`When Speaker and Hearer Commune'

Had you asked last week what I knew about Ralph McInerny, I would have answered with the titles of two books: A First Glance at St. Thomas Aquinas: A Handbook for Peeping Thomists (1990) and The Question of Christian Ethics (1993). I had no idea of the life out of which these books emerged, nor of the staggering number of other books McInerny had produced. After learning of his death (here and here), I pulled A First Glance off the shelf and enjoyed this again:
“Not all philosophers are helpful. Only a handful are. Most philosophers are pretty bad. You have to study them to know that, which is annoying, or you can take my word for it, which is dangerous and unwise. I may be one of the bad ones myself.”

Immediately you know you’re not reading Hegel or Derrida, both of whom are “pretty bad.” McInerny continues:

“If you are going to choose a philosopher to read you might be guided by the fact that only a few philosophers have followers today. There are Kantians, perhaps there are Hegelians, God knows there are Marxists if only in universities and in Central America. There are Platonists and Aristotelians. There are Thomists. The list could be added to but it would still be a short one. Your choice is thereby made easier. (I am assuming that you do not want to be a mere scholar.)”

When was the last time you laughed while reading an introduction to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas? McInerny must have been wonderful company but I missed my chance. I visited the Notre Dame campus only once, almost 40 years ago, in the company of the professor with whom I was studying analytic philosophy. We were there to hear John Searle speak on Speech Acts, a book we had read together. Campus security escorted us, drunk and disorderly, out of the building before we could hear Searle’s lecture.

In 2005, at age 76, McInerny published his only volume of poetry, The Soul of Wit. I don’t yet have a copy but online I’ve discovered one of his poems, “Effable” – not a word you often hear, unlike its opposite, “ineffable.” Dictionaries call it “archaic” and “obsolete” but I prefer the sound of “effable” to “utterable” or “expressible.” Here it is:

1
“Where are words when not yet spoken:
on the tongue,
in the mind,
perhaps in air,
nowhere?
Their meanings, more elusive
still, unbreathed await
articulation,
though I have heard
in the beginning was the word.”

2
“Mutes and dentals shape the air
that tongue addresses to the ear:
speech is the mystery we hear.
Animals are dumb,
their braying, chirp, and bark
a mere semblance of speech,
lacking that shared spark
when speaker and hearer commune
like hands that meet at noon.”

“When speaker and hearer commune” – the blessed reciprocity of writing and reading, of speech as an act of communion. In “The Writing Life,” an essay he published four years ago, McInerny adapts the idea to the working of a professional writer:

“…what any writer does, return again and again to the original aspiration that came to him when young. It is the writing, producing a well-made story, that counts. All the rest is gravy.”

`i, the Square Root of Minus-One'

From a math teacher I’ve learned an absurd new word – “surd,” a phonic mingling of “surly” and “curd.” The students are learning to calculate square roots, a satisfying enterprise though slightly less so when the root is a surd – an irrational root, in the mathematical sense. Irrational numbers are decimals that neither repeat nor end. The square root of four is two, a rational number, not a surd. The square root of three, 1.732050808…, is definitely a surd.

The etymology of this silly-sounding word is culturally revealing. In English it dates from the 16th century, from the Latin surdus, “unheard, silent, dull.” The mathematical sense derives from the use of surdus to translate the Arabic (jadhr) asamm – “deaf (root)” – a loan-translation of the Greek alogos, meaning “speechless, without reason” (as used by Euclid). One monosyllable recapitulates our Greek, Arabic, Roman inheritance.

Lewis Carroll (who, as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford University) composed a poem including this quatrain, which scans and rhymes perfectly, even the equation:

“And what are all such gaieties to me,
Whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?
x2 + 7x + 53
= 11/3”

Tom Disch writes in “The Dot on the i” (in About the Size of It):

“When it comes to the sense
Of beauty we are all Pythagoreans,
Transfixed upon the ineffable and inexplicable
Significance of a number; for instance
(Or especially?), i, the square root of minus-one.”

The square root of minus-one is, of course, a surd. Go here to learn that “i” was chosen to represent this irrational number because it’s short for “imaginary” – that is, absurd. Disch probably knew Pythagoras and his followers were shocked by the discovery of irrational numbers. For them, numbers were as real as poets and mathematicians, and irrational numbers represented a flaw in nature, in the world’s texture and design. The 20th-century Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős thought otherwise:

"Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is.”

`The Rhetor's Inner Voice'

“A melodic line, after all, can be compounded out of any combination of notes, intervals, distribution of phrases. In that sense it is almost a random process: as a prose stylist fits words, phrases, together to form a coherent whole, so does the architect of a melody assemble its component parts. What distinguishes a great prose stylist from a mere compiler of words has to do with selection, with inner rhythm, with factors far transcending the simple mechanics of sentence construction.”

Who would expect to find an instructive comparison of musical and prose composition (or improvisation) in a history of jazz? The answer is: readers of the late Richard M. Sudhalter, a accomplished trumpet player, and author of some of the most exhaustively researched, least politically muddled books on America’s musical glory. The passage above comes from one of his two masterworks, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz 1915 – 1945 (1999), which I’m reading for a second time. The other is Bix: Man and Legend (1974), a biography of Beiderbecke co-written with Philip R. Evans. Sudhalter also published Stardust Melody (2002), a biography of Hoagy Carmichael.

Lost Chords is a book big (890 pages) and elastic enough to accommodate digressions on almost any subject. Sudhalter worked as a reporter for UPI, covering the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and wrote jazz criticism for the New York Post from 1978 to 1984. As a journalist and musician he upends two stereotypes simply by writing well. When he distinguishes “a great prose stylist” from “a mere compiler of words,” he might be thinking of former colleagues and most other jazz writers (he adored Whitney Balliett and quotes him generously in Lost Chords).

For so vast a subject, the appropriate structure is all-important. A strict chronological approach, Sudhalter writes in the preface, would have been “not only impractical but often downright impossible.” Instead, he deftly organizes musicians and groups “by stylistic and personal affinity.” The passage above comparing prose and melody comes in the middle of a chapter devoted to the great trumpet player Bobby Hackett. Sudhalter writes in his preface: “Aesthetic evolution is never neat or calendrical, but full of back-and-forth episodes.”

Sudhalter cites “selection” and “inner rhythm” as essential to writing great prose. Too many would-be writers are indiscriminate and tin-eared. Language, their medium, seems not to interest them. Prose need not be flowery or vulgarly “musical” to sing. In his essay “The Journal of John Cardan,” J.V. Cunningham writes:

“No dignity, except in silence; no virtue, except in sinuous exacting speech.”

After stating that prose “far transcend[s] the simple mechanics of sentence construction,” Sudhalter writes:

“The writer of prose understands instinctively that certain combinations of phrases and rhythms – the inflections as it were, of the rhetor’s inner voice – will produce strong and varied responses in a reader. It’s equally applicable to the great melodists: Tchaikovsky among nineteenth-century composers, Jerome Kern among songwriters of the American twentieth century, knew the emotive power of certain intervals, certain combinations of notes and rhythms, and the contexts in which they could be presented most effectively.”

In this context only, a writer of prose can make music.

`Impishness, Almost'

Boswell asked Johnson about John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and its reputation for making criminality attractive to playgoers. Johnson was skeptical:

“...I do not believe that any man was ever made a rogue by being present at its representation.”

He modifies his judgment somewhat, saying “I do not deny that it may have some influence, by making the character of a rogue familiar, and in some degree pleasing.” It’s as though we are spectators in the theater of Johnson’s mind, watching him revise his thoughts. Boswell next reports: “Then collecting himself, as it were, to give a heavy stroke: `There is in it such a labefactation of all principles as may be injurious to morality.”

In his Dictionary, Johnson defines “to labefy” as “to weaken; to impair.” By the 20th century, “labefactation” had labefied to “labefaction.” The etymology is Latinate, of course -- labare, “to totter,” and facere, “to make.” Webster’s gives “a weakening or impairment esp. of moral principles or civil order.”

I would suggest Johnson had his doubts about Gay’s roguish play but was also having fun, probably at Boswell’s expense. Johnson was a ferocious arguer but also a wit, often of a distinctly playful sort. His prose like his conversation is wonderfully limber and expressive, not the pompous, desiccated stuff detractors claim. In an essay about Johnson collected in Literary Distractions (1958), Ronald Knox writes:

“…the intellectual trick which is perhaps most characteristic of him is that of coining a phrase, usually with one good long word [“labefactation”] at the heart of it, to act as ballast, which sets on record for all time, marmoreally [“one good long word”], Johnson’s attitude to this or that, this person or that. It is probably a mistake to think of Johnson as specially fond of long words; certainly a mistake to think you can parody Johnson by using a lot of long words. He wrote at a period when long words were used; what is probably the best sentence in his Journey to the Western Islands is written, I think, entirely in monosyllables. But he had a playful love of using a long word now and again for its judicial effect; it was a kind of signature.”

Knox’s observation is acute and serves to remind us that Johnson, like many writers of the 18th century, could be witty or even raucously funny without announcing the fact and chortling at their own comic sense. Look at Dryden, Pope, Swift and Sterne – all funny men, all elegant writers. Consider Boswell’s next sentence, after the one deploying “labefactation”:

“While [Johnson] pronounced this response, we sat in a comical sort of restraint, smothering a laugh, which we were afraid might burst out.”

Yes, but who would do the laughing, and at whom? Knox writes later in his essay:

“This occasional note of frivolousness – impishness, almost – suffices to mark out Johnson clearly enough from the highbrows, of his own age or another.”

`Bound By Contract to His Duty'

When I meet a literate Russian I almost invariably ask if he or she has read Chekhov. Most have, and we talk about favorite stories or anecdotes from the writer’s life. If I’ve judged my subject accurately we sometimes move on to other writers – Tolstoy, say, or Mandelstam. Either way, the Russian is flattered by my interest and sometimes visibly swells with literary patriotism. I’ve never asked a comparable question of a reader from another nationality, and I wonder about the response of an American reader if probed on James or Cather. Would the question provoke pride, befuddlement or politically correct deflection?

We employ “peer tutors” of varying ability in the special-education center where I’ve been working. These are high-school students who volunteer a little time each week to work with the kids, helping with snacks and games, and supervising them on walks and work details. Two new boys showed up Tuesday, one a football player, the other a skinny kid with a Russian surname and accent. While showing the latter where things are kept in the kitchen, I popped the Chekhov question and he, in turn, asked: “Do you know Russian?” No, I only wish I did, I said. He asked skeptically, “But you still read Chekhov? In English?” Well, yes. What's the alternative? “Why?” He’s perhaps my favorite writer, one of the greatest we've ever had. The Russian boy grabbed my hand and pumped it vigorously, as though I had just sold him his first car. “He is a great Russian. We love him. He tells the truth,” the boy said, and I thought of the passage in a letter Chekhov wrote in 1887 to one of his friends, the children's writer Maria Kiselyova:

“The writer is a man bound by contract to his duty and to his conscience. In for a penny, in for a pound: however degrading he may find it, he has no choice but to overcome his squeamishness and soil his imagination with the filth of life.”

Good readers of all nationalities this month celebrate the sesquicentennial of Chekhov’s birth. I’m reading a little bit of him each day, this great, unclassifiable Russian writer, scorned and misunderstood in his day by radicals and reactionaries alike. The Marxists contorted themselves into grotesque shapes trying to homogenize and pasteurize Chekhov. It never worked. Our Russian student, born after Communism’s implosion, said nothing of such attempts to subdue an unruly writer. Chekhov merely made him feel proud to be Russian. As V.S. Pritchett writes in “A Doctor,” a 1973 essay (included in Complete Collected Essays):

“In a well-known letter Chekhov said that it was not the artist’s business to solve questions, but to pose them correctly. Marxists do not allow the posing of the question: they state the answer first and then create the question.”

`They're Good. I Like Them'

The playground sounded like the long-vanished stockyards of Cleveland, but smelled better. Kids played four-square, kickball, tether-ball and a gladiatorial fusion of soccer and American football. Others, playing without rules or apparent purpose, chased each other and screamed, “punching and pulling each other’s hair to emphasize their points,” as Penelope Fitzgerald writes of her father and his siblings in The Knox Brothers. One boy sat alone on a bench, reading.

I kept my eye on him as I made my rounds, tying shoes, issuing bathroom passes (plastic clothespins labeled “Boys” and “Girls”) and breaking up the loudest of the fights. He appeared serene, untroubled, an obvious target for bullies. “What are you reading?” I asked, though I had already guessed from his age and the size of the volume. “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” he said. The dust jacket was gone and the cloth of the spine was torn top to bottom. Each corner of the cover was worn to the cardboard and the binding had cracked in several places, turning one volume into four or five.

He’s 10 years old, started reading Rowling at age 7 and is on his seventh turn through the series. He rereads sequentially and has seen all of the movies at least twice. I asked what kept him coming back and he said, “They’re good. I like them,” and could put no finer a critical point on the matter, which is just fine at his age.

I asked myself: What novels have I read six or seven times? That’s easy: None. What novel have I read most often? That too is easy: Ulysses. Its linguistic and human density is Shakespearean – that is, inexhaustible but not perversely obscure (unlike Finnegans Wake) – and thus merits rereading. (Parenthetically, it takes its place among “conservative novels,” which “come in two leading varieties: one that enjoys a life and a world, another that grieves at their loss, its damage to people’s identity.” Joyce, the ultimate novelist of family, qualifies on both counts.) I’ve read it, I think, five times.

Which novels, I wondered, have I read more than twice? This requires a bit of digging in memory. Moby-Dick, of course. Proust’s masterwork. Tristram Shandy. The Man Who Loved Children. Bellow through Humboldt’s Gift. So Long, See You Tomorrow. Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada. Wise Blood. Morte d’Urban. The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. Kim. Madame Bovary. Little Big Man. Portnoy's Complaint. Stoner. Winesburg, Ohio. Huckleberry Finn. Rasselas. Gulliver's Travels. Middlemarch. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Malamud's The Assistant. At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman. Invisible Man. Washington Square and What Maisie Knew. Sword of Honour. Beckett’s trilogy. If I stretch the bounds to include all fiction, then much of Chekhov, Isaac Babel, Borges and Flannery O’Connor. Stretch it further – Shakespeare, Dante, Montaigne and so forth. A good reader forgets much.

I’ll probably never again read fiction with the selfless absorption I saw on that kid’s face as he sat on the playground bench. I’ve never read Rowling’s books and have no plans to do so but I haven’t in a long time met so blissfully contented a reader.

`People in the Sun'

Go here to look at “People in the Sun,” painted by Edward Hopper in 1960, and consider the young man in the lower left corner, the only one of the five not gazing at the sun. Hopper, as usual, paints a mundane mystery. Where are these people? Could it be a sanitarium? Why are they so formally dressed in such an informal setting? The bald man closest to us might be smiling. The woman to his left, who recalls Joan Crawford, appears to grimace. The man to her left, the Rudyard Kipling look-alike, stands at attention while seated. The blonde beyond him is faceless.

The landscape is peculiar, one I’ve never seen – a road, a square-cut field of grass or grain, a low range of blue-gray hills like waves in the ocean. The juxtaposition of flat field and stony hills is as unexpected as men in suits and women in dresses seated in wooden deck-chairs. They might be on the deck of a cruise ship, intently watching the waves. The scene is comic but not satirical.

Only the young man is hunched over and wears a cravat, the color of which matches the blue of the most distant hills and the faceless woman’s dress. For me, he is the sympathetic center of Hopper’s painting. I like the way he ignores the sun and landscape, and reads intently, as I’m always heartened when I see people reading in public places. He holds his book in the shadow to reduce the glare. The others might be mannequins. He is unquestionably alive and reminds me of my younger self, when I once read so long in a field adjoining my university campus that I came to my senses with a serious sunburn.

“I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.”

`The Bright Dust of Dreams'

Richard Lingeman closes Small Town America: A Narrative History 1620 - The Present with the final words of “Departure,” the final story in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio:

“…the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.”

Lingeman and Anderson came back to me last week when an e-mail arrived from an old friend in Ohio. I met her 29 years ago this month when I went to work as the city reporter for the Bellevue Gazette, my first daily newspaper. She was a legal secretary and served as the city council clerk. I was 27, with 16 months of experience editing the weekly newspaper of an even smaller Ohio town. I didn’t know a soul in Bellevue but was happy to be living four miles east of Clyde, Anderson’s boyhood home and his model for the fictional Winesburg.

Linda has remarried and moved to Tiffin, Ohio, about 30 miles southwest of Bellevue. She ran for office and was elected county clerk of courts and city auditor but now is retired: “I'm no longer in politics--thank God. That's a long, complicated, epic tale, and undoubtedly I'll write you more about it some other time—or maybe not.”

When I first read Winesburg, Ohio in 1970 I loved the book out of proportion to its literary worth (and still do). Ten years later, a few months before moving to Bellevue, I read the volume by Lingeman, who went on to publish a two-volume biography of Anderson’s friend Theodore Dreiser. In Bellevue I felt the self-inflicted loneliness of youth, exacerbated by the sense that I didn’t know how to be a journalist. I found comfort in my readerly proximity to Anderson (who had also edited a newspaper), a feeling intensified by Lingeman’s book, which he closes with a narrative of his visit to Clyde. He begins by writing:

“Sherwood Anderson’s Clyde, Ohio, is now a place of over four thousand people twenty miles east of Toledo. A 1966 town history still refers to Sherwood Anderson [who published Winesburg, Ohio in 1919 and died 20 years later] as `the black sheep of the Anderson family.’”

Linda’s note revived an era of my life infused with my devotion to Anderson and his work. After quoting the passage from “Departure” I cited above, Lingeman adds a final bit of prose poetry about Clyde and small town America. It’s a little corny but true to my experience:

“A town, a railroad station, a train setting off with a young man, a starting place, a beginning. It recedes behind us and vanishes with all those green and gold summer mornings of boyhood, the air smelling like brown sugar, the cicadas’ metronomic droning. A beginning…a starting place always there behind us, in memory. And the past decomposes into the bright dust of dreams…”

`Don't Prettify Decrepitude'

Occasionally I work with an 80-year-old semi-retired teacher whose strength and lucidity belie her age. She possesses the quiet humility, not to be confused with self-abasement, of someone who long ago gave up fretting and who speaks her mind when necessary, not when she wants to. She has five great-grandchildren and plans to tour the eastern Mediterranean with her husband (84) in March. More than most people I know she is given to speaking aphoristically -- a privilege of age and intelligence. During a momentary lull in the classroom Friday afternoon, she warned me about the assumptions people make when you are officially recognized as elderly:

“Hell, I know people half my age and younger who are older than me. Some of them were old children.”

And this:

“If I want help I’ll ask for it. This isn’t pride and I’m not shy about asking. I think everybody has a job to do, and that’s where they ought to keep themselves focused. Pity is a dirty emotion.”

And, finally, this, a phrase:

“…the terrible egotism of youth.”

I hope I don’t make her sound like one of those “spunky” old people who say self-consciously wise and sassy things to the amusement of their juniors. She probably detests that sort. Eric Ormsby is a poet wise in matters of aging. In “Adages of a Grandmother” (all quotes from Time's Covenant: Selected Poems, 2007) he writes:

“Grandmother said to me, `Keep thyself
Unspotted from the world.’ She spoke in quotes.
I got the feeling that she had rehearsed
All her admonitions as a child…”

In “My Mother in Old Age”:

“`Oh, don’t prettify decrepitude,’
She demands. `Don’t lie!
Don’t make old age seem so ornamental!’”

And in “A Freshly Whitewashed Room”:

“Sometimes I think the sufferings of the old
Make heroes look ridiculous.
Sometimes I think to bring down Ilion
Was easier than to guide the bitter spoon
At medicine time to the reluctant lip.”

`Sweepings from the Butchers' Stalls'

For the past week we’ve been reading Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory aloud to students in the special-education center. Most have little understanding of the story but some enjoy the occasional songs, nonsense words and sound effects voiced by enthusiastic readers. My turn came with Chapter 24, “Veruca in the Nut Room,” in which an assembly line of discerning squirrels shells walnuts.

Veruca Salt is a pathologically selfish and spoiled little girl who demands that her parents, who are touring Willy Wonka’s factory with her, indulge every whim. In the Nut Room, Veruca resolves to take home one of the factory’s 100 squirrels. They have other ideas and deposit her in the garbage chute leading to the incinerator, followed by her parents. It’s the sort of justice we long for in real life but which occurs only in art. The Oompa-Loompas enter, singing a two-page song in rhyming couplets celebrating the fate of the Salts and other waste sent down the garbage chute. Here’s a selection:

“A bacon rind, some rancid lard,
A loaf of bread gone stale and hard,
A steak that nobody could chew,
An oyster from an oyster stew,
Some liverwurst so old and gray
One smelled it from a mile away,
A rotten nut, a reeky pear,
A thing the cat left on the stair,
And lots of other things as well,
Each with a rather horrid smell.”

The staff enjoyed Dahl’s doggerel, if not the kids. My sons, though rather fastidious about suspicious foods and smells, eat up this sort of thing in print. So do I, and between the couplets and offal I was reminded of another poem that revels in filth and noisomeness -- Jonathan Swift’s “Description of a City Shower” (1710), the conclusion in particular:

“Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow,
And bear their trophies with them as they go:
Filth of all hues and odours seem to tell
What streets they sailed from, by the sight and smell.
They, as each torrent drives, with rapid force
From Smithfield or St. Pulchre’s shape their course,
Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood.”

Dahl and Swift savor catalogs of cloaca. Rarely, but sometimes, the humor of nasty little boys is more than just the humor of nasty little boys.

[I agree with much of what Nige wrote about Dahl several months ago. Based on my reading of Jeremy Treglown’s biography I understand that “Dahl was a nasty overgrown child…” yet still enjoy some of his books for children, especially The BFG. His stories for adults, some published in Playboy, are commercial rubbish.]

`A Floor of Flounders'

In an anthology with a silly premise – Beach: Stories by the Sand and Sea (2000), edited by Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker – I happened upon a beautiful piece of nonfiction by Whitney Balliett, the late jazz writer for The New Yorker. A note says this is the first publication of “A Floor of Flounders.” In 12 pages, Balliett describes how he rented a summer house on Smithtown Bay, on Long Island’s North Shore, and met an old man who had lived alone in a beach house for decades – Joe Molers, né Edward Louis Dagostino. Balliett’s hallmarks – precise, pellucid prose, and lengthy, monologue-like quotes from his subject – are much in evidence. A sampler:

“The sky was clean and the light startling. A rug of dew covered the ground, and it was chilly.”

“I found myself on a narrow path still wet from the tide. Hundreds of tiny, perfect holes dotted it, and as I thundered along, fiddler crabs, their claws cocked, poured out of the holes, hesitated, and slid into the grass.”

“A stocky, short man, with bowed legs and a barrel chest, he was dressed in a tight wool shirt, a brown cardigan, bathing trunks, and ankle boots with no socks. A knitted caps was pulled low on his head. He looked like Pablo Picasso – leathery and gnomish and solid.”

And these lines from Molers:

“`You can’t be lonely when you see the things I’ve seen here. I was sitting out late one October night, just looking, and suddenly the northern lights started up. Well, I’d never seen them before, and I thought what in the name of heaven is happening. Lights dancing and waving – red, blue, green white. I was shivering with what was happening in that sky.’”

Balliett’s profile of Molers reads like an oblique homage to Joseph Mitchell, his fellow nonfiction master at The New Yorker. It shares with Old Mr. Flood and The Bottom of the Harbor the seaside setting and the same fond, respectful attention paid to human eccentricity. There’s no patronizing of Molers and no awkward reaching after significance. There’s the quietly suggestive deployment of images –lightning, thunder, sand, hermit crabs – we find in Balliett’s jazz profiles. Clearly, he was drawn to such odd, private personalities as Lester Young and Pee Wee Russell.

In the Molers’ piece there’s no mention of jazz or any sort of music though the title may serve as a muted reference to Thelonious Monk. Ostensibly, the phrase comes from one of Molers’ monologues, the one on fishing:

“One night, oh, maybe forty years ago, I was out with a light in my boat. The water was shallow and I came upon a sandy place completely covered with flounders. A floor of flounders about two city blocks square. Just lying there in my light on the bottom.”

Balliett must have liked the alliteration because an almost identical phrase appears in the 1982 obituary for Thelonious Monk he published in The New Yorker:

“A tall, dark, bearish, inward-shining man, he wore odd hats and dark glasses with bamboo frames when he played. His body moved continuously. At the keyboard, he swayed back and forth and from side to side, his feet flapping like flounders on the floor.”

`Counsel, Sustenance, and Solace'

As a reporter I paid attention to the books on the shelves of people I interviewed, and still do. Who can resist the cheap psychoanalysis of complete strangers based on their literary taste or its absence? Who knows if the titles were chosen to impress visitors? Who hasn’t purchased a book, or at least displayed one prominently, as an act of vanity? Literary voyeurism pays off in another way: Lists, catalogs and most other human efforts to arrange things are inherently amusing, rich with absurd juxtapositions. The surrealists had nothing on the random workings of everyday people. Roger Boylan posts a photo of books lined up on a table and writes:

“Nice to know how randomly scattered are those with idiosyncratic literary tastes. This is from my friend Stephen Wesson, who recently spent a weekend in a cabin in the mountains of West Virginia and discovered therein this eclectic bookshelf.”

I’ve spent time in West Virginia and don’t recall seeing any of those titles. One is reassured by their eclecticism and utter absence of order despite the lapses in taste. Left to right they are:

Louis Giannetti’s Understanding Movies, unknown, [Robert] Benchley Beside Himself, Boylan’s novel Killoyle, Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, Richard Daniel Altick’s Victorian Studies in Scarlet, Jacob Needleman’s Money and the Meaning of Life, Adrian Room’s The Dictionary of Confusable Words, Leon Edel’s Henry James: The MiddleYears 1882-1895, a volume by Max Apple I’m unable to make out, and a blue volume lost in low-definition murk.

Nothing appalling on the part of our mystery reader though the Bloom is a disappointment, and I’ve not read Altick, Needleman and Apple. A treasure lurks in West Virginia, however. To the left of Understanding Movies stand three books partially obscured by a rusty vase or pencil holder. The first two, left to right, I can’t identify but the third, with “HE” visible on the spine, is an old friend and stands on my table three feet from my fingers as I type these words: Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman (1978). Clearly, Roger’s friend was in the presence of a reader of distinction.

Some bloggers post photos of their bookshelves, which, though often interesting, seem rather boastful. I’d rather hear them talk about the books they’ve read rather than see pictures of those they own. Besides, I don’t know how to use a digital camera, don’t know how to download an image into my computer and wouldn’t know how to post it anyway. Instead of a snapshot, I’ll refer readers to “Constant Rereader’s Bookshelf,” an essay collected in Sissman’s Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70s, published the year before his death in 1976:

“A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign. Since you, the reader, are that hero of modern literature, the existential loner, the smallest denominator of moral force, it behooves you to take counsel, sustenance, and solace from the writers who have been writing about you these hundred or five hundred years, to sequester yourself with their books and read and reread them to get a fix on yourself and a purchase on the world that will, with luck, like the house in the clearing, last you for life.”

`Each Time I Am Delighted Anew'

For his first extensive research project my fourth-grader has decided to ask: “Why is it so hard to hit a fly with a fly swatter?” The question has all the requisite elements to hold the attention of a 9-year-old boy – bugs and violence. Michael has taken a stack of pertinent books out of the library, found useful web sites and identified a researcher to question by e-mail. I too learned some interesting things:

Thomas Eisner is an emeritus professor of chemical ecology at Cornell and one of the best-known entomologists in the world. As a newspaper reporter I interviewed him several times and he was always articulate and generous with his time. As the epigraph to For Love of Insects (2003), Eisner chose a sentence from “Exploring Our Universe and Others,” an article by Martin Rees published in the December 1999 issue of Scientific American:

“What makes things baffling is their degree of complexity, not their sheer size... a star is simpler than an insect.”

A marvelously counterintuitive observation, worthy of Blake (who, in “Little Fly,” wrote: “Am not I / A fly like thee? / Or art not thou / A man like me?”) in one of his saner moments. I’ve also learned a new word, ommatidium (the plural: ommatidia) meaning “one of the elements corresponding to a small simple eye that make up the compound eye of an arthropod.” In other words, one of many clusters of photoreceptor cells in the eye of a fly. To move briefly from entomology to etymology, the word is from omma, Greek for “eye.”

Another book from the library is Peter E. Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design (1992). His choice of epigraphs is also noteworthy, and in one case unexpected. The first is from a scientist, C. Stern, who wrote in excellent prose in a 1954 article in American Scientist:

“For more than 25 years I have looked at the little fly Drosophilia and each time I am delighted anew. When I see it under moderate magnification of a binocular microscope I marvel at the clear-cut form of the head with giant red eyes, the antennae, and elaborate mouth parts; at the arch of the sturdy thorax bearing a pair of beautifully iridescent, transparent wings and three pairs of legs; at the design of the simple abdomen composed of a series of ringlike segments. A shining, waxed armor of chitin covers the whole body of the insect. In some regions this armor is bare; in other regions there arise short or long outgrowths, strong and wide at the base and gently tapering to a fine point. These are the bristles. Narrow grooves, as in fluted columns with a slightly baroque twist, extend along their lengths.”

This reminds me of nothing so much as a passage in Centuries of Meditation by Thomas Traherne, surely one of literature’s happiest men. Traherne examines a “curious and high stomached” fly under an early microscope and writes:

“The infinite workmanship about his body, the marvellous consistence of his limbs, the most neat and exquisite distinction of his joints, the subtle and imperceptible ducture of his nerves, and endowments of his tongue, and ears, and eyes, and nostrils; the stupendous union of his soul and body, the exact and curious symmetry of all his parts, the feeling of his feet and the swiftness of his wings, the vivacity of his quick and active power…”

Lawrence’s other epigraph is the surprise. He takes it from one of Masha’s speeches in the second act of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters (as translated by Michael Frayn):

“To live and not know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why the stars [back, like Rees, to the stars] are in the sky. Either you know why you’re alive or it’s all nonsense, it’s all dust in the wind.”

Lawrence doesn’t mention it but on April 11, 1889, Chekhov wrote in a letter to his brother, Alexander, also a writer:

“Brevity is the sister of talent. Remember, by the way, that declarations of love, the infidelity of husbands and wives; widows', orphans', and all other tears, have long since been written up. The subject ought to be new, but there need be no `fable.’ And the main thing is--father and mother must eat. Write. Flies purify the air, and plays--the morals.”

`Humdrum, Daylight Things'

When I listen to Dick Wellstood play the piano, I feel happy – engaged, energized, entertained – as I do when I listen to Armstrong, Bechet and James P. Johnson. (Go here to sample their music and that of their confrères). In some quarters this is a shameful admission, like saying you don’t enjoy the sound of Albert Ayler’s horn, but life is too short for music that torments my ears.

Wellstood’s Live at Hanratty’s (1981) has been in the CD player for a week. He was a modern stride player, retooling a piano style he called “late Eastern ragtime,” but was more than a revivalist or peddler of musical nostalgia. He matured late as a musician. If his early models were Johnson and Fats Waller, he later learned from Basie, Monk and Bill Evans, but his style was never attention-gettingly eclectic. Live at Hanratty’s includes standards and almost-standards by Berlin, Porter and the usual hyphenated brokerage firms – Razaf-Brooks-Waller, Brecht-Weill, Arlen-Mercer.

By all accounts, Wellstood was urbane, witty and well-read, and made for splendid company. He wrote excellent liner notes, even for the likes of Earl Hines. When Wellstood died in 1987 at age 59, Whitney Balliett wrote in The New Yorker “He was a good, piquant writer,” and cited this example from the notes Wellstood wrote for a Donald Lambert album:

“In a world full of pianists who can rattle off fast oom-pahs or Chick Corea solo transcriptions or the Elliott Carter Sonata, there are perhaps only a dozen who can play stride convincingly at any length and with the proper energy.”

In a 1978 profile of Wellstood (“Easier Than Working,” collected in American Musicians), Balliett describes him waiting in a club for a tuner to finish mend the piano:

“He looked as if he were sitting in his East Side apartment, which is small and is lined with Smollett, Aldous Huxley, Robert Musil, Samuel Johnson, Nabokov, Meredith, Hazlitt, Gibbon, Chesterton, F.R. Leavis, and Thomas Love Peacock.”

A stride player with a taste for Musil and excellent English prose? Knowing this about Wellstood adds another layer of “piquancy” (Balliett’s word) to his version of, say, Armstrong’s “Cornet Chop Suey.” Balliett’s profile includes the usual lengthy quotations from his subject, including this:

“Audiences are rarely on the same wavelength as performers. In fact, two very different things are going on at once. The musician is worrying about how to get from the second eight bars into the bridge, and the audience is in pursuit of emotional energy. The musician is struggling, and the audience is making up dreamlike opinions about the music that may have nothing at all to do with what the musician is thinking or doing musically. If audiences knew what humdrum, daylight things most musicians think when they play, they’d probably never come.”

This ought to be humbling to critics and civilian listeners alike. While truest of music, the most potent art but the one with the least “content,” it applies as well to the less sublime literary arts. I think Wellstood is not complaining but merely reporting reality. A saxophonist I knew confirmed that while performing, his thoughts were not elevated. Usually he was thinking about “humdrum, daylight things” -- or an attractive woman in the audience.

`Lost Among the Great Shadows'

A satisfactory way to celebrate a writer’s memory and express gratitude for his work is to read him and read him again. Saturday was the sesquicentennial of Anton Chekhov’s birth (according to the old-style Julian calendar, January 29 by the Gregorian). While my 6-year-old ran around in the gymnasium downstairs I sat in the lobby of the YMCA with Robert Payne’s translation of Forty Stories. I read six of them at random and realized each, regardless of how early or slight, was about death. Like Laurence Sterne, Chekhov returned irresistibly to the subject. Both were comic writers and both died prematurely of tuberculosis (Sterne at 54, Chekhov at 44).

In “A Dead Body,” written when he was 25, Chekhov describes two “watchers” sitting with a dead body on a summer night – “one of the most disagreeable and uninviting tasks ever given to peasants.” The story could be the germ of a one-act Beckett play. The young peasant – “a tall youngster with a faint mustache and thick black bushy eyebrows” – is carving a spoon from a piece of wood, and is given no name. He calls his older companion Syoma or Syomushka -- a “pock-marked peasant with an ancient face, a scant mustache, and a little goatee beard,” who stares at their fire. The young man berates and patronizes the old one. He tells Syoma:

“You don’t know how to put words together…You’re plain scared of talking. You must be getting on fifty, but you’ve no more sense than a baby. Aren’t you sorry you are such a fool?”

Syoma answers: “`Reckon so.’”

A wandering lay brother traveling on foot between monasteries is attracted by their fire but horrified by the corpse, which is covered with a clean linen sheet and a wooden icon. He wants directions to his uncle’s brickyard (a non sequitur typical of Chekhov). The peasants oblige him but the pilgrim is too frightened by the corpse. The young one agrees to accompany him for five kopecks. They depart and the five-page story concludes like this:

“Syoma closed his eyes and fell into a gentle sleep. The fire gradually went out, and soon the dead body was lost among the great shadows.”

The young peasant pockets his money. The pilgrim is rattled by death. The fool falls asleep beside a corpse.

One of the effects of reading Chekhov is a renewed interest in one’s fellows and a wish to observe them with greater attentiveness. In the chair next to mine in the lobby of the YMCA sat a middle-aged woman in workout clothes and a bulky ski jacket, fiddling with her cell phone. Across from us sat her husband, a short paunchy man with a sparse beard just turning white. He too worked his phone. He never smiled, his wife never stopped. Both were sweaty and limp. She apparently retrieved a message and said, “That was Agnes. She found somebody for Simon. I guess she does wonders with ADHD.”

The husband pretended to listen, uttered a well-timed grunt and poked at his keypad. The wife went on talking.

`Actually Lived By Most People'

As a newspaper reporter I learned that two subjects might open the mouths and memories of recalcitrant interviewees – their families and work. People love talking about what they do – bragging and complaining -- especially when they’re good at it and enjoy the work. Work is central to most of our lives.

A writer new to me, Alain de Botton, has written a brief essay, “The Enlightening Bridge Between Art and Work,” about the absence of work in contemporary literature. His explanation is that technology has alienated most of us, including writers and other artists, from the means of production. We have little idea how our world works. Botton writes:

“How ignorant most of us are by contrast, surrounded by machines and processes of which we have only the loosest grasps; we who know nothing about gantry cranes and iron-ore bulk carriers, who register the economy only as a set of numbers, who think — even now — that it is only about money, who have avoided close study of switch gears and wheat storage and spare ourselves closer acquaintance with the manufacturing protocols for tensile steel cable.”

All of this is true but not convincing. Closer to the truth is this comment by Frank Wilson, from whom I borrowed the link: “What this really is about is the extent to which art has become divorced from life as it actually lived by most people.”

“Artists,” of course, have become a class apart, abetted by the privileged insulation of universities. That art is not “about” life – and thus work – is an article of faith among too many artists. My consumption of contemporary fiction is limited, but the last recent novel with memorable accounts of industry I recall reading is American Pastoral. Glovemaking, as described by Roth, of course, no longer exists.

I’ve always enjoyed reading about jobs and procedures, even the parts of Moby-Dick devoted to whaling that tire many readers. John Williams’ Stoner is a novel about teaching English in a university, Zola’s The Belly of Paris is about preparing and selling food, and Ulysses is about an advertising canvasser. Part of the charm of the Parker novels by Richard Stark (the late Donald Westlake) is how they document the work of a thief, his competence and cunning (in this, at least, Parker shares something with Odysseus).

I came home to find Frank’s link after working all day in the special-education centers in two public schools. In the first, an angry 7-year-old scratched the back of my right hand and wrist until they bled. At the other, a 17-year-old punched me on the top of my head (not a good target) and slapped the side of my neck, after he had thrown much of his lunch at me. I love my work.

`If Everything Were Smoke'

Shortly after seven o’clock each schoolday morning I walk my 9-year-old to his bus stop around the corner, a route he likens to the knight’s move in chess. It’s still dark and usually we talk about something in the natural world – the cause of fog, why the sunrise is red, why we don’t see or hear robins and juncos at night. The darkness and drizzle, and perhaps our state of half-awakeness, lend a conspiratorial intimacy to our conversations. The best part is the final approach, the last 100 feet as we pass the house with a rose garden instead of a lawn.

The house is modest – a “rambler,” in local parlance – and painted the same pale blue as the first edition of Ulysses (I held one in my hands, in the rare books collection at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y.). This time of year, of course, the roses are cut back and offer no fragrance, but the air around them is scented with wood smoke. The owners have a woodburning stove – an appliance that carries a lot of self-righteous baggage in certain quarters, but one that generously perfumes the air for the entire neighborhood.

It’s a fragrance with a brief intensity, like the smell of ground coffee as you open the can or the first briny-fishy whiff of the ocean. You smell it, breathe deeply to smell it again, and it’s gone, faded like a drug though the craving remains. Years ago I wrote a newspaper story about olfactory science and cited favorite smells. A naturalist said he was partial to the fragrance of a newly opened cottonwood blossom, saying it smelled like “freshly pressed laundry.” Many people praised new-baked bread, and an old lady said she liked the smell of slate sidewalks after a rain. I’m partial to the lemon-scented hand cream my wife uses, but the second inhalation is always a bit of a disappointment. Consider this gnomic fragment by Herakleitos, in Guy Davenport’s translation:

“If everything were smoke, all perception would be by smell.”

There’s something like pothead humor in this but also a more substantial suggestion – that we are customized for this world. We have five senses, not one, because the world is more than smoke. Even smoke is more than its smell. Michael and I use the wisp of smoke leaving the chimney as a handy anemometer. Under the right conditions we see, smell, taste, feel and hear smoke. Ask a firefighter. In another fragment Herakleitos/Davenport writes:

“Men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.”

`I Shut My Book With the Greatest Relief'

I’ve reread one of my favorites among R.K. Narayan’s novels, his fourth, The English Teacher (1945), a sad book with moments of supernatural happiness. Krishna, the narrator and title character, loses his wife to typhoid, as Narayan had in 1939. He’s teaching at his boyhood school, and most of his students are loud and loutish with no interest in his beloved English literature. In the second paragraph he writes:

“I took stock of my daily life. I got up at eight every day, read for the fiftieth time Milton, Carlyle and Shakespeare, looked through compositions, swallow a meal, dressed, and rushed out of the hostel just when the second bell sounded at college; four hours later I returned to my room; my duty in the interval had been admonishing, cajoling and browbeating a few hundred boys of Albert Mission College so that they might mug up Shakespeare and Milton and secure high marks and save me adverse remarks from my chiefs at the end of the year.”

This passage sounds the lament of every good teacher, and some of lousy ones, I’ve known, though the situation in the United States today is probably worse than in Narayan’s colonial India. At least Krishna’s students are nominally literate. When I think of my own public-school education, I remember the principle impediment to learning being the dumb kids who were often among the loudest and most loutish, and who consumed an inordinate amount of time and teacher attention. They’re still around, of course, but there’s more of them and they have louder, more loutish allies – teachers. I don’t see this sort much in the special-education staff but they’re almost ubiquitous in mainstream classes. Here’s a profile that spans disciplines and grades:

No love of scholarship or learning; no broad experience of reading; full immersion in popular culture, down to clothing and language; a fear of sounding articulate or “elitist”; a pretense of egalitarianism, and kneejerk faith in multiculturalism; an obsession with pleasing and never offending students; a desperate wish to be liked by them, to be their friend.

In aggregate, these qualities form the anti-teacher who sabotages genuine learning without offending administrators or boards of education. Early in Narayan’s novel, Krishna must lecture on King Lear to a class of dolts. He recriminates himself for having to yell to quiet the boys and get their attention. His text is Act III, Scene 2, Lear and the Fool on the heath. Krishna makes his opening remarks – “The words rang hollow in my ears” – and begins to read Lear’s words aloud:

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks; rage, blow.
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks.”

Krishna says:

“As I read on I myself was moved by the force and fury of the storm compressed in these lines….I read on. The boys listened attentively. I passed on to the next scene without knowing it. I could not stop.”

Krishna reads the passage that begins “Poor naked wretches…” and says:

“At the thought of helpless humanity I nearly broke down. The bell rang, I shut my book with the greatest relief, and walked out of the class.”

Such a scene is virtually impossible to imagine in a contemporary American school – the noisy, disrespectful students, yes; the conscience-stricken teacher powerfully moved by Shakespeare’s words, no. I have faith good teachers are working out there and feeling the strain and loneliness of their task, and I’m not suggesting nostalgia for a golden age of education. I had plenty of indifferent teachers, especially once I entered junior high school. Near the end of the novel, Krishna resolves to resign from his job and perhaps go to work in a nursery school. Thinking of his letter of resignation, he writes:

“I was going to explain why I could no longer stuff Shakespeare and Elizabethan metre and Romantic poetry for the hundredth time into young minds and feed them on the dead mutton of literary analysis and theories and histories, while what they needed was lessons in the fullest use of the mind.”

Enjoy, Endure

Decades of immersion in Johnsoniana – the work and life of Samuel Johnson – leave me convinced he’s the author of the purest distillation of his own thought and feeling (inextricably bound in Johnson) on record, and all in 19 words:

“The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”

Writing, in other words, is a moral act (a tautology if we assume every human act possesses a moral component). It carries responsibility and should not be undertaken frivolously. Writers enter into implied contracts with readers but the terms are elastic. Writers as various as Montaigne and P.G. Wodehouse help us “better to enjoy life” and both of them enable us “to endure it.” My only quibble with Johnson’s phrasing would be to replace “or” with “and” (not the odious “and/or”). I can’t think of a good or great writer who does not contribute to our enjoyment and endurance.

Alan Jacobs might agree. He has written a fine tribute to Johnson, “Man of Sorrow,” at Books & Culture. He too is taken with the passage quoted above, written by Johnson in 1756 in a review of Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil by Soames Jenyns, whom Jacobs calls “an armchair philosopher.” Johnson makes him sounds like a naïve New Age twit. It’s fitting he is best remembered for the savage review Johnson gave his book, and equally fitting that Johnson’s shrewdest self-assessment should appear in a book review. He was a working journalist, a pen-for-hire, no sensitive plant awaiting the Muse. After quoting Johnson’s 19-word apologia, Jacobs writes:

"Jenyns' incompetent book does neither of these. Instead, by recommending a placid indifference to suffering, it relieves no one and magnifies frustration.”

That describes precisely how I react when reading self-help, pop psychology, pop religion or happy talk of any pedigree – no enjoyment, no endurance.

`Yes,This Is a Most Useful Universe'

Like their middle-school classmates, two of the girls in the special-education program I worked with on Monday are raising milkweed bugs in biology class. Oncopeltus fasciatus is a true bug, belonging like cicadas and aphids to the order Hemiptera. Their outer wings are black with orange triangles and other geometric shapes. They are shiny and elegant creatures, and might have been designed by a jeweler. The bugs, a male and two females, live in a plastic bag furnished with a stick, cotton balls (for egg-laying) and shelled sunflower seeds (food, in lieu of milkweed). Some of the girls’ classmates have already found the yellow stain of eggs on the cotton.

Their assignment was to describe what they saw in the habitat, emphasizing what had changed since last week. The girls were lost. One is more verbal than the other, and I asked, “What do you see? What’s going on in there?” “You mean data?” Well, yes. Not my first choice of words, but adequate. “Well, they’re still alive,” she said. “Excellent,” I replied, having overlooked that obvious but critical fact. Then the flood began, at first only the verbal girl, soon joined by her shy partner. No detail was too trivial. They talked and wrote in their notebooks a catalog of impressions, even counting the bits of excrement. Except for encouragement and praise, I said little, and soon each had filled two pages with detailed notes.

The biology teacher was pleased and perplexed. I was merely pleased. Art and science share attentiveness to detail, the opposite of laziness and indifference. As Guy Davenport put it in his essay on Eudora Welty, “That Faire Field of Enna” (collected in The Geography of the Imagination): “Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world.” These girls are not likely to become artists or scientists but attention paid to the gratuitous bounty of the world is an act of respect, gratitude and intelligence.

Over the weekend I reread Nabokov’s “`That in Aleppo Once…’” [The title is drawn from Othello. For extra credit, name another Nabokov work with a Shakespearean title.] In the second paragraph of the story, which takes the form of a letter written by a Russian émigré to a Russian friend, Nabokov writes:

“I have a story for you. Which reminds me - I mean putting it like this reminds me - of the days when we wrote our first udder-warm bubbling verse, and all things, a rose, a puddle, a lighted window, cried out to us: `I'm a rhyme!’ Yes, this is a most useful universe.”

We – poets,biologists; students, teachers -- are adapted to the world. Together, we have co-evolved. “I’m a rhyme,” indeed (Nabokov wrote the story in English. Does the rhyme co-exist in Russian?). We rhyme with the world. No writer can honestly complain about lack of material. Look around. Make some notes and caress the details.

“Yes, this is a most useful universe.”

`If Trills Could Kill'

Much breath has been expended on the meaning and purpose of bird song. Biologists theorize the size and variety of a male bird’s repertoire alerts females to his fitness as a mate – the bigger the song book, etc. Others argue that birds, like some humans, possess an aesthetic sense and just enjoy jamming. Keats’ bird is “pouring forth thy soul abroad / In such an ecstasy!” My sons entered the ornithological fray while listening to crows in our neighborhood at twilight:

“Why do they make so much noise, Dad?”

“They’re social creatures. They enjoy yakking with their friends, discussing the events of the day.”

The boys started translating the din and added subtitles:

“Hey, that’s my pizza. Hands off.”

“Did you see Avatar?”

“Don’t poop on me.”

“Eat hot lead, sucker!”

There’s precedent for this approach to bird studies. In About the Size of It (2007), Tom Disch includes “Birdsong Interpreted”:

“Scuse me? Scuse M? This is my territory.
Didja hear what I said? I said, Go away!
No Trespassing! Vamoose! Amscray!
Everything was hunky-dory
Till you disturbed the eco-balance.
I homesteaded here and you’re Jack Palance
Terrorizing godly folk.
Leave! Or I will have a stroke.
I will! I kid you not. I’ll sing
My heart out, pop a valve, expire:
This nest will be my funeral pyre.
I’m warning you: if songs could sting,
If trills could kill, my dear sweet thing,
You wouldn’t linger longer here.
Jug, jug, pu-whee! – now, disappear!”

Disch’s bird, speaking avian demotic in rhyming couplets, starts out sounding like Travis Bickle. The voice is young, male, macho and American, until the final line when Disch quotes an Elizabethan poet quoting a bird: “Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!” That’s from Thomas Nashe’s “Spring, the Sweet Spring” (from Summer’s Last Will and Testament, 1600).

[Last week, after I wrote successive posts recalling the deaths of Guy Davenport, John Berryman and Elvis Presley, my brother referred to it as “Dead Guy Week.” Add Disch, a wonderful poet who died a suicide on July 4, 2008, to the roll. Go to Schrodinger’s Cake for a site rich in links to Disch’s poetry, fiction, criticism and online journal.]

`To See In Them a Deeper Meaning'

Who has limned the avarice of children? Their greed is innocently relentless. More than adults, children are mouths and grasping fingers. For Christmas the boys got their first Monopoly set and since then we’ve played at least one game every day. My brother and I were the same, staging marathon sessions, unleashing our inner capitalists. As adults, neither of us is acquisitive or a tightwad. We’re indifferent to the accumulation of stuff so central to the lives of many. Perhaps, after hundreds of hours spent arguing over the board as kids, we got it out of our systems.

Who has limned the lives of American children, their sensibilities, their “material culture,” as the professors say? Steven Millhauser has, for almost 40 years. He’s a fantasist with an obsessive eye for details of American life. In his second novel, Portrait of a Romantic (1977), probably his least-read book (if not From the Realm of Morpheus, 1986), his narrator is a dreamy, yearning adolescent, Arthur Grumm. Among his friends is William Mainwaring, an obsessive game-player and record-keeper. Grumm describes Mainwaring in a way that recalls Michael, my 9-year-old:

“Like myself [he] played to win, and an eager rivalry soon sprang up between us. But there was this difference, at least to begin with, that whereas my passion was solely for the sake of the game, and was always in danger of collapsing into indifference [a quintessential Millhauser observation], his was part of his very nature, and flourished in the empty spaces between games.”

Mainwaring, like Michael, is an inflexible stickler for the rules of any game:

“When playing Monopoly, for instance, father and I had always put the money owed to Chance, Community Chest, Luxury Tax, and so forth in the center of the board, where it was collected by anyone who landed on Free Parking. But William insisted that you had to pay it to the bank. `Show me,’ I demanded, rapping the instructions with my forefinger. At once William snatched up the folded sheet, opened it eagerly, and began scanning the lines in hungry haste. `Here it is,’ he said, thrusting the sheet before me and holding in place his infuriating forefinger.”

Out of love for the game, Grumm concedes, and Mainwaring gets his way:

“`You sound like my mother,’ I said, as nastily as possible, and he looked at me with hatred. But I wanted to play Monopoly. We paid the money to the bank.”

Michael hasn’t reached the depths of Mainwaring’s mania:

“[He] was an avid keeper of records, and one day he brought with him a special two-ring notebook divided into numerous sections by white tabs on which were neatly printed the names of our various games: Boxes, Canasta, Checkers, Chess, Ghosts, Gin Rummy, Monopoly, Ping-Pong, Salvo, Scrabble, Tic-tac-toe,” and so on.

Millhauser’s tone, unlike any contemporary’s though somewhat like Nabokov’s, mingles comedy, nostalgia and ineffable sadness – the tone of childhood recalled. In the title story from his 1990 collection The Barnum Museum, Millhauser writes:

“Among the festive rooms and halls of the Barnum Museum, with their flying carpets, their magic lamps, their mermaids and grellings, we come now and then to a different kind of room. In it we may find old paint cans and oilcans, a green-stained gardening glove in a battered pail, a rusty bicycle against one wall; or perhaps old games of Monopoly, Sorry, and Risk, stacks of dusty 78 records with a dog and Victrola pictured on the center labels, a thick oak table-base dividing into four claw feet. These rooms appear to be errors or oversights, perhaps proper rooms awaiting renovation and slowly filling with the discarded possessions of museum personnel, but in time we come to see in them a deeper meaning.”

As I play Monopoly with my sons I’m aware of being present at the creation of memories that will outlast me. Nabokov writes in the final sentence of “A Guide to Berlin”:

“How can I demonstrate to him that I have glimpsed somebody’s future recollection?”

`The Soul None Dare Forgive'

In preparation for writing an essay on the poetry of Jonathan Swift – my choice from among the vast crowd of “neglected” poets – I’ve been rereading the poems, of course, and some of Swift’s prose, and have looked into several biographies, including Dr. Johnson’s “Life” (which hardly mentions the verse), and have ignored most of the critics. But Swift and his poems turn up in unexpected places, particularly in the work of Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Derek Mahon and other Irish writers, of course, and this too is a form of criticism and certainly more interesting than most of the conventional sort (the “cloacal” school of psychoanalytic busybodies). My favorite example is from the funniest travel book I know, Redmond O’Hanlon’s Into the Heart of Borneo (1985). O’Hanlon and the English poet James Fenton are navigating the perilous Rajang River, where the leeches grow to a foot in length:

“James, sitting opposite me on the duckboards in the centre of the canoe and facing upstream, was reading his way through Pat Rogers's new edition [1983] of the complete poems of Swift, a straw boater on his bald head, his white shirt buttoned at the neck and at the wrists.

“`Some of this juvenilia is pretty feeble,’ James would mutter, displeased.

“`Quite so. But—er—James?’

“`Yes?’

“`Rapid 583/2, Green Heave Strength six-out-of-ten, is approaching.’

“With a second or two to spare, James would shut his book, mark his place in it with a twig, slip it neatly under an edge of the tarpaulin, place his left buttock upon it, shut his eyes, get drenched, open his eyes, squeeze the water from his beard with his right hand, retrieve his book and carry on reading.”

I love O’Hanlon’s account of Fenton’s readerly sangfroid in the face of such rigors. Once, while I was reading B.S. Johnson, a friend set fire to the ragged bottoms of my jeans, and I didn’t notice until I almost wore Capri pants. Another appearance by Swift comes in J.V. Cunningham’s “With a Copy of Swift’s Works” (written in 1944; published in The Judge is Fury, 1947; collected in The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, edited by Timothy Steele, 1997):

“Underneath this pretty cover
Lies Vanessa’s, Stella’s lover.
You that undertake this story
For his life nor death be sorry
Who the Absolute so loved
Motion to its zero moved,
Till, immobile in that chill,
Fury hardened in the will,
And the trivial, bestial flesh
In its jacket ceased to thresh,
And the soul none dare forgive
Quiet lay, and ceased to live.”

The operative line is “the soul none dare forgive,” which compliments Swift’s self-penned epitaph: “Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit” (“Where savage indignation no more can lacerate his heart”). In his gloss of the poem Steele writes:

“Because of the rebarbative nature of his satire, Swift was reviled as no other major English author had been or has been since.”

In a stanza from another poem, “The Wandering Scholar’s Prayer to St. Catherine of Egypt,” Cunningham writes in a Swiftian manner:

“The vagrants smoke in solitude,
Sick of the spittle without cough;
Not unabsolved do they grow rude,
Dying with Swift in idiot froth.”

It’s the “rebarbative nature” of Swift’s work and his mastery of the plain style that have kept me reading him since he was first sold to me as a writer of children’s books.

`A Habit of the Time'

After working with me periodically for almost a year, a high-school teacher mentioned on Thursday that her father is a professional Elvis Presley impersonator. He sells a little real estate but for 20 years has earned most of his living performing as the man who would have celebrated his 75th birthday today. She showed me some online photos and played a video of her Dad backed by the Jordanaires, the quartet that accompanied Presley starting in 1956. I was hoping for a sweaty, campy act, a parody I could laugh at and feel superior to, but her father is a dead-ringer for the not-quite-corpulent Elvis, circa 1971. In photos he’s utterly convincing and in a blindfold test his voice would fool a lot of fans. In other words, he’s not a caricature but an uncanny re-creation, a respectful trompe-l'œil Elvis.

“There’s a lot of old ladies who think he is Elvis. It’s embarrassing. They ask my mother very embarrassing questions,” the teacher said. What impressed me was her matter-of-factness. She felt no need to defend her Dad or launch a preemptive joke attack against him. Her father impersonates Elvis the way mine was an ironworker. Her attitude mirrors my own toward the real Presley -- neither fan nor hater. An aunt who lived in Olean, N.Y., gave me the single of “Hound Dog” for my fourth birthday, in 1956, the year Elvis recorded it. I thought it was a novelty song about a puppy, and that was last Presley recording I owned until I bought the great Sun sessions a few years ago. His death in the summer of 1977, when we also lost Nabokov and Groucho Marx, is still sad and tawdry, even to a tepid listener.

In his second book, The Sense of Movement (1957), Thom Gunn, born in Gravesend, Kent, but already transplanted to the Bay Area, included “Elvis Presley,” surely among the first poems about rock and roll:

“Two minutes long it pitches through some bar:
Unreeling from a corner box, the sigh
Of this one, in his gangling finery
And crawling sideburns, wielding a guitar.

“The limitations where he found success
Are ground on which he, panting, stretches out
In turn, promiscuously, by every note.
Our idiosyncrasy and our likeness.

“We keep ourselves in touch with a mere dime:
Distorting hackneyed words in hackneyed songs
He turns revolt into a style, prolongs
The impulse to a habit of the time.

“Whether he poses or is real, no cat
Bothers to say: the pose held is a stance,
Which, generation of the very chance
It wars on, may be posture for combat.”

The title of the volume suggests Gunn’s move to the U.S. in 1954 and the energy he found in his newly adopted country. It also hints at Elvis and his once-lascivious moves. Written as unrhymed free verse, the poem couldn’t work. The substance must press against the form. Only that tension can suggest Elvis’ energy, still so fresh: “He turns revolt into a style, prolongs / The impulse to a habit of the time. Twenty-five years later, in The Passages of Joy (1982), Gunn includes another poem about Presley, “Painkillers”:

“The King of rock ‘n’ roll
Grown pudgy, almost matronly,
Fatty in gold lame,
mad King encircled
by a court of guards, suffering
delusions about assassination,
obsessed by guns, fearing
rivalry and revolt

“popping his skin
with massive hits of painkiller

“dying at forty-two.

“What was the pain?
Pain had been the colours
of the bad boy with the sneer.

“The story of pain, of separation,
was the divine comedy
he had translated
from black into white.

“For white children too
the act of naming the pain
unsheathed
a keen joy at the heart of it.

“Here they are still!
the disobedient
who keep a culture alive
by subverting it, turning
for example a subway
into a garden of graffiti.

“But the puffy King
lived on, his painkillers
neutralizing, neutralizing,
until he became
ludicrous in performance.

“The enthroned cannot revolt.
What was the pain
he needed to kill
if not the ultimate pain

“of feeling no pain?”

This is a bad, paint-by-number poem, a string of pop-psychology and counterculture clichés that rationalizes and romances a junky’s self-destructiveness and mourns his inner child. If “Elvis Presley” is my friend’s Elvis-impersonating father, “Painkillers” is the guy I saw at a county fair with the jumpsuit-encased beer gut and sweat-stained armpits. My friend’s father, at age 53, has outlived his model by 11 years.

`I Always Observe How It Ended'

Thirty-eight years ago late this afternoon, during a lecture on Robert Browning, I learned of the death by suicide of John Berryman that morning. The professor, whose name I’ve forgotten, injected the news parenthetically, and I remember nothing else of the class. Berryman’s was the first public death that hit me personally. I was reading his work and what I knew of his life obsessively. At age 19, I fancied I was “half in love with easeful Death” but there was nothing easeful about Berryman’s leap from a bridge in Minneapolis onto the frozen bank of the Mississippi River. The poet was 57, the age I am today. A reader in New York City, also 57, wrote Wednesday morning to say he had been reading Montaigne’s “On a Few Verses of Virgil”:

“My guess is it was one of his later ones [1585-88], perhaps written after a couple of glasses of his strongest wine. His choices on how to fight off old age struck me as good prescriptions not yet expired. I don't have the quotes with me here at the office, but in effect, as you'll recall, he argued that at our age we need to fight temperance as much as we needed to seek it at times in our youth.”

At the time of his death, Berryman seemed improbably old to me. Youth is arrogantly myopic. Today, I grieve for Berryman’s early end, for the promise partially fulfilled, for the grace only hinted at in “Eleven Addresses to the Lord,” collected in the last book he published during his life, Love & Fame (1970): “Oil all my turbulence as at Thy dictation / I sweat out my wayward works.” In one of his earliest essays, “That our happiness must not be judged until after our death” (1572-74) Montaigne writes:

“In judging the life of another, I always observe how it ended; and one of my principal concerns about my own end is that it shall go well, that is to say quietly and insensibly."

Montaigne died in 1592, six months short of his 60th birthday. The immediate cause of death was quinsy (peritonsillar abcesses), a condition that left him unable to speak. The most despairing poem I know is Berryman’s “He Resigns,” written early in 1971 while the poet was sober but severely depressed. It was published in Delusions etc. after his death:

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

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

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

`An Entertaining Companion'

Monday marked the fifth anniversary of the death of Guy Davenport. I’d forgotten until Tuesday, when, in a review of a new life of Montaigne, I found this sentence:

“Montaigne is, in truth, an entertaining companion rather than a therapist or a prototypical Miss Lonelyhearts.”

The essayist was among Davenport’s favorites, and he would have endorsed the reviewer’s characterization and probably recognized himself in it. Like Montaigne, Davenport prized companionship and its constellation of related virtues – loyalty, amiability, trust. He could have spontaneously rattled off the etymology I had to go looking for:

“…1300, from O.Fr. compaignon `fellow, mate,’ from L.L. companionem (nom. companio), lit. `bread fellow, messmate,’ from L. com-`with’ + panis `bread.’ Found first in 6c. Frankish Lex Salica, and probably a translation of a Gmc. word (cf. Gothic gahlaiba `messmate,’ from hlaib`loaf of bread’). Replaced O.E. gefera `traveling companion,’ from faran `go, fare.’”

A bread fellow, messmate, traveling companion – Davenport remains all of these for me, and not only because I corresponded with him and visited his home in Lexington, Ky., but because the words of no other writer have so indelibly marked my thinking and remained fresh within me as I’ve gone and fared. In 1983, Davenport wrote the introduction to a reissue of Montaigne’s Travel Journal, later collected in Every Force Evolves a Form (1987). In that essay he writes:

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

A young person, in or out of school, English or business major, cabinetmaker or grill man at Burger King, couldn’t pay for a better education than he’d earn by reading and taking to heart Davenport’s collected works and finding in their author “an entertaining companion.”

`Erudition, Depth, and Beautiful Style'

The best book I read for the first time in 2009 was Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, first published in 1950. I qualify the statement because I no longer read many books for the first time. At age 57 I’m beginning to understand the counterintuitive wisdom in Nabokov’s words (from Lectures on Literature):

“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.”

As a result, I pay little attention to the annual spectacle of “best-of” lists. They’re artifacts from a world I hardly know. Even the Marxists, I see, make lists and indulge in the fetishism of commodities. So, what did I read during 2009 that was published that year? Three biographies of Samuel Johnson, one of Flannery O’Connor, another of Isaac Rosenfeld, Terry Teachout’s splendid Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, Bryan Lynch’s The Winner of Sorrow, Geoffrey Hill’s Selected Poems and little else I remember or care to look up. Last month when my friend David Myers posted his “list of the [last] decade’s best English-language fiction,” I paid attention. Of the 46 titles he assembles, I’ve read 10, and David has tempted me with several others. He remains the literary omnivore, the trencherman of contemporary books I was decades ago.

So, what do I read? I explained that, in part, here, but didn’t have room to list Gogol, Charles Lamb, Elizabeth Bowen, Keats, Flann O’Brien, Henry Green, Spinoza, John Dryden, Kipling, Anthony Powell, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Praeterita, Tristram Shandy and a thousand other writers and titles. Pleasure is always my goad when it comes to books, and pleasure comes in almost infinite forms.

So, which year-end book lists do I find interesting and useful? Here’s an example: I subscribe to a weekly e-letter put out by the Ignatius Press. On Monday it included a link to “The Best Books I Read in 2009…” They asked their authors, editors and others to submit lists which turn out to be both Catholic and catholic. Included are some books I already know and admire -- Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman, much Chesterton, Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy – and there’s dreck, even science fiction, but the best part is that most of the titles are new to me. Now I want to read Henry Chadwick’s Augustine of Hippo: A Life, Aquinas by Edward Feser and two titles by the previously mentioned Ronald Knox. Here’s what Carl E. Olson says of them:

“Two similar works, written many decades ago, but filled with delightful writing and penetrating thought, are Stimuli (Sheed and Ward, 1951) and Lightning Meditations (Sheed and Ward, 1959), both by Monsignor Ronald Knox. The brilliant English convert never fails to impress with his erudition, depth, and beautiful style.”

Perhaps I’ll have to revise what I wrote earlier: “I no longer read many books for the first time.”

`Manners, Virtue, Freedom, Power'

In its issue of Aug. 10, 1998, The New Yorker published “A Ballad That We Do Not Perish” from Zbigniew Herbert’s first book of poems, Chord of Light (1956). Herbert had died in Warsaw on July 28 at age 73. The poem, an appropriate choice – a young man’s prescient encomium to an old man and his poetic peers -- was translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter, and later collected in Elegy for the Departure (1999):

“Those who sailed at dawn
but will never return
left their trace on a wave—

“a shell fell to the bottom of the sea
beautiful as lips turned to stone

“those who walked on a sandy road
but could not reach the shuttered windows
though they already saw the roofs—

“they have found shelter in a bell of air

“but those who leave behind only
a room grown cold a few books
an empty inkwell white paper—

“in truth they have not completely died
their whisper travels through thickets of wallpaper
their level head still lives in the ceiling

“their paradise was made of air
of water lime and earth an angel of wind
will pulverize the body in its hand
they will be
carried over the meadows of this world”

I was sent back to Herbert’s poem, written by a man in his early 30s, while rereading Milton’s short poems, which in turn sent me back to a poem about Milton. I’m not suggesting influence; rather, a tone among poets otherwise separated by language, culture and centuries of history. They share a seriousness in which pretention and self-pleading are absent. It’s a deportment scorned by most recent English-language poets, though I hear it occasionally in Geoffrey Hill. Call it a form of nobility. Reading Herbert’s poem in the shadow of Milton reminded me of Wordsworth’s “England, 1802,” a call from one poet to another, a plea for poetic and moral ministrations I always find moving:

“Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In chearful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on itself did lay.”

Herbert says of the poets, “in truth they have not completely died,” they are “carried over the meadows of this world.” This will remain true for so long as we read them. Only then can they teach us “manners, virtue, freedom, power,” precisely the qualities we most resist.

`Even Behind the Day'

The e-mail from David Ferry arrived Saturday morning with the subject line “New Years wish.” Inside was a poem bearing no title:

“The chair left out in the garden night all winter
Sits waiting for the summer day all night.

“The insides of the metal arms are frozen.
Over the house the night sky wheels and turns

“All winter long even behind the day.”

I recognized it as “The Chair,” collected in the “New Poems and Translations” section of Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (2000). It’s a quietly enigmatic poem, more whisper than shout, one I had never paid much attention to. The subject line lends it a new color. Ferry writes not “wishes,” which would have turned the phrase into a conventional salutation, but “wish.” In what sense is “The Chair” a “New Years wish?”

I thought of the chair we kept in the backyard when I was a kid. The seat and back were fashioned from sheet steel, one piece bent to accommodate a human form. Punched by stamping machine into the back, as a minimal concession to aesthetics, were clusters of holes, heart-shaped like the leaves of a lilac. The arms and rocker legs were bent steel tubing riveted to the seat. I remember the color as washed-out gray-green. On a hot summer day, the chair would burn exposed flesh and no one sat on it in winter except, occasionally, the German neighbor lady’s German shepherd. Ugly, uncomfortable, built to last. It probably dated from the early nineteen-fifties, judging from a fuzzy family snapshot. Unless it was melted down for scrap, it endures somewhere, perforated by rust.

Something about the first two lines of Ferry’s poem eludes me – the apples-and-oranges juxtaposition of “garden night all winter” and “summer day all night.” Only the third line, the poem’s hinge, describes the chair. The final two lines enlarge the scene, abandoning the chair. “Night,” “winter” and “day” are repeated and reshuffled. The telling phrase is “even behind the day.” Children and primitive people are unaware that the diurnal sky, like the nocturnal, “wheels and turns,” that the stars and planets still turn in their places. The only break in the artifice comes with the occasional daytime sighting of the moon. Otherwise, the night is “behind the day,” like a stage backdrop concealed by the curtain.

About Ferry’s chair there’s a mute, inert quality, as though it were a rock or some other feature of the natural landscape. Robert Frost has a poem, “The Ax-Helve,” in which a chair grows animated, Gogol-style, and almost becomes a character:

“[She] rocked a chair
That had as many motions as the world:
One back and forward, in and out of shadow,
That got her nowhere; one more gradual,
Sideways, that would have run her on the stove
In time, had she not realized her danger
And caught herself up bodily, chair and all,
And set herself back where she started from.”

So how is Ferry’s poem a “New Years wish?” The humble chair endures in the midst of all this cosmic choreography. Night or day, summer or winter, it sits there in the garden, insignificant on the celestial scale, reliable in its “chairness” for you and me -- a place to rest. The poet signs his e-mail:

“All the best for the next decade, xxx, David.”

`The Careful Connecting of Phrases'

The coming of the New Year is time not for resolutions but stock-taking and gratitude. Life, as usual, has treated me better than I deserve. Almost a year ago I started working as a school substitute with special-education students, making each day an opportunity for self-forgetting. There’s good health, family and friends, of course, and an endless supply of reading and writing. D.J. Enright puts it like this in Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book (1995):

“The careful connecting of phrases, the discipline (too martial a word) of syntax, and hence of thought, however modest, the arrival of a degree of order (order can be more than it sound) in a world increasingly random and gratuitous, more abundant in assertion than in sense…[ellipsis in the original] Thus a rudimentary account of the continuing function of literature, or rather – for who can be sure what weight of responsibility it can still bear, what earnest expectation it can meet? – the mitigating intimations it holds out.”

For non- and indifferent writers, Enright’s observation will make little sense. Writing, like virtue, is its own reward, though some of us on occasion get paid for it. Enright’s first sentence describes the deep pleasure of writing as well as anything I remember reading. All that he leaves out is the sense of adventure, of diving head-first into page or screen, without a map, crash helmet or insurance – a legitimately extreme sport. Perhaps writing is a flaw or malady, a defect of character or constitution that rewards its host and, on occasion, others. Here is Enright’s next paragraph, in which he describes what I assumed was my peculiar little mental fillip, no one else’s:

“One pleasure in reading almost anything: focusing on a word or sentence and asking oneself how one would have put it. Gratifying if one’s rephrasing seems an improvement. Pleasing if, seeing why it is how it is, one concludes that the writer got it right, righter than one would have oneself.”

Either way, you can’t lose. There’s a fussy, neurotic aspect to being a writer-reader. Every worthwhile writer is an editor of his own and others’ words – that is, a critic.

`A Good Cry Is the Initial Aim'

As a public service to those who sickened themselves celebrating the arrival of an arbitrary date on the calendar, permit me to pass along some of Kingsley Amis’ hard-earned advice on how to treat the “Metaphysical Hangover” (M.H.). It comes from Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis (2008), which collects On Drink (1971), Every Day Drinking (1983) and How’s Your Glass? (1984). Consult the compendium for tips on treating the P.H. (physical hangover). I will concentrate on Amis’ literary prescriptions, though he also includes musical therapies. Both “Courses,” as he calls them, rest on “the principle that you must feel worse emotionally before you start to feel better. A good cry is the initial aim.” Amis writes:

“Begin with verse, if you have any taste for it. Any really gloomy stuff that you admire will do. My own choice would tend to include the final scene of Paradise Lost, Book XII, lines 606 to the end, with what is probably the most poignant moment in all our literature coming at lines 624-6. The trouble here, though, is that today of all days you do not want to be reminded of how inferior you are to the man next door, let alone to a chap like Milton. Safer to pick somebody less horribly great.”

Here are the poignant lines from Paradise Lost singled out by Amis:

“So spake our Mother Eve, and Adam heard
Well pleas'd, but answer'd not; for now too nigh
Th' Archangel stood…”

The jig, in other words, is up. As an I.E. (i.e. Imbiber Emeritus), I can’t endorse the palliative powers of Milton from first-hand experience but I know Miltown possesses reliably restorative properties. Amis continues:

“I would plump for the poems of A.E. Housman and/or R.S. Thomas, not that they are in the least interchangeable. Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum is good, too, if a little long for the purpose.”

From Housman let me suggest as a pick-me-up “XLI” in A Shropshire Lad, particularly these lines: “I see / In many an eye that measures me / The mortal sickness of a mind / Too unhappy to be kind.” Despite tee totaling, I feel better already. Now it’s time for stronger medicine, from the poet Bryan Appleyard has called “Laughing Boy.” This is R.S. Thomas “Winter,” from Mass for Hard Times (1992):

“Evening. A fire
in the grate and a fire
outside, where a robin
is burning. How they both
sing, offering a friendship
unacceptable to the hand
that is as vulnerable to the one
as it is treacherous to the other.

“Ah, time, enemy of their music,
reducing fuel to feathers, feathers
to ash, it was, but a moment ago,
spring in this tinder: flames
in flower that are now embers
on song’s hearth.
The leaves fall
from a dark tree, brimming
with shadow, fall on one who,
as Borges suggested,
is no more perhaps than the dream God
in his loneliness is dreaming.”

Feeling better? Back to Amis:

“Switch to prose with the same principles of selection. I suggest Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It is not gloomy exactly , but its picture of life in a Russian labour camp will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have, and who put up with it, if not cheerfully, at any rate of no mood of self-pity.”

At this point, Amis suggests his morning-after regimen has already begun producing results, and that we ought to turn to “stuff that suggests there may be some point to living after all.” He recommends “battle poems” -- Macaulay’s “Horatius” and Chesterton’s “Lepanto.”

“By this time you could well be finding it conceivable that you might smile again some day. However, defer funny stuff for the moment,” Amis writes, suggesting instead “a good thriller or action story” – Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, Gavin Lyall, Dick Francis, Geoffrey Household, C.S. Forester. Here’s where I part company from Amis’ program, but my objection is merely theoretical as I remained out from under the influence last night. From here on I’m a solid partisan:

“Turn to comedy only after that; but it must be white – i.e. not black – comedy: P.G. Wodehouse, Stephen Leacock, Captain Marryat, Anthony Powell (not Evelyn Waugh), Peter De Vries (not The Blood of the Lamb, which, though very funny, has its real place in the tearful category, and a distinguished one). I am not suggesting that these writers are comparable in other ways than that they make unwillingness to laugh seem a little pompous and absurd.”

As a New Year bonus, allow me to add a timely though seasonally belated poem by De Vries, “Christmas Family Reunion,” originally published as part of the novel The Tents of Wickedness (1959):

“Since last the tutelary hearth
Has seen this bursting pod of kin,
I've thought how good the family mould,
How solid and how genuine.

“Now once again the aunts are here,
The uncles, sisters, brothers,
With candy in the children's hair,
The grownups in each other's.

“There's talk of saving room for pie;
Grandma discusses her neuralgia.
I long for time to pass, so I
Can think of all this with nostalgia.”

`The Crazy Bit Was Irish'

More than 20 years have passed since the death of Samuel Beckett on Dec. 22, 1989. “Birth was the death of him,” he’d written, and his passing coincided with the Iron Curtain’s, a convergence he might have enjoyed. Seven years earlier, Beckett had dedicated a new play, “Catastrophe,” to Václav Havel, then a political prisoner in Czechoslovakia. Roger Boylan has published a fine remembrance of the Irish writer in Boston Review and gets him better than most:

“But even in his bleakest writings, even in the daunting Trilogy, that barren Purgatorio, some passages are buboes of the craziest and most bilious humor ever created. The crazy bit was Irish, like the gibberings of Mad King Sweeney. The bilious part was French, the scathing laughter of Rabelais. God is unfair, complains the superstitious Irishman. God does not exist, declares the rational Frenchman. Beckett unites them in Endgame into Hamm’s exclamation, `The bastard! He doesn’t exist!’”