`Noiseless, Patient'

This afternoon, my brother sent me the following e-mail message with the subject line "Arachnaphoibles":

"When I got home from work today I went to the garage to do some cleaning and tidying in preparation for the summer season of painting. After an hour of happy and pleasurable work I sat down to read at random from the Norton Anthology of American Literature. As I was opening the book I dropped it and it fell open to the Whitman page containing the poem `The Noiseless, Patient Spider' so I started to read where Fortuna bade me. I finished reading it just as Ingrid called me in for dinner. I reached for my coffee cup and on the bottom was a small brown spider."

`The Subworld'

I shared the morning with an autistic third grader who remembered me from our previous meeting six weeks ago. His mood had improved and he was no longer argumentative or seriously withdrawn. For the first time he displayed a resilient sense of humor – always a symptom of mental health. We read The Stinky Cheese Man in the school library and he laughed at all the stories, particularly the parody of “The Princess and the Pea.” In Jon Scieszka’s version, the pea is replaced by a bowling ball. My student suggested other substitutions – pizza, a flamethrower, “a really, really fat guy.”

Back in the classroom, the teacher read aloud “Rumpelstiltskin,” always my favorite among the fairy tales collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. Fairy tales are stories of anarchy contained by ritual and repetition – a very appealing strategy. The power of Rumpelstiltskin’s name, and the young queen’s cunning in discovering it, possess the narrative satisfactions of a Homeric tale. The kid loved it, especially the recurrence of words and events in threes –always a charmed number in fairy tales. He noted a trio of them or, as he put it: “Three threes. That makes nine. This story is a nine.” A potent mix for a bright autistic boy and the rest of us: repetition, symmetry, magical powers, good prevailing over evil, a happy ending. Here’s the ending in Ralph Manheim’s translation (not the one read in class):

“`The Devil told you that! The Devil told you that!’ the little man screamed, and in his rage he stamped his right foot so hard that it went into the ground up to his waist. Then in his fury he took his left foot in both hands and tore himself in two.”

I reviewed Guy Davenport’s The Balthus Notebook, his idiosyncratic study of the Polish/French painter Balthasar Kłossowski de Rola, when it was published in 1990 (Davenport approved of my review), and have just reread it with children in mind. The book helped me reevaluate an artist I, like many, had thoroughly misunderstood. In the nineteen-thirties, Balthus illustrated an edition of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, a book Davenport rightly describes as “a dismal and hysterical novel.” He goes on:

“What caught Balthus’s imagination in it was the manner in which children create a subsidiary world, an emotional island which they have the talent to robinsoner, to fill all the contours of. This subworld has its own time, its own weather, its own customs and morals.”

As the father of three sons I knew this intuitively, but Davenport distilled the idea. My autistic third grader found an “emotional island,” a “subworld” created by others – the Volk, the Brothers Grimm – congruent with his own, and colonized it. I’ve never seen him so happy.

`Unalterable and Permanent'

David Myers has performed a wonderful service and posted some of the notes he kept in 1976 as a student of the poet-critic J.V. Cunningham. Here are a few favorites:

"Writing aims at being unalterable and permanent. Thus records and tape recordings are forms of writing."

"Tolerance is almost identical to indifference."

"An accumulation of bad habits marks the colloquial style."

"The finder of his theme will be at no loss for words."

"It would be indecorous to ascribe a fault to Jane Austen."

`The Crazy Woodpecker'

Two weeks ago, while my oldest son and his girlfriend were visiting, we heard a rapid, rhythmically regular tapping on the outside wall in my office. The drumming seemed to issue from a spot above the shelves of books by and about Joyce and Beckett. I stepped outside to investigate and found only a small, asymmetrical hole in the wood just beneath the eave. I’ve since heard the sound four or five times, always as precise as a well-tuned engine. On Saturday it happened again. I ran out and found a downy woodpecker hanging on the board by the hole I’d located earlier. I stood motionless and watched him hammer for two or three minutes before he shot away. The hole wasn’t larger than before and I saw no trace of sawdust, leading me to guess the bird wasn’t after food, or at least not exclusively. Frances Backhouse, who lives not far from here, in Victoria, B.C., seems to confirm this in her Woodpeckers of North America:

“The muted but persistent tapping that accompanies their excavating activities sometimes attracts other downy woodpeckers.”

Courtship? Latent avian aesthetic sense? I don’t know but I find the sound comforting and not at all annoying, and I’m not worried about damage to the house. In describing the song of the downy, Backhouse resorts to the language of music:

“Drum rolls usually last 1.5 seconds or less, with a tempo of about 16 to 18 beats per second, decelerating slightly toward the end. They are broadcast at a rate of about nine to 15 repetitions per minute. Downy woodpeckers of both sexes tap to attract their nearby mate to a potential nest site. They typically tap nine or 10 times in a row at a rate of about three or four taps per minute.”

Thoreau, in his journal on Valentine’s Day, 1854, uses the language of religious ceremony: “A downy woodpecker with the red spot on his hind head and his cassock open behind, showing his white robe, kept up an incessant loud tapping on another pitch pine.”

I’ve been rereading Guy Davenport’s essays and fiction, including “O Gadjo Niglo,” a 42-page, comma-less story from A Table of Green Fields (1993). Savor the language of this passage – most of it monosyllabic like the woodpecker’s song:

“I moseyed up to the sea bluff. He was not in the scoop. I drew the leaf and acorn of a white oak. A woodpecker thucked in flurries high up. A spink fifed in the service and was answered with a trill from the beech. I gave the hoot hoot we used. And sharpened my ears. There was only the woods rustle and wash of the sea. The birds. The crazy woodpecker.”

`Hearty, Jovial Aristocrats of the Heart'

“One might compile a select company of such uncompromising artists who will have no illusions about them, who want for paradise nothing but their own good natures; they are not many.”

Downright scarce, I’d say. The sentence is from “Spinoza’s Tulips,” an essay Guy Davenport collected in The Geography of the Imagination, his essential magpie’s nest of an education. In his immediate context, “uncompromising artists” include the titular philosopher, Wallace Stevens, George Santayana, Melville and Thoreau. He calls them “hearty, jovial aristocrats of the heart.” Every seasoned reader can draw up a comparable list. Mine might include the aforementioned Spinoza and Thoreau seated at a table with Montaigne, Matsuo Bashō, Samuel Johnson, Chekhov, Osip Mandelstam, Zbigniew Herbert and our host, Guy Davenport. Imagine a United Nations of the spirit equipped with headphones for instantaneous translations.

Thirty-four years after working there, I still occasionally dream about my dream-like job as a clerk in Kay’s, a cluttered, three-story Cleveland bookstore. I can still draw the floor plan, both public space and stockrooms, and remember where each publisher’s backlist was arranged. I’ve always conceived of it as a vast conversation – Ezra Pound over here in New Directions at last talking to Kafka and Benjamin over there in Schocken. Such fancies grow in quaintness with the unchecked passing of used, rare and antiquarian bookstores. “In Pursuit of the Unknown” is an elegiac essay by Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple) on the imminent extinction of such shops. It’s also a celebration of minds happy with the gift of bookish serendipity, a pastime that loses its charm in the online world:

“Browsing is a manifestation of multiculturalism in the best possible sense. By browsing, you realise that what you previously did not know existed interests you deeply. The internet, by contrast, is the instrument of monomaniacs.”

`What a Good Job for Me'

I was assigned to work for less than three hours on Friday and wasn’t expecting a break, so I didn’t bring a book to school. Given a gratuitous 30 minutes to kill, I poured a cup of coffee in the staff room and searched the shelves for something to read other than the obligatory copies of Sports Illustrated and O. Pickings were slim but I found Jack the Bum and the Haunted House (1977) by Janet Schulman, with illustrations by James Stevenson, longtime cartoonist and illustrator for The New Yorker. The title says it all. Jack, with the help of some kids, finds a place to live in a haunted house. He ends up a hero by catching a jewel thief who hides his loot in the house. The wealthy owner offers Jack a job as watchman in the century-old house, which he plans to turn into a museum. Jack responds:

“`Who says I want a job? I am a bum.’”

The owner coaxes him, leading to this exchange:

“`All you have to do is be yourself.’”

“Jack grinned. `What a good job for me – at least for a while,’ he said.”

Now I work with kids, and I’ve almost always worked as some kind of writer, so, like Jack, all I’ve had to do (most of the time) is be myself. I’ve been fortunate. Some jobs are too awful to contemplate, and I’ve avoided most of them. I endorse Jack’s shrewd caveat: “`What a good job for me – at least for a while.’” On Thursday night I reread the introduction Guy Davenport wrote for the North Point Press edition of Montaigne’s Travel Journal, collected in Every Force Evolves a Form. Two sentences glowed with significance. First, this:

“In his ability to convey a sense of place with a few deft details (a topiary garden, an historical site, local anecdotes) Montaigne can be compared to Bashō, whose Journey to the Far North is the ideal form of all journeys of passionate pilgrims to shrines and to places which they have already visited in their imagination.”

Anyone who notes the similarities between Montaigne and Matsuo Bashō is a reader who deserves attention and respect. Davenport sent me back to the 17th-century poet’s prose and his frog haiku. When I came home from work on Friday I found Frank Wilson had linked to a story in the National Geographic about Bashō in which Howard Brown writes: “Basho has become many things to many people—bohemian sage, outsider artist, consummate wayfarer [“Jack the Bum”], beatific saint, and above all a poet for the ages.” Note, too, the ravishing autumn photo accompanying Brown’s story.

Here’s the second sentence I noted in Davenport’s essay:

“We all lead a moral inner life of the spirit, on which religion, philosophy, and tacit opinion have many claims. To reflect on this inner life rationally is a skill no longer taught, though successful introspection, if it can make us at peace with ourselves, is sanity itself. The surest teachers of such reflection, certainly the wittiest and most forgiving, are Plutarch and Montaigne.”

`To Help Others, Write for Others'

I meditated on Mark Van Doren’s “Dr. Johnson” for much of the day, in the company of an autistic third grader:

“Monster of learning, master judge
Of poems and philosophies,
Of good and bad, of great and small
Men who prowled Fleet Street with him,
And Cheapside, and the Strand –
Within that huge, that blinking
Frightener of babies,
Nevertheless mice played: delights
In miniature – shy loves, true servants,
Friends, and taste of tea –
And nibbling fears, as now,
As now, of horrible death, oh, on hot feet
Presentiments of blank, of worms, of fire;
Of dissolution, Bozzy,
Dissolution.”

The boy had spoken a dozen words to me when, at recess, he began scratching marks on the bare ground with a stick. He would scratch, walk 10 or 15 paces and scratch again. After three or four marks I understood he was writing the alphabet, something like the chicken in Finnegans Wake scratching “litterish fragments.” Kids who know him started following his circuitous abecedary. They were flabbergasted he knew the alphabet and could write perfect upper-case letters, and cheered when he reached “Z.” He wrote the digits from “1” to “10” and the 26 letters again, this time in a straight line. Then he broke the stick into five equal lengths, formed a square with four of them next to the “Z” and stuck the fifth in the middle, upright. I sensed he was conjuring something with the ritual. He took no notice of the attention he received and wouldn’t talk about it.

In A Dictionary of the English Language, after dispensing with chemistry, Johnson defines “dissolution” as “destruction of anything by separation of parts; the substance formed by dissolving any body; death; destruction; breach or ruin of anything compacted or united; the act of breaking up an assembly.” Johnson associated physical death with the human propensity for riot and ruin – in a word, madness, and his “nibbling fears” of it. In his Life, Boswell (“Bozzy”) reports Johnson saying, “Without truth there must be a dissolution of society.” I suspect in autistic kids and others among us a “separation of parts.” Some of us seek unity, others fail to recognize our dissolution. We drift apart, only to focus for an isolated task – writing a poem, a blog, letters in the dirt. When I read Van Doren’s “master judge / Of poems and philosophies,” I think of Johnson’s refutation of Bishop Berkeley’s radical idealism, which resembles the autistic worldview: Johnson kicked a stone, and has been mocked for missing the point. On the contrary, he got the point precisely and could have scratched Q.E.D. in the dirt beside the stone. In the journal excerpts he collected in The Hunter Gracchus, Guy Davenport writes:

“The hope of philosophy was to create a tranquility so stable that the world could not assail it. This stability will always turn out to be a madness or obsession or brutal indifference to the world. Philosophy is rather the self-mastery that frees one enough – of laziness, selfishness, rage, jealousy, and such failures of spirit – to help others, write for others, draw for others, be friends.”

`Nothing Was Too Difficult for Students'

The art teacher pronounced Wassily Kandinsky’s first name so it sounded like an adjective form of wassail: wassail-y? She told the fifth graders Kandinsky “painted what he felt, and he must have felt pretty happy.” She pulled a violin from its case and played discordant variations on “Tennessee Waltz,” a nameless reel and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” and instructed the kids to paint “what they felt” as she played. Judging from the primary-colored messes on their desks, most were trying to pass kidney stones. In Watt, Beckett anatomizes laughter like this:

“The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well well. But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout -- Haw! - so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs – silence please -- at that which is unhappy.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “dianoetic” as “Of or pertaining to thought; employing thought and reasoning; intellectual.” So, which species of laughter was the most appropriate response to the art teacher’s performance? I can think of good arguments for all three: bitter, hollow, mirthless. Mine was silent but combined elements of each.

The poet-critic Mark Van Doren (author of excellent books on Shakespeare and Dryden) taught literature at Columbia University for almost 40 years. Students – among them John Berryman, Thomas Merton and Whitaker Chambers – remembered him as a brilliant teacher. In his Autobiography, Van Doren addresses the basic assumption behind his approach to instruction:

“From the beginning I assumed experience in freshmen. Perhaps the chief novelty consisted in my assumption that nothing was too difficult for students. Freshmen have had more experience than they are given credit for. They have been born, have parents, had brothers and sisters, been in love, been jealous, been angry, been ambitious, been tired, been hungry, been happy and unhappy, been aware of justice and injustice. Well, the great writers handled just such things, and they did so in basic human language men must use whenever they feel and think. The result, if no teacher prevents its happening, was that freshmen learned about themselves. And so did the teachers, at least if they read and talked like men of the world, simply and humbly, without assumptions of academic superiority.”

Teaching begins in mutual respect. Fifth graders are not Columbia freshmen but they deserve not to be patronized and treated like morons. Nor is learning a species of therapy. How Kandinsky felt – how the kids “feel” -- is irrelevant and ultimately unknowable. I admire the simple daring of Van Doren’s stance: “nothing was too difficult for students.”

`He Was Simply Doing His Job'

Emotions, like clothing and wine, are subject to fashions, though not so much emotions as their appearance. Chief among today’s fashionable emotions is a self-flattering hybrid of sensitivity and compassion. Master the correct facial and linguistic expressions and you too can be mistaken for Gandhi’s brother. On Tuesday, I witnessed such a performance when an angry narcissist made all the appropriate sounds and was congratulated on the depth of her selfless caring, thus adding a second layer of fraud to the proceedings. In a recent post Elberry places such posturing in a literary context:

“Chekhov was wasted on me in my youth: surface energy (rhetoric) meant more to me than subtlety and uncluttered observation. Today i was struck by the extent of his compassion, almost divine in its pervasive, unobtrusive influence. He writes of appalling human beings without apparent judgement or disgust. And yet it is not that he lacks affect; this is no unfeeling lens. It is rather an ability to see people as they are, as extending beyond one’s vision into the darkness of the soul, where - one might say - only god can rightly see and judge.”

This is shrewd, mature critical judgment. I share Elberry’s evolving relations with Chekhov. I respected him when young and recognized his power but tucked him in the obligatory file labeled “Great Russian Writer.” Today, in my pantheon, he ranks supreme among fiction writers. Part of the reason is precisely the “almost divine” sense of compassion cited by Elberry, combined with an unblinking narrative gaze. I’ve learned to beware of workers in my field – educating damaged children – who feel compelled to parade their compassion and selflessness. They (admittedly, a minority) put more energy into looking good than doing good. The same is true of do-gooder writers who wish to position themselves most advantageously in the compassion sweepstakes. Elberry’s father, like Chekhov, seems to have been a doctor of the old school, for whom professional competence was the sincerest form of compassion. Of course, the wish to appear sensitive long ago infected the ranks of physicians. Compassion is an action not a self-regarding pose for the likes of Dr. Elberry:

“My father, like Chekhov, was a doctor. He also tended to reserve judgement, i think because so many of his patients were drug addicts or violent criminals that judgement would quickly have overwhelmed the clarity he needed for his work. It wasn’t that he was oblivious to a patient’s character as that he witheld condemnation because it was irrelevant. He wasn’t what i would call compassionate; he was businesslike in his work, without any theory of doing good or helping humanity: it was what he was good at, what he enjoyed, and i think his patients appreciated the sense that he was a good businessman, his business being Medicine. So when he gets on a bus, passengers often recognise him from 15 or more years ago, and offer him their seats. And yet, he was simply doing his job.”

Based on Elberry’s description, his father sounds pragmatically, not histrionically, compassionate. In this, he brings to mind two other doctors: Johnson and Dalrymple, neither of whom gave a damn about striking an altruistic pose.

`The Nature of Assistance'

Do a Google search for “Herbert Morris” and a post I wrote last June comes up fourth from the top. This is sad and bewildering, especially because two of the top three results are for other Herbert Morrises, not the great poet who died in 2001 at age 73. Do the same search but add “poet” and my post is fifth. (Go here for another post on Morris.) We can safely conclude the critical oblivion Morris endured in life lingers on in death.

I was delighted Monday morning when I woke to an e-mail from a man whose father was Morris’ cousin. He found my post, he writes, “in a very roundabout way.” I don’t yet have permission to identify him or further quote his e-mail, but he suggests Morris was much loved by his family, a man who loved and delighted children. I’m not surprised judging from the evidence in Morris’ poems. Most are set in the past, viewed through the lens of memory, with the poet often returning to his childhood in a sort of observant reverie. The second of his four books, Dream Palace (which I take as a metaphor of memory), includes the lines “'the past you would reclaim, the past/you would entreat to stop the heart, the past.”

I worked Monday as a reading aide in an elementary school. All day, kids came to my office and we read together – an unexpectedly encouraging experience because even the weak readers, including one I’d been warned was a discipline problem, enjoyed their books. Even that kid, with his dirty fingernails and clothes reeking of cigarette smoke, never gave the impression reading was an odious task. As part of my assignment I spent an hour on recess patrol. A group of boys trying to dig a rock out of the ground with sticks unearthed a small, four-sided glass bottle with a rusted cap. They brought it to me and asked what I thought it contained. I threw the question back at them and the consensus was “magic potions,” which is more interesting than the poster paint it once held.

One of my favorite poems in Dream Palace, which I read during lunch, is “Magic,” a first-person account of a childhood encounter with a stage magician. It reads like a Steven Millhauser story told from the point of view of an audience member picked to assist the performer. It’s more than autobiography in the banal sense. Here is the last of the poem’s 20 four-line stanzas:

“Magic, I tell myself, is transformation.
We are conspirators in our undoing.
Still, there are weights and depths to be determined:
What kindness is, the nature of assistance.”

`The Hawk that Soars'

A pair of Cooper’s hawks has built a nest in the woods behind my brother’s house, the house where I grew up. Trees in northern Ohio are still leafless, and Ken at first mistook the dark silhouette high in the branches for a squirrel’s nest. Binoculars revealed a substantial structure of sticks, not leaves, and he confirmed the identification when he saw the birds. Watching hawks is always a privilege and rather frightening.

I accompanied a group of birders on their annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count in 1996. We met at dawn at the entrance to Vale Cemetery in Schenectady, N.Y., where the temperature was eight degrees. We hiked up a hill, past the grave of Charles Steinmetz and across a field of century-old stone markers and monuments. Something moved perpendicular to our path, 20 yards ahead of us, just above the tops of the gravestones, the rising sun glowing feebly behind it. The senior birder among us, a retired General Electric executive, promptly identified it as a Cooper’s hawk, and others concurred. The bird moved without effort or hurry, like a remote-control model airplane, and ignored us, disappearing like an apparition into the oaks.

Cooper’s hawks prey on other birds and are adapted to hunting in woods, though a recent study showed almost one-quarter of the birds examined had suffered broken bones in their chests – presumably from smashing into trees at high speeds. That’s a strangely comforting discovery, an attractive flaw in an otherwise perfect hunting machine. A hawk’s fierce gaze suggests focused intelligence and always earns my respect. When an ornithologist told me hawks possess 400 times the visual acuity of humans, he confirmed my atavistic fears. What I remember vividly of that hawk in the cemetery is its coolly savage indifference to our existence. Eugenio Montale recognizes this in Cuttlefish Bones, as translated by Jonathan Galassi:

“Often I have met what’s wrong in life;
it was the stream that chokes and roars,
the shriveling of the scorched leaf,
it was the fallen horse.

“I knew no good, beyond the prodigy
That reveals divine Indifference:
it was the statue in the drowsiness
of noon, and the cloud, and the hawk that soars.”

Here’s David Young’s more emphatic translation:

“Again and Again I have seen life’s evil:
it was the strangled brook, still gurgling,
it was the curling of the shriveled leaf,
it was the fallen horse.

“I have known no good except the miracle
that reveals the divine Indifference:
it was the statue in the drowsy trance
of noon, the cloud, the cruising falcon.”

`As Pelicans Swallowed Fish'

This paragraph is from “The Aeroplanes at Brescia,” a story Guy Davenport published in 1970 in The Kenyon Review and included in his first fiction collection, Tatlin!, published in 1974:

“The young Orville and Wilbur [Wright] had constructed mechanical bats, Otto said, after the designs of Sir George Cayley and Penaud. For America was the land where the learning of Europe was so much speculation to be tested on an anvil. They read Octave Chanute’s Flying Machines; they built kites. The kite was the beginning, not the bird. That was da Vinci’s radical error. The kite had come from China centuries ago. It had passed through the hands of Benjamin Franklin, who caught electricity for the magician Edison, who, it was said, was soon to visit Prague. Men such as Otto Lilienthal had mounted kites and rode the wind and died like Icarus. The Wrights knew all these things. They read Samuel Pierpont Langley; they studied the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge. That was the way of Americans. They took theories as pelicans swallowed fish, pragmatically, and boldly made realities out of ideas.”

I remembered Davenport’s story on Saturday while visiting the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where a full-size working model of the Wright Brothers’ plane, the one they flew at Kitty Hawk, N.C., on Dec. 17, 1903, is on display. Their first flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. By day’s end, as the museum poster says, “Wilbur had coaxed the machine to go 852 feet (256 m.) in 59 seconds.”

Davenport’s story is a capriccio rooted in fact. In 1909, Franz Kafka and his friends Max and Otto Brod attended an air show in Italy. The story shares its title with Kafka’s newspaper account of the air show – his first published writing. As in many of Davenport’s stories, little happens in “The Aeroplanes at Brescia,” which partakes of collage, poem, journalism and essay – a dense weave of images and ideas. Making cameo appearances – as they did in 1909 -- are D’Annunzio, Puccini and Glenn Curtiss. Davenport also introduces a mysterious figure who captures Kafka’s attention – Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, as Davenport explains in an essay (“Ernst Mach Max Ernst”), “might well have been there.” To prepare for writing the story, Davenport read various accounts of the air show and built a model of Louis Blériot’s Antoinette CV25.

As I took notes in front of the model of the Wright Brothers’ plane, an elderly man in a blue blazer, walking with a cane, approached and said, “Isn’t she beautiful?” He’s a retired Boeing engineer who volunteers as a guide at the museum. We talked about the designs of early airplanes, how they combined functionality with elegance, resulting in unexpected beauty. We agreed aircraft – and much else – are no longer as aesthetically pleasing as they once were. I mentioned I’m an Ohioan by birth, and had visited the Wrights’ machine shop in Dayton as a kid. As if in confirmation of Davenport’s description of the Wrights he said admiringly, “Those boys knew their math. They weren’t a couple of hicks, you know.”

`A Spark from a Beacon'

The fourth section of Eugenio Montale’s first book, Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1925), is a suite of nine untitled poems he called “Mediterraneo” (“Mediterranean”). This is the ninth, as translated by Jeremy Reed (included in Montale in English, edited by Harry Thomas):

“Then obliterate if you wish
the errors of a life,
as a sponge erases
the chalk marks on a blackboard.
I need to re-enter your circle,
find help in my fragmentation.
my coming here signifies
a meaning I lost on the road,
and these words of mine allude
unconsciously to a signal event.
But whenever the wind carried
your lazy surf upon a beach,
consternation shook me
as it does a man who’s lost
then recollects his home.
Having learnt my lesson
more from the breathless gasping
of some deserted midday hour of yours
that is hardly audible
than from your glorious moment,
I give myself up in humility.
I’m no more than a spark from a beacon,
And well I know it, to burn,
this is my single, solitary meaning.”

It’s customary to speak of Montale’s poetry as “gnomic” and “hermetic” (Eric Ormsby calls it “blissfully cryptic), and it’s true his early work in particular is seldom explicit, and moves by oblique suggestion and a private mythology. In this reader, however, it also elicits a powerful emotional response. The “Mediterranean” is especially rich, perhaps the core of Montale’s work. The speaker of the poem above addresses the sea, his source, in words reminiscent of Eliot (whom Montale revered): “In my beginning is my end.” I sense a man wishing to mend his ways and return to something elemental, to his original aims – to answer a deferred calling, a vocation. As is customary with Montale’s speakers, there’s an element of passivity, of being acted upon.

I packed Montale in English with my lunch on Friday, when I worked with special-ed. kids in a middle school – a loud, spirited bunch. Most replaced conventional speech with moaning, shrieking or growling, though none was violent or abusive. Reading Montale at lunch was a sanctuary, one I left to join the collective crossword puzzle-solving in the staff room. A woman worked two newspaper puzzles simultaneously, reading clues aloud. I gave up puzzles years ago when they started consuming too much time, but the group effort was unexpectedly enjoyable. I felt a new sense of solidarity with my colleagues and a conviction that working with damaged kids is precisely what I should be doing, that working for newspapers, a wire service and in other capacities as a writer was merely prelude. In “Jackals in Parentheses,” his essay on Montale collected in Facsimiles of Time, Eric Ormsby writes:

“There are no manifestoes in Montale, no slogans, no agendas, no morals, no party platforms; nothing but that private monologue carried out with lovers, friends, mother and father, God, himself, the sea, the wind, the muse and that you, that tu, we all carry within us, call it guardian angel or daimon, as you wish.”

`Shocked By Excellence'

I was touched by Elberry’s admission that during a period of immersion in poetry he “got used to being routinely shocked by excellence.” He cites as examples the poems of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Browning, Hart Crane and his most recent discovery, Geoffrey Hill, our foremost living poet. The shock is hardly difficult to understand. Excellence is always rare but especially in so difficult an endeavor as writing poetry. Only musical composition seems to rival it in near-impossibility. A reliable test of a work’s worthiness for survival – and for earning a berth in the “canon” -- is its capacity to shock us with its excellence. Even poets are not immune to such shocks, as Hill explains:

“At one point in The Orchards of Syon (XXIII), I say `I write/ to astonish myself’. This self-astonishment is achieved when, by some process I can't fathom, common words are moved, or move themselves, into clusters of meaning so intense that they seem to stand up from the page, three-dimensional almost.”

How many poets astonish themselves in their work? And how many astonish us, their readers? More than prose, poetry seems susceptible to bullshit of myriad sorts – falsity of emotion and tone, shrillness, pontificating, self-conscious poeticizing, a tin ear. Its appeal to the resolutely ungifted is virtually unlimited, though we’re fortunate truly bad poetry is easy to recognize. Thus, our astonishment when we encounter what Hill calls “common words” marshaled uncommonly, as in his “An Emblem” from A Treatise of Civil Power:

“Among the slag remonstrances of this land
memory reinterprets us, as with
a Heraclitean emblem. On a sudden,
sunslanting rain intensifies, the roses
twitch more rapidly, flights
of invisible wing-roots lift
from the lighter branches; a purple sky
ushering a rainbow. Now it is gone.”

To remain indifferent to such a poem (better to hate it) amounts to aesthetic impoverishment. To be shocked by its excellence is a gift to envy.

`Somebody's Heavenly Picture'

David Ferry might agree with Ishmael: “Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.” Rivers, lakes and the sea appear with reassuring regularity in his poems, often as occasions for contemplating mortality. Consider “Lake Water,” published in The New Yorker in 2007, which concludes with these heartbreaking lines:

“When, moments after she died, I looked into
Her face, it was as untelling as something natural,
A lake, say, the surface of it unreadable,
Its sources of meaning unfindable anymore.
Her mouth was open as if she had something to say;

“But maybe my saying so is a figure of speech.”

Death here is no literary device. Ferry’s wife of 48 years, the critic Anne Ferry, died in 2006. The language is measured and stately without ponderousness, for Ferry is our nimble, less earnest American Wordsworth (the subject of his first book). Now read “Down by the River,” set on the banks of the Charles in Cambridge, Mass. Ferry is deft with endings:

“On the other side of the river somebody else,
A man or a woman, is painting the scene I'm part of.

“A brilliantly clear diminutive figure works
At a tiny easel, and as a result my soul
Lives on forever in somebody's heavenly picture.”

Ferry is best known as the translator of Gilgamesh, Horace’s Odes and Epistles, and Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics. The co-editor of Horace in English, classicist D.S. Carne-Ross, has called him “a true Horatian poet” whose language is “gravely beautiful.” His poems are the sort one lives with over the years, for their pleasures are time-released. He’s a poet of maturity who now is writing in his maturity (he turns 85 this year). Ferry writes for adults, an anomaly in contemporary poetry, and has a sense of humor. His books sit not on my shelves but on my desk with Eliot, Auden, Cunningham, Berryman, Bowers, Larkin and Geoffrey Hill. Reading Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (1999), one is reminded of Unamuno's description of Spinoza’s Ethics as “a desperate elegiac poem,” though Ferry’s despair is muted by family, fellowship, the homely beauties of nature, and craftsmanship.

Ferry sent me a gracious thank-you note on Tuesday for something I had written about his use of Samuel Johnson a long time ago. He reminds us in “Rereading Old Writing” that “writing/Is a way of being happy.” So is reading David Ferry. Take some time to read “Scrim” and "The Intention of Things."

`Trapped in Our Minds'

Proctor derives from the Latin pro- (“in behalf of”) and curare (“care for”), and can signify an agent of a church or holy order. It also refers to an attorney or university official, particularly in England. The word in the United States is used most often as a transitive verb, to proctor, meaning to supervise the taking of an examination; that is, to watch for cheating. It shares an etymology with another English verb, to procure, but not, disappointingly, with the noun proctology (from the Greek proktos).

I spent much of St. Patrick’s Day proctoring exams and pondering fanciful etymologies. Part of the standardized reading test requires 10th-graders to read a three-page story about Willa Cather, a writer not part of the curriculum at the high school where I’ve been working. This photo of Cather was printed in the examination book, and a boy asked me if it was a woman or a man. Sitting for hours in the gymnasium, occasionally rising to wake sleeping students, revived memories of a thousand study halls. Do you remember the tedium of those hours? Sunlight refracted through dirty windows? The passing of notes? The ripe smell of bag lunches? Boys playing “football” with paper folded into triangles? That’s where I first read T.S. Eliot, in a yellow paperback I still own.

I had Guy Davenport’s The Hunter Gracchus with me again, wishing it and the rest of his essays, along with Willa Cather, were part of the curriculum in all American high schools. This comes from “Keeping Time,” a two-page essay Davenport crafted out of a request from an editor to write about “the authorial I”:

“The business of a writer is to show others how you see the world so that they will then have two views of it, theirs and yours. We are all of us trapped in our minds. We can get out through the imaginative alchemy of reading, a skill complementary to writing but psychologically more mysterious. How writing is written is a process far more straightforward than how it is read.”

`A Systematic Misleading'

“And then I made the discovery that what I liked in reading was to learn things I didn’t know.”

This week thousands of 10th- graders are taking the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, a standardized test known by the acronym WASL, pronounced wassail. On Monday I served as a proctor for the reading portion, and was first assigned to work as a “scribe” for a boy with a learning disability. We sat at a table in the reference section of the high-school library, next to a poster announcing “Reading: Make It a Hobbit.”

“It is a truism that reading educates. What it does most powerfully is introduce the world outside us, negating the obstructions of time and place.”

The reading test consisted of brief narratives drawn from history. The students were to read the stories and answer three sorts of questions – multiple choice, brief answers and longer, mini-essays (three sentences or so).They could consult the stories, where all the answers were explicitly given, at any time. They were asked, in effect, to parrot information.

“I think I learned quite early that the judgments of my teachers were probably a report of their ignorance. In truth, my education was a systematic misleading.”

The boy I was assigned to wanted to write his own answers, so my services as a scribe were not required. He asked me to read several words he was unable to figure out – “preparation,” “mail,” “defeat” – and to help him spell several others – “statue,” “Abraham Lincoln,” “express.” His printing reminded me of my 8-year-old’s. All of his multiple-choice answers were wrong but I was prohibited from telling him so.

“[We have] a society that reads badly and communicates execrably about what we read. The idea persists that reading is an activity of thoughtful, idealistic, moral people called authors and that they are committed to protecting certain values vital to a well-ordered society. Books mold character, enforce patriotism, and provide a healthy way to pass the leisurely hour.”

I spent the next three hours in one of the school’s two gymnasiums – shiny plank floors, clocks in cages, curved ceiling like a Quonset hut. More than 100 kids were seated, two to a table, taking the same reading test. After two hours, more than 40 were still slogging away. Part of my job was to wake students who had fallen asleep on their tests. I saw a kid flashing what appeared to be a pile of small white papers at another kid, both of whom were laughing. I reported this to another proctor, a retired English teacher, and she said, “He’s already failed the test twice for cheating.”

“If, now, I had at my disposal as a teacher only what I learned from the formalities of education, I could not possibly be a university professor. I wouldn’t know anything. I am at least still trying. I’ve kept most of my textbooks and still read them (and am getting pretty good at botany).”

After three hours, 16 kids were still working at their tests. One boy asked permission to use the restroom, and the retired English teacher asked him how much longer he thought he would need to complete the test. “About two hours,” he said, grinning.

“For the real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one’s mind in the workings of another sensibility, quite literally to give oneself over to Henry James or Conrad or Ausonius, to Yuri Olyesha, Bashō, and Plutarch.”

The italicized passages above are drawn, in order, from Guy Davenport’s “On Reading,” collected in The Hunter Gracchus, the book I brought to school on Monday.

`A Bowl of Mush'

I love Chicago but have never been a Studs Terkel fan -- too folksy. Fortunately, the wonderful Richard G. Stern has written a beautiful sendoff for his old friend, worth reading if only for its generous expression of affection. And for this:

"Back in the Fifties, I didn’t think much of Studs. A culture snob, I didn’t think much of Brahms and delighted in such mots as Stravinsky’s `Wagner is the Puccini of music.' I championed such writers as J. F. Powers, Peter Taylor, and the Bellow of Seize the Day (Augie March seemed back then too loose-jointed for me), along with Proust, Joyce, and what Ezra Pound called `the Rooshans.' So Studs, who daily `interrupted' the music on WFMT, was for me a bowl of mush. nce, he came up to a round-table discussion at the University of Chicago, and I thought I’d never heard a gabber who couldn’t locate a verb to pin down his adverbial clauses."

Stern's half-century-old tastes and prejudices are almost precisely mine today.

`The Mystery of the Mind and Heart'

“There comes a time when we take into account the fact that everything we do will become a memory in due course. That is maturity. To reach it one must already have memories.”

That’s the entry for Oct. 1, 1944, from Cesare Pavese’s The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1950. I know from experience we become self-conscious about manufacturing memories, even purposely trying to make them, only in middle age (otherwise, we would have paid better attention when young). Fortunately, Pavese is wrong to assert that “everything we do will become a memory in due course.” Forgetting is merciful and a perfect, vacuum cleaner-like memory is a form of madness.

My oldest son and his girlfriend have arrived from New York City for a five-day visit, their first to the Pacific Northwest. My son is reading one of the rare perfect novels, John Williams’ Stoner, which he first heard about from this blog. It’s the book I last read when he was sick more than three years ago and I flew back to upstate New York to visit him in the hospital. It didn’t occur to me then that I was creating a memory, or rather a cluster of related memories that now form a sort of temporal symmetry.

One of Williams’ themes in Stoner is the raggedness of memory, its faded, fading nature. In the novel’s first two paragraphs, he tells us the title character graduated from the University of Missouri in 1918 and taught there until his death in 1956. In his name, colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the university library. Students who happen upon his name “may wonder idly who William Stoner was.” He continues:

“Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.”

I admire the audacity of starting a novel with the assertion that its main character is a forgotten man of no particular distinction, in a conventional worldly sense. We learn otherwise, for Stoner is a quiet, understated, emotionally devastating book, wise in the ways of the world:

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age, he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as an act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”

Belatedly, after becoming a teacher, Stoner wakes to the desire to become a good one:

“The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print -- the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.”

`A Poorer World'

A reader in Texas passes along a story in City Journal about the possible banning of children’s books published before 1985. If the idea reminds you of Fahrenheit 451 or sounds like another online parody of do-gooder shenanigans, consider the conclusion to Walter Olson’s story:

“Whatever the future of new media may hold, ours will be a poorer world if we begin to lose (or `sequester’ from children) the millions of books published before our own era. They serve as a path into history, literature, and imagination for kids everywhere. They link the generations by enabling parents to pass on the stories and discoveries in which they delighted as children. Their illustrations open up worlds far removed from what kids are likely to see on the video or TV screen. Could we really be on the verge of losing all of this? And if this is what government protection of our kids means, shouldn’t we be thinking instead about protecting our kids from the government?”

`It Grows Along with Knowledge'

I almost wept as I finished reading Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor. I knew the rough outlines of her life and have loved her fiction since a high-school teacher in 1968 loaned me a college anthology of stories, including “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” That reading, late on a school night in my bedroom, is among the most memorable of my life. I know it was a school night because I couldn’t get to sleep afterwards and was groggier than usual the next morning.

O’Connor lived with lupus for the final third of her life, until it killed her at age 39. The horror of premature death looms throughout Gooch’s book. Since finishing the biography I’ve been rereading O’Connor’s stories which seem the best written by an American. Children, I’ve noticed, show up often in her stories, as innocents and monsters (more often the latter), especially in light of my own recent return to the classroom. Gooch quotes a letter O’Connor wrote her friend Betty Hester in 1960, reacting to a suggestion she write about a Georgia girl with a cancerous tumor on her face, who died at age 12:

“What interests me in it is simply the mystery, the agony that is given in strange ways to children.”

Spend enough time around sick and damaged kids and you come to share some of O’Connor’s understanding. Gooch also quotes a 1963 letter from her to the poet Alfred Corn, developing the theme of mystery”:

“Mystery isn’t something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.”

That confirms my recent experiences. By way of telling a joke O’Connor would have enjoyed, visit this blog, which may or may not be a parody. Either way, it’s too horrible not to laugh at.

ADDENDUM: Dave Lull passes along much excellent supplementary material:

"Your posting got me thinking about another Christian novelist. D. Keith Mano, in `Reflections of a Christian Pornographer' (Christianity and Literature, Spring 1979, v28 n3, pages 5-11) tried to explain why `[f]or any serious Christian writer the obscene, the grotesque, the violent seem almost prerequisite.'

"He quoted from an essay in Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners, in which she explains what Mano calls the Christian novelist's `special alienation' in an age so unlike Dante's, i.e. in an age where, according to Mano, there is not for the Christian writer a "prodigious consensus of emotion and shared symbolism':

"`When I write a novel in which the central action is a baptism, I am very well aware that for a majority of my readers, baptism is a meaningless rite, and so in my novel I have to see that this baptism carries enough awe and mystery to jar the reader into some kind of emotional recognition of its significance. To this end I have to bend the whole novel-- its language, its structure, its action. I have to make the reader feel, in his bones if nowhere else, that something is going on here that counts. Distortion in this case is an instrument; exaggeration has a purpose, and the whole structure of the story or novel has been made what it is because of belief. This is not the kind of distortion that destroys; it is the kind that reveals, or should reveal.'

"`Our salvation is a drama played out with the devil, a devil who is not simply generalized evil, but an evil intelligence determined on its own supremacy. I think that if writers with a religious view of the world excel these days in the depiction of evil, it is because they have to make its nature unmistakable to their particular audience.'

"`The novelist and the believer, when they are not the same man, yet have many traits in common-- a distrust of the abstract, respect for boundaries, a desire to penetrate the surface of reality and to find in each thing the spirit which makes it itself and holds the world together. But I don't believe that we shall have great religious fiction until we have again that happy combination of believing artist and believing society. Until that time, the novelist will have to do the best he can in travail with the world he has. He may find in the end that instead of reflecting the image at the heart of things, he has only reflected our broken condition and, through it, the face of the devil we are possessed by. This is a modest achievement, but perhaps a necessary one.' (pages 7-8)

In particular, Mano tries to explain his artistic need to use `obscenity'; here's a sort of summary of his rationale:

"`I warn you: don't construe me too suddenly. I'm about to say that the Incarnation, to our purblind and literal human understanding, must be-- yes-- obscene. The evidence is clear: the holy, incorruptible and flawless Light did choose by a glorious whim to partake of human fraility. And, worse, flesh. What a falling off was there: I speak as a fool. To be perfect and yet unsatisfied. By comparison no mere human act could equal it for sheer plummeting depravity.'

"`For any serious Christian writer the obscene, the grotesque, the violent seem almost prerequisite.' (page 5)

"`. . . if there is anyone with whom I feel a blood brotherhood, whose purposes and tactics are mine, it is-- not a fiction writer-- but the poet John Donne.' [He quotes "Batter my heart, three person'd God" (http://www.bartleby.com/105/74.html).] `In that holy sonnet I could rest my case. For only the sexual act can approach-- in its wild animal consummation-- the working of God's love in the human soul. Match that with St. John of the Cross: you know who is the greater poet. And who the greater mystic. Though their language and imagery are similar, Donne and St. John begin from different starting blocks, different premises. John has attained and needs to express. Donne needs to express so that he-- and his readers-- might hope to attain.' (page 10)

"`In a profane age, the profane must be taken unawares and in their own tongue.' (page 10)

"`You might say that the end, doubtful as it is, cannot justify the means. But the Flood was a means. Saint Paul's blindness. And the crucifixion. God does not go gently into our self-imposed night.' (page 11)"

`A Bullet in the Side'

In the high-school library I sat beside a girl whose job was to push a large yellow disk on the table in front of her. That activated a hose clamped to the side of the table, shooting a quick shot of water from the nozzle. A colleague across from us sat beside another girl whose job was to hold a library book beneath the water and wipe the cover with a terry-cloth rag. In practice, I held the hand of the girl beside me and pressed it on the disk while my colleague cupped the other girl’s hand around the book and wiped the water off the cover for her. We cleaned up the “S” section of biographies – Socrates, Spielberg, Stalin.

Later, I pushed the same girl, helmeted and strapped in her wheel chair, around the basketball court while another 15 special-ed. kids ran, skipped and walked flat-footed around us, howling, moaning and laughing. We moved to the sports field. I pulled a 16-year-old boy seated on an oversized tricycle around the quarter-mile running track. Other kids walked with us or sat on the track’s plastic surface, baffled by so much open space and sunshine after half a day indoors. I remembered Augie March and his retarded brother Georgie who “ran dragfooted with his stiff idiot’s trot,” and the time Augie and his mother institutionalized Georgie:

“We were about an hour getting to the Home – wired windows, dog-proof cyclone fence, asphalt yard, great gloom.”

Two girls who will never read a book washed books in the library. The whole class, none of whom will play football or run a relay, moved slowly down the numbered lanes of the track. Flannery O’Connor’s father died of lupus erythematosus when the writer was 16 years old. She was diagnosed with the disease 10 years later and died at 39. Biographer Brad Gooch shows that such a life can serve as an inspiration to those of us smug with good health. In Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor he writes:

“When her father died, she had compared God’s grace to a bullet in the side. Faced with that same daunting grace, she developed a narrative to explain her situation. For this dedicated writer there was no surer sign of grace than writing as good story, and she had just written several. So when she broke the news of her lupus to Robert Lowell, in March 1953, she wrote that `I can with one eye squinted eye take it all as a blessing.’”

`Knock Me Sideways'

“That feeling of being chosen by the language, I think, is a common property of all readers and writers of poetry: it’s the invasion of a body snatcher. But the takeover makes you more individual, not less.”

That’s Clive James in his introduction to Opal Sunset: Selected Poems 1958-2008. Poems with even one “strong line” – James’ phrase – claim you for a lifetime. “Prufrock” did that and chunks of “Song of Myself,” much Hopkins and poems or lines by Shakespeare, Auden, Tate, Berryman and Karl Shapiro – an unlikely personal anthology. James says of Louis Macneice’s “The Sunlight on the Garden”: “I can still recite [it] from memory, having learned it on the first day I saw it.” I didn’t know the poem:

“The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

“Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

“The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

“And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.”

I’m grateful to James for having introduced me to so musical and sweetly sad a poem, written when MacNeice was 30 years old. The echo of Antony’s dying words brings back Cleopatra’s reply:

“No, let me speak; and let me rail so high,
That the false housewife Fortune break her wheel,
Provoked by my offence.”

I haven’t tried to memorize a poem in many years but I’ll make the effort with “Sunlight.” Go here, scroll down and click on the link to a recording of MacNeice reading the poem. I like the idea of the gratuitous discipline of memorization. Recalling his early years as a poet in Australia, James says of poems by Auden and MacNeice:

“The impact of these brief pieces was like a vision of love, and still is: even now, there are individual lyric poems, sometimes by people I have never previously heard of, that knock me sideways.”

`Special Needs'

A spinal deformation leaves one of the boys I work with unable to stand upright. He’s virtually quadrupedic and uses a walker on wheels to move around. It reminds me of the drum kit custom-built to accommodate Chick Webb’s twisted, undersized body, and Samuel Johnson in his “Life of Pope” noting “it was necessary to raise his seat.” The boy’s fellow second-graders accept him without fuss and vie for the privilege of carrying his books and lunch tray. On Wednesday, I worked with him for almost an hour on compound words, and he seems just as lazy, wise-assed and likeable as the other 7-year-olds.

At recess, a parent volunteered to accompany the boy while he rode around the schoolyard on a tricycle with oversized handlebars, safety belts and blocks on the pedals. Her manner was loud and smarmy: “Let me help you! Aren’t you a brave little man?” and so on. It was sickening but I’m not sure the kid was bothered. He was happy for the attention though I wonder what his parents would have thought of her self-congratulatory performance. Some people are so disturbed by disabled people they want to hug and kiss themselves just for being in their presence.

Clive James wrote a poem about a Wordsworthian “idiot boy,” his father and the narrator’s encounter with them. In “Special Needs,” James faces our discomfort with disabilities squarely, and weighs the meanings latent in the euphemistic title phrase. He would probably be more sympathetic toward the woman on the playground than I was:

“I can look down again, two thoughts
Contesting in my head:
`It’s so unfair, I don’t know what to do’
Is one. The other is the one that hurts:
`Don’t be a fool. It’s nothing to do with you.’”

James skirts melodrama but its proximity adds to the moral tension of the poem. Melodrama and its implicit falsity of emotion is always a temptation, but James resists the urge to turn the boy into a freak or saint:

“Yes, the boy is bad:
So bad he holds one arm up while he walks
As if to ward off further blows from heaven.”

`A Latent Double'

In the staff room, scene of my piddling failure and triumph, I ate my apple and chicken sandwich and read Kay Ryan’s “Why We Must Struggle”:

“If we have not struggled
as hard as we can
at our strongest
how will we sense
the shape of our losses
or know what sustains
us longest or name
what change costs us,
saying how strange
it is that one sector
of the self can step in
for another in trouble,
how loss activates
a latent double, how
we can feed
as upon nectar
upon need?”

To feed upon need is a pragmatic, often tardy expression of maturity. Earlier in the morning a teacher had given me 20 three-page handouts – inspirational stuff, including a potted biography of Mother Teresa, “The Greatest Humanitarian of the 20th Century.” I was to make eight copies of each sheet, collate and staple them, making certain each handout was printed on a different color of paper. My pride was bruised by such a menial job (“I’m a para-educator!”), though she couldn’t have known I’m unable to play a DVD without assistance. The digital control panel on the copier was written in the cryptic language of machines that only other machines can decipher. With the assistance of a forgiving teacher and the passage of one hour and 12 minutes, I finished the job, though the little-kid part of me, the anti-“latent double,” wanted to chuck it all and tell off the teacher. Ryan, the most mature and sensible of poets, reminded me of who I am and what I’m not.

Back in the classroom, a 16-year-old was hollering, swearing, stomping and kicking chairs. He was supposed to have been my charge for the day but didn’t show up until lunch. Three male instructors, all looking nervous, were talking to the kid who wouldn’t go to chemistry class and wanted to play computer games. A teacher turned off his computer, the kid turned it back on and the instructor knelt down to unplug the entire bank of machines. The kid was poised to kick him in the crotch or jump on his back. He looked at me, sitting 10 feet away. I looked back impassively, ready to jump, when he suddenly slumped in his chair, deflated. He walked out of class and someone called security. It was the first tickle of fear I’ve felt since reentering the classroom a month ago. Ryan’s “The Job” is also in Say Uncle:

“Imagine that
the job were
so delicate
that you could
seldom – almost
never – remember
it. Impossible
work, really.
Like placing
pebbles exactly
where they were
already. The
steadiness it
takes…and
to what end?
It’s so easy
to forget again.”

Ryan has taught remedial English part time at the College of Marin in Kentfield, Ca., for almost 40 years. It’s no surprise she would excel in a job “so delicate,” as she also does in poetry: “The/steadiness it/takes.”

`An Old, Tried, and Valued Friend'

“If we strictly follow Hazlitt's advice as you have included it, then how do we ever get around to reading anything so that something serves as the antecedent to which we eagerly return?”

There’s only one way to answer R.T. Davis’ question, posed in a comment to my post on Monday: We don’t. Reading is at least as idiosyncratic as writing. Some read deeply and over time in a single genre or form; some only at the beach. Some begin as hunter-gatherers and remain so, reading strictly for sustenance. I started as an omnivore and as decades passed found my palate grew more discriminating. I lost my taste for literary fast food – say, science fiction and anything by Doris Lessing, especially her science fiction – and sought both nutrition and pleasure (for some readers, a contradiction in terms).

My book-diet has left me strong and healthy, with a few nagging deficiencies among some of the vitamins and minerals – Chinese literature, for instance, and Scandinavian. A return to Coleridge or Chekhov is a painless booster shot. A long habit of reading furnishes one’s imaginative, intellectual and moral lives. One always senses the ghostly presence of book, even when not reading or in their company. If you don’t read with some dedication when young, you’ll probably never know the mellow bliss of rereading (for some readers, again, a contradiction in terms). Hazlitt begins his essay like this:

“I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire ever to read at all.”

Let’s make allowances for provocation – Hazlitt recognized a good lead when he saw one – but there’s truth here. I’ve never counted but I move with regularity, like Kant in Königsberg, within a small radius -- though surely more than 30 titles. And the books I most look forward to reading are ones I’ve already read, sometimes more than once – A Dance to the Music of Time, for instance. I’m not philosophically opposed to new books. Rather, I’m jealous of my reading time and don’t want to squander it on books whose only likely virtue is a recent copyright. Most of the literary blogosphere is lost on me because its attention usually is focused on the recently or soon-to-be published. There are new books I eagerly await – in particular Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Prose, scheduled for publication next year by Ecco. But even Herbert, dead almost 11 years is, as Hazlitt says, “an old, tried, and valued friend.”

As to “the `superior’ judgment of the reader (yours truly) who teaches literature” mentioned by Davis: I would sooner ask my dentist for a book recommendation than most college professors. Leave the last word to Hazlitt:

“To have lived in the cultivation of an intimacy with such works, and to have familiarly relished such names, is not to have lived quite in vain.”

`The Relics of Our Best Affections'

An acquaintance asks R.T. Davis at Books and Notes: “Can you recommend a good book to read?” – a seemingly simple question so difficult to answer, one to which I reply with more questions: Fiction or nonfiction? Poetry or prose? English or translation? How serious and experienced a reader are we dealing with? Do we suggest something challenging or, like Kessler, smooth as silk? Not knowing Davis’ acquaintance, we’re left dealing with an abstraction, a Platonic Reader of unknown qualities.

My instinct is to recommend a bona fide classic, something road-tested by generations of readers – Catullus, say, or Maimonides, Montaigne or Shakespeare. Such a suggestion carries with it an implied compliment: You can handle this, no sweat, no Stephen King for you. But what if they feel they can’t handle it and end up turning their failure of confidence into resentment against you, the innocent recommender of books? Then you’ve sacrificed not only a reader but a potential friend. Of course, the same risk applies if you go in the other direction and suggest a creampuff of a book. Then they think you’re condescending to them. William Hazlitt, in his 1821 essay “On Reading Old Books,” proposes a sensible solution:

“In reading a book which is an old favourite with me (say the first novel I ever read) I not only have the pleasure of imagination and of the critical relish of the work, but the pleasures of memory added to it. It recalls the same feelings and associations which I had in first reading it, and which I can never have again in any other way. Standard productions of this kind are links in the chain of our conscious being. They bind together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity. They are landmarks and guides in our journey through life. They are pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours.”

There it is: Ask your acquaintance to select an “old favourite,” a book he or she once read with delight and still recalls with pleasure, but one never read a second time. The result could be pleasure doubled, or a new sort of pleasure, more nuanced, redolent of earlier selves, “landmarks and guides,” “pegs and loops.” If someone were to work this gambit on me (though I’m already a frequent rereader) I might return to Little Dorritt (a Dickens title I read early but have not reread), or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a gift from my grandmother when I was a boy, one that impressed all those years ago with the clarity of its language and its immense popularity over the centuries. “Happiest hours.”

`When Stuck Between Books'

David Myers lives up to his reputation as chief agent provocateur of the literary blogosphere with his list of “the greatest English novels published since the era of Dickens and Eliot.” On Friday he posted his top 50, with the next 50 promised soon. His apologia is simple:

“These are my favorites—the best-written, the most provoking and memorable, the titles I am likeliest to reread when stuck between books.”

Such lists are as idiosyncratic as our genetic arrays. Few dedicated readers would produce identical lists and no list is wrong, though some are more interesting, intelligent and honest than others. None is definitive or unchanging, though some are more worthy of respect. One can already hear howls of outrage, of course (“Only two blacks?”), but literature, like all art, is not democratic, is eminently unfair and doesn’t practice affirmative action.

List-making is a parlor game, one I would play only with so deeply read a reader as Myers. Let the quibbles begin: For The Portrait of the Lady I would substitute The Golden Bowl; for The Secret Agent, Nostromo; for A Handful of Dust, Sword of Honour; for Light in August, The Sound and the Fury; for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Memento Mori; for Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Herzog; for An American Pastoral, Sabbath’s Theater. At this level of accomplishment I could easily endorse other titles by the same writers. Some choices are almost too close to call, particularly with a novelist like Spark who never wrote a bad or mediocre book, but we’ll stick to the sensible ban on double-dipping. I’m tempted to substitute Parade’s End for The Good Soldier, but let it stand.

Myers includes some writers I can’t abide – Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Greene, Murdoch, Salinger – and some whose books I haven’t read – Janet Lewis, C.S. Lewis, Forbes, Taylor, Garnett. But let’s thank him for the writers he didn’t include (as yet): D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, John Updike, Toni Morrison and so many others.

Some of my alternative nominees, of course, may show up in Myers’ second 50: Beckett’s trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable), Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, Henry Green’s Loving, William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time and John Williams' Stoner. For me, the warm heart of Myers’ list is the handful of novels by writers whose reputations have faded or were never more than modest – Farrell, Bowen, Jarrell, Anderson, Powers, Stead and O’Brien. In fact, The Man Who Loved Children would float somewhere in my Top 5, near Ulysses and a notch or two higher than Loving.

ADDENDUM: Thanks to David Myers and other readers for pointing out my obliviousness. I missed Ulysses on Myers' list. No excuses.

`Until Some Voice Brings It to Life'

Above the teacher’s desk in a seventh-grade “language arts” (more about that later) classroom, hangs a poster printed with two sentences identified as a Hmong proverb:

“The tongue tastes food. The mind tastes words.”

The first thing that came to mind was Job 34:3, in the King James translation: “For the ear trieth words, as the mouth tasteth meat.” I like the Hmong saying but it doesn’t go far enough. Yes, the mind tastes words but so do the tongue, lips, teeth and soft palate. Part of the joy of language, particularly of poetry – and it’s probably the first joy we know when reading as children – is the pleasure-giving music it makes in our mouths. The first poem I can remember falling in love with was Poe’s “The Bells”:

“To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells –
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.”

God, it’s awful but it hypnotized me and I memorized parts of it without trying. Today I can’t abide Poe’s poems or prose but I’m pleased I could hear his music, just as I can carry a tune with my voice without being able to play a musical instrument. I fell for “Kubla Khan,” “Danny Deever” and “Fern Hill.” I outgrew Kipling and Thomas but found happy replacements -- Basil Bunting, for instance, whose poems are always musical. In 1966, the year he published Briggflatts, Bunting wrote:

“Poetry, like music, is to be heard. It deals in sound – long sounds and short sounds, heavy beats and light beats, the tone relations of vowels, the relations of consonants to one another which are like instrumental colour in music. Poetry lies dead on the page, until some voice brings it to life, just as music, on the stave, is no more than instructions to the player.”

“Language arts” tastes cloyingly of bureaucracy, composition by committee. It makes us “earsick,” a word Bunting favored. Here’s the “Coda” to Briggflatts:

“A strong song tows
us, long earsick.
Blind, we follow
Rain slant, spray flick
To fields we do not know.

“Night, float us.
Offshore wind, shout,
ask the sea
what’s lost, what’s left,
what horn sunk,
what crown drift.

“Where we are who knows
of kings who sup
while day fails? Who,
swinging his axe
to fell kings, guesses
where we go?”

Eighteen lines, 62 words, 70 syllables. Strict economy and precision. Earlier in Briggflatts, Bunting writes:

“It is time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti
condensed so much music into so few bars
with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence,
never a boast or a see-here; and stars and lakes
echo him and the copse drums out his measure,
snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight
and the sun rises on an acknowledged land.”

Astonishment

Before school on Thursday I pulled Pascal’s Pensées off the shelf, the old green-and-white Penguin translated by the indefatigable J.M. Cohen, the edition I’ve owned and read for almost 40 years. I’m also indebted to Cohen for my first readings of Don Quixote, Rabelais, Rousseau’s Confessions and St. Teresa of Avila. Pascal is useful in the morning, like stiff coffee – an intellectual jolt – and I found what I was looking for without knowing I was looking for it – No. 304:

“Children are astonished when they see their comrades respected.”

Pascal confirms a phenomenon I witness daily. He’s specific about what inspires astonishment in children, and it’s not adults praising children, or children performing prodigious acts of scholarship or physical grace. It’s adults respecting children – deferring to them for information or opinions, or trusting them enough to let them make risky decisions. In my experience adults generally micro-manage kids or disregard them entirely, and I’m including parents and teachers, though plenty of kids deserve only the passive, boilerplate respect we owe every person.

Thursday morning in a high-school history class I watched a teacher listen respectfully as a boy explained that Harry Truman, in dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was motivated in part by a wish to send an implicit warning to Joe Stalin. This wasn’t news to me but clearly it had never occurred to the teacher. However, she listened attentively, asked questions, let a couple of other kids continue the cross-examination, and thanked the boy. She didn’t overdo it. Her reaction seemed genuine. A few kids giggled, uncomfortable with evidence of intelligence among their own, but others smiled at him, respecting the respect he earned from the teacher. The kid was glowing rather becomingly.

In one of those happy gifts of serendipity dedicated readers know well, I found this sentence in Cohen’s introduction to Pascal: “Furthermore, as a practical inventor he gave the world the calculating machine, and devised also the first public bus service, the first syringe, and the first wrist-watch.” I’m certain I’ve read Cohen’s introduction before, as well as a number of studies and biographies of Pascal, but I’d forgotten all about the syringe. What a remarkable man, I thought – the patron saint of junkies.

After school, thanks to Ron Slate, the boys and I stopped at the library to pick up Alissa Valles’ new book of poems, Orphan Fire. I know her as the translator of Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, one of the essential books of our age. I skimmed through Orphan Fire long enough to find “Pascal, Inventor of the Syringe”:

“What I hate in myself, I destroy in others.
What I don’t have I take away from them.
Lord, fill and destroy me with one needle.”

Such coincidences brighten the day and prove precisely nothing. In “Mr. Cogito and the Imagination,” Herbert writes (in Valles’ translation):

“he employed the imagination
for wholly different purposes

“he wanted to make of it
an instrument of compassion

“he longed to understand fully

“--Pascal’s night
--the nature of a diamond
--the prophets’ melancholy
--the wrath of Achilles
--the fury of mass murderers
--the dreams of Mary Stuart
--the fear of Neanderthals
--the last Aztecs’ despair
--Nietzsche’s long dying
--the Lascaux painter’s joy
--the rise and fall of an oak
--the rise and fall of Rome”

`The Words and the Assonances'

The 16-year-old and I sat in the far corner of the classroom, awkwardly sharing a computer. His assignment was to write a brief profile and analysis of John Proctor, one of the more cartoonishly drawn characters in Arthur Miller’s cartoon of a drama, The Crucible. I played it straight, kept my opinions of Miller’s dramaturgy to myself and acted strictly as a gatekeeper of clean, logical prose.

Writing was agony for this kid, as was typing. He seemed unaware of the space bar and relied rather touchingly on spell-check software. He wasn’t stupid or defiant, and clearly he had read the play but he found the translation of ideas into words almost viscerally painful, like cramps. To make the process even more difficult he was obligated to craft a “topic sentence” and follow a curriculum-prescribed method of composition called “chunk writing.” In short, I was helping a kid who can’t write complete an essay about a lousy play by a writer of simple-minded agitprop, all the while conforming to a crackpot theory of expository writing. Futility hovered around us like flatulence in a locked room.

Fortunately, I had revised my rule that morning and brought a book for those moments when I wasn’t “chunk writing” -- The Knox Brothers, Penelope Fitzgerald’s account of her father (Edmund Knox, editor of Punch) and his three brothers (Ronald, theologian and crime writer; Dillwyn, cryptographer; Wilfred, Bible scholar). Early on, we learn the teenage Ronald, who later translated the New Testament and whose biography was written by Evelyn Waugh, memorized Henry Vaughan’s “Peace.” One-hundred twenty pages later, the poem returns:

“Ronnie’s shy courtesy made it difficult for him to attract attention from the waitresses, and his insistence of `doing the most difficult thing’ led him to tackle his meringue with a fork only. While doing this he began to talk enthusiastically to Eddie about Henry Vaughan’s `Peace’:

“`My soul, there is a country
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a winged sentry
All skilful in the wars…’

“Ronnie, chasing the crumbs, objected to the half-rhyme, country and sentry, and to the unlikeliness of one sentry guarding a whole boundary. The text must be wrong. Mightn’t Vaughan have written

“`My soul, there is a fortress
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a winged porteress…’

“Eddie immediately rejected the fortress; it was too menacing; why not a tea shop?

“`My soul, there is a caterer’s
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a Gunter’s waitress…’

“At the false rhyme, Ronnie half-rose from his chair in agony. The tea was brought, the band played on unnoticed. Other customers stared in amazement. So much did the words and the assonances of the English language mean to the Knox brothers.”

How good it was to be in the company of language-loving people.

`In His Old Threadbare Nimbus'

“The favorite poets of Polish school-children are not only leading Polish poets such as Wisława Szymborska (Nobel prize winner 1996), and Zbigniew Herbert but also include Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke and Emily Dickinson, among others.”

This announcement comes from the Evens Foundation, an organization I had never heard of before Sunday. I don’t know about the accuracy of the claims but they’re certainly encouraging. Good taste in poetry is rare in any population but a vision of Polish school kids sitting around and savoring the fourth “Duino Elegy” or “J'aime le souvenir de ces époques nues” is a genuine balm. Inevitably, one wonders how American school-children might respond if asked to name their favorite poets. Elizabeth Alexander? Among the poets named by the Polish kids, one notes the presence of four languages and the absence of writers of “inspirational messages” and the grosser forms of sentimentality.

I don’t bring books with me to school, though I could read them during my 30-minute lunch and 15-minute break, but I don’t want to give the impression of goofing off or, worse, being a reader. I have to think of the children. Instead, each working day I transcribe or print a passage that has moved me in my recent reading and keep it in my pocket. I can pull it out in the staff room while eating my turkey sandwich and quietly remove myself to other surroundings.

If you scroll down on the Evens Foundation page I linked to above, you’ll come to 19 videos of Poles reading their favorite poems, part of a program called “Poetry Unites.” Several of the writers represented are new to me but consider some of the others: Larkin, Horace, Shakespeare, Milosz, Tadeusz Różewicz and Elizabeth Bishop. Whether the readers genuinely live with and enjoy the poems is debatable, I suppose, but I’m touched that awareness of such eminent writers is alive in the Polish population. I’m particularly touched by 15-year-old Marta Kuczyńska, who reads Herbert’s “The Seventh Angel” in the original Polish, with English subtitles. Such poise, articulateness and generosity of spirit in a young person seem almost supernatural. She says of Herbert’s poem:

“This poem, in a way, confirms the imperfection of the world, even when issues of the Higher Order, such as the host of angels, are concerned. God let into his host an angel who was the opposite of the other angels, I mean a black one.”

I took a copy of “The Seventh Angel” with me to work on Monday, my most challenging day since I started working in the schools. Typically, Herbert gets around to the subject of art and artists. Here’s the conclusion (in Alissa Valles’ translation):

“the Byzantine artists
when they paint all seven
reproduce Shemkel
just like the rest

“because they suppose
they might lapse into heresy
if they were to portray him
just as he is
black nervous
in his old threadbare nimbus”

Tuesday was easier – three hours as the substitute assistant office manager in a grade school. I filed two student immunization records, stacked eight boxes of copy paper, wiped tables in the cafeteria, used a wireless microphone to dismiss kids from trash-free tables in the lunchroom, tied shoe laces for three kids during playground duty, delivered bags of live crickets to five second-grade classrooms, laminated 27 pieces of paper for four teachers, divvied up mail in teachers’ mail boxes and answered the school telephone seven times. All that time I carried in my hip pocket a copy of Herbert’s “Journey.” Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough used the first four lines (apparently in her own translation) as the epigraph to “In Zbigniew Herbert’s Garden,” the essay I wrote about on Tuesday. The poem’s final section (in Valles’ translation) is most memorable, the part I meditated on most often at school:

“So if there is a journey pray that it be long
a true journey from which you do not return
a copying of the world an elemental journey
a dialogue with nature an unanswered question
a pact forced after a battle

“a great atonement”

`Foreign to No Literate Person'

One of the most interesting things I’ve read online in a long time is “In Zbigniew Herbert’s Garden” by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, in the spring issue of The Threepenny Review. A native of Poland and now a Californian, she looks at Barbarian in the Garden, the first of Herbert’s three volumes of prose, published in Polish in 1962 and in English translation in 1985. Like most good essay collections, its contents defy simple categorization. We find history, art history, travel, memoir and a great poet’s ruminations (seldom explicitly on poetry). Hryniewicz-Yarbrough discovered the book as an art history student in Poland in the nineteen-seventies:

“After dry academic textbooks with little passion or flair, Barbarian in the Garden was a dazzling revelation. A traveler's account, imaginative and erudite, it looked at art and life and took the reader to art's salons and kitchens.”

I’m surprised by how little known Herbert’s essays are in the English-speaking world, even among intrepid readers. His closet cognates among essayists in our language might be Guy Davenport, Cynthia Ozick and Hubert Butler. Those familiar with his poetry seem to assume the prose is a busman’s holiday by a dilettante. Hryniewicz-Yarbrough corrects this impression:

“…Herbert's journeys into the world of painting and architecture were never a retreat from the quotidian world. Herbert prided himself on his no-nonsense attitude and his devotion to the concrete….For him art and life are part of the same fabric of human experience.”

Hryniewicz-Yarbrough’s discussion of the title Herbert gave his collection -- Barbarzyńca w ogrodzie in Polish – is illuminating:

“To Herbert we're simply all barbarians when we enter art's garden. We're also barbarians in the Greek sense of the word because each traveler is always `the other,’ an intruder of sorts who observes the newly encountered world with a certain detachment. Anyone who has ever traveled knows that we don't experience the reality of the places we travel to the way their residents experience it.”

Herbert was a formidably erudite man who carried his learning humbly. When he visits Lascaux, Siena or Chartres cathedral, he has already read voluminously, and probably out-read the scholars like a true autodidact, but visiting the places he has known only through books becomes a pilgrimage of sorts, acts of living humility. Herbert is, as Hryniewicz-Yarbrough says, “the other,” but he has already inhabited the sacred places of Western civilization before he arrives in his amply furnished imagination. He is comfortably at home in places he has never seen. I’ve just reread A.J. Liebling’s masterpiece, Normandy Revisited, another category-bending “travel” book. Liebling shares Herbert’s at-homeness away from home:

“Paris is foreign to no literate person, and the sensation of being abroad is the only pleasure I have never known there.”

`Difficult Achievements'

A reader in Canada writes:

“I wonder if your more pessimistic post recently about the future of literacy in our society can be linked to your experiences in the classrooms of the twenty-first century. I know that encountering some of [his niece’s] teachers, who think proper spelling is bad for children's self-esteem and knowledge of parts of speech is unimportant, provokes in me at times a sense of despair.”

I draw one conclusion from my recent return to the classroom: I prefer working with grade-school students to their older, angrier, less attentive brothers and sisters, and the differences are rooted only partially in hormonal surges. High-school students have had more experience of popular culture, lousy teachers and indifferent parents, and it shows. When expectations are minimal or non-existent, and self-esteem is judged more important than working after knowledge, it’s only human to be lazy, self-centered and contemptuous of learning, authority, tradition and civility. More than 50 years ago, in “On Being Conservative,” Michael Oakeshott calmly diagnosed the problem:

“To rein-in one’s own beliefs and desires, to acknowledge the current shape of things, to feel the balance of things in one’s hands, to tolerate what is abominable, to distinguish between crime and sin, to respect formality even when it appears to be leading to error, these are difficult achievements; and they are achievements not to be looked for in the young.”

Oakeshott’s virtues are absent not only in most students but in parents, teachers and the rest of the body politic. The centrality of a right sizing of one’s self in the world is unacknowledged or held in contempt. I watched a high-school boy push three chairs together, lie down across them and fall asleep. When I pointed this out to an English teacher, she shrugged and said, “Well, at least he’s not causing any trouble.” Another kid in the same class put his head on the desk and slept. A third visited a Hooters web site.

The first difference I observed in contemporary classrooms from my own experience decades ago – after tattoos, cell phones, mp3 players, male students with earrings and females dressed in streetwalker chic, I mean – was their decentralized nature. The teacher is just another member of the mob. Seldom is he or she in charge, the object of attention and at least putative respect. Education, the acquisition of knowledge, is a dim, mirthless joke.

The only pleasure in books I’ve witnessed in school has been among students in fourth grade or younger. Of course, the curriculum calls for high-school kids to read tripe – Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird. No wonder they and most of their teachers associate literature with tedium. For years I’ve meditated on the final sentence of Oakeshott’s “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” (also collected in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays). I’ve concluded it applies not only to poetry in the strict sense but all literary work:

“Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.”

A sort of truancy our schools ought to encourage.

`The Ones That Can Be Read and Reread'

“The run-of-the-mill critic is a Linnaean; he likes to pop his specimens into plainly labeled phials, and [Stephen] Crane, genus Doomed Genius, went into the one labeled `Edgar Allan Poe.’”

That’s A.J. Liebling nailing the sort of critic (and unaffiliated reader, I suppose) who fetishizes taxonomy, forcing books and authors into reductive categories stinking of formaldehyde. It’s from “The Dollars Damned Him,” a book review Liebling published in 1961 in his longtime literary home, The New Yorker. In reviewing biographies of Crane and his wife Cora, Liebling writes out of a deep sense of identification with his subject. While Crane was more severely cash-strapped, Liebling was forever in hock to “editors and creditors” (as a former newspaper colleague of mine once put it). More significantly, both were crammed into misleadingly constrictive literary categories that have cost both writers some of their best readers.

With the Library of America at last giving Liebling the same Pleiades treatment it afforded Henry James and Willa Cather (and H.P. Lovecraft, for God’s sake) -- World War II Writings and The Sweet Science and Other Writings – perhaps the Linnaeans will at last acknowledge that genera and species are often mutable. This is a matter of “opening the canon” but not in the customary politicized sense. A canon worth opening is a canon based on quality – literary quality. David Myers, a Liebling admirer (I covet his first edition of The Sweet Science), puts it like this:

“I love Democracy in America, for example, and Anne Frank’s Diary; Michael Wyschogrod’s Body of Faith, a theology of Judaism, and Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down; A. J. Liebling’s boxing reports and Karen Horney’s studies of neurosis; Michael Oakeshott’s philosophical essays and Ronald Knox’s history of Enthusiasm. Each of these is a literary masterpiece, I would argue.”

Liebling’s prose ranks with the best written by Americans -- with Thoreau’s, Lincoln’s and James’. The Liebling quote above comes from Liebling at The New Yorker: Uncollected Essays, edited by James Barbour and Fred Warner, and published in 1994 by the University of New Mexico Press. Only one of the 34 pieces assembled by Barbour and Warner (who also edited A Neutral Corner, boxing pieces not included in The Sweet Science), appears in the Library of America volumes. Most of Liebling’s favorite beats are represented – horse racing, war, food, France, the press, plus several crime stories. The only piece also found in the LoA’s World War II Writings is “Pyle Set the Style,” a 1950 review of a biography of Ernie Pyle, the war correspondent Liebling had known in North Africa and France. He welcomes the book’s revelations of Pyle’s heavy drinking, agnosticism and marital troubles (more of Liebling’s deep identification with a troubled writer) because the Pyle he knew was “abstinent and resolutely Philistine.” He writes:

“…his appearance of placed, pawky normality seems to have been as deceptive a dickey as ever concealed a troubled breast, and I like him a lot better for it, and for keeping his troubles to himself.”

The Barbour-Warner volume closes with The New Yorker obituary anonymously written by Liebling’s oldest friend, Joseph Mitchell, who includes an excerpt from the eulogy he delivered Dec. 30, 1963, two days after Liebling’s death. It remains the best, most Lieblingesque assessment I know of the writer’s work:

“Shortly after I heard Joe was dead, I went over and looked at his books in a bookcase at home. There were fifteen of them. I looked through The Road Back to Paris and reread `Westbound Tanker,’ which is one of my favorite stories of his, and when I finished it I suddenly recalled, with great pleasure, a conversation I had had some years ago with the proprietor of one of the biggest and oldest stores in the Fourth Avenue secondhand bookstore district. I had been going to this store for years and occasionally talked to the proprietor, who is a very widely read man. One day I mentioned I worked for The New Yorker, and he asked me if I knew A.J. Liebling. I said that I did, and he said that every few days all through the year someone, sometimes a woman, sometimes a young person, sometimes an old person, came in and asked if he had Back Where I Came From or The Telephone Booth Indian or some other book by A.J. Liebling. At that time all of Joe’s early books were out of print. `The moment one of his books turns up,’ the man said, `it goes out immediately to someone on my waiting list.’ The man went on and said that he and other veteran secondhand bookstore dealers felt that this was a certain sign that a book would endure. `Literary critics don’t know which books will last,’ he said, `and literary historians don’t know, and those nine-day immortals up at the Institute of Arts and Letters don‘t know. We are the ones who know. We know which books can be read only once, if that, and we know the ones that can be read and reread and reread.’”