`On Jonathan Swift's Poetry'

My essay “On Jonathan Swift’s Poetry” appears in issue 19 of The Quarterly Conversation.

`I Did Something Different'

“His sentences soar like laminated boomerangs, luring the reader’s eye until they swoop in and dart across the mind like bright-eyed hummingbirds, for a clean strike every time.”

That’s A.J. Liebling in The Honest Rainmaker (1953) writing of his friend Colonel John R. Stingo, the nom de cheval of racing writer James A. Macdonald. I thought of those swooping words on Saturday when Nige reminded us of the centenary of the birth of the funny, sadly disregarded novelist Peter De Vries. Like Liebling, De Vries was associated for decades with The New Yorker, and also like Liebling he was among the wittiest of American writers.

Thanks to Dave Lull by way of Frank Wilson for alerting me to a De Vries post-mortem by Timothy Dumas. It’s a flip, wordy article that calls for a big red pencil, but there’s much to enjoy, as when Dumas quotes one of the novelist’s sons, Derek De Vries:

“`It’s hard to think of him as a father, someone like him. He was complicated. He was passionate about his craft, the most serious literary person I ever met. But you have to understand, he was extremely sad about a lot of things. He had a lot of tragedy in his life and he put on no airs about being cheery.’”

And later, describing the days before De Vries’ death in 1993, when all of his 24 novels were out of print:

“Pinpricks of light did shine through the gloom. Derek recalled, for instance, one of the last notes his father jotted down on the clipboard that he kept at his bedside: `I had a good life. I did something different.’”

Find a copy of the impossibly sad and funny The Blood of the Lamb but also read Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, Comfort Me with Apples, The Mackerel Plaza, Reuben, Reuben and the rest of his books. Twice I've gorged on De Vries' novels -- once in the early seventies while managing a miniature golf course in suburban Cleveland, and again in 1998 in Nova Scotia while staying in a house stocked with thousands of paperbacks including his. I'd start one book as soon as I finished the last one. Here’s De Vries, from a 1964 interview:

“I’m past admiring [in literature] anything I don’t enjoy; divorce of appreciation from enjoyment…is the curse of academic literary analysis.”

And more, from a 1966 interview with an editor assembling an anthology of “black humor”:

“Nobody has been funnier than Faulkner, nor has anyone had a better grasp of the human predicament than Mark Twain. And didn’t Yeats say Hamlet and Lear are gay? Frost said of this basic principle of playfulness (in discussing Edwin Arlington Robinson, of all people), `If it is with outer seriousness, it must be with inner humor. If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner seriousness. Neither one alone without the other under it will do.’ Any comic worth his salt knows this instinctively, even without being able to put it in Charlie Chaplin’s word: `If what you’re doing is funny, don’t be funny doing it.’ Any attempt to isolate the `serious’ from whatever you want to call its opposite is like trying to put asunder what God hath joined together. The reverse is equally foredoomed. There’s a kind of hilarious frustration about it, like working one of those puzzles where you no more than get one pellet into its hole than the other rolls out again.”

`An Interior Matter'

Weather and its attendant moods feel powerful and permanent. If you’ve grown up in a temperate zone where the seasons are forever turning, this shouldn’t be the case. An attentive observer after a brief walk in the woods can calculate the day of the year without resort to a calendar. But let a cloud obscure the sun or an abrupt wind shake the leaves on the poplars, and the day is transformed. Perhaps we’re answering to instincts that have lost their usefulness, or like birds we’re unknowingly sensing shifts in polarity or barometric pressure. Sensitivity ought to have limits. Kay Ryan has published “Clouds” in the February issue of Poetry:

“A blue stain
creeps across
the deep pile
of the evergreens.
From inside the
forest it seems
like an interior
matter, something
wholly to do
with trees, a color
passed from one
to another, a
requirement
to which they
submit unflinchingly
like soldiers or
brave people
getting older.
Then the sun
comes back and
it’s totally over.”

The first image is homey, even homely: a stain spreading across a carpet -- an indoor conceit lent to the outdoors. It is an “interior / matter” but in us not the trees. I remember hiking in Schoharie County, N.Y., a region of low craggy mountains and flat valleys. On the peaks and on the farmland below drifted fleets of cloud-shadows, visible only because of the expanse. They looked absurdly ominous in bright sunshine.

The blue stain is visible only from outside the forest. Thoreau and Nabokov noticed that shadowed snow appears blue but we call it white. What is the color of a river or lake? In Saratoga County, N.Y., Lake Desolation (named allegorically, like nearby Lake Lonely) is the color of strong tea.

Ryan’s ear is, as always, tuned to the music of words but she also pays attention to the demotic: “it’s totally over,” spoken like a teenager numb to words using my least favorite adverb, a tic without meaning. In his journal for Sept. 7, 1851, Thoreau writes:

“The most beautiful thing in nature is the sun reflected from a tearful cloud.”

`Time Was Still Harmony'

One of the peer tutors who volunteers in our special-education room is a pianist and today she auditions to enter a conservatory in Seattle. She’s modest, charming and possesses unusual poise for so young a woman. Thursday morning we walked the students to the high-school orchestra room and listened to her perform two of the pieces she’ll play today for the professors – a lovely Brahms “Intermezzo” (Op. 118 No. 2) and Scott Joplin’s “Elite Syncopations.”

Her choices contrast in tempo and mood (yearning and jaunty, respectively) but compliment each other pleasingly. The Brahms was almost flawless and the Joplin had some left-hand problems but she was playing from memory and today will use sheet music. The kids, seated among music stands and staring at tympani and double-basses, paid attention though several applauded at the wrong places, like a jazz audience. All of us seemed to feel refreshed and energized afterwards, the way music ought to make us feel.

The late Donald Justice studied music at the University of Miami with the composer Carl Ruggles, who encouraged him to enter Yale and continue his studies in composition. Instead, Justice switched to English literature and wrote poetry. His 1987 volume The Sunset Maker is organized around memories of childhood piano lessons. Here is “The Pupil”:

“Picture me, the shy pupil at the door,
One small, tight fist clutching the dread Czerny.
Back then time was still harmony, not money,
And I could spend a whole week practicing for
That moment on the threshold.
Then to take courage,
And enter, and pass among mysterious scents,
And sit quite straight, and with a frail confidence
Assault the keyboard with a childish flourish!

“Only to lose my place, or forget the key,
And almost doubt the very metronome
(Outside, the traffic, the laborers going home),
And still to bear on across Chopin and Brahms,
Stupid and wild with love equally for the storms
Of C# minor and the calms of C.”

I imagine C., fortified with “frail confidence,” thinking such thoughts today, bearing on across Brahms and Joplin, weathering the storms and coming home to happy resolution.

`An Old, Tried, and Valued Friend'

A reader complains of having to buy copies of books he once owned but discarded for various reasons including loss of interest, financial distress and the expense of moving them. I commiserate, having moved so often and generally feeling over-freighted with possessions. I like to travel light which can be difficult for a devoted reader. My library has always been a work-in-progress, culled with regularity and updated according to changing needs and tastes. It’s a working library, not a museum, used purposefully and often.

Just as we naturally outgrow certain writers (anyone beyond age 16 still reading J.D. Salinger with pleasure should be watched carefully), some we grow back into. I prematurely discarded A Dance to the Music of Time about 30 year years ago (sorry, Levi) and finally bought a replacement set in 2007. During a particularly thin period I sold my first edition of W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson to a book dealer in Schenectady, N.Y., and several years later Steven Millhauser told me he bought it (my bookplate was in the front). I still regret selling my two-volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the compact (“four-up”) version with the magnifying glass in the little drawer on top.

As a corollary I thought of the books I’ve always been faithful to and that have remained on my shelves without interruption the longest. The oldest and most threadbare is The Bible, the Revised Standard Version published by Thomas Nelson & Sons. The inscription at the front in my mother’s handwriting shows she gave it to me on Sunday, Sept. 25, 1960, one month before my eighth birthday. I open it at random to an underlined passage, Isaiah 41:29:

“Behold, they are all a delusion; their works are nothing; their molten images are empty wind.”

I own three copies of Ulysses. The oldest dates from 1967, when I joined the Book-of-the-Month Club and bought it as an alternate selection (about the same time I ordered Henri Troyat’s Tolstoy, which I wish I still owned). It’s the Random House edition with the black dust jacket, the most heavily annotated book I own. It’s too beat-up and overstuffed with taped-in notes to serve as a reading copy but sentimentally it’s my most valuable book.

My Shakespeare dates from a few years later. It’s the boxed, three-volume edition from The Heritage Press (1958) -- The Tragedies, The Comedies, The Histories. It’s not scholarly and the illustrations are corny but I like the large typeface, wide margins and the palimpsest of notes I’ve accumulated over the years. Of late, my reading copies are the recent Yale University Press paperbacks edited by Burton Raffel, but even those I read in tandem with the brick-like Heritage Press edition.

My copy of The Poetical Works of John Keats, I see from the ink stamp on the inside cover, I bought at Paupers’ Paperbacks in Bowling Green, Ohio, in 1973. I have three editions of Tristram Shandy, the oldest dating from 1971, when I bought it at Kay’s Bookstore in Cleveland, Ohio, where I went to work four years later. It’s a two-volume hard cover with a book plate saying it once belonged to A.C. Cudworth, who chose “Vera pro gratis” as his motto. Each of the books I’ve mentioned is, as Hazlitt says, “an old, tried, and valued friend.”

One of my new friends, the reader who inspired this little celebration, has just sent me the newest book on my shelves – The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World by Adam Jacot de Boinod. I particularly like serein, French for “the rain that falls from a cloudless sky.”

`The Manner of the Telling'

Without trying I’ve stumbled on a theme for reading aloud this week in the high-school class where I’m working. On Monday I picked Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad Are Friends (1970) – a favorite of my sons when they were little and a book redeemed from insipidity by silliness. On Tuesday the teacher handed me a collection of Twain’s stories and I started at the beginning with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), the story that lent its title to Twain’s first book, in 1867. Doing justice to its rhythms and dialect took a few sentences but I read the whole thing aloud, the best way I know to appreciate the prose and humor of Twain and Joyce. Here the narrator remembers Jim Smiley:

“If there was a horse-race, you'd find him flush, or you'd find him busted at the end of it; if there was a dog-fight, he'd bet on it; if there was a cat-fight, he'd bet on it; if there was a chicken-fight, he'd bet on it; why, if there was two birds setting on a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first; or if there was a camp-meeting, he would be there reg'lar, to bet on Parson Walker, which he judged to be the best exhorter about here, and so he was, too, and a good man.”

Twain’s pacing is impeccable which is why that tacked-on “and a good man” is so funny, and I like the raffish informality of calling a preacher an “exhorter.” I did most of the laughing on Tuesday. In Twain voice is everything and none of the kids and few of the staff have an ear for it. In “How to Tell a Story” (1895) Twain asserts his art while pretending to explain it:

“The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.”

Paraphrased into serviceable literal-minded English, “The Celebrated Frog of Calaveras County” would be a dreary anecdote without an “exhorter.” Here’s Twain again in his essay:

“The humorous story is strictly a work of art--high and delicate art --and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story--understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print --was created in America, and has remained at home.”

Again, savor Twain’s sense of timing, in this case with a spurious qualifier: “understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print.” Lobel, in a story titled “The Story” in Frog and Toad Are Friends, has Toad resolve to tell Frog a story in hopes of making him feel better. Toad, however, can’t think of one so he tries various cures to stimulate his imagination – standing on his head, splashing water on his head and finally banging it against the wall. By now Frog feels better but Toad is ailing, so Frog tells the story of Toad’s unsuccessful attempt to tell his story. It concludes:

“`So the toad went to bed and the frog got up and told his a story. The end. How was that, Toad?’ said Frog.

“But Toad did not answer. He had fallen asleep.”

`The Very Heart of the Planetary System'

My new student has suffered frequent seizures so her parents had a vagus nerve stimulator (VNS) surgically implanted in her upper left chest, below the clavicle. The device is a battery-powered generator that sends programmed electrical impulses through the vagus nerve, the longest of the cranial nerves. The idea is to restore regularity to her brain’s impulses and thus reduce the severity and frequency of seizures.

Her mother said she’s down to one seizure every seven to 10 days but I still carry a magnet on a lanyard around my neck. When she seizes, I’m to hold the magnet over the device for five seconds, sending a jolt to the electrode attached to her vagus nerve. In theory, that will stop the seizure.

“Vagus” has the unfortunate homonym “Vegas,” though wearing a VNS is a sort of gamble. The word is from the Latin vagus, meaning “wandering, rambling, vacillating.” The nerve earns its name by wandering from the brain stem throughout the neck, thorax and abdomen. Related English words include vague, vagabond, vagrant and my favorite, vagary. Today, the last refers to a capricious or unexpected act, though it once meant an aimless digression – not always a bad thing, as in Burton, Sterne and Lamb.

When young I vaguely surmised “vagary” meant vagueness, which it does at several removes. Let Sterne turn the vagary of his medium into his vagabond message. This is from Book One, Chapter XXI, of Tristram Shandy:

“I was just going, for example, to have given you the great out-lines of my uncle Toby’s most whimsical character;—when my aunt Dinah and the coachman came across us, and led us a vagary some millions of miles into the very heart of the planetary system…”

"Warm, Moist, Incarnated'

Robert Louis Stevenson, who cites no evidence and never met his fellow three-named consumptive, writes of Henry David Thoreau (in Familiar Studies of Men and Books, 1894):

“He was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind. His enjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be convincing. He had no waste lands nor kitchen-midden in his nature, but was all improved and sharpened to a point … He has a cold, distant personality. . . His point of view is both high and dry.”

One still hears the familiar complaint. Even an admirer, John R. Stilgoe, in his introduction to the latest culling of Thoreau’s journal (The Journal 1837-1861, New York Review Books, 2009), calls him “arrogant, supercilious, observant, but often doubting himself.” Like Swift, Thoreau was irreducibly himself, and this inevitably bothers those more adept at ingratiating themselves at any cost. The supreme wish of many, even writers, is to be liked or loved, and those who don’t share their proclivity baffle and frighten them. Not all of us are given to random acts of hugging. Thoreau was not, by affiliation or temperament, a Unitarian. Emerson was, but even he wrote of his friend and rival:

“Yet, hermit and stoic as he was, he was really fond of sympathy, and threw himself heartily and childlike into the company of young people whom he loved, and whom he delighted to entertain, as he only could, with the varied and endless anecdotes of his experiences by field and river: and he was always ready to lead a huckleberry-party or a search for chestnuts or grapes.”

Thoreau, in other words, was a complicated, contradictory man and writer (and no “hermit”). No man is all of a piece, except a sociopath. One-hundred fifty years ago today, on Feb. 23, 1860, Thoreau, this "cold, distant personality," wrote in his journal:

“A fact stated barely is dry. It must be the vehicle of some humanity in order to interest us. It is like giving a man a stone when he asks you for bread. Ultimately the moral is all in all, and we do not mind it if inferior truth is sacrificed to superior, as when the moralist fables and makes animals speak and act like men. It must be warm, moist, incarnated, -- have been breathed on at least. A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it.”

`Pulses of Active and Passive Motion'

The narrow, winding, rock-filled creek behind our house was home to crayfish, leeches and what kids in the neighborhood called “water spiders.” Already pedantic readers of field guides, my brother and I corrected them: water striders, of the family Gerridae, wondrous, sliver-like insects that flit across water. Their feet are covered with water-repellant hairs and never break the surface. They’re skimming not swimming. (Among their folk names is “Jesus bugs.”) In his magisterial Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity, Stephen A. Marshall writes:

“Water striders use the entire water surface the way orb-weaver spiders use their webs. Any terrestrial insect unlucky enough to fall onto a pond surface, and to struggle and vibrate the surface the way a trapped insect vibrates a spider’s web, is likely to attract hungry water striders…”

Coleridge knew little of entomology but he took note of water striders, in particular their mode of locomotion, the way they move forward smoothly and then drift backwards, only to repeat the forward motion, as though enacting our species’ cliché for halting progress -- “Two steps forward, one step back.” In Chapter VII of his Biographia Literaria he strives to describe the workings of human creativity:

“Let us consider what we do when we leap. We first resist the gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by another act, voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to alight on the spot, which we had previously proposed to ourselves. Now let a man watch his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case, while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process completely analogous.”

In one of his marvelous metaphoric leaps Coleridge continues:

“Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive.”

Coleridge intuitively grasps the way engaged imagination works. His biographer, Richard Holmes, lauds the passage and writes (in Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834):

“The psychology of this passage is remarkably modern. It seems to describe the actual process of creative inspiration, without resorting to the traditional idea of a muse. Instead it proposes a model of the engagement between the conscious forward drive of intellectual effort (`propulsion’), and the drifting backwards into unconscious materials (`yielding to the current’), constantly repeated in a natural diastolic movement like breathing or heartbeat. This is how creativity actually works: a mental (ultimately spiritual) rhythm which arises from the primary physical conditions of the natural world.”

Metaphors are memorable when rooted in the familiar. Thanks to Coleridge I often think of water striders when writing. Had he known of the insect’s hydrophobic feet and sensitivity to water vibrations, how might the poet have elaborated and refined his metaphor?

`Most of the Savory Words'

Learning the names of a flower’s sexual parts from Miss Whistler, who never uttered the word “sexual” and about whom I never harbored a sexual thought, was like learning to sing my part in an oratorio. She was my sixth-grade teacher, stern and encouraging, the first I can remember wanting to please. It was necessary first to learn that flowers, like pieces of music, had parts of any sort. Until then a flower, like a musical score, was an undifferentiated whole. A flower, I thought, was something like a rock (later I learned even rocks have parts, but not sexual parts). Part of wit is the capacity to hold parts and wholes in the mind at once, like a double exposure without the blurriness.

The nomenclature of floral anatomy is wondrously musical: calyx, sepals, corolla, torus, pistils, stamens, anthers and carpels. To know flowering plants are heterosporangiate is to admire them more ardently, not to mention the teasing forthrightness of androecium and gynoecium (titillating etymologies). Flowers and words share roots. Daniel Mark Epstein has written “Fleur de Lys” (from The Glass House, Louisiana State University Press, 2009) in celebration of “savory words / That make a flower”:

“When sepals and petals look the same,
As in the tiger lily, we call them
Tepals, these bright blades of perianth,
Sheathing the tulip and hyacinth,
The blossoms that do not bother to put on
Green calyx beneath the corolla gown.

“If all this is Greek to us, then
So it is. Most of the savory words
That make a flower: anther, stamen,
(Not pistil, which some Roman
Named because its style reminded him
Of his pestle, and his swords),

“Were spoken by Aristotle and Phidias,
Long ago, by hero, virgin, and wench.
Much later came the tepal, coined in Paris.
Once the ancient gardeners were done
Spinning flowers from words, no one
Dabbled in such magic but the French.”

“Tepal,” like “perianth,” I acquired much later, as did English. Epstein is correct: we borrowed it from the French tépale, which my dictionary says was “influenced” by the French sépale -- just another ménage in the history of linguistic cross-pollination.

`Ornithology Between the Corn-Rows'

The cat, recovered to his customary state of contemplative hauteur, sits before the sliding glass doors in the kitchen, studying ornithology. The phrase is Thoreau's, from the journal, Oct. 2, 1858:

“The garden is alive with migrating sparrows these mornings. The cat comes in from an early walk among the weeds. She is full of sparrows and wants no more breakfast this morning, unless it be a saucer of milk, the dear creature. I saw her studying ornithology between the corn-rows.”

This time of year the backyard curriculum/menu features crows, song sparrows, dark-eyed juncos and robins. The cat, confined to the house, twitches and mutters under his breath, responding to instincts that serve only to torment him.

It’s a comfort to know Thoreau, who claimed “In Wilderness is the preservation of the World," favored so domestic and civilized a creature as a cat. So did Montaigne, Samuel Johnson and Henry James – evidence we can, with confidence, posit the superiority of cat lovers over partisans of their graceless, under-evolved rival, the dog. In his final journal entry, from November 1861, written six months before his death, Thoreau describes the birth of four kittens. On Feb. 15, 1861, already mortally ill but still enjoying the company of cats, he writes:

“A kitten is so flexible that she is almost double. The hind parts are equivalent to another kitten with which the fore part plays. She does not discover that her tail belongs to her till you tread upon it. How eloquent she can be with her tail. She jumps into a chair and then stands on her hind legs to look out the window, looks steadily at objects far and near, first gazing this side, then that, for she loves to look out a window as much as any gossip.”

`Not a Goal, But a Way of Arriving'

“Today, only great poetry shares with satire the need for retelling. The poem asks to be memorized so that it can be recited before others. And when this happens, when we listen and allow the poem to take hold of us, we enter into a world as different from ordinary life as the play world of laughter. This is the world of solemnity, formality, and grandiloquence … When all life is ordinary life, la vie et rien d’autre [“life and nothing but”], when life’s poetry and drama are forgotten, then a community of high culture has disappeared.”

So writes F.H. Buckley in The Morality of Laughter. I would add that a poem might also “ask to be memorized” so that it can be recited before one’s self. There’s much solace in the solitary speaking of poems from memory:

“O wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth nature by these diverse laws?
Passion and reason, self-division cause.”

These are the only lines written by Fulke Greville I know by heart -- the opening of the “Chorus Sacerdotum” from his closet drama Mustapha (1609). Ten years Shakespeare’s senior, he outlived him by 12 and is probably best known as the biographer of his friend Sir Philip Sidney. I love Greville’s verse and resolve to commit more of it to memory, a job made easier by the University of Chicago Press which recently published a new edition of Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, edited by the late Thom Gunn and first published in 1968. It includes Gunn’s original introduction and a new afterword by Bradin Cormack, “In the Labyrinth: Gunn’s Greville.” It’s an invaluable book for admirers of either poet. It’s the one I used almost 40 years ago to memorize the lines from Mustapha.

Since learning of Rachel Wetzsteon’s death by suicide I’ve been reading two of her books of poems – Home and Away (1998) and Sakura Park (2006). In the former is an elegy for a master elegist, “In Memory of W.H. Auden,” including lines that suggest any poet’s grateful celebration of a poetic forbear, as Gunn with Greville:

“You have taught us
not how to follow in your footsteps, but

“how to carve out paths for ourselves, and if I
had my way with the elements, I’d have you
know you are gone, but not forgotten:
tender, impudent, cynical, joyful

“silent as a tidal wave, safe from the sands
of time, twenty years later you still show us
not a room, but a way to light it,
not a goal, but a way of arriving.”

`Everything Should Be Where It's Supposed to Be'

After our father’s death almost five years ago my brother inherited the house on the West Side of Cleveland in which we had lived as children. Family lore, always murky, says my Polish-born grandfather and his three sons built the house after World War II, expanding the one-story, cottage-like structure they already occupied into a sturdy, two-story, red-brick fire plug of a house. We moved in when I was almost three years old, in 1955, the year my brother was born, and I lived there until I went to college 15 years later.

I was relieved my brother got the house and chooses to live there with his family. I know its moods and geography, and the geography of the neighborhood, more indelibly than any other place I've lived, and that includes dozens of addresses in five states. I couldn’t swallow the idea of strangers living there. I have no reason to feel nostalgic about my childhood, so my loyalty to turf surprises even me.

A reader in New York City writes, “Like you, I prefer the prose of August Kleinzahler to his poetry. In the London Review of Books, he writes about selling the old family home.” Kleinzahler’s poems read like jazzed-up, post-LSD William Carlos Williams, but he’s a good storyteller and I recommend Cutty, One Rock, the prose collection he published in 2004. The essay in the LRB recounts the sale of his family’s house in Fort Lee, N.J., after his father died and his mother entered a nursing home. It could have prompted another precious wallow in Baby-Boomer self-regard but Kleinzahler’s eyes, ears and sense of humor redeem it:

“I dislike change, at least as it relates to childhood memory … Everything should be where it’s supposed to be, which is where it was; if you remove one significant element, everything collapses. Much as a body would, if you removed a thigh bone or major organ. It all goes kittywumpus. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men … The house, in some queer way, has become part of my body, or an extension of it. And as the rooms are laid out and furnished, with the mirror above the dresser there, and the desk with the Chinese lamp by the living-room window over there, so is my imagination and my way of taking in the world ordered, a cockamamie variant of Matteo Ricci’s Memory Palace.”

Kleinzahler walks the tightrope between sentiment earned and unearned without embarrassing himself or his readers. He even reminds me of a passage in William Maxwell’s novel Time Will Darken It documenting the mundane ravages of time’s passage:

“To arrive at some idea of the culture of a certain street in a Middle Western town shortly before the First World War, is a much more delicate undertaking. For one thing, there are no ruins to guide you. Though the houses are not as well kept up as they once were, they are still standing. Of certain barns and outbuildings that are gone (and with them trellises and trumpet vines) you will find no trace whatever. In every yard a dozen landmarks (here a lilac bush, there a sweet syringa) are missing. There is no telling what became of the hanging fern baskets with American flags in them or of all those red geraniums. The people who live on Elm Street now belong to a different civilization. They can tell you nothing. You will not need mosquito netting or emergency rations, and the only specimens you will find, possibly the only thing that will prove helpful to you, will be a glass marble or a locust shell split up the back and empty.”

The novel is set in fictional Draperville, Ill., in 1912. Maxwell, born in Lincoln, Ill., in 1908, published Time Will Darken It in 1948, when he was 40. My archeology, 40 years after leaving the dig, is conducted solely in memory.

`Some Secret Part of Our Heart'

From my brother comes this perfect alignment of composer, performer and setting: Mstislav Rostropovich playing the Prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, in the Basilique Sainte Madeleine, Vézelay, Yonne, France, in 1991. It compliments something I read last night in F.H. Buckley’s The Morality of Laughter (The University of Michigan Press, 2003):

“The spirit of the age is journalistic, and journalism flattens life down to the merely political. Conservatives bemoan the retreat from high culture but misdiagnose the cause. It is not so much that the canon has been abandoned, but that we no longer share the sense of transcendence that inspired Donne and Crashaw, Tallis and Bach, Bellini and Carpaccio, or makes them comprehensible to us. The anguished passion that finds its resolution through a mystical unity, the communion with those who speak to some secret part of our heart, the reverence for things that are hidden, all these inform our high culture; but for those without a sense of sanctity they are like a foreign language for which we lack the code.”

Conversation: `A Manifold of Some Sort'

Only slowly do footnotes reveal their treasures, at least for this sluggish reader. I’ve read Michael Oakeshott’s “Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” (in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, 1962) half a dozen times over the years, and always relish its concluding sentence:

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

But I had never pursued a lengthy quotation from William Cory tucked away at the bottom of a page. Oakeshott identifies Cory as “an Eton master,” and says he “understood education as a preparation for participation in conversation.” Here’s a portion of the passage Oakeshott cites:

“… you go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment's notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person's thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and for mental soberness. Above all, you go to a great school for self-knowledge.”

I knew nothing of Cory (1823-1892) but his words distilled some of my feelings about the purposes of education, how it hardly begins in school and is best sustained across a lifetime; how it is less an effort to accumulate information than a means of growing into the person one might become; how true learning is never passive. Cory reminded me of the great Nirad C. Chaudhuri and his father’s “glorification” of education as described in The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian:

“It was not with intellectual conviction alone that my father spoke of education. There was emotional fervour in his attitude, so that we got a sense that by educating ourselves we should be acquiring, not simply the means to do something else, not simply a key to other kinds of success, but some all-round and absolute goodness which was not mere skill but something desirable in itself.”

A brief online investigation suggests Cory was a gifted tutor whose extracurricular activities may have been less than wholesome. I remain impressed by his notion that one attends “a great school” – which I amend to include one’s life – “for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and for mental soberness.” On the page where he cites Cory, Oakeshott defines his understanding of “conversation”:

“It may be supposed that the diverse idioms of utterance which make up current human intercourse have some meeting-place and compose a manifold of some sort. And, as I understand it, the image of this meeting-place is not an inquiry or an argument, but a conversation.”

This sounds surprisingly like the more civilized regions of the blogosphere. Among those who, in Oakeshott’s words, “embraced [this notion] without reserve and without misgiving,” is Montaigne. Oakeshott doesn’t elaborate, but the Frenchman is certainly a model for those enrolled in a “great school” from which graduation is not an option. In “Of presumption” (Donald Frame’s translation) he writes:

“I gladly return to the subject of the ineptitude of our education. Its goal has been to make us not good or wise, but learned; it has attained this goal. It has not taught us to follow and embrace virtue and wisdom, but has imprinted in us their derivation, and etymology. We know how to decline virtue, if we cannot love it.”

Montaigne was born too soon to know we've even dropped "learned" as a goal.

`Apterous Jerks'

With a single word Nabokov prompts a lesson in etymology and entomology. The word is “apterous,” new to me and found in the second paragraph of his story “`That in Aleppo Once…’”:

“And the sonorous souls of Russian verbs, lend a meaning to the wild gesticulation of trees or to some discarded newspaper sliding and pausing, and shuffling again, with abortive flaps and apterous jerks along an endless windswept embankment.”

Context here isn’t much help and my spell-check software doesn’t recognize the word. The noun form is “aptery,” the condition of being without wings. An apterous (or apteral) insect is wingless. The etymology is straightforward Greek, from a- meaning “not” and pteron meaning “wing.” Thus, an apteryx is a wingless bird native to New Zealand. The word is also used by botanists, as in “destitute of winglike membranous expansions, as a stem or petiole.” Nabokov, of course, was a lepidopterist and butterfly hunter. To describe wind-tossed newsprint as “apterous” and to hear in it “the sonorous souls of Russian verbs” distills in three syllables his life in exile.

On a less elevated level, “apterous jerks” brings to mind writers of leaden prose whose words never take wing.

`The Attractions of the Journey Itself'

While writing a longer-than-usual essay about Jonathan Swift and his poetry I’ve been heartened by a passage in Chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria, in which Coleridge alternately demolishes Wordworth’s theories of poetry and lauds the verses of his old friend and poetic comrade-in-arms:

“The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution [ominous phrase]; but by the pleasureable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air; at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward.”

Coleridge is composing an apology for his own exuberantly conversational prose style, rooted in digression and profusion of metaphor. The operative phrase is “the attractions of the journey itself.” Prose and poetry are more than workmanlike delivery systems for information. Try imagining Tristram Shandy or Moby-Dick in such purely utilitarian terms. The journey – lexical deployment, the play of words – is the destination. Narrative is more than a recital of events, a plot-driven slog.

In writing I try to set myself little problems that amuse and challenge me. They’re of no interest to readers, most of whom are unaware of such things, except to the degree that I succeed and the reader is the beneficiary of “the attractions of the journey itself.” Robert D. Richardson, one of our best biographers – Thoreau, Emerson, William James – recently gave an interview to James Barszcz at College Hill Review. He praises recent biographers who “have learned from fiction to tell stories rather than analyze things” and concludes by saying:

“Narrative is the garlic of good writing. You can't use too much and it improves everything.”

`Like an Enormous Yes'

The essay’s title is irresistible: “Philip Larkin and Happiness.” To the credit of its author, Rachel Wetzsteon, it’s more than a cheap joke, though she recognizes some will find the pairing “a juxtaposition so improbable as to be laugh-out-loud funny.” I’ve never thought of Larkin, man or poet, as desperately unhappy. He scorned some of life’s conventional palliatives, such as family and faith, but that’s hardly the same as misery, and his feelings about both were nuanced. He was a realist about some of the things many prefer to candify. He drank too much and juggled women but hints of self-pity are rare in his poems, novels and non-fiction. Think of his tribute to the great soprano saxophonist and clarinetist, “For Sidney Bechet”:

“On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.”

I knew Wetzsteon as the translator of three poems included in Montale in English (edited by Harry Thomas, Handsel Books, 2004). Her adaptation of “Di un natale metropolitano,” Montale’s poem about London, is especially good:

“Mistletoe, a city of snapshots taped to
plaster, blue bottles and a fire’s
fitful sparks the only glimmers
of warmth in your new lodgings.
For you, this season without wreaths,
I would manhandle a city, conjure
a drizzle, then soften it to snow,
paint lampposts deep reds and greens
and so install around your room some
snatches of the festive. But starting
and ending here, these wishes are slipshod:
they never seem to settle on a picture that
touches you at all. Storms, ramshackle
gifts fly freely, but the setting’s
the same: you dine upon sausage and frost.”

Even knowing only Wetzsteon’s Montale translations, this note at the end of her essay on the author of “Aubade” was shocking:

“Editor's Note: I asked Rachel for this piece last year, and I am terribly sorry that it was not published before she passed away at the end of 2009. She did, however, approve this final copy. We hope you enjoy it.”

`A Disarranged Stoic'

V.S. Pritchett, the man who packed a copy of Tristram Shandy while walking across Spain in 1927, writes in Midnight Oil (1971) of his early years as a reviewer/essayist:

“I had read widely but I had never `done’ Eng. Lit., French Lit., or Russian Lit. [Read his books on Meredith, Balzac and Chekhov.] I had no critical doctrine – a shock later on to the platoons of New Critics and later regiments – for critical doctrine is of little interest to the novelist, though it may mean something to the poet.”

Pritchett attended college briefly but like Aristotle, Johnson and Coleridge never earned a degree or joined the faculty of a university. He may not have “done” the various national literatures cited but ranks among the most industrious of readers. For Pritchett, books are the ideal compliment to life, its secret sharer. He’s a model for those of us who read, and write about it. Sadly, times have changed in 40 years: one wishes novelists took no interest in “critical doctrine,” so more of them might spend more time writing novels worth reading. Pritchett continues:

“The tendencies of the thirties persuaded me to the historical situation of the writer who was being enjoyed first and then examined. We were fond of calling ourselves victims of an age of transition; but it seemed to me this had been the lot of every writer of any distinction at any time. I was moved by attitudes to social justice; but presently I saw that literature grows out of literature as much as out of a writer’s times. A work of art is a deposit left by the conflicts and contradictions a writer has in his own nature. I am not a scholarly man; and I am not interested for very long in the elaborate super-structures of criticism.”

The enjoyment of books precedes their study, though it sounds quaintly heretical to say so. A good critic shares enthusiasms and a good book is written not for critics or graduate students but good readers. Professors have hijacked pleasure-giving writers – Joyce, for example – and elevated dreary grinds – Gertrude Stein – because both suit the purposes of a cloistered academy. Pritchett, a scholar by any reasonable definition, goes on:

“… Anyone who has written a piece of imaginative prose knows how much a writer relies on instinct and intuition. The war had added to my knowledge of human nature. I appear as a disarranged stoic, a humanist with one wall of his room missing – an advantage there, I think, for all writing has one of its sources in the sense of a moral danger to which the writer is sensitive.”

There’s no science and little method to writing – or reading. Too many critics deem their job a species of social engineering. Wayward readers and writers, like free speech and free markets, worry them. Elsewhere, Pritchett describes himself as “less a critic than an imaginative traveler or explorer.” Later on the page from Midnight Oil quoted above he writes:

"I have always thought of myself -- and therefore of my subjects -- as being `in life,' indeed books have always seemed to be a form of life, and not a distraction from it. I see myself as a practicing writer who gives himself to a book as he gives himself to any human experience."

`Lots of Things Which Should Not Be Subverted'

“I listen to Dylan and I listen to Haydn. I listen to quite a lot of music but I never have any ideas about it.”

The taste – eclectic but not stupidly so. Modest – but not proudly so. A discerning mind, one accustomed to making fine distinctions. No hint of snobbery but clearly a critical mind, one that weighs and assesses rigorously, with wit. One might say a civilized mind. Here he is again:

“We need people to remind us that the good is the enemy of the best and we need people to remind us that the best is the enemy of the good. We need to protect ourselves from the dangers from both flanks.”

This is Sir Christopher Ricks in The Literateur, a new online journal. Go here for Part 1 and here for Part 2 of the interview. His gift for conversationally articulating ideas is refreshing, in part because for so long we haven’t associated intelligence with members of the professorial class. Reading him, one is reminded in several ways of Dr. Johnson – the broad learning, of course, and the drive to articulate thought, but also a deep humanity, a sense that books matter terribly but people matter more. For instance:

“So I’m not one of those people who use the word ‘subversive’ as if it’s automatically a good thing: ‘The great thing about literature is that it’s so subversive’. There are lots of things which should not be subverted. The idea that you have shown that someone is a good writer because you have shown that he or she has challenged the orthodox opinion… Orthodox opinion is often immensely to be valued.”

And here is Ricks in the mode of Johnson the common-sensical moralist:

“The reason I admire Johnson and Eliot and Empson so much – the thing that holds them together – is that they all think that doing the right thing is steering between two equally dangerous opposite bad things.”

`Such Tiny Motions'

A recurrent fantasy: renting a hall, calling my friends (“real” and “virtual” – tell me the difference), and reading aloud my favorite book of the moment. Everyone listens raptly – guffawing and weeping at all the right places, no snores or coughs. My voice never falters, my listeners never nod.

Instead, I blog.

A reader in New York City, whose existence I never suspected before Tuesday, writes:

“. . . now seems to be a good time to tell you how very much I enjoy your blog. I have just printed out `The Shaft’ & the Kay Ryan poem. I will probably read the Kay Ryan at the memorial of a close friend next month . . . Occasionally your entries are over my head, but most days they are apposite to something I have read. My husband & I just finished reading five Chekhov short novels aloud, so I love what you have to say about C.”

As I told her, Chekhov is an ideal candidate for reading aloud. His prose is plain-spoken, even in translation, never artsy or pretentious but nicely nuanced. Lots of room for interpretive – not over-emotive – reading, and his sense of comedy would become, at last, undeniable. He was, after all, a very funny playwright. Readers seem less willing to admit the same about his stories.

Another reader, this one a friend in Houston, also writes:

“I read Ryan's poem and burst into tears. I could feel it coming as soon as I read the word `knob.’ It's quite likely this has something to do with menopause . . . . . but still that's pretty good writing. I just finished William Trevor's Love and Summer, which I loved. It reminded me of [William] Maxwell a little, the way so much is revealed in such tiny motions. Like reaching for the same knob for decades. It's easy to forget that those tiny motions are still there under the river of garbage that's constantly washing over us.”

I reread Maxwell’s Time Will Darken It last week and remain convinced it, with So Long, See You Tomorrow, stands as his supreme achievement. Since I haven’t rented a hall, let me read you this passage from the novel:

“The world (including Draperville) is not a nice place, and the innocent and the young have to take their chances. They cannot be watched over twenty-four hours a day. At what moment, from what hiding-place, the idea of evil will strike, there is no telling. And when it does, the result is not always disastrous. Children have their own incalculable strength and weakness, and this, for all their seeming helplessness, will determine the pattern of their lives. Even when you suspect why they fall downstairs, you cannot be sure. You have no way of knowing whether their fright is permanent or can be healed by putting butter on the large lump that comes out on their forehead after a fall.”

`The Thing That Doesn't Match the World'

“Well, there are a lot of things that I deep six right away. Most things I write don’t pass muster.”

The words are Kay Ryan’s, though one wishes for a world in which every writer could honestly say the same thing. The admission bears Ryan’s characteristic astringency, fondness for American idiom and for retrofitting clichés (“deep six”). Thanks to Dave Lull for alerting me to issue #11 of Drunken Boat, which includes the interview excerpted above and six of Ryan’s poems. In the subsequent sentences, Ryan discusses “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” (from The Niagara River, 2006):

“A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space –
however small –
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn’t
be so hard.”

The poem treats a familiar human yearning with farfetched literalness, a common Ryan strategy. We want the world to commemorate the lives of those we love who now are dead. We don’t want their passage through life erased. To take literally another figure of speech: We want loved ones to leave their mark. The speaker even longs for “ruts,” a word conventionally scorned, as in “stuck in a rut” (though ruts worn by chariots endure in Roman paving). In the interview, Ryan, the least autobiographical of poets, reveals the poem’s personal origins:

“I was kind of carried away in that poem. It really is about my mother, written many years after her death, although it’s generalized … I guess I saved the poem because I was overcome by its beauty … The poem says not our circumstances but our objects shouldn’t be so hard. Our lives should make more marks. That wordplay is kind of characteristic. The poem isn’t literal, but it still gives you the rich feeling of somebody’s life vanishing without much of a trace, even of wear.”

One senses Ryan’s embarrassment at revealing too much. She’s the opposite of a confessional poet. Like Dickinson, her instinct is to conceal and at the same time reveal enough to let us know she’s concealing something. This tension, like the tease in striptease, drives the poems and keeps us coming back. The most touching of her remarks reveals the enormous confidence often concealed by true modesty: “I was overcome by its beauty.” In the same interview she says:

“A lot of the job that one has to do as a writer is to protect the thing that doesn’t match the world.”

`Comic Variousness and Oddity'

“He was remarkable for always wearing galoshes and a warm wadded coat, and carrying an umbrella even in the very finest weather. And his umbrella was in a case, and his watch was in a case made of grey chamois leather, and when he took out his penknife to sharpen his pencil, his penknife, too, was in a little case; and his face seemed to be in a case too, because he always hid it in his turned up collar.”

We know the type, in life and literature. Could this be a thumbnail portrait in Gogol? Dickens? Isaac Bashevis Singer? Could it be the furtive little man in the apartment down the hall? The shoe salesman or that skinny clerk in accounting? It’s Belikov, the Greek master in Chekhov’s “The Man in a Case.” This is Chekhov the caricaturist, the brisk cartoonist of character, though the story was written in his maturity as a writer, in 1898. As a teenager, ranging for the first time among the world’s storytellers, I relished the deft capturing of character. This was among fiction’s first attractions – a core sample of a person, as unique as fingerprints, in a few sentences. I found it reliably in Bellow, Tolstoy, Faulkner and Chekhov.

I reread “The Man in a Case” after reading James Lasdun’s “The Wonder of Chekhov” on Saturday. My translation is Constance Garnett’s. Lasdun uses another in which the title is “A Hard Case.” He writes:

“However tragic or despicable or exasperating the moralist in [Chekhov] found the world, the writer in him was constantly drawn to its comic variousness and oddity. No other writer has evoked boredom, dreariness, ennui with such richly entertaining specificity. Who but Chekhov could have conceived a story such as `A Hard Case,’ built around a living embodiment of stifling conventionality in the person of Belikov, who reduces a whole town to his own state of cowering joylessness before the inhabitants finally turn against him? The exorcising of such baleful spirits seems to have been one of the primal drives underlying the production of the 800-odd stories Chekhov left behind: happiness, in his work, almost always occurs against an encroaching darkness that requires constant warding off. In life he was known as an aficionado of jokes, pranks, festivities, the burlesque spirit in general.”

One of the after-effects of reading Chekhov is growing hyper-sensitive to the ridiculousness of the human realm. On Saturday, the landlord and I spent seven hours drilling holes and pumping insulation into the walls of our house. We felt like Laurel and Hardy, except both of us were Laurels – hapless amateurs, well-intentioned ittle boys outclassed by machines, dolts pretending we knew what we were doing, a couple of Belikovs, Chichikovs, Gimpels, Tommy Wilhelms. We spent the itchy, sweaty time telling each other stories that didn’t make us look good – the best kind.

At the end of Chekhov’s story (told by a character in the framing story), after Belikov’s death, the town of Mironositskoe rejoices. Berkin the schoolmaster says:

“`We returned from the cemetery in a good humour. But not more than a week had passed before life went on as in the past, as gloomy, oppressive, and senseless – a life not forbidden by government prohibition, but not fully permitted, either: it was no better. And, indeed, though we had buried Byelikov, how many such men in cases were left, how many more of them there will be!”

`Not a Place to Stare Into'

Knowing of my debt to Guy Davenport, a reader alerted me to “The Shaft,” a poem Charles Tomlinson dedicated to the author of The Geography of the Imagination:

“The shaft seemed like a place of sacrifice:
You climbed where spoil heaps from the hill
Spilled out into a wood, the slate
Tinkling underfoot like shards, and then
You bent to enter: a passageway:
Cervix of stone: the tick of waterdrops,
A clear clepsydra: and squeezing through
Emerged into cathedral space, held-up
By a single rocksheaf, a gerbe
Buttressing-back the roof. The shaft
Opened beneath it, all its levels
Lost in a hundred feet of water.
Those miners—dust, beards, mattocks—
They photographed seventy years ago,
Might well have gone to ground here, pharaohs
Awaiting excavation, their drowned equipment
Laid-out beside them. All you could see
Was rock reflections tunneling the floor
That water covered, a vertical unfathomed,
A vertigo that dropped through centuries
To the first who broke into these fells:
The shaft was not a place to stare into
Or not for long: the adit you entered by
Filtered a leaf-light, a phosphorescence,
Doubled by water to a tremulous fire,
And signalling you back to the moist door
Into whose darkness you had turned aside
Out of the sun of an unfinished summer.”

A few notes: “clepsydra” is a water clock (thus, “the tick of waterdrops”); “gerbe,” “a firework throwing a shower of sparks”; “adit,” a horizontal entrance to a mine. “The Shaft” is the title poem in Tomlinson’s 1978 collection – a date relatively early in Davenport’s writing career, three years before he published The Geography of the Imagination. This is a tentative exploration of a poem I have only just read and found intriguing, one that echoes with a story, “Robot,” from Davenport’s first fiction collection, Tatlin! It describes the discovery of prehistoric cave paintings in France in the early days of World War II:

“Next morning they found the figure of the hunter in the shaft at the back of the cave, a mere stick of a man, bird-headed, ithyphallic, childish. Beside him is a carved bird on a staff. His spear has gored a bison, whose bowels are spilling out. To the left of the hunter is a rhinoceros.”

A clue to Davenport’s link to Tomlinson’s poem “Cervix of stone.” Davenport returned often in his fiction and nonfiction to the epochal discovery of the cave paintings. He characterized modernism as the rediscovery of the archaic and argued that Picasso, Pound and Joyce were unimaginable without it. They were “artists who were performing the great feat of awakening an archaic sense of the world.'' Ancient culture is “the great archeological midden of history,” and the modernists are its chief archeologists. In “The Symbol of the Archaic” Davenport writes:

“The archaic is one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century.”

In Tomlinson’s poem, one enters not a prehistoric cave but an abandoned mine, and returns to the subterranean birthplace (thus, “cervix”) of art. There’s a suggestion of religious ritual – “a place of sacrifice,” “You bent to enter,” “cathedral space.” A place of birth, ritual, death. Not a place to linger. The pleasing echoes of “vertical” and “vertigo.” Tomlinson suggests we enter the cave for “grounding,” a shaded place to stand, but we must return to the “unfinished summer.” Near the conclusion of the essay cited above Davenport writes:

“The nearest model for a world totally alive was the archaic era of our own culture, pre-Aristotelian Greece and Rome. From that world we began to feel terribly alienated, as the railroad tracks went down and the factories up, as our sciences began to explain the mechanics of everything and the nature of nothing.”

[On another level Tomlinson’s poem also reminded me of this song.]

`Foxlike, Killing Time'

Whitney Balliett died three years ago this week, on Feb. 1, 2007. A year before his death the longtime jazz writer for The New Yorker published his final book, New York Voices: Fourteen Portraits (University of Mississippi Press). Among the profiles included is one of Daphne Hellman, a socialite-harpist. Balliett foregoes his customary role as critic and doesn’t evaluate Hellman’s performance on her unlikely instrument. He leaves that to others, including Julius Monk, a pianist and impresario profiled by Balliett in the same book. Monk says of a group he had with Hellman:

“After the war, we played at the Bœuf sur le toit, in Paris. We did Jerome Kern, and to keep her out of trouble we glissed a great deal.”

“Glissed” needs a gloss (as Joyce writes in a Finnegans Wake footnote: “Wipe your glosses with what you know”). It’s shortened from glissando (plural: glissandi), meaning to play the notes of a chord in a rapid sweep rather than consecutively, producing a harp-like sound. The word sounds like what it means – glissed, with echoes of “bliss,” "glass," “glisten” and its French root, glissade (“to slide”). Monk was implying that by glissing on the piano he was helping to disguise Hellman’s limitations (“trouble”) as a performer in a jazz or art song setting.

I bring this up because I enjoy the sound of the word and the wit of jazz musicians, and because I’ve been glissing for the last seven school days. My job was to shadow a student on in-school suspension. I followed him from class to class, sitting at the back of the room, exchanging no more than 20 words with him throughout my assignment. If he was the harp, I was the glissing piano. The kid is utterly passive, a little boy looking for Mommy, and accomplishes nothing at school but collecting hugs and squeezes from credulous females. The school nurse told me he suffers from “little-man syndrome.” I got a lot of reading done, and even got paid for it.

One of the books I reread was The Stories of J.F. Powers. No writer is funnier than Powers when it comes to stylistic concision. His ear was perfect. In “A Losing Game,” Father Fabre wants a desk for his typewriter in the rectory. The pastor is pathologically laconic. They search the furniture-choked basement, when the pastor says the room is infested with rats. He picks up a .22 and gives Father Fabre an air rifle. Fabre says:

“`What’s wrong with trapping ’em?’”

“`Too smart.’”

“`How about poison?’”

“`Die in the walls.’”

Anyway, the rectory employs a janitor, John, who has established goldbricking sanctuaries around the building – under the stairs, in the furnace room, in the choir loft behind the organ, in “the visiting priest’s confessional.” The narrator, deadpan, says:

“John moved around a lot, foxlike, killing time.”

That sounds like the kid I’ve been working with, glissing.

`A Throb of Pleasure in His Heart'

The first words I posted on Anecdotal Evidence four years ago today were not mine but William Hazlitt’s, and they remain my preferred ice-breaker and contractual statement of purpose:

“…we agreed to adjourn to my lodgings to discuss measures with that cordiality which makes old friends like new, and new friends like old, on great occasions. We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves, and have neither thoughts nor feelings to impart to them. Give a man a topic in his head, a throb of pleasure in his heart, and he will be glad to share it with the first person he meets.”

That inaugural come-on-in post comes from “The Fight,” Hazlitt’s account of an illegal, bloody, bare-knuckles boxing match in 1821 -- an irony I savor when the blogosphere experiences one of its periodic paroxysms of incivility. It also reminds me of the inclusive nature of essays in seasoned hands, and of what Montaigne wrote in “Of three kinds of association”: “Life is an uneven, irregular, and multiform movement.” So too is prose and literature worthy of the name.

This blog is a conversation with its best readers, some of whom I know by name – Gary Baldridge, Roger Boylan, Laura Demanski, Elberry, Katy Evans-Bush, David Ferry, Roger Forseth, Mike Gilleland, Joshua Kurp, Ken Kurp, James Marcus, David Myers, Nige, Bill Sigler, Ron Slate, Levi Stahl, Terry Teachout, Bill Vallicella, Frank Wilson and many who remain nameless or pseudonymed. A song written by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel in 1937, and sung by Ella Fitzgerald, acknowledges my largest, oldest, most consistent blog debt.

In a footnote he added to The Honest Rainmaker (1953), A.J. Liebling stated definitively the only philosophy of writing I have ever claimed:

“The way to write is well, and how is your own business. Nothing else on the subject makes sense.”

With this, my 1,633rd post, I thank all of my readers.

`Getting Past Vanity'

“And if no one reads me, have I wasted my time, entertaining myself for so many idle hours with such useful and agreeable thoughts?”

Montaigne, of course, from “On giving the lie,” asking another self-answering question. Sometimes I think the man who redefined essai for literary purposes has already asked all the important questions and supplied all the interesting if not always definitive answers. He was not quite 50 when he wrote this essay, around 1580. I (age 57) reread it Wednesday in a high-school gymnasium where I was keeping an eye on a student arguing with a teacher. Soon I had to escort him to the counselor’s office. At home I had an e-mail from Elberry, who has hardly passed 30:

“It's probably not coincidence most of the best bloggers are in their 50s at least - such equilibrium isn't a youthful property.”

A flattering sentiment but probably true. The thoughtful middle-aged are less likely to rant, to bait their lessers, to scrawl their names on the bathroom wall. They’re less interested in pleasing or angering you and more interested in getting the job done to their satisfaction. They have less to prove and more to say – concisely, we hope. Elberry continues:

“One can only do good work by getting past vanity. i like to give pleasure but it's very important that i write to give myself pleasure first of all - and to be the sort of person who will take most pleasure in that which will also please others.”

Middle-aged thoughts from a young man, and very much in the manner of Montaigne. Solemn or goofy, Elberry is always worth reading carefully. He speaks of vanity, our chronic human malady, and Montaigne addresses a sizeable essay to that subject:

“No pleasure has any savor for me without communication. Not even a merry thought comes to my mind without my being vexed at having produced it alone without anyone to offer it to.”

`Nothing Was Ever Forgotten'

On a summer evening in Illinois in 1912, a widow and her two unmarried daughters leave a dinner party at their neighbors’ house and prepare to walk home when another dinner guest, a gentleman from Mississippi, offers to escort the ladies. The widow replies, “`No, you mustn’t come with us, Mr. Potter. We left a light burning and we’re not afraid.’” The oddly solicitous and chatty narrator takes over:

“The light could not protect Mrs. Beach and her daughters from death by violence, or old age, or from the terrible hold they had on one another, but at least it would enable them to enter their own house without being afraid of the dark, and it is the dark most people fear, anyway – not being murdered or robbed.”

It’s an old-fashioned, scoffed-at notion that fiction can teach us something about life, just as we hope life can teach us something about life, at least if we’re paying attention. It wouldn’t have seemed old-fashioned to our great-grandparents and most of their forbears, assuming they could read, and did. Literature was assumed to be, among other things, “equipment for living,” as Kenneth Burke put it.

The passage above comes early in William Maxwell’s fourth novel, Time Will Darken It (1948), in which the narrator comments broadly and obliquely on the narrative. He’s cousin to George Eliot’s narrator in Middlemarch, but quieter, less discursive. The effect is not dictatorial but amiable, in the manner of a friend who wishes to encourage and console without appearing pushy. Among the guests at the dinner party is an old man whose longueurs are indulged by all. The narrator writes:

“Ten years before, he had been an imposing representative of the world sensitive little boys are afraid of – the loud, ample, bald-headed, cigar-smoking, cigar-smelling men. And then suddenly, before anyone realized what was happening, Mr. Ellis’ hair had turned white and with it his bushy eyebrows and the long black hairs growing out of his nose and ears. He was now a little old man with a tired mind and the violent emotions of second childhood. He discovered the plate in front of him and made a futile effort to cut his fried chicken.”

Such passages seem almost like interpolated tales, stories within stories that neither hasten nor impede the larger narrative but add another layer of resonance. The narrator is the least vicious of gossips. In less exquisite hands he might have come off as bossy or distressingly folksy. Like a storyteller in some oral culture, he’s the keeper of history who reminds us that nothing is without precedent, nothing is new under the Illinois sun. He permits us to see changes accelerated as in a time-lapse film, as Mr. Ellis ages before our eyes. The narrator describes with delicate wit the role of historian in a small Midwestern town:

“Of the literary arts, the one most practiced in Draperville was history. It was informal, and there was no reason to write it down since nothing was ever forgotten. The child born too soon after the wedding ceremony might learn to walk and to ride a bicycle; he might go to school and graduate into long pants, marry, move to Seattle, and do well for himself in the lumber business; but whenever his or his mother’s name was mentioned, it was followed inexorably by some smiling reference to the date of his birth.”

In 2004, the year of his death, Anthony Hecht published a lovely essay on Time Will Darken It (in A William Maxwell Portrait). He too takes special notice of the narrator, relishing Maxwell’s wry assistant and stand-in:

“… [the novel] employs an authorial voice of piercing wisdom, gentle irony, and thoughtful comment that sounds, time to time, like the voice of Chekhov.”

The comparison, for once, is not far-fetched. Every fiction writer, in particular of short stories, eventually gets compared to Chekhov, usually to ridiculous purpose. The sadness and muted comedy of Maxwell's best work, its devotion to what he called "the fragility of happiness," owes much to Chekhov and his other Russian masters, Turgenev and Tolstoy. Maxwell and Chekhov remind us of what Whitney Balliett wrote about Pee Wee Russell:

"His blues were an examination of the proposition that there must be a way to make sadness bearable and beautiful."

`A Nice Constellation of Tastes and Experiences'

Few people, even dedicated readers, share more than one of my enthusiasms. Samuel Johnson, Alec Wilder and Coleoptera? To think otherwise would be delusional, self-centered and ultimately frustrating. Interests accumulate across a lifetime and come to define us. Some we shed, others intensify and grow more sophisticated and lasting. These are among the reasons we have no right to complain of boredom.

Michael Steinman was not a name I recognized though I’ve read two books he edited, and on Monday linked to a post about the clarinetist Pee Wee Russell on his blog Jazz Lives. In an e-mail thanking me, Steinman writes:

“I was even more pleased to see your comments on Whitney Balliett (someone I admired almost without reserve -- and met -- and sent tapes to!) and Richard M. Sudhalter (whom I read, heard on record, and had a very brief email correspondence with when he could still use a computer) and William Maxwell…I knew WM at the end of his life, met him in person three or so times, did three books that involve him . . . and am his literary executor. A nice constellation of tastes and experiences, I'd say.”

Thanks to the internet, another “nice constellation of tastes and experiences” is no longer so rare an experience. In a biographical note on his blog, Steinman says he saw Louis Armstrong perform in 1967 and that his “heroes include Bobby Hackett, Vic Dickenson, Ruby Braff, Eddie Condon, Frank Chace, Jo Jones, Pee Wee Russell, Ben Webster, Frankie Newton, Hot Lips Page, Lester Young, Dave Tough, and Big Sid Catlett” – a list representing a significant chunk of my favorite music.

That a Pee Wee Russell admirer should also be Maxwell’s literary executor is a gift almost beyond reckoning. That he knew Balliett, Sudhalter and Maxwell to varying degrees stirs my usually dormant sense of envy. The books Steinman edited that I have read are The Happiness of Getting It Down Right: Letters of Frank O’Connor and William Maxwell 1945- 1966 (1996) and The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner & William Maxwell 1938 – 1978 (2001). He also edited The Music At Long Verney: Twenty Stories (2000) by Warner with an introduction by Maxwell. Thank you, Michael. Let me return the favor in a small way by adding a passage from the tribute to Pee Wee Russell written by Balliett after the musician’s death in 1969:

“His style – the chalumeau phrases, the leaps over the abyss, the unique why? tone, the use of notes that less imaginative musicians had discarded as untoward – was paradoxically, his final snare and his glory. People laughed at it. It was considered eccentric, and because eccentricity, the kindest form of defiance, baffles people, they laugh. But those who don’t laugh understood that Russell had discovered some of the secrets of life and that his improvisations were generally successful attempts to tell those secrets in a new, funny, gentle way.”

`An Enormous Roomy Private Universe"

Whitney Balliett writes of the clarinetist Pee Wee Russell:

“No jazz musician ever played with the same daring and nakedness and intuition. He took wild improvisational chances and when he found himself above the abyss, he simply turned in another direction, invariably hitting firm ground.”

The sound of few musicians, even in so renegade yet tradition-minded a form as jazz, is so instantly identifiable as Russell’s. He was accused of being a primitive, of not knowing the fundamentals of his instrument, yet he was the only musician to perform and record with both Bix Beiderbecke and Thelonious Monk (against whom critics made similar accusations). He was never Benny Goodman in his command of technique – who was? -- but as an improviser he was peerless. In an obituary written for Down Beat, pianist Dick Wellstood describes Russell’s sound as “that crabbed, choked, knotted tangle of squawks with which he could create such woodsy freedom, such an enormous roomy private universe.”

A life of prodigious drinking and generally dubious habits almost killed Russell in 1950, after his wife left and his alcohol consumption became methodically suicidal. He lived, Mary returned and Russell experienced a second career as a “Dixieland” player in the age of bop. Robert Hilbert tells the story in Pee Wee Russell: The Life of a Jazzman (Oxford University Press, 1993).

In 1965, Russell’s wife, frustrated with his habitual melancholy and refusal to promote himself, bought a set of paints, brushes and canvases. Russell had never painted before or expressed interest in any art other than jazz, though he befriended the great American modernist painter Stuart Davis. He completed his first painting on Nov. 30, 1965, and in the next year and a half finished another 60 “bold and powerful abstract canvases,” in Hilbert’s words. Go here to see one. In rereading Hilbert’s biography, I was struck by something he quotes Russell saying about his work with the brush:

“Like my playing, it’s a challenge to get in and get out of certain choruses. I start with certain colors and when it starts getting too dull for me, I say how will I get out of this and what color will I use?”

This reminded me of something the novelist William Gaddis said to me during an interview in 1990:

“For me, writing is about solving a problem, usually a technical problem. I start with a problem and the book is my solution.”

Russell was a more instinctual artist than Gaddis and took “wild improvisational chances,” as Balliett says, in his music and, presumably, his paintings. But any serious artist, certainly any serious writer, knows the anxiety and bliss of problem-solving. Writing is an endless chain of decisions, small and large, as to consonants and vowels, tone, dynamics, rhythm – all the qualities language shares with music, each the solution to a minute problem. On a less grand scale, each of us is trying to “get out of certain choruses.”

As a sad coda, it should be added that Russell’s wife Mary died of pancreatic cancer on June 7, 1967, at the age of 56. Russell never painted again. His dedicated drinking resumed and though he played and recorded occasionally, Pee Wee died at age 62 on Feb. 15, 1969.