guys are members of the eponymous “plunder squad.” Among them is “short and stout” Lou Sternberg, a fastidious, easily offended American who lives in London and returns to the U.S. only to do a job. He goes from the airport directly to his room at the First Standard Motel:
“Ghastly. Drinking glasses in the bathroom were encased in little white paper bags imprinted with a message including the word `sanitized.’ A similar message was on the paper band bridging the toilet seat. It was like dating a sexual hysteric who can never stop talking about her virginity.”
The joke doesn’t work but we learn something about Sternberg and appreciate Stark’s eye for Americana. A few more mildly satirical sentences follow, and then we come to this:
“By the time he'd unpacked and desanitized everything, the air in the room had a bit of life in it. Sternberg stripped to his boxer shorts, turned down the bed, settled himself comfortably with the pillows behind his back, and opened the Anthony Powell novel he'd started on the plane. It was Magnus Donners he wanted to identify with, but he kept finding his sympathies going to Widmerpool."
Alone on the couch at midnight, I laughed out loud. In more conventional noir novels, a motel room signals sex, often of the weird or at least sordid variety. In Stark’s hands it means A Dance to the Music of Time (also kept in print by the University of Chicago Press) and another revelation of Sternberg’s character. We might call this applied literary criticism, and we shouldn’t be surprised. In an interview from 2006, Westlake talks about reading Hammett’s The Thin Man when he was 15:
“I hadn't known you could tell the reader something without actually saying it, and I've loved that effect ever since. Nabokov was a master of that. But I also love good writing just for its own sake, and go back to reread Anthony Powell every once in a while. I have to be careful with him, though. After I've read Powell a while, my sentences get longer and longer. That works with him, but not with me.”
Late Monday night I was reading Plunder Squad from 1972 – the 19th of the 28 Parker titles, as best I can tell. About two-thirds of the way through the novel we meet a series of new characters, each given his own brief chapter. We know a dubious art heist is in the works and the new guys are members of the eponymous “plunder squad.” Among them is “short and stout” Lou Sternberg, a fastidious, easily offended American who lives in London and returns to the U.S. only to do a job. He goes from the airport directly to his room at the First Standard Motel:
“Ghastly. Drinking glasses in the bathroom were encased in little white paper bags imprinted with a message including the word `sanitized.’ A similar message was on the paper band bridging the toilet seat. It was like dating a sexual hysteric who can never stop talking about her virginity.”
The joke doesn’t work but we learn something about Sternberg and appreciate Stark’s eye for Americana. A few more mildly satirical sentences follow, and then we come to this:
“By the time he'd unpacked and desanitized everything, the air in the room had a bit of life in it. Sternberg stripped to his boxer shorts, turned down the bed, settled himself comfortably with the pillows behind his back, and opened the Anthony Powell novel he'd started on the plane. It was Magnus Donners he wanted to identify with, but he kept finding his sympathies going to Widmerpool."
Alone on the couch at midnight, I laughed out loud. In more conventional noir novels, a motel room signals sex, often of the weird or at least sordid variety. In Stark’s hands it means A Dance to the Music of Time (also kept in print by the University of Chicago Press) and another revelation of Sternberg’s character. We might call this applied literary criticism, and we shouldn’t be surprised. In an interview from 2006, Westlake talks about reading Hammett’s The Thin Man when he was 15:
“I hadn't known you could tell the reader something without actually saying it, and I've loved that effect ever since. Nabokov was a master of that. But I also love good writing just for its own sake, and go back to reread Anthony Powell every once in a while. I have to be careful with him, though. After I've read Powell a while, my sentences get longer and longer. That works with him, but not with me.”
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
`A World View in Two Sentences'
I mostly ignored blogs before starting Anecdotal Evidence more than two and a half years ago, though some of my original models appear on the blogroll to the left. The technology seemed to possess immense potential, a writer’s fantasy realized – immediacy, independence, ease of production. With Internet access and minimal knowhow the world’s writers, freed from the shackles of editors and market demand, could share their gifts with a global readership. Now such hopes sound ridiculously utopian. There isn’t a lot out there worth reading and blog hubris is pandemic.
A harmlessly offhand post I wrote last summer about my indifference to the sub-literary genres of fantasy and science fiction garnered more comments – a few too vile to post -- than anything else I’ve written. The only comparable reaction has been to posts some angry readers interpreted as relating to politics, a tedious subject I usually ignore. I shouldn’t have been surprised, as politics is a sub-species of fantasy and both appeal to adolescents of all ages.
Not wishing to give up on pockets of hope, I’ve remained alert for blog cognates and precursors, writers who might have blogged successfully had they possessed the technology, and from whom we might learn something. Among others I’ve identified Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt, Thoreau, Ruskin, Karl Kraus and Mencken. Another, less well known, is Peter Altenberg (1859-1919), the Viennese miniaturist championed by Kraus. In 2005, Archipelago Books published Telegrams of the Soul, a selection of his prose translated by Peter Wortsman. Clive James says Altenberg could craft “a world view in two sentences,” and his pieces are always brief, a mélange of essay, fiction, aphorism and feuilleton. I know of nothing quite like them in English. Here’s one of his elusive exercises in self-definition from “Autobiography”:
“I’d like to capture an individual in a single sentence, a soul-stirring experience on a single page a landscape in one word! Present arms, artist, aim, bull’s-eye! Basta. And above all: Listen to yourself. Lend an ear to the voices within. Don’t be shy with yourself. Don’t let yourself be scared off by unfamiliar sounds. As long as they’re your own! Have the courage of your own nakedness.”
Altenberg, a coffee-house denizen, a lifelong Viennese without a home, a dirty old and young man, revels in clownish irony. His prose is slippery and never solemn. In “Autobiography” he writes “that which you `wisely withhold’ is more artistic than that which you `blurt out.’ Isn’t that so?! Indeed, I love the `abbreviated deal,’ the telegram style of the soul!”
In his afterword, Wortsman likens Altenberg to his close contemporary Lewis Carroll. Both idealized children to the point of flirting (Platonically, so far as we know) with pedophilia. Altenberg, with his excitement and sense of wonder, sounds like an articulate child. This is from “Retrospective Introduction to my Book Märchen des Lebens":
“Everything is remarkable if our perception of it is remarkable! And every little local incident written up in the daily newspaper can sound the depths of life, revealing all the tragic and the comic, the same as Shakespeare’s tragedies! We all do life an injustice in surrendering poetry as the exclusive province of the poet’s heart, since every one of us has the capacity to mine the poetic in the quarry of the mundane! The poet’s heart will forfeit this privilege through the intrinsic culture of the common human heart!”
The best writing is always rooted in the local, particular and mundane. Straining after grand thoughts is often futile and always tiresome, especially among us dime-a-dozen bloggers. In “Little Things,” Altenberg writes:
“Little things kill! Fulfillment can always be defeated, but never anticipation! Therefore I hold fast to the little things in life, to neckties, umbrella handles, walking stick handles, stray remarks, neglected gems, pearls of the soul that roll under the table and are picked up by no one! The significant things in life have absolutely no importance.”
A harmlessly offhand post I wrote last summer about my indifference to the sub-literary genres of fantasy and science fiction garnered more comments – a few too vile to post -- than anything else I’ve written. The only comparable reaction has been to posts some angry readers interpreted as relating to politics, a tedious subject I usually ignore. I shouldn’t have been surprised, as politics is a sub-species of fantasy and both appeal to adolescents of all ages.
Not wishing to give up on pockets of hope, I’ve remained alert for blog cognates and precursors, writers who might have blogged successfully had they possessed the technology, and from whom we might learn something. Among others I’ve identified Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt, Thoreau, Ruskin, Karl Kraus and Mencken. Another, less well known, is Peter Altenberg (1859-1919), the Viennese miniaturist championed by Kraus. In 2005, Archipelago Books published Telegrams of the Soul, a selection of his prose translated by Peter Wortsman. Clive James says Altenberg could craft “a world view in two sentences,” and his pieces are always brief, a mélange of essay, fiction, aphorism and feuilleton. I know of nothing quite like them in English. Here’s one of his elusive exercises in self-definition from “Autobiography”:
“I’d like to capture an individual in a single sentence, a soul-stirring experience on a single page a landscape in one word! Present arms, artist, aim, bull’s-eye! Basta. And above all: Listen to yourself. Lend an ear to the voices within. Don’t be shy with yourself. Don’t let yourself be scared off by unfamiliar sounds. As long as they’re your own! Have the courage of your own nakedness.”
Altenberg, a coffee-house denizen, a lifelong Viennese without a home, a dirty old and young man, revels in clownish irony. His prose is slippery and never solemn. In “Autobiography” he writes “that which you `wisely withhold’ is more artistic than that which you `blurt out.’ Isn’t that so?! Indeed, I love the `abbreviated deal,’ the telegram style of the soul!”
In his afterword, Wortsman likens Altenberg to his close contemporary Lewis Carroll. Both idealized children to the point of flirting (Platonically, so far as we know) with pedophilia. Altenberg, with his excitement and sense of wonder, sounds like an articulate child. This is from “Retrospective Introduction to my Book Märchen des Lebens":
“Everything is remarkable if our perception of it is remarkable! And every little local incident written up in the daily newspaper can sound the depths of life, revealing all the tragic and the comic, the same as Shakespeare’s tragedies! We all do life an injustice in surrendering poetry as the exclusive province of the poet’s heart, since every one of us has the capacity to mine the poetic in the quarry of the mundane! The poet’s heart will forfeit this privilege through the intrinsic culture of the common human heart!”
The best writing is always rooted in the local, particular and mundane. Straining after grand thoughts is often futile and always tiresome, especially among us dime-a-dozen bloggers. In “Little Things,” Altenberg writes:
“Little things kill! Fulfillment can always be defeated, but never anticipation! Therefore I hold fast to the little things in life, to neckties, umbrella handles, walking stick handles, stray remarks, neglected gems, pearls of the soul that roll under the table and are picked up by no one! The significant things in life have absolutely no importance.”
Monday, October 06, 2008
`A Good But Flawed Man'
“In any made thing a repair that is thoughtfully done adds a pathos that a new object or one that has fallen into disrepair cannot have.”
On Sunday, my brother and I spoke of the wonderful English painter Rackstraw Downes, who edited Fairfield Porter’s Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism 1935-1975, which I pulled from the shelf, seeking, I suppose, consolation. Earlier in the day I read the final pages of Peter Martin’s Samuel Johnson: A Biography, and felt some of the melancholy experienced when leaving an old friend one sees only infrequently. The sentence quoted above, written by Porter in the nineteen-fifties, might be applied with justice to Johnson, whose life was a long effort at thoughtful, tortuous self-repair. His disadvantages from the start were obvious – compromised health, few social privileges, poverty, a monstrous engagement with depression and madness – but his life is a tale of ongoing spiritual mending. To know his life and take it to heart is to repudiate self-pity and the blame of others for our failings and difficulties. Consider Martin’s description of Johnson’s final days:
“What several of the written accounts of these last days reveal is that the two dominant, opposing keynotes of his mental state during the last weeks of his life were desperation and calm acceptance of God’s mercy. His desperation to try anything to survive gradually evolved into some measure of peace about what he realised was his imminent death, but it appears also that his desperation did not cease until very shortly before he died, and that a last frantic clutching at the possibility of life may indeed have hastened his end.”
To read such a scene is to be filled with admiration and a wish to emulate Johnson’s courage. This is why Johnson remains bottomlessly interesting and worthy of yet another biography. His life is an allegory of all human life as it might best be lived. “What Makes Dr. Johnson Great?” one of Theodore Dalrymple’s best essays, was published two years ago in City Journal. He frames the piece with his effort to convince a Russian-born friend of Johnson’s eminence. Here’s part of his answer:
“What Johnson said of the London of his time, that it contains all that human life can afford, seems also true of his own life. Johnson is a good but flawed man, always trying to be, but not always succeeding in being, a better one: he is proud, he is humble; he is weak, he is strong; he is prejudiced, he is generous-minded; he is tenderhearted, he is bad-tempered; he is foolish, he is wise; he is sure of himself, he is modest; he is idle, he is hardworking; he is opinionated, he is consumed by doubt; he is spiritual, he is carnal; he is hopeful, he is despairing; he is skeptical, he is credulous; he is melancholy, he is lighthearted; he is deferential, he is aware that he has no superior in the world; he is clumsy of body, he is elegant of mind and diction; he is a failure, he is triumphant. We never expect to meet anyone who, to such a degree, encompasses in his being all human vulnerability and human resilience.”
On Sunday, my brother and I spoke of the wonderful English painter Rackstraw Downes, who edited Fairfield Porter’s Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism 1935-1975, which I pulled from the shelf, seeking, I suppose, consolation. Earlier in the day I read the final pages of Peter Martin’s Samuel Johnson: A Biography, and felt some of the melancholy experienced when leaving an old friend one sees only infrequently. The sentence quoted above, written by Porter in the nineteen-fifties, might be applied with justice to Johnson, whose life was a long effort at thoughtful, tortuous self-repair. His disadvantages from the start were obvious – compromised health, few social privileges, poverty, a monstrous engagement with depression and madness – but his life is a tale of ongoing spiritual mending. To know his life and take it to heart is to repudiate self-pity and the blame of others for our failings and difficulties. Consider Martin’s description of Johnson’s final days:
“What several of the written accounts of these last days reveal is that the two dominant, opposing keynotes of his mental state during the last weeks of his life were desperation and calm acceptance of God’s mercy. His desperation to try anything to survive gradually evolved into some measure of peace about what he realised was his imminent death, but it appears also that his desperation did not cease until very shortly before he died, and that a last frantic clutching at the possibility of life may indeed have hastened his end.”
To read such a scene is to be filled with admiration and a wish to emulate Johnson’s courage. This is why Johnson remains bottomlessly interesting and worthy of yet another biography. His life is an allegory of all human life as it might best be lived. “What Makes Dr. Johnson Great?” one of Theodore Dalrymple’s best essays, was published two years ago in City Journal. He frames the piece with his effort to convince a Russian-born friend of Johnson’s eminence. Here’s part of his answer:
“What Johnson said of the London of his time, that it contains all that human life can afford, seems also true of his own life. Johnson is a good but flawed man, always trying to be, but not always succeeding in being, a better one: he is proud, he is humble; he is weak, he is strong; he is prejudiced, he is generous-minded; he is tenderhearted, he is bad-tempered; he is foolish, he is wise; he is sure of himself, he is modest; he is idle, he is hardworking; he is opinionated, he is consumed by doubt; he is spiritual, he is carnal; he is hopeful, he is despairing; he is skeptical, he is credulous; he is melancholy, he is lighthearted; he is deferential, he is aware that he has no superior in the world; he is clumsy of body, he is elegant of mind and diction; he is a failure, he is triumphant. We never expect to meet anyone who, to such a degree, encompasses in his being all human vulnerability and human resilience.”
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