`Damnable Hard'

I sat reading in the cool lobby while my kids had their swimming lessons in a pool heated to 96 degrees Fahrenheit, almost human body temperature. At another table sat a woman several years my senior, reading what appeared to be one of the newer black-covered Penguins, though the title was obscured by her knee. I excused myself and asked what she was reading. “The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. Have you heard of it?” she asked.

That was not among the replies I expected. My maternal grandmother gave me an illustrated edition of Bunyan’s allegory, first published in 1687, when I was about 10. The pages were already brown and brittle, as it had been a gift from one of her brothers when she was young. I’m ashamed to say I no longer have the book and cannot remember how I lost it.

The book’s full title is The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, and for a churchless, unbelieving kid it proved unexpectedly compelling, rather like science fiction or a good adventure story (both of which I was reading at the time). I found it – and here I will use a word guaranteed to rile the sophisticates – consoling. I’m not alone, of course. The Pilgrim’s Progress has never gone out of print (of how many 17th-century books can that be said?), has been translated into more than 200 languages and is said to have been second only to the King James Bible in popularity among English-language readers.

I asked why she was reading the book, hoping not to sound surprised or condescending, merely curious, as I was. She had enjoyed The Shack, a novel I had never heard of, and a reviewer had judged it “a modern Pilgrim’s Progress.” I suspect The Shack will not join the stack on my bedside table but I was impressed by her enterprise in taking on a 331-year-old book written by a theological Puritan – one she seemed to be enjoying. We spoke of the phenomenon of writers who write in great quotations – “Slough of Despond,” “Vanity Fair,” “House Beautiful” – and agreed it was a splendid gift. She left when her grandson had finished his swimming lesson.

The next morning a friend in New York City sent an e-mail with the subject line “consolations of literature.” His best friend, with a history of cancer, has been diagnosed again with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Could I suggest a book that might offer consolation (to him, not his friend)? I thought of L.E. Sissman, the American poet who suffered cyclic bouts of Hodgkins disease and died in 1976 at age 49. He was a great poet less of death than of living with the knowledge of imminent death. His poems are not maudlin, not rah-rah inspirational, always witty and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. They are, thus, consolatory. David Myers, informed by his own experience with cancer, has written of Sissman here and here. Myers cites lines from “Dying: A Resurrection, 1969,” and I’ll cite others from the same poem:

“Sheepish revenant,
I crept back into life as into much
Too large a pair of trousers. Evident-
Ly even desperation leads a charmed
Life, valetudinarians go unharmed
At times, self-sorrow often sobs in vain,
And morrows rob us of our moral pain.”

No soft-soaping, dishonest glibness or sentimentality – precisely the qualities that betray most attempts at consolation. When I’m dying I don’t want lies, however soothing and well-intended. I’d rather read Sissman – or Bunyan:

“Then [Christian] went to the outward door, that leads into the Castle yard, and with his Key opened the door also. After he went to the Iron Gate, for that must be opened too, but that lock went damnable hard, yet the Key did open it.”

ADDENDUM: A retired professor of English among my readers writes: "When I was teaching the English novel I always began with The Pilgrim's Progess. The students seemed at first surprised (this is a novel?) and then, for the most part, delighted. I remember someone writing that for two centuries the education of the English middle class came from four works: The King James Bible, The Book of Common Prayer, Foxe's Book of Martyrs (`Acts and Monuments . . .') and The Pilgrim's Progess. One could do worse."

`The Brain is Still Distempered'

To escape the Houstonian heat which we thought we had escaped when we escaped Houston, I took the boys to the new Harry Potter film. We enjoyed the air conditioning for three hours, and they enjoyed the movie for more than two and a half hours, and my only complaint was that they dimmed the house lights so low I was unable to read Anthony Powell. The film is loud, baffling and emotionally unengaging, rather like a former girlfriend, all of which makes it difficult to ignore (ditto).

I called my wife as we left the theater and walked into the Tandoori oven of a parking lot. She confirmed greater Seattle on Wednesday had registered its highest temperature ever – 102 degrees Fahrenheit. The thermometer on my dashboard said 116 but plummeted to a brisk 103 by the time we got home. I wanted a medical opinion on the effects of prolonged heat on the human mind and body, and consulted Dr. Robert Burton, whom I quote:

“Piso, Benedictus Victorius Faventinus, will have [melancholy] proceed from a hot distemperature of the brain; and Montaltus… from the brain's heat, scorching the blood. The brain is still distempered by himself, or by consent: by himself or his proper affection, as Faventinus calls it, or by vapours which arise from the other parts, and fume up into the head, altering the animal facilities.”

My animal facilities and my family’s are cooked so we’ve booked a room in a nearby hotel for Friday night and plan to abuse the environment with air conditioning and anything else that cools our scorched blood. Wednesday and Thursday nights were already booked solid. Throughout the interminable, Powell-free movie I thought about the steamiest literary evocation of summer I know, the first paragraph of Bellow’s The Victim:

“On summer nights New York is as hot as Bangkok. The whole continent seems to have moved from its place and slid nearer the equator, the bitter gray Atlantic to have become green and tropical, and the people, thronging the streets, barbaric fellahin among the stupendous monuments of their mystery, the lights of which, a dazing profusion, climb upward endlessly into the heat of the sky.”

`Nothing Passes Away'

“Last weekend in Union Square I found a pristine copy of Penelope Fitzgerald’s one collection of stories, The Means of Escape, which as you no doubt know was completed just before her death. As I often do I read the shortest story first, the New Zealand story `At Hiruharamm’ and cried out in surprise, shaking my head from time to time for the next hour with pleasure at the way she shaped the tale.”

So writes a reader in New York City. It’s a fine story, too, new to me, moved along by digressive memory. A New Zealander wants to tell how his family finally has a lawyer in it. His grandparents emigrated from England and met in the new country. Their farm is remote – 15 miles by horse and wagon from the doctor’s office. While his wife is in labor, a neighbor, a bachelor farmer named Brinkman, stops by for his semi-annual dinner (from memory he recites the last menu):

“Like most people who live on their own, Brinkman continued with the course of his thoughts, which were more real to him than the outside world’s commotion.”

When the doctor arrives, Tanner (“covered with blood, something like a butcher”) has already safely delivered the baby. At this point “At Hiruharamm” (“`I think it means Jerusalem,’ Tanner says.”) might have turned into a tale of horror. At the start of the 11-page story’s second-to-last paragraph, Tanner tells the doctor he has disposed of the placenta:

“There Tanner had made his one oversight. It wasn’t the afterbirth, it was a second daughter, smaller, but a twin….That evening, when the doctor came in from the yard with the messy scrap, he squeezed it as though he were wringing it out to dry, and it opened its mouth and the colder air of the kitchen rushed in and she’s got her start in life. After that the Tanners always had one of those tinplate mottoes hung up on the wall: Throw Nothing Away.”

The first-born sister, we’re told, “never got to be anything in particular”; the second “grew up to be a lawyer with a firm in Wellington, and she did very well.” There’s an amusing four-sentence coda involving Brinkman, the hungry bachelor, and I thought: This is a Chekhov story set in rural New Zealand – the cool, sympathetic deliberation; the comic counterpoint; the provincial setting; the resignation to contingency, happy or otherwise.

The tinplate motto reminds me of the hapless hero of “My Life,” one of Chekhov’s certified masterpieces. His wife writes him a letter asking for a divorce, and tells him she has purchased a ring with an engraving in Hebrew: “All things pass away.” Our hero muses: “If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose would be, `Nothing passes away.’”

`You Are Made of Almost Nothing'

How refreshing to hear the tetchy snarl of resentment echo in the pages of a field guide – seemingly a cool collection of facts rooted in research and field observation, and written by a professional entomologist. Such is the unexpected pleasure I found in the preface to Dennis Paulson’s Dragonflies and Damselflies of the West (Princeton University Press, 2009):

“These insects are just as special as another group of well-loved insects, the butterflies, and there is no reason they cannot become as well known.”

Sure, except for indifference mingled with repugnance. My maternal grandmother passed on two bits of folklore regarding the order Odonata (not the name of a city in upstate New York): Dragonflies get tangled in your hair and they sew your ears shut while you sleep. Born the same year as T.S. Eliot, she also read tea leaves and believed in signs and portents. There’s a human-devised pecking order among the world’s species, and dragonflies, despite their incontestable beauty, rank higher than mosquitoes (one of their favorite meals) but lower than fritillaries.

Paulson is director emeritus of the Slater Museum of Natural History at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. His book is definitive and beautifully illustrated, and documents the 348 known species of dragonflies and damselflies in the Western United States and Canada. If the beauty and speed of dragonflies have ever caught your attention, Paulson is your man. I already knew that most of a dragonfly’s brain is devoted to vision, but here are some specifics:

“Dragonflies have the finest vision in the insect world. The compound eyes in the largest species have as many as 30,000 simple eyes (ommatidia) perceiving the world around them. Because the simple eyes are individual receptors, insect vision is somewhat of a mosaic, and dragonflies are very good at detecting movement….The eyes are so large, especially in darners, that they wrap around the head and afford almost 360-degree perception.”

What does it feel like to see everything at once? Is it like holding the universe in one’s hand, as in Borges’ “The Aleph?” Or is the sensation more biologically mundane – more food, more sex? Louise Bogan wondered. Her 1961 poem, “The Dragonfly,” is entomologically acute, not impressionistic. She was a great admirer of Thoreau, particularly his observations of the natural world in the journals, and she sticks to the facts:

“You are made of almost nothing
But of enough
To be great eyes
And diaphanous double vans;
To be ceaseless movement,
Unending hunger
Grappling love.

“Link between water and air,
Earth repels you.
Light touches you only to shift into iridescence
Upon your body and wings.

“Twice-born, predator,
You split into the heat.
Swift beyond calculation or capture
You dart into the shadow
Which consumes you.

“You rocket into the day.
But at last, when the wind flattens the grasses,
For you, the design and purpose stop.

“And you fall
With the other husks of summer.”

Bogan’s biographer, Ruth Limmer, tells us the poem was written to order for the Corning Glass Co. There’s little romance in the insect for Bogan – beauty, yes, but mostly organized appetite (“Unending hunger / Grappling love.”) Power, speed, phenomenal vision and savagery – and extinction. The poet’s admiration is tempered with dread. Paulson writes:

“After the immature phase, most temperate-zone odonates live a surprisingly short time. Small damselflies live no more than a few weeks, larger dragonflies a month or two. Dying of old age is rarely observed in odonates…”

Go here to listen to Bogan’s 1968 recording of the poem.

`Extraordinarily Alert and Flighty'

Chief among the reliable pleasures of the blogosphere are Nige’s accounts of his butterfly sightings, accompanied by color photos of the Lepidoptera in question. On Sunday he described a walk in the Surrey Hills, a mere hour from the center of London:

“A high point of the walk was butterfly hunting (sans net, eyes only) in an abandoned chalk quarry which was flowering gloriously with wild marjoram, scabious, vipers' bugloss and all manner of ground plants - not to mention masses of that most butterfly-friendly invader, Buddleia. In the hot sun, with the pungent scent of the marjoram, you could almost think yourself on a Mediterranean hillside...”

Go here, here, here and here for more of Nige’s recent close encounters in the aurelian world.

As I shared with Nige I had just seen a Common Blue flitting amidst the ivy in front of our house. Befitting their beauty and evanescence, butterflies trail clouds of memory and association. The Blues, for me, evoke Nabokov, my years in upstate New York and the endangered Karner Blue (Lycaeides melissa samuelis), a species identified and named by the novelist.

Sunday afternoon in a nearby park, where my kids played while I sat on a bench reading Anthony Powell, something flickered in the brown grass to my right. It might have been ash or confetti but it was a butterfly I mistook at first for another Blue. I waited and watched and concluded I was enjoying the company of a Gray Hairstreak (Strymon melinus), cousin to the Blues. It worried a long-stemmed yellow flower I’m unable to identify and was gone, half flying, half moved by warm breezes.

I had just spoken with my brother on the phone and that, synchronized with the Hairstreak’s appearance, reminded me of the butterfly collecting case my father made for me when I was 10. He had no instinct for lightness or grace. He was, in every sense I know, ponderous. The case was about 30 inches square and four or five inches deep, made of unpainted sheetmetal. The lid was hinged and had a square opening on top. It weighed 15 pounds or more and was suitable for sitting on a shelf in the closest. I lined it with cotton batting and pinned a few specimens, but the heaviness of the case, its industrial bulk, drained my enthusiasm for collecting.

When I got home on Sunday I took out Old Faithful – The Butterflies of Cascadia (published by the Seattle Audubon Society, 2002) by Robert Michael Pyle. He confirms my identification and reports the Gray Hairstreak is more common in Eastern Washington but not unknown between the mountains and the coast. Likening them to Brown Elfins, he writes:

“Grays are also extraordinarily alert and flighty, even compared to other lycaenids. Very often, a rapid, dark, mysterious darter will prove to be a Gray Hairstreak when finally netted or spotted at rest or nectar.”

Pyle lives in Gray’s River, Wa., along a tributary of the lower Columbia River. He has a Ph.D. in butterfly conservation ecology from Yale and founded the Xerces Society. I first heard of him from Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (2000), edited and annotated by Pyle and Brian Boyd (the novelist’s biographer), with translations by Dmitri Nabokov. It’s a grand book (820 pages), excellent for bedtime reading, and includes a list assembled by Pyle of all the butterflies described by Nabokov and those named after him.

Nabokov notes in Speak, Memory: “It is astounding how little the ordinary person notices butterflies.” Sad but true, judging by my experience. More than flowers or birds, butterflies come as gratuitous gifts, spirit-lifting reminders, in a ponderous world, of lightness and grace.

`The Things That Are Often Ignored'

“Liebling does have a great lesson to teach: that there’s a way of describing the world we all live in by focusing on the things that are often ignored.”

That’s from “The Art of Listening,” the interview Pete Hamill gives James Marcus at the Columbia Journalism Review. Hamill edited the two volumes of A.J. Liebling’s work -- World War II Writings and The Sweet Science and Other Writings -- published by the Library of America. As a young reporter, he had the honor of meeting Liebling, in the last year of the great writer’s life, at the Patterson-Liston fight in Chicago in 1962. Liebling even complemented the young reporter on some of his stories in the New York Post – a blessing to last a lifetime.

Hamill’s lesson from Liebling – “describing the world we all live in” by writing about “things that are often ignored” -- was precisely Liebling’s bequest to me as a reporter and now as a freelancer and blog-tender. I never wanted to write about mayors or captains of industry, who seem inherently tiresome – pompous, flatulent, inarticulate and beside-the-point. Power and fame hold no attractions for this writer. My loyalties are with the obscure, peculiar and unnoteworthy – a sentiment inexplicable to newspaper editors.

Almost 20 years ago I wrote a profile of a tattoo artist in upstate New York, a biker who looked like Allen Ginsberg’s obese cousin, complete with Uncle Sam hat. His nom de plume was “Critter.” I watched him fill in one of the remaining blanks on the epidermis of a fellow biker who wore a leather loin cloth. The story ran and El Jefe called me into his office. He started unctuously, praising my enterprise, but advised me to dwell less on the “raffish side of things.” Inflating a little more, he said, “Such things never last,” which reminded me of Dr. Johnson’s verdict on Tristram Shandy: “Nothing odd will do long.”

For all my proselytizing for Liebling’s books among fellow journalists, only one ever took me up on it. He liked politics and wanted to read The Earl of Louisiana (1961), Liebling’s book-length profile of Gov. Earl Long. The only copy I then owned was included in Liebling at Home, a paperback compendium published in 1982. For months my colleague said nothing. Finally I asked if he had enjoyed what is, after all, a wildly funny book. No, he hadn’t gotten around to reading it yet, maybe sometime soon. More months passed and I asked again and got the same answer. Later, without comment, I found the book in my mail box at the newspaper. The spine was split and one volume had turned into five or six. My colleague told me he had never found the time to read The Earl of Louisiana.

Both anecdotes supply small, incomplete explanations for the long-simmering extinction of newspapers. But leave the final word to Liebling. On Oct. 6, 1962, in The New Yorker, he published “The Morest” (collected in A Neutral Corner, 1990), his account of the Patterson-Liston fight in Chicago where Hamill met his hero. Here’s the final sentence:

“Courtesy, urbanity, good humor, wealth, self-satisfaction, and other destructive elements of civilization had descended upon Liston like the Asian flu, and Ibn Khaldun, that matchless Tunisian diagnostician, would have instantly recognized the symptoms of what is in store for him.”

`Bread and Butter and Melons'

In keeping with Friday’s Thoreau-and-fruit theme let us consider the watermelon. For a man who often wrote not of happiness but ecstasy, Thoreau’s contemporary image is anything but ecstatic. Some readers, or at least image-mongers, have tried to turn Thoreau into an earnest Al Gore with an Amish-style beard and unruly hair. Here is counter-evidence, supplied by Edward Waldo Emerson (Ralph Waldo’s son, 1844-1930) in his wonderful Henry Thoreau Remembered by a Young Man (1917):

“He especially loved to raise melons. I once went to a melon-party at his mother’s with various people, young and old, where his work had furnished the handsome and fragrant pink or salmon fruit on which alone we were regaled; and he, the gardener, came to help entertain the guests.”

Thoreau the gracious host will surprise some, in particular those who fail to recognize him as a great comic writer. Thoreau liked his solitude but on his terms. He was a certified crank but no dour hermit. Any man who takes pride in his watermelon crop, and happily shares the bounty with his neighbors, is a friend of mine. In a brief essay on watermelons collected in Wild Fruits (2000), Thoreau writes:

“Our diet, like that of the birds, must answer to the season. This is the season of west-looking, watery fruits. In the dog-days we come near to sustaining our lives on watermelon juice alone, like those who have fevers. I know of no more agreeable and nutritious food at this season than bread and butter and melons, and you need not be afraid of eating too much of the latter.”

In a journal entry for Aug. 27, 1859, Thoreau offers tips for judging the ripeness of watermelons. If you planted the patch and have watched it all season, the first fruit to appear will probably be the first to ripen, he suggests.

“Next the dull dead color and want of bloom are as good signs as any. Some look green and livid and have a very fog or mildew of bloom on them, like a fungus. These are as green as a leek through and through, and you’ll find yourself in a pickle if you open one. Others have a dead dark greenness, the circulations being less rapid in their cuticles and their blooming period passed, and these you may safely bet on…Of two otherwise similar, take that which yields the lowest tone when struck with your knuckles, i.e., which is hollowest. The old or ripe ones sing base; the young, tenor or falsetto.”

Thoreau advises against poking the melon or tapping on the vine to assess its ripeness. It is, he says, “suggestive of a greediness which defeats its own purpose. It is very childish.” This reminds Thoreau of the time he caught a neighbor boy sitting on one of his watermelons with a case-knife in his hand, carving away. He “instantly blowed him off” with his voice, but the kid had already started cutting the rind. Thoreau concludes:

“This melon, though it lost some of its bloom then, grew to be a remarkably large and sweet one, though it bore to the last a triangular scar of the tap which the thief had designed on it.”

`Of What I Already Have Some Inkling'

So often, despite his flighty Transcendentalism, posturing and dubious politics, Thoreau makes great personal sense:

“I am, perchance, most and most profitably interested in the things which I already know a little about; a mere and utter novelty is a mere monstrosity to me. I am interested to see the yellow pine, which we have not in Concord, though [French botanist François André] Michaux says it grows in Massachusetts; or the Oriental plane, having often heard of it and being well acquainted with its sister, the Occidental plane; or the English oak, having heard of the royal oak and having oaks ourselves; but the new Chinese flower, whose cousin I do not happen to know, I pass by with indifference. I do not know that I am very fond of novelty. I wish to get a clearer notion of what I already have some inkling.”

That’s from Thoreau’s journal entry for Aug. 6, 1851, when he was 34 and hardly an old man (chronologically, he had no chance to become an old man). Thoreau’s mind was as wide and venturesome as any I know but it was focused on the vital and near-at-hand: “I have travelled a good deal in Concord,” he writes in the third paragraph of Walden. I contrast this with a woman I know who is fond of saying “Change is always good.” She’s older than Thoreau at the time of his death but has not lived half as much. For life to transcend mere pulse and respiration, it must be mindful and attentive, not novelty-seeking. It’s not a matter of shunning new experience -- that will arrive inevitably – but braiding the new to the old and assaying it, a lifetime’s accumulation of weighed experience. Thoreau again, from his journal three weeks earlier, on July 16, 1851:

“Berries are just beginning to ripen, and children are planning expeditions after them. They are important as introducing children to the fields and woods….During the berry season, the schools have a vacation, and many little fingers are busy picking these small fruits. It is ever a pastime, not a drudgery. I remember how glad I was when I was kept from school half a day to pick huckleberries on a neighboring hill all by myself to make a pudding for the family dinner. Ah, they got nothing but the pudding, but I got invaluable experience beside! A half a day of liberty like that was like the promise of life eternal. It was emancipation in New England. O, what a day was there, my countrymen!”

I didn’t play catch as a kid and don’t play catch with my kids. It bored me and still does, as does anything to do with sports. But today or tomorrow we’ll spend hours in the blueberry patch, filling buckets. Like Thoreau, I loved berry picking as a kid. Behind our house in suburban Cleveland was a sprawling plot of fields and woods. Dense thickets of blackberries grew there. We harvested casually during the day as we played, and on summer nights, after dinner, carrying sauce pans, we picked for hours, until after the sun had set. It was hot, the mosquitoes were viscous and we shredded our arms on the thorns. Sweaty, itching and purple-mouthed, we “got invaluable experience beside!”

Storyteller, Teacher, Enchanter

Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature opens with “Good Readers and Good Writers,” an introductory lecture he delivered to his students at Cornell University. Near the conclusion he proposes what I take to be a useful, amusing way to distinguish among writers and their books, rather than an ironclad critical stricture:

“There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three – storyteller, teacher, enchanter – but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.”

This is Nabokov at his most charmingly provocative. To the storyteller, he continues, “we turn for entertainment, for mental excitement of the simplest kind, for emotional participation, for the pleasure of traveling in some remote region in space or time.”

Nabokov being Nabokov, we’re likely surprised he includes writer-as-teacher in his scheme, though he promptly qualifies the category: “Propagandist, moralist, prophet – this is the rising sequence. We may go to the teacher not only for moral education but also for direct knowledge, for simple facts.” Here, Nabokov implies his conviction that artist and scientist are cousins, not members of different species. He concludes:

“Finally, and above all, a great writer is always a great enchanter, and it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study the style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels or poems.”

Nabokov’s notion of the tripartite writer comes to mind as I’m reading Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time for the third time. (Nabokov encouragingly says, in the same lecture: “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”) Powell, for my money, qualifies as a major writer in Nabokov’s sense, though I suspect the author of Lolita would not have agreed. As a storyteller Powell is compulsive as he chronicles an English generation across half a century. As a teacher – yes, we learn much, from English customs and colloquialisms, to class-based folkways and the impact of war on soldiers and civilians, to incidentals of food and clothing. Also, satirists are teachers. Nabokov once said a satire was a lesson; a parody, a game. He was defending his own eminence as a parodist.

Powell casts an enchanter’s spell, especially in rereading. First, there is the prose – elegant, precise, witty, occasionally bitchy. Then there is the master artificer’s gift of convincing us we have entered a parallel universe, one than mirrors our own but plays by its own rules of physics and theory of music. Life – our life – is never quite so beautiful or sad, fortunately. He effortlessly induces self-forgetting in the right reader.

A seasoned reader inevitably wants to try out Nabokov’s scheme on other writers, especially favorites, looking for close fits and those who defy the template. Triple-crown winners include Chekhov, Henry James and Penelope Fitzgerald, always; Gogol, Melville, Faulkner and Beckett, sometimes. Christina Stead did it in one novel, The Man Who Loved Children. So did John Williams, in Stoner.

Writers who don’t even come close are also instructive. Dreiser, for instance, can tell a story (especially in Sister Carrie), but as a teacher he’s an earnest, Naturalistic puppet master: “Propagandist, moralist, prophet,” to quote Nabokov. And I suspect Dreiser has never enchanted a reader, not even among his admirers.

But what do we do with Bellow? And the man who started this parlor game, Nabokov? Nominations accepted.

`The Final Aggregate is One'

“Trains lead to ships and ships to death or trains,
And trains to death or trucks, and trucks to death,
Or trucks lead to the march, the march to death,
Or that survival which is all our hope;
And death leads back to trucks and trains and ships,
But life leads to the march, O flag! at last
The place of life found after trains and death—
Nightfall of nations brilliant after war.”

The lines are from Karl Shapiro’s “Troop Train,” from V-Letter and Other Poems (1944), written while the author was stationed in New Guinea with the Army Medical Corps. They came to mind as I started reading Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath, by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman – especially “the march to death, / Or that survival which is all our hope.”

I’ve seldom started a book with such a sense of dread – not, for once, about the quality of the reporting and writing, which are uniformly excellent, but about the inevitability of the horror to come. The Bataan Death March followed the three-month Battle of Bataan, part of the larger Battle of the Philippines in 1941-42. Some 76,000 American and Filipino troops surrendered to the Japanese – the largest single defeat in American military history. In April 1942, the Japanese marched the Allies 60 miles up the Bataan peninsula with an almost gleeful spirit of brutality. Thousands died of hunger, thirst, gunshot, disease, decapitation, beating and bayoneting.

The reader’s sense of dread is compounded by the ill-preparedness of the American command. Even after the attack on Pearl Harbor, many American aircraft were, as the Normans write, “parked [at Clark Field, Philippines] in neat rows in the open on their ready lines, noses to the runway. From above they looked like toys on a large lawn, silver toys perfectly outlined against the greensward of Luzon’s wide central plain.”

The narrative is graceful and prudently detailed, never hobbled by authorial over-indulgence in minutiae. After the sentence just quoted, we’re put in the cockpit of a Japanese Zero piloted by Saburō Sakai. We’re given a brief digression on Japanese nationalism and Japan’s antagonism toward the West. Then, back to Sakai: “The Japanese airman was astonished. Why, he wondered, weren’t the Americans in the air, `waiting for us?’” The prose is meticulous. I have never seen a bomb explosion described with such scientific, medical and human specificity:

“A bomb blast is lethal science, fluid mechanics meant to maim. First, the shock wave, a surge of air that hits a man like a wall of wind, hits him so hard his cerebrum starts to shake concussively in his skull, swelling at first, then hemorrhaging, rivulets of blood running from his nose and ears, vomit from his mouth. An instant after the shock wave passes, the atmosphere turns hot and dense, high pressure sucking the low pressure from every recess around it, from a man’s lungs and ears and eye sockets, leaving him gasping for breath and fighting the feeling his pupils are being pulled from their sockets. Finally, fluid mechanics turns to terminal ballistics as the blast blows apart the bomb’s casing, sending hundreds of jagged fragments – pieces of white-hot shrapnel, some no bigger than a pebble, others as big as a brick – slicing into anything in their path.”

The narrative backbone of the book is the story of Ben Steele, a cowboy – or “echo of a cowboy,” as the authors put it -- and artist born in Montana in 1917. He enlisted in the Army in October 1940, a month shy of his 23rd birthday, and survived as a prisoner of the Japanese for more than three years. Steele is still alive, age 91. The Normans interviewed him and quote his letters home. They interviewed 400 other participants in the Death March – Americans, Filipinos, Japanese – but their ongoing narrative witness is Steele, some of whose wartime sketches are reproduced. I’m little more than 150 pages into Tears in the Darkness, and I know Steele survives, but the sense of dread is hardly abated. He and his comrades, living and dead, remind me of another poem in V-Letter, “Elegy for a Dead Soldier,” in particular this stanza:

“We ask for no statistics of the killed,
For nothing political impinges on
This single casualty, or all those gone,
Missing or healing, sinking or dispersed,
Hundreds of thousands counted, millions lost.
More than an accident and less than willed
Is every fall, and this one like the rest.
However others calculate the cost,
To us the final aggregate is one,
One with a name, one transferred to the blest;
And though another stoops and takes the gun,
We cannot add the second to the first.”

`You Must Teach Yourself'

“The only thing missing from these essays is everything.”

This sentence appears in the introduction to Out of Eden: Essays on Modern Art (1991) by the American poet W.S. Di Piero. I admire the wry mingling of humility and audacity, and it might serve as the motto for this blog and others that are big and elastic enough to include almost anything, with the tacit understanding that we’re leaving out almost everything. At Anecdotal Evidence you’ll find nothing about sports, money, nanotechnology, rap music, politics, agronomy, independent films or automobiles. I know nothing about those subjects and have little interest in learning. Later in his introduction Di Piero refers to his essays “more as contentious autobiographical advocacy than as disinterested systematizing.”

I was thinking about these things after a telephone conversation last week with my brother. He and a longtime colleague are taking over the Cleveland picture-framing business where they’ve worked for years. Neither has ever been a boss, signed somebody’s paycheck, or hired or fired a soul. At the age of 54, Ken for the first time will be the guy he’s always bitched about. I thought about helping him in the only way I can, by writing content for his shop’s web site, which is overdue for a redesign. When I mentioned this to my wife, ever the shrinking violet, she said if I’m looking for a facelift I ought to first look at Anecdotal Evidence.

It’s true: For almost three and a half years I’ve lived with a blog design I’ve never liked – color, typeface, you name it. It looks dowdy but I dread changing anything for fear of losing everything. I have no digital skills or understanding. I don’t know how to add a link to my blog roll or post an image. She thinks I ought to begin using photos but I argued that one of my ongoing themes is the centrality of the word. She said that was a load of crap. We’ll see.

My wife also suggested I add a feature called something like “On My Bedside Table.” Since I never read just one book but usually have four or five going simultaneously, and I’m always dipping into other books for the odd, half-remembered sentence, I ought to post a list of those titles, updated as needed. That’s under consideration especially as I don’t write about most of the books I’m reading and such a list might serve as a shorthand version of a commonplace book or recommendations for readers. Here are the books on my night stand, along with the Di Piero:

A Dance to the Music of Time, “First Movement,” by Anthony Powell; Poussin: Paintings, a Catalogue Raisonné, by Christopher Wright; Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, by Ronald Knox; Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath, by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman.

That final title just arrived on Monday and I hope to start reading it today. Michael Norman is a Marine combat veteran of Vietnam, a former reporter for the New York Times, and a professor of narrative journalism at New York University. The couple interviewed some 400 men, half of them Americans, the rest Japanese and Filipinos. I read an excellent interview Michael Norman gave to Vice, in which he was asked what “narrative journalism” means:

“I try to teach writing students how to read like a writer. That’s based on the notion—and maybe I’m echoing Cormac McCarthy here—that all great books are built on the backs of other great books. Also, nobody can really teach you how to write. You must teach yourself.”

The echo I hear is not McCarthy but Guy Davenport, who insisted that books are always echoes of other books, sometimes covert, sometimes announced. It’s good to hear a university professor say without equivocation that writing is of necessity self-taught. And there’s another good sign that I’m in good company with Tears in the Darkness. Here’s Norman’s next response:

“As a writer, you’re alone with the page. So what I try to do is teach students to read deeply. I teach them to read at the sentence level. It takes a lot of discipline on the one hand, but it also takes a tremendous amount of desire. A lot of students like the idea of being a writer, but nobody likes the work of being a writer. I was lucky. I was trained as a poet, so I had some terrific sentence training.”

Every day I meet another book I want to read, most recently the Normans’, and every day something happens – in a book, in life – that I want to write about. My night stand is sturdy, my wife is smart and Anecdotal Evidence will soon be pretty enough to hold almost anything – maybe even pictures.

Happy Birthday, Thomas Berger

Today we celebrate the 85th birthday of Thomas Berger, one of the funniest writers in the language. He remains best known for the third of his 23 novels, Little Big Man (1964), but I’m probably fondest of Vital Parts (1971), Sneaky People (1975) and The Feud (1983). Berger has always denied he is a humorist but rather a novelist of manners like one of his writing heroes, Anthony Powell. Berger’s prose, like Powell’s, is flexible, never self-consciously arty. He’s a master of the American demotic, a lineal descendent of Twain at his best – that is, Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. I wish someone would collect the movie reviews Berger published in Esquire in 1972-73. Few writers have given me so much raw pleasure.

For a taste of Berger, go here and read selections from his correspondence with the novelist Zulfikar Ghose. Here’s a sample:

“I hadn’t remembered that Pound disparaged Shaw and I don’t think I ever heard your opinion, but I’m delighted to hear that you both find him trivial. I agree. Shaw has always seemed a journalist and not really a literary man. It’s his tendentiousness, I think, that keeps him trivial. He’s always out to solve social problems—the sure sign of a superficial practitioner.”

`The Proof was Always on the Page'

Good health spoils us. A bad cold is less suffering than irritation. Why me? Why not? In Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement, Richard Brookhiser writes:

“But nothing comes unmixed. Age brought the trials of age, to Bill and, indirectly, to his colleagues. His hearing began to go. He helped it depart by firing a pistol out his bedroom window in Stamford at the geese on his lawn.”

Humor helps. Of Al D’Amato, Brookhiser writes: “A gross being, he could be funny.” I remember Irving Howe calling D’Amato a “chowderhead,” Three Stooges-style.

Brookhiser dedicates Right Time, Right Place to Terry Teachout and writes of him:

“Terry was a little reserved, a little anxious, bursting with attention, eager to show how much he knew. None of us ever needed persuading of that; the proof was always on the page.”

Just writing that, I feel better.

`The Whole Structure of Polite Living'

I read most of Evelyn Waugh’s work in my teens and early 20s, largely because he was cited by critics as a precursor of the “Black Humor” school of American writing that came to prominence in the nineteen-sixties – Barth, Heller, Pynchon & Co. I’ve never lost my taste for grim comedy, and now I understand that Barth and the others were never a school and were not particularly good writers, but my admiration for Waugh has grown with the years.

For some reason I didn’t read Sword of Honour, his World War II trilogy, until 1984. It’s one of those books vividly tied in memory to a place: I started reading it in the bathtub of the apartment I was renting in Richmond, Ind.:

“When Guy Crouchback’s grandparents, Gervase and Hermione, came to Italy on their honeymoon, French troops manned the defences of Rome, the Sovereign Pontiff drove out in an open carriage and Cardinals took their exercise side-saddle on the Pincian Hill.”

That’s the novel’s first sentence, and I still find its mingling of private lives with the sweep of history rather breathtaking. But what I recall most intensely from that first reading a quarter-century ago is how smitten I was by the beauty and clarity of Waugh’s prose, which Graham Greene likened to “the Mediterranean before the war, so clear you could see to the bottom.” If one can learn to write well by reading well, Waugh is the finest of mentors.

What a pleasure it is to discover a previously unknown piece of work by Waugh. Jim Shelden, on the blog of The Virginia Quarterly Review, introduces “The Rough Life,” first published in the VQR in 1934. Follow the link to the essay itself, and sample sentences like this:

“For there must have been a time in everyone’s experience—more than one in mine—when a conversation about some amenity of life—cookery for example—has been rudely interrupted by a stern voice from another world. `Well I can tell you the best meal I ever had. Arrowroot biscuits, rather mouldy at that, and cocoa made in an old cigarette tin. We’d done twenty-six miles safari that day, on foot, through elephant grass—two of my bearers down with dengue, etc. . . . That meal tasted better than anything I ever hope to eat in Europe.’ Crash! The whole structure of polite living lies in ruins.”

In lucid words Waugh captures a personality-type we all recognize (today, they leave such comments on blogs) and makes us laugh. Those are some of the reasons – satire and humor (not always the same) – I reread Waugh, in particular the travel books and Sword of Honour. An anecdote:

For six months in 2002-2003, I read nothing but books by and about Henry James as I wrote my senior thesis on that writer. I had returned to college 30 years after dropping out and finally earned my B.A. in English literature in May 2003. The first book I read after my quarantine with James was Sword of Honour (the second and third, respectively, were Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz).

`Strong Writers with Quirky Minds'

I came of age during the Age of Magazines when my family, not notably bookish, subscribed to piles of them – Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report. My mother read women’s magazines -- McCall’s, Better Homes and Gardens -- and dutifully clipped the recipes. As a teenager I added Esquire and The New Yorker to the heap. And Mad, the first issue of which came out the month I was born – October 1952.

I can date moments in my life by fondly remembered Time covers – Nabokov when he published Ada and The Band when they put out their second album. We looked for Ted Key’s “Hazel” cartoon on the back page of the Post and Norman Rockwell’s covers before we were informed they were kitschy. Magazines were an American habit, a ritual, a tacit means of organizing one’s weeks and months – all of which now feels quaint and long-ago.

Earlier this week my wife brought home the July 20 issue of Newsweek, and I realized I hadn’t looked at a weekly news magazine in decades, not even while waiting for the dentist. I found my indifference vindicated. I have no interest in politics, celebrities and most of popular culture, the subjects dominating the magazine’s pages. The “Books” section devotes a photo and 57 lines of copy to the late David Foster Wallace and his ironically titled Infinite Jest. Most damning is the universal blandness of the writing – machine prose. I compelled myself to sample a bit of everything, smorgasbord-style, and nothing gave me the momentum to read beyond the second or third sentence.

A magazine aimed at adult readers (admittedly, a narrow demographic) must be organized around the quality of its writers. Think of The New Yorker of the nineteen-fifties and early -sixties, when Liebling, Mitchell, Maxwell, Nabokov, Perelman, Balliett, J.F. Powers, Welty and Cheever graced its pages – a reader’s paradise. Such things will never happen again, of course, for many reasons, not least because three of the magazines I mentioned above ceased publication ages ago. Richard Brookhiser, a senior editor at National Review, recently published Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement, in which he offers a common-sense prescription for magazine excellence:

“A magazine must find strong writers with quirky minds and let each have his head. Their obsessions give a magazine life, and the cacophony of their different obsessions gives it variety. Readers look to favorite magazines for features – elements that stand out like landmarks and that create, then fulfill, expectations. The easiest way to generate features is by using design elements and graphics – pie charts, naked women – though the best way is to build features around writers.”

`A Congeries of Essences'

A 40-percent-off coupon lured me to a second-hand bookstore where the kids burrowed in the comic books and I wandered the desert without expectations. Instead I found a cheap, mint-condition copy of Guy Davenport’s Twelve Stories, the sampler selected from three of his eight books of fiction and published in 1997. I never bothered to buy it because I already own most of his books, but the coupon and markdown made it irresistible.

Only at home did I discover the bonus: Tucked inside the back cover was Davenport’s New York Times obituary, published Jan. 7, 2005, three days after his death. It’s a cut-and-paste assemblage of banalities by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and includes an intriguing bit of creative writing: “the novel `Bicycle Rider’ (1985).” No such book exists and Davenport never published a novel under any title. However, his second collection of stories, published in 1979, was titled Da Vinci’s Bicycle, which Lehmann-Haupt refers to elsewhere in the obit. Bicycle is a fiction in the other sense, ontologically speaking.

Why does a reader care enough to tear a writer’s obit from a newspaper and fold it into one of the writer’s books but not enough to keep the book on the shelf and refrain from selling it? Did the obit spark his interest in Davenport but the book, once open in his hands, disappointed or baffled him? The vagaries of readers are unfathomable. In his “Postscript” (ever the Latinist) to Twelve Stories, Davenport writes:

“The imagination sees with the eyes of the spirit; the maker, finished with his making, must then see what he has done, like the reader, with corporeal eyes. Thoreau on an afternoon in 1852 when he had been looking at birds, trees, cows, squirrels, and flowers for hours raged that he had no words for the music he felt in every muscle of his body.

“To see that Thoreau could achieve a spiritual music in words you have only to look at any page he wrote. His frustration is the habitual anguish of all writers. A congeries of essences must find a form, and the form must be coherent and harmonious.”

Perhaps Davenport alludes to the entry from Thoreau’s journal dated Sept. 28, 1852:

“I find the hood-leaved violet quite abundant in a meadow, and the pedata in the Boulder Field. Those now seen, all but the blanda, palmata, and pubescens, blooming again. Bluebirds, robins, etc., are heard again in the air. This is the commencement, then, of the second spring. Violets, Potentilla, Canadensis, lambkill, wild rose, yellow lily, etc., begin again.

“A windy day. What have these high and roaring winds to do with the fall? No doubt they speak plainly enough to the sap that is in these trees, and perchance check its upward flow.

“Ah, if I could put into words that music which I hear; that music which can bring tears to the eyes of marble statues, to which the very muscles of men are obedient.”

`As a Drop of Dew Contains the Sky'

In the first chapter of his new book, Beauty, Roger Scruton reviews the ancient arguments over beauty being “the object of a sensory rather than an intellectual delight.” He notes that “aesthetics” as a modern word was derived by Kant from the Greek aisthesis, meaning “sensation.” Scruton concludes that a comprehensive definition of beauty, despite its centrality to human experience, may be beyond human reckoning:

“A beautiful face, a beautiful flower, a beautiful melody, a beautiful colour – all these are indeed objects of a kind of sensory enjoyment, a relishing of the sight or sound of a thing. But what about a beautiful novel, a beautiful sermon, a beautiful theory in physics or a beautiful mathematical proof?”

Scruton pursues his toughest example, the novel, the beauty of which cannot be reduced exclusively to its sound (as a poem might be, though he doesn’t address this). In fact, a novel of pure sound (not even Finnegans Wake meets that definition) would not be a novel at all but a freak, a stunt, and probably unreadable in any conventional sense. Scruton continues:

“In appreciating a story we certainly are more interested in what is being said than in the sensory character of the sounds used to say it…a novel is directed to the senses – but not as an object of sensory delight, like a luxurious chocolate or a fine old wine. Rather as something presented through the senses, to the mind.”

The distinction is crucial and, at least to this reformed aesthete, convincing. And which writer of fiction does Scruton select to bolster his case?

“Take any short story by Chekhov. It does not matter that the sentences in translation sound nothing like the Russian original. Still they present the same images and events in the same suggestive sequence. Still they imply as much as they say, and withhold as much as they reveal. Still they follow each other with the logic of things observed rather than things summarized. Chekhov’s art captures life as it is lived and distills it into images that contain a drama, as a drop of dew contains the sky. Following such a story we are constructing a world whose interpretation is at every point controlled by the sights and sounds that we imagine.”

In his memoir, Gentle Regrets, Scruton describes Shakespeare’s plays as “works of philosophy – philosophy not argued but shown.” Beyond argument, this is true, and Chekhov’s stories are philosophy in a similar sense. His characters, unlike Dostoevsky’s and other Russian writers’, are never mouthpieces for their author’s religious or political hobbyhorses. His stories, like Shakespeare’s plays, never argue but show. Though his linguistic palette is circumscribed, Chekhov’s prose, like Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry, has a plainness and lack of ostentation that survives the inevitable blood-letting of translation. Its lucidity, modesty and attention to detail are beautiful. As Nabokov says in Lectures on Russian Literature:

“…Chekhov managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was.”

`A Valuable Delusion'

I hope some enterprising editor assembles a collection of the scattered, unsystematic writings of Richard Diebenkorn. The result may amount to no more than a pamphlet but based on the stray samples of the painter’s prose I’ve happened upon, Diebenkorn’s aphorisms are tonic for the intellect, rooted in experience and never theoretical. That one man should possess exceptional gifts in painting (he’s one of the finest 20th-century American artists) and writing seems terribly unfair to the rest of us. In an essay introducing Richard Diebenkorn: Figurative Works on Paper (Chronicle Books, 2003) the painter Barnaby Conrad III quotes a note found in Diebenkorn’s studio after his death in 1993:

“Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.”

The first two sentences are a platitude and a truism, respectively. Few artists worthy of attention know every move in advance. Most accomplishment – this seems particularly true of writing – tempers rigor with serendipity, planning with improvisation. We’re back to the etymology of essay – “to try,” “to attempt.” The beauty lies in the third sentence – learning to recognize and capitalize upon a “valuable delusion.”

I happened to read Conrad’s essay the same day I began reading Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (1950). His subject is, Knox (1888-1957) admits, “elusive,” and his title amounts to “a cant term, pejorative, and commonly misapplied, as a label for a tendency.” He refers to the schismatic nature of belief in the context of Roman Catholicism – the sometimes fruitful friction between “the charismatic and the institutional.” Thus, Knox examines Montanists, Donatists, Anabaptists, Quakers, Jansenists, Quietists, Methodists and other species of dissenters.

Knox was ordained an Anglican priest in 1912, converted to Roman Catholicism five years later, and was ordained a priest in that faith in 1918. As such, he might be presumed a disapproving chronicler of “enthusiasts.” But something happened over the 30 years Knox worked on his masterwork. He explains in the introduction:

“…when the plan of this book was first conceived, all those years ago, it was to have been a broadside, a trumpet-blast, an end of controversy…here I would say, is what happens inevitably, if once the principle of Catholic unity is lost! All this confusion, this priggishness, then pedantry, this eccentricity and worse, follows directly from the rash step that takes you outside the fold of Peter!”

Certainty, to use Diebenkorn’s phrasing, did not come. Instead, Knox followed a “valuable delusion”:

“…somehow, in the writing, my whole treatment of the subject became different; the more you got to know the men, the more human did they become, for better or worse; you were more concerned to find out why they thought as they did than to prove it was wrong.”

This is admirable less as “tolerance” or “open-mindedness” – Knox remained a stout-hearted Catholic and priest – than as generosity of spirit, sympathetic imagination and something like Keats’ notion of “Negative Capability.” It also makes Enthusiasm compulsively readable, as it would not have been had it degenerated into a denunciatory screed. What could be more attractive than a writer with a first-rate mind examining, with empathy and scholarly care, ideas he personally does not embrace?

`My God, My God, What a Writer!'

I’ve written before about Shelby Foote’s literary tastes as expressed in his letters to lifelong friend Walker Percy, but a recent reading of C. Stuart Chapman’s Shelby Foote: A Writer’s Life (2003) fills in some of the human context. Among fiction writers, Foote most admired Proust and Chekhov. Proust he first read as a teenager, and followed a ritual of rewarding himself after completing each of his own books with a rereading of À la recherche du temps perdu.

Chekhov, like Percy, was a doctor. Both suffered from tuberculosis, Chekhov fatally. In 1989, when Percy was already being treated for the cancer that would kill him the following year, Foote found it difficult to address his friend’s illness directly. Chambers writes:

“Foote even struggled with what to say to his dying friend, and as always, denial was his better form of valor. Even though Percy had little problem talking about his illness [unlike Chekhov], Foote’s letters continued to focus on artistic issues, even while his friend grew sicker.”

Thus, Foote, in one of his final letters to Percy, extolled Chekhov’s stories and urged his friend to read them:

“My God, my God, what a writer! How he does it is a mystery you cant [sic] solve by analyzing it – he just does it; does it out of being Chekhov…he landed running and never looked back, a highly individual man with his own particular fond absurdity that enabled him to see it in others when he wrote about them.”

Chambers writes: “Almost insensitively, Foote droned on, talking about a number of Chekhov stories; but by the end of the letter, it became clear that contained within his monologue on Chekhov’s talent lay his cryptic efforts to reach out to his friend.”

Chambers is wrong about Foote’s near-insensitivity. Foote and Percy met in 1930 and had been each other’s closest friend for almost 60 years. Though dramatically different temperaments, they understood each other better than many spouses. Percy took no offense at his old friend’s literary foot-dragging, and probably welcomed the letter’s enthusiasm for something other than his imminent mortality. Foote urged him to read “The Bishop,” written in 1902, two years before Chekhov’s death, and continued in his letter:

“He was researching dying while he wrote it; that is, he was dying himself, and Lord, Lord, what a job he did. It takes the mystery out of dying, makes it almost an ordinary occurrence, and in the course of doing it, makes dying more of a mystery than ever.”

Percy read “The Bishop” (which I wrote about here) and replied: “It’s all you say. Nothing short of miraculous.” Fully understanding his friend, Percy saw himself in the character of the dying bishop and writes: “The Bishop is in poor shape, dying in fact.” In a remarkably tactful gesture, Percy the Roman Catholic says of the story to Foote the agnostic: “What’s so good about it is that it doesn’t matter in the least that Chekhov was, apparently, an unbeliever.”

Percy died on May 10, 1990. Ten years later Foote wrote an introduction to Anton Chekhov: Longer Stories from the Last Decade, published by the Modern Library. In it he writes:

“Moreover, like most good writers, his work is even better on rereading, since then you can better appreciate how he goes about getting where he's going. Often, after a stretch of such rereading, I wax enthusiastic beyond all bounds. (Like Hemingway, I sometimes play the fool, but in the opposite direction.) Walker Percy and I shared this reaction, and once, in the course of a discussion, I asked him if he had read `In the Ravine.’ He said he hadn't, and I said: `I'd rather have written “In the Ravine” than Moby-Dick.’ His eyebrows rose at this, as well they might, but he went home and read that great last long story-in which all the author's talents seem to be gathered together as naturally as a hand closing into a fist-and wound up in a state of exaltation similar to my own. Echoing Nabokov on Chekhov's near-miraculous combination of the funny and the sad, he shook his head in wonder. `I don't know how it can be so pitiful and funny,’ he wrote me later. `I have to laugh out loud.’”

Foote died June 27, 2005.

Catalpa

In 1969 I bought a paperback titled The Poem in Its Skin, edited by Paul Carroll. I found it in a department store, when such places still had book departments. It collected the work of American poets then entering middle age -- Ashbery, Merwin, Ginsberg, James Wright, John Logan, among others. I was not yet 17, my tastes were fluid, and I couldn’t distinguish gold from pyrite but I knew what I liked, even if only a single stanza:

“The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven't learned
A blessed thing they pay you for.
The blossoms snow down in my hair;
The trees and I will soon be bare.”

This is the opening of “April Inventory,” from Heart’s Desire, the first poem by W.D. Snodgrass I read. The reason it thrilled me was botanical, not poetic (I’m certain I had no idea what the poem was about). As a kid I already loved the northern catalpa (Catalpa speciosa) for its gaudy white flowers in spring and long, bean-like seed pods in summer. We knew catalpas as “cigar trees,” and kids enjoy masquerading as adults. I was pleased on Saturday by Nige’s celebration of this elegantly gaudy tree:

“The catalpas are in full bloom in London now. In the right setting this is a fine tree, in a slightly showy and exotic way, with its huge leaves and great trusses of white blossom, followed by long hanging pods (hence its other name, the Indian bean tree).”

Nige also notes “catalpa” is a “fine musical word,” and Plants and Their Names: A Concise Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 1995) reports the name is from catawba, “the North American Indian word for this plant.” I knew that word from Catawba Island, on the Lake Erie shore west of Cleveland. It’s part of the main land, not an island, but nearby is Kelleys Island, where I spent summers with my grandparents. I accept the etymology but catalpa to my ears has a Mediterranean sound – Latin or Italian – and I like the stress on the second syllable, lending the word a pleasing, symmetrical bell-like ring: ca-TAL-pa. It’s a rare word/thing that gives pleasure on multiple levels, even the olfactory, and even in memory:

Fifteen years ago I worked briefly as a copy editor on the graveyard shift for a newspaper in upstate New York. I would leave the office between midnight and 1 a.m. and follow the Mohawk River back to my apartment, often spying the furtive blur of a coyote along the road. I had to stop at a dogleg intersection where my headlights, in May, illuminated a house-sized catalpa in glorious bloom. I looked forward every morning to seeing that glowing revelation, which always reminded me of the story Guy Davenport tells at the conclusion of his essay about Eudora Welty, “The Fair Field of Enna”:

“An anecdote about Faulkner relates that once on a spring evening he invited a woman to come with him in his automobile, to see a bride in her wedding dress. He drove her over certain Mississippi back roads and eventually across a meadow, turning off his headlights and proceeding in darkness. At last he eased the car to a halt and said that the bride was before them. He switched on the lights, whose brilliance fell full upon an apple tree in blossom.

“The sensibility that shapes that moment is of an age, at least, with civilization itself.”

`Booklight and Kitchen Light'

In an e-mail Bill Sigler refers to Fred Chappell as “the literary version of my uncle in the hills of Western North Carolina,” and quotes a passage from one of my favorite poems, Chappell’s book-length Midquest:

“These are the flower-worlds with all
the visionary petals shriveled away.

“Please hold my hand, may we
go down now, home?
Where booklight and kitchen light
furrow the silence?”

Near the end of the poem, Chappell’s stand-in, Old Fred, is speaking to his wife. The moment is central to the poem, to Chappell’s vision, and to my understanding of our place in the world. We’ve had a peek at Chappell’s Appalachian Paradiso. Now it’s time to go home. Even mystics, sooner or later, return. We need the sustenance: “booklight and kitchen light.”

A previous mention of Midquest prompted at least one reader to buy a copy, the happiest possible byproduct of criticism.

`A Green Thought in a Green Shade'

The garden at my kids’ school is remarkably tidy and secure. It’s surrounded by a chain-link fence and the vegetables, fruits and flowers, except for squash and grapes, grow in horse troughs of galvanized steel. The paths are covered with crushed gravel, and there’s even a portable outhouse. Next to it is a coffin-shaped plastic chest for storing the hose, shears and other supplies, all tidily stowed and secured with a combination lock. I volunteered to take care of the garden for a week.

We go early in the evening. For six weeks greater Seattle has had no measurable rainfall, and none is expected until at least next week. The boys sample nasturtium blossoms – it’s not about the flavor, which is peppery, but the novelty of eating flowers – and go to work on the playground while I pull out the hose, soak the garden and think about Marvell: “What wondrous life is this I lead!”

Red-leaf lettuce, broccoli, two kinds of beans, corn, peas, tomatoes, strawberries, carrots -- none is quite ripe. Nothing to nibble. I’m outdoors but the garden feels like a greenhouse -- laboratory conditions, no herbivores, antiseptic. This is how, I think darkly, they arrange gardens in Belgium. I resist the urge to pull the token weeds. Let them thrive. Fred Chappell, too, has titled a poem “The Garden,” which begins “The garden is a book about the gardener.” If so, this gardener, if I’m reading the text rightly, is prim, at least a little neurotic. Later in the poem, Chappell flips the equation: “The gardener is a book about her garden.” I’m the only male among the garden volunteers. How do I read that? Further on Chappell writes:

“Her thoughts set down in vivid greenery,
The green light and the gold light nourish.
Firm sentences of grapevine, boxwood paragraphs,
End-stops of peonies and chrysanthemums,
Cut drowsy shadows on the paper afternoon.”

The best part of gardening is the easy mindlessness. I water and weed without thinking. Or I think about Marvell:

“Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.”

`The Arithmetic of Compassion'

Stalin is widely assumed to have said “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic,” though scholars can’t agree on the authenticity of the quotation. Its Wildean cynicism has always seemed too mannered, too polished, for the thug from Georgia, and who can imagine the “one man” whose demise Stalin might have honored as tragedy?

Morbid fascination led to me recall Stalin’s quip. I visited a Communist blog, which led me to another, and another, into a moral vortex. The technical quality of the writing varied, from rabid to academically congealed to eerily civilized and grammatically correct, but the themes remained consistent: Capitalism, imperialism, the United States and Israel -- bad; Marx, Muslims, the proletariat, sometimes Lenin, sometimes Mao, one time Stalin – good. I’m not as naïve as I was a few years ago but the experience was like learning the smallpox bacillus had spontaneously reappeared in the human population. The nadir, or one of the deeper nadirs, came when a self-described Marxist-Leninist mutated Stalin’s formulation and said the death of “Palestinian civilians” was a “tragedy” and the death of Israelis was a “necessity.”

A man who knew the blessings of the worker’s paradise first-hand, whose life was cut short by it, was Zbigniew Herbert, who at least had the satisfaction of outliving the Soviet Union. I wonder if he had Stalin’s one-liner in mind when he wrote “Mr Cogito Reads the Newspaper” (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter):

“On the front page
a report of the killing of 120 soldiers

“the war lasted a long time
you could get used to it

“close alongside
the news of a sensational crime
with a portrait of the murderer

“the eye of Mr Cogito
slips indifferently
over the soldiers’ hecatomb
to plunge with delight
into the description of everyday horror

“a thirty-year-old farm labourer
under the stress of nervous depression
killed his wife
and two small children

“it is described with precision
the course of the murder
the position of the bodies
and other details

“for 120 dead
you search on a map in vain

“too great a distance
covers them like a jungle

“they don’t speak to the imagination
there are too many of them
the numeral zero at the end
changes them into an abstraction

“a subject for meditation:
the arithmetic of compassion”

It sounds like a grotesque joke: How many Israeli deaths does it take for a Marxist-Leninist to calculate “the arithmetic of compassion?”

`Something Straight and Simple'

In our hotel room at Lake Chelan, on the wall across from our bed, hung what appeared to be a reproduction of a painting by Richard Diebenkorn. There was no signature and the frame was sealed to the wall so I couldn’t examine the back, but it looked convincingly like a painting from the “Ocean Park” series – irregular pastel grids, like landscapes viewed from the air. It resembled this. I assume it was either a Diebenkorn reproduction or an anonymous ripoff of his style. Either way, I enjoyed its company.

Since returning home, while reading more about Diebenkorn and looking at his paintings, I came across two sentences reportedly scrawled on a scrap of paper and found in the artist’s California studio after his death in 1993, age 70. I haven’t documented the source but even if it’s apocryphal it’s intriguing and worthy of contemplation – like the painting in the motel room:

“I seem to have to do it elaborately wrong and with many conceits first. Then maybe I can attack and deflate my pomposity and arrive at something straight and simple.”

These are not the words of a young man. They have none of the willfulness, self-indulgence and impatience of youth, even brilliant youth. They reflect a full life’s experience, its dead ends, flops, erasures, detours, the inevitable depression and self-loathing, at least in passing – but not defeat or surrender. We could learn from them, especially from “elaborately wrong,” which is how many of us wrote and lived when young, congratulating our daring and individuality while slavishly serving the Zeitgeist.

At Lake Chelan I was reading the poems of Janet Lewis and her husband, Yvor Winters. The latter’s “To a Young Writer” seems apposite, in particular the final quatrain:

“Write little; do it well.
Your knowledge will be such,
At last, as to dispel
What moves you overmuch.”

Knowledge (experience) tempers emotional over-indulgence -- “What moves you overmuch.” The risk, of course, is over-compensation in the other direction, turning cold and sterile. In his note to the poem in The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters, R.L. Barth points out the poem was dedicated to Achilles Holt (1911-1993), a poet, fiction writer and student of Winters’. Barth writes: “Holt’s writing career ended relatively early with the onset of severe mental illness.” Yet he lived to the age of 82.

For what it’s worth, Diebenkorn, Lewis and Winters lived much of their lives in California, though none was a native, and all were associated with Stanford University.

`The Art of Surprise'

It’s July in Helkovo, a dusty resort town in Russia, where Pavel Matveyitch Zaikin steps off the train with others, “mostly fathers of families,” Chekhov tells us. He is “perspiring, red in the face, and gloomy.” Zaikin is a lawyer, joining his wife and son at their summer villa. We know him from Gogol and Dickens – an irritable little man whose only pleasure is complaining. “I maintain, sir,” he tells a fellow traveler (dressed in “ginger trousers”), “that summer holidays are the invention of the devil and of woman.”

Only Petya, his 6-year-old son, is home. His wife, Nadyezhda [Hope] Stepanova, and her friend, Olga Kirillovna, have gone to rehearse a play. Petya collects insects and is full of questions about gnats. In a brilliant image, Chekhov has Petya give his father a box out of which comes the sound of buzzing and scratching:

“Opening the lid, he saw a number of butterflies, beetles, grasshoppers, and flies fastened to the bottom of the box with pins. All except two or three butterflies were still alive and moving.”

Pavel Matveyitch has already made his son cry and called him “a horrid little pig.” When he asks Petya who taught him to pin insects, he answers it was his mother’s friend. “Olga Kirillovna ought to be pinned down like that herself!...It’s shameful to torture animals,” he says.

The mother and her friend return in the company of two men who are also in the play. Pavel Matveyitch complains when she wishes to serve them “vodka and savouries.” Alone in his study he drinks tea and eats “a whole French loaf,” though he takes no pleasure in food or drink, nor does he kiss or embrace his wife and son. He feels no jealousy about the actors rehearsing with his wife and staying overnight in their villa -- merely irritation. His son asks more questions about insects and Pavel Matveyitch tells him to shut up. Finally, in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, he walks outside and meets “Ginger Trousers,” his companion on the train, who says, “I am enjoying Nature.” His mother-in-law and nieces have arrived, and he is happy. “And you, too,” he asks, “are enjoying Nature?” Pavel Matveyitch agrees that he is and asks Ginger Trousers if he knows where he can find a tavern.

“Ginger Trousers raised his eyes to heaven and meditated profoundly.”

That’s how “Not Wanted” (in the Constance Garnett translation) concludes inconclusively. The pleasure of the story is in Chekhov’s ability to keep the pot simmering without bringing it to a boil. We’ve all felt like Pavel Matveyitch, and some of us have spoken the way he speaks to his wife and son. He’s not a bully or sadist. He’s quietly, undramatically unhappy, and Chekhov quietly, undramatically balances misery with comedy.

In 2006, theater/film critic Steve Vineberg delivered a lecture, “The Art of Surprise,” at the College of the Holy Cross, later published in The American Scholar. He writes:

“The art I love most dearly emerges from an acknowledgement that we’re none of us pure of either mind or heart. It’s the art of mixed tones—buffoonery mixed with regret, as in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro; comic absurdity mixed with heartache, as in Chekhov’s stories; salvation that appears improbably out of despair, as in Shakespeare’s King Lear, or when all hope is lost, as in The Winter’s Tale. It’s the art of surprise, which can only come from the unpredictable—and what I mean by `unpredictable’ isn’t the preposterous (like the twists in M. Night Shmalayan’s movies) but the turn you don’t expect just because it’s so true to life, and life is never predictable, yet when you see it or hear it you think, `Of course.’”

When Pavel Matveyitch, instead of flying into a rage, merely fumes and sputters; and when he rants at his son and apologizes, then rants again; and when he wanders sleeplessly into the summer night, and asks for directions to a tavern and gets profound meditation instead of an answer – that is the surprise that does not surprise, artifice fashioned so subtly as to seem indistinguishable from life: “Of course.”

In his final book, Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, completed when he was 88 years old, Viktor Shklovsky writes:

“Chekhov is the most desperate of all writers , he is the most straightforward one.

“He doesn’t want to soften, loosen the threads of life, he doesn’t want to be capable of bending them to make a false happy ending.”

`There is No Nothingness'

“Nature has no nothing. To feel that it has is what we call the devil, the enemy. In Blakean words, our predicament is that we can exist and still not be, for being requires an awakeness from the dream of custom and of ourselves. The self is by nature turned outward to connect with the harmony of things. The eyes cannot see themselves, but something other. The strange and paradoxical rule of nature is that we are fullest in our being by forgetting our being. To love nothing is to be nothing, to give is to have.”

These sentences by Guy Davenport come near the conclusion of his essay about the American poet Ronald Johnson. Despite repeated tries I’ve been unable to share Davenport’s enthusiasm for Johnson’s work. It leaves me cold. I would never have made even a second attempt to enjoy and understand the poems had a critic other than Davenport spoken so admiringly of them. Even in disagreement, he’s a critic – a reader and teacher – one listens to and learns from. The passage above, which seems quite remarkable in its spirited refutation of solipsism, the postmodern epidemic, is almost an aside, a digression in what is, after all, merely a book review. Davenport could afford to be profligate with his gifts.

The paragraph jibes with everything I know about Davenport the man, his generosity, casual kindness and availability to others. It also resonates with his familiar themes and sources, Herakleitos in particular. Davenport translated the fragments left by the pre-Socratic thinker (in Herakleitos and Diogenes, 1979; later included in 7 Greeks, 1995), and much of his work is suffused with what he calls the “astuteness and comprehensiveness of [Herakleitos’] insight into the order of nature.” One fragment says: “The unseen design of things is more harmonious than the seen.”

The passage from the Johnson essay reminds me of J.V. Cunningham’s “For a Woman with Child”:

“We are ourselves but carriers. Life
Incipient grows to separateness
And is its own meaning. Life is,
And not; there is no nothingness.”

The choice of a pregnant woman is astute. At no other time is our moral connectedness to the separateness of another so dramatized: “we are fullest in our being by forgetting our being.” Having a child ought to signal the beginning of the end of self-absorption in both mother and father. The entry of a child into the world forever changes that world. Davenport says, “Nature has no nothing;” Cunningham, “there is no nothingness.”

Elsewhere, Davenport writes that Cunningham’s poems “are as well made as wristwatches.”

`Style is the Leaves of the Tree'

I don’t know anyone who reads the work of William Gerhardie (1895-1977), an Anglo- Russian writer of the remarkable generation that included Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. Edith Wharton was among his champions. Gerhardie was born in St. Petersburg, where he served as a British military attaché during World War I and witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution. His best novels – Futility, The Polyglots – have Russian characters, settings and themes. In 1923 he published Anton Chekhov: A Critical Study, the first book not written in Russian devoted to that writer. I wrote about it here.

Now I’m reading Memoirs of a Polyglot, published in 1931 when the author was 36. Gerhardie has a gift for distilled portraiture, for comedy and for treating his remarkable life as nothing out of the ordinary – not in a spirit of false modesty (the book’s first sentence is “Yesterday, at dinner, it suddenly occurred to me what a fine fellow I was.”), but rather in the manner of his master, Chekhov. Another of his incidental gifts is for off-the cuff literary criticism. In describing the departure of a British general with whom he served in Petrograd, Gerhardie writes:

“I was so attached, so devoted to the man that when I was alone in the street I hurried against the biting blizzard, which blinded me as I tore on, and sobbed. And if you think it `unmanly’ of me, let me tell you that the `larme facile’ is again in the fashion. All true humorists, moreover – Dickens, Gogol, Chekhov, Mark Twain, Proust, [Arkady Timofeevich] Averchenko, to name only a few at random – are lachrymose by the natural balance of things.”

The transition from personal anecdote to critical assessment is seamless and shrewd. For Gerhardie to place Proust among the humorists is inspired, and must have surprised his early readers. In the nineteen-twenties, while at Oxford, Gerhardie wrote most of Futility and the Chekhov study, and resisted pressure from classmates to become a Communist. After describing a Red friend’s proselytizing, and his later reconversion to democratic principles, he writes:

“Just as every political party considers itself a `centre-party’ threatened by revolutionaries on the left and reactionaries on the right, so every young writer tends to think his talent is compounded from the choicest ingredients. One hopes – and on what little ground! – that one incorporate the lucid sanity of a Bertrand Russell, without any of his liberal smugness; the bitter incisiveness of Bernard Shaw, without his sterility; the rich humanity of H.G. Wells, without his splashing-over; the analytical profundity of Proust, without his mawkish snobbism; the elemental sweep of D.H. Lawrence, without his gawky bitterness; the miraculous naturalness of Chekhov, without that sorry echo of the consumptive’s cough; the supreme poetic moments of Goethe unimbedded in the suet-pudding of his common day; the intimations without the imbecility of William Wordsworth; the lyrical imagery of Shakespeare, without his rhetoric; the pathological insight of Dostoevski, without his extravagant suspiciousness; the life-imparting breath of Tolstoy, without his foolishness; Turgenev’s purity in reproducing nature, without his sentimentalism; the lyrical power of Pushkin, without his paganism; the elegiac quality of Lermontov, without his `Byronism’; the humour and epic language of Gogol, without his provincialism; the spirit of Voltaire, without his tininess; the human understanding of Dr. Johnson, without his overbearingness; the dash of Byron, without his vanity; the faithful portraiture of Flaubert, without his tortuous fastidiousness. The list could be prolonged.”

There’s much here to quibble with (I’ll take Shakespeare’s rhetoric any day) but if a young writer or reader were to pursue each of Gerhardie’s observations – read the texts and come to his own conclusions – he would possess the rudiments of a first-rate literary education. That seems even less likely than it was in Gerhardie’s day. And here is what he writes in the middle of an assessment of H.G. Wells:

“…there is but one thing an original artist has in common with another – originality…style is the leaves of the tree. No tree, no leaves. A writer’s style is the measure of his personality, and cannot be acquired consciously. It shows unmistakably what you are: gives you away for what you are.”

`What Salutes of Cannon and Small Arms!'

One-hundred fifty-four years ago today, Walt Whitman published 12 untitled poems and a preface in an edition of 795 copies at a Brooklyn print shop owned by two Scottish immigrants, the brothers James and Andrew Rome. Within two weeks Emerson, one of Whitman’s many inspirations, praised Leaves of Grass as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.” In later editions, Whitman mentions Independence Day – the birth of the nation, the birth of his book -- in “Song of Myself,” Section 15, near the conclusion to one of his catalogs, this one celebrating Americans of every stripe, from opium-eater and “quadroon girl” to the president:

“The floor-men are laying the floor, the tinners are tinning the roof, the masons are calling for mortar,
In single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers;
Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather’d, it is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannon and small arms!)
Seasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground...”

My favorite among Whitman’s evocations of July, without mention of the national holiday, can be found in Specimen Days, “A July Afternoon by the Pond”:

“The fervent heat, but so much more endurable in this pure air—the white and pink pond-blossoms, with great heart-shaped leaves; the glassy waters of the creek, the banks, with dense bushery, and the picturesque beeches and shade and turf; the tremulous, reedy call of some bird from recesses, breaking the warm, indolent, half-voluptuous silence; an occasional wasp, hornet, honey-bee or bumble (they hover near my hands or face, yet annoy me not, nor I them, as they appear to examine, find nothing, and away they go)—the vast space of the sky overhead so clear, and the buzzard up there sailing his slow whirl in majestic spirals and discs; just over the surface of the pond, two large slate-color’d dragon-flies, with wings of lace, circling and darting and occasionally balancing themselves quite still, their wings quivering all time, (are they not showing off for my amusement?)—the pond itself, with the sword-shaped calamus; the water snakes—occasionally a flitting blackbird, with red dabs on his shoulders, as he darts slantingly by—the sounds that bring out the solitude, warmth, light and shade—the quawk of some pond duck—(the crickets and grasshoppers are mute in the noon heat, but I hear the song of the first cicadas;)—then at some distance the rattle and whirr of a reaping machine as the horses draw it on a rapid walk through a rye field on the opposite side of the creek—(what was the yellow or light brown bird, large as a young hen, with short neck and long-stretch’d legs I just saw, in flapping and awkward flight over there through the trees?)—the prevailing delicate, yet palpable, spicy, grassy, clovery perfume to my nostrils; and over all, encircling all, to my sight and soul, and free space of the sky, transparent and blue—and hovering there in the west, a mass of white-gray fleecy clouds the sailors call `shoals of mackerel’—the sky, with silver swirls like locks of toss’d hair, spreading, expanding—a vast voiceless, formless simulacrum—yet may-be the most real reality and formulator of everything—who knows?”

`A Sullen Growl of Resentment'

On the way home from Lake Chelan we drove through or near towns and villages with such names as Gold Bar, Entiat, Winesap, Grotto, Skykomish, Index, Sultan, Chumstick, Wilderness, Verlot and Robe. One of the joys of travel in the United States is the surreal poetry of its place names, the history of which, Names on the Land, was written by George R. Stewart. As we passed through Dryden, Wa., I wondered: Could it be named for John Dryden (1631-1700), author of these rousing lines from “Mac Flecknoe”:

“All human things are subject to decay,
And, when fate summons, monarchs must obey.”

When we stopped for the traffic signal in Dryden, I noticed we were waiting at the intersection of Dryden Avenue and Johnson Road. Surely, this was no coincidence. The early settlers of North Central Washington must have been stout-hearted readers. With more time I might have found Donne Drive or Pope Lane. Instead, at home, I returned to Samuel Johnson’s “Life of Dryden” and this insightful encomium:

“With his praises of other and of himself is always intermingled a strain of discontent and lamentation, a sullen growl of resentment, or querulous murmur of distress. His works are undervalued, his merit is unrewarded, and he has few thanks to pay his stars that he was born among Englishmen.”

`More Richly Seen'

John Muir the man -- the naturalist and explorer -- has always seemed more compellingly substantial than Muir the writer. His prose is workmanlike and unmemorable. His need to report what he knew -- and he knew a lot -- outweighed his gift for articulating it in an artful fashion, however humbly. His best books -- The Mountains of California and The Grand Cañon of the Colorado -- are indifferent as prose but even an undistinguished stylist, Janet Lewis suggests, can furnish our imaginations. In “For John Muir, a Century and More After His Time,” she meditates on how a writer’s vision can become as vital and real as our memories of personal experience: “…all these / In memory, both mine and borrowed, doubly rich are grown, / Till I can hardly tell his treasure from my own.”

Deep readers recognize the déjà vu-like sensation. The “mind’s eye” is creative, unreliable and opportunistic, and claims the work of others as its own. During my first visit to Paris, in 1973, I recognized people and scenes from Proust none involving rats). I’ve seen Hemingway’s “Big, Two-Hearted River” in Ohio, Indiana and upstate New York. Lewis superimposes childhood memories of Wisconsin, scenes of the Sierra Nevadas in Muir’s books and her own experience of those mountains as a longtime resident of California:

“These I truly know
That I have seen with my own eyes, and yet
There merges with them an unreckoned crowd
Of things more richly seen…”

Here at Lake Chelan I see a desert-like landscape already familiar from Lewis’ poems. Her novels mingle with my memories of two visits to France. Yet another reason for reading is to experiment with immense elasticity of the imagination. How much can it hold? Of Muir (and more) Lewis writes:

“Moments of wisdom and intenser sight.
And these I owe to one
Who built his campfire on the canyon rim,
Who woke at dawn, and felt surrounding him
The mind of God in every living thing,
And things unloving.”

`In the Still Sunshine'

After the mountains, some streaked with snow, we drove through a grass-covered piece of Nebraska grafted onto central Washington, and then through a valley of vineyards and fruit trees along the river. The mountains around Lake Chelan are soft and brown with dry grass that looks like sand from a distance. The sky is a blue bowl and the landscape reminds us of Baja California. Fifteen years ago my wife worked for a year in Barcelona on a Fulbright, and she says this place looks like Spain but for the absence of olive trees. Instead, we have apples, peaches, cherries and apricots.

At the urging of David Myers I read Janet Lewis’ austerely beautiful novel The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941) and have moved on to The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron (1959). I’m also rereading The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis and feel as though I have discovered a clairvoyant sister. Her poems echo the landscape around us. Here is a late one -- Lewis lived from 1899 to 1998 -- “Dios No Se Muda”:

“Doves call in the orchard where
Arbutus and magnolia replace
Cherry and nectarine
And the heavy peach.
Everything changes, Saint Teresa reminds us,
Save the presence of God.
I could name tree after tree
That has grown in this earth.
Borne its sweet fruit in sequence
In accord with the loving hand
That planted it and vanished.
What presence embraces me now
In the still sunshine?”

In his notes, R.L. Barth tells us Lewis took her title from a poem by Santa Teresa de Ávila (1515-1582), as translated from the Spanish by Lewis‘ husband Yvor Winters:

“Nothing move thee;
Nothing terrify thee;
Everything passes;
God never changes.
Patience be all to thee.
Who trusts in God, he
Never shall be needy.
God alone suffices.”

`The Man from Scotland'

I should have known that “dunce,” by a comically cruel mischance of etymology, derives from the name of John Duns Scotus, one of the subtlest and most lastingly interesting of Church thinkers. As my ninth-grade Latin teacher used to say, my learning is “laced with lacunae.” Waiting in the optometrist’s office on Tuesday, I was browsing in The Private Lives of English Words (edited by Louis G. Heller, Alexander Humez and Malcah Dror, 1984), looking for words other than pandemonium coined by poets, when I happened on the “dunce” entry. The editors feebly term the etymology “ironic.”

Duns was born around 1265, possibly in Duns, a village in Berwickshire, Scotland. He never called himself “Scotus,” as Heller & Co. note:

“The Scotus, often mistakenly believed to be part of the philosopher’s name, is actually a Latin epithet used by those outside the British Isles to identify him as the man from Scotland.”

Duns was a theologian and Franciscan, and earned the title “Doctor Subtilis” for the acuity of his thought. His was among the earliest generations of Church thinkers to attempt an integration of the “pagan” philosophy of Aristotle into Christian thought. The editors explain that his followers were known as “Duns men, “a phrase with a wholly favorable connotation of reasoning both clever and sophisticated.” However,

“…the students were not the equal of the master, and by gradual stages such phrases as Duns men, Duns prelate, Duns learning acquired new connotations signifying `petty sophistry’ and `caviling purely for the sake of arguing.’ Eventually this degenerated into meaning `acting like a fool.’”

It’s Duns’ notion of the haecceity of a thing – its thisness, not its whatness (its quiddity) – that most interests me, as it did Hopkins and J.V. Cunningham (a Jesuit and a lapsed Catholic). It can’t be said either poet coined the word but both frequently turn the concept to their own purposes. Here is Cunningham’s “Haecceity,” dating from 1943:

“Evil is any this or this
Pursued beyond hypothesis.

“It is the scribbling of affection
On the blank pages of perfection.

“Evil is presentness bereaved
Of all the futures it conceived,

“Wilful and realized restriction
Of the insatiate forms of fiction.

“It is this poem, or this act.
It is this absolute of fact.”

Here Cunningham uses haecceity in such a way that Duns would hardly recognize it. The poet writes of “Haecceity” in his essay “The Quest of the Opal” (from The Collected Essays of J.V. Cunningham):

“The subject of that poem was metaphysical evil, evil as a defect of being. Any realized particular, anything which is this and not that and that, is by the very fact evil. For to be this is to exclude not only any other alternative but to exclude all else in the universe. Perfection is in possibility, in the idea, but that which is realized, specific, determined, has no possibilities. It is precisely this and nothing else at all. It is lacking in all the being of the universe other than its own particularity. The more realized a thing is the greater its defect of being; hence any particular choice is as such evil though morally it may be the best choice.”

In a 1940 poem, “The Metaphysical Amorist,” Cunningham cites Duns as a possible way to resolve Plato’s idealism and Hume’s “sensationalism.” Here is the final stanza:

“Plato! you shall not plague my life.
I married a terrestrial wife.
And Hume! she is not mere sensation
In sequence of observed relation.
She has two forms—ah, thank you, Duns!—,
I know her in both ways at once.
I knew her, yes, before I knew her,
And by both means I must construe her,
And none among you shall undo her.”

This is not what Duns had in mind. For more on the subject, read Timothy Steele’s invaluable edition of The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, including the introduction and commentary.