`The Weft of Seeing'

The first mushrooms of the season appeared overnight last week in the backyard and I doubted their existence. What I saw from the kitchen window was a pale roundness in the grass -- a bit of rotten wood fallen from the fir or a peanut shell from the neighbor’s bird feeder left by a squirrel or crow. Instead, it was an irregular white sphere, smaller than a Brussels sprout, and there were seven of them within a six-foot radius. By the weekend they had swollen to the size of croquet balls and turned the color of a bagel’s crust. On Tuesday, despite the chill, the umbrellas opened and the caps were flecked with pale bumps like bits of onion on the bagel.

My thoughts, fueled by the mushrooms’ toothsome appearance, turned first to dinner, then to psilocybin, then to the late Paul Metcalf, author of Genoa. On my own I would never pull a John Cage and eat a wild mushroom, regardless of gustatory or hallucinogenic temptations. Paul lived in Chester, Mass., in the Berkshires, not far from the New York line. He was in his seventies when I knew him and boasted of secret morel hunting grounds in the woods. His daughter shared knowledge of the jealously guarded locations but not Paul’s wife Nancy. It became a joke among us, like tales of his friend Charles Olson’s drug and alcohol consumption.

Once I wrote a profile of a mycologist employed by the New York State Museum who, in my company, plucked a red mushroom from a tree trunk in downtown Albany and carried it to the banquet where he was the guest speaker. He sliced the beautiful fungus and ate it with his steak, the sort of flamboyant gesture I secretly admired but would be too timid to emulate. Mushrooms, like microsurgery and the writing of poems, are best left to experts.

Charles Tomlinson is becoming a favorite poet and I regret not having read him sooner. He’s fond of mushrooms and they show up with inspired regularity in his work, often associated with epistemological probings: What exists and how do we know it? These are important questions when the human and natural worlds intersect. Mistaken identity could prove fatal. This is “Mushrooms” (from The Shaft, 1978, and Selected Poems, 1997), which reminds me of my first seasonal sighting last week:

“Eyeing the grass for mushrooms, you will find
A stone or stain, a dandelion puff
Deceive your eyes—their colour is enough
To plump the image out to mushroom size
And lead you through illusion to a rind
That's true—flint, fleck or feather. With no haste
Scent-out the earthy musk, the firm moist white,
And, played-with rather than deluded, waste
None of the sleights of seeing: taste the sight
You gaze unsure of—a resemblance, too,
Is real and all its likes and links stay true
To the weft of seeing. You, to begin with,
May be taken in, taken beyond, that is,
This place of chiaroscuro that seemed clear,
For realer than a myth of clarities
Are the meanings that you read and are not there:
Soon, in the twilight coolness, you will come
To the circle that you seek and, one by one,
Stooping into their fragrance, break and gather,
Your way a winding where the rest lead on
Like stepping stones across a grass of water.”

Look attentively at the world – like a poet, in other words, or a scientist -- and accept that perception is incomplete and sometimes mistaken, and enjoy the show. I love this: “taste the sight / You gaze unsure of—a resemblance, too, / Is real and all its likes and links stay true / To the weft of seeing.”

`The Adult Subterfuge'

Monday we observed R.S. Thomas’ 97th birthday but I was reading Clive James’ Opal Sunset: Selected Poems 1958-2008 as I sat in the high-school dispensary beside the cot where my student was resting. She had had a seizure Sunday morning and was more lost and medicated than usual. She couldn’t focus to sort shapes or do her other tasks, and wobbled dangerously while walking the halls. The nurse suggested I let her sleep it off so I reread James’ “Special Needs,” a poem which plays with the ambiguities suggested by its patronizing title – a euphemism applied to kids like my student:

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

The choice James offers we negotiate each morning, between pity and paralysis on one side and numbness on the other. There’s too much work to do to grow contemplative, kids to feed and diaper, messes to clean up and reports to write. Neither option is genuine, theoretical only, and theory can kill. Later in the day my wife asked, “Doesn’t it depress you?” Most of us are too busy and too grateful to feel depression, a decadent luxury, after all.

Compassionate in his idiosyncratically icy way, R.S. Thomas knew something of children and choices and the ways we deal with them, as he suggests in an early poem:

“We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.”

`A Graphic and Passionate Clearness'

She’s small and looks delicate but for her size and age she’s strong and spirited. She shoveled in the pasta and chopped-up grapes I put on the tray of her high-chair. Her locomotion is a peculiar crab-like scuttle, tucking her left leg underneath and rowing it like an oar. She pushes the dog, four or five times her size, out of the way, and the dog never objects. As we tried to watch The Black Stallion she climbed on the couch, lifted my wife’s shirt and proceeded to play pat-a-cake on her belly. She laughs when I imitate the sound of an adenoidal pig. Soon we will celebrate my niece’s first birthday.

G.K. Chesterton and his wonderfully named wife, Frances Blogg, never had children. On March 7, 1931, in the Illustrated London News, Chesterton wrote:

“A literary man who cannot see that a baby is marvellous could not see that anything was marvellous.”

An ideal companion: A “literary man” in no way childish who enjoys the company of children and whose company children enjoy. Chesterton wrote in the Illustrated London News on May 30, 1908:

“Children have more life than we have; the only thing they lack is law. Children feel the whiteness of the lily with a graphic and passionate clearness which we cannot give them at all. The only thing we can give them is information – the information that if you break the lily in two it won’t grow again. We need not teach them the good of admiring the lily; the only thing we can teach them is the evil of uprooting it.”

[Passages found in More Quotable Chesterton, Ignatius Press, 1988.]

`Nature is Not Cleanly'

On a two-mile hike with Cub Scouts along the western shore of Lake Sammamish, in a woodland dominated by cedars, ferns and a lush upholstery of moss, the conversation of the adults was consumed with real estate costs and one woman’s troubles with her GPS device, interrupted only by reminders to the boys that they “Think green!” I tried to focus the scouts on a game of “Nature Bingo,” which my son and I won by finding a conifer, a worm, “a new green leaf,” a bud, a caterpillar and “some rubbish” (two crushed beer cans). All of this was preceded by a pep talk by another adult urging the boys to “Love Mother Nature!” and “Stop and smell the roses!”

I thought about Nathaniel Hawthorne and his legacy of abstract nature worship. Much of what Hawthorne knew about the natural world he gleaned from Shelley and when he chose to pay attention, the conversation of his sometime neighbor, Henry Thoreau. He seems to have seen little with his eyes. There’s the vagueness and generality of boilerplate Romanticism about his observations. One reads them not to learn something about the world but about Hawthorne. Of course, the same is true of Thoreau’s early journals and much of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Consider this passage from Hawthorne’s “Buds and Bird-voices,” collected in Mosses From an Old Manse (1846):

“One of the first things that strikes the attention when the white sheet of winter is withdrawn is the neglect and disarray that lay hidden beneath it. Nature is not cleanly according to our prejudices. The beauty of preceding years, now transformed to brown and blighted deformity, obstructs the brightening loveliness of the present hour.”

I like the second sentence: “Nature is not cleanly according to our prejudices.” True enough, nature is messy but efficient. All that “brown and blighted deformity” is an essential component of the nitrogen cycle: Death fuels life. The closest Hawthorne comes to recognizing this follows later in the paragraph, but the thought feels inherited and conventional:

“How invariable throughout all the forms of life do we find these intermingled memorials of death! On the soil of thought and in the garden of the heart, as well as in the sensual world, lie withered leaves—the ideas and feelings that we have done with.”

I pick on Hawthorne only because I reread some of his Mosses this week, on impulse, and the lushness of the mosses in the woods reminded me of his book. I could as easily criticize the know-nothing nature effusions of Emerson (who, in We Are Doomed, John Derbyshire characterizes as “a key progenitor of modern smiley-face liberalism”). My companions on the scout hike are good people but sometimes in their company I feel as though I have entered a church in which the faithful worship a deity they neither understand nor believe in.

`A Deep Moan of Shame'

David Myers borrows from Tim Davis the notion of “reading skeletons,” defined by Myers as “the books and writers you will never confess to: those that cause, not merely embarrassment, but a deep moan of shame.” Not since late adolescence have I wasted much time on unmitigated, shame-inducing trash. Science fiction, Tolkien, pulp novels of any genre, Margaret Mitchell, Edgar Rice Burroughs – all target children of all ages, and I read them as a child. Discerningly ambitious readers begin as omnivores, hungrier than they are discriminating. Reading such stuff as kids gives them immunity against it as adults. It can't satisfy a grownup sensibility.

Myers mentions The Day of the Jackal, a Frederick Forsyth novel I’ve never read (I’m not sure I’ve ever read a “thriller,” unless Chandler and Westlake count) though I periodically watch the Fred Zinneman film version (1973), mostly for Michael Lonsdale’s Inspector Lebel and Cyril Cusack’s gunsmith. No one will mistake it for Tokyo Story, but trash in film form, though emetic as a book, sometimes proves palatable.

Myers cites the shame he feels for having once read a novel by Tom Robbins – probably the writer I have never read who has most often been urged upon me by people who know nothing about literature. He also mentions Robert Pirsig’s pretentious little bestseller. It was mildly readable at the time – 1974? – but even then I knew it was, in effect, a one-night stand. There’s no shame in that. We must read junk to recognize it and flush it from our systems, like a toxin that carries its own enema.

A good reader possesses intestinal fortitude and little capacity for regret. I often read books that will never be mistaken for literature – in recent weeks, a biography of Charles Addams, histories of Chinese calligraphy (my 9-year-old’s current enthusiasm) and Tin Pan Alley, a field guide to butterflies of the Pacific Northwest. I go to them not for the pleasures Nabokov and Samuel Johnson offer – elegance and incisiveness of language and thought -- but for the pleasure of new information.

The Welsh poet-priest R.S. Thomas was a deeply self-centered, unpleasant fellow though one of the last century’s great poets, as Byron Roger’s The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas confirms. Rogers quotes the poet’s son, Gwydion Thomas, as saying:

“Why didn’t he read more? He had this extraordinary Stalinist approach, there were all these books he just wouldn’t read. And if something got a review, that ruled it out altogether. Yet he’d trawl Pwllheli public library looking for things to read, and his choices were very odd, books about penguins and whales. I used to drop little bundles of books outside his room, then he’d read them, and when I went back to university my mother would say she’d found him crawling up the stairs to fish books out of my room. I gave him the mediaeval history Montaillou, he was very fond of that.”

Filial resentment aside, Thomas’ account of his father’s reading habits is, on balance, largely admirable. Penguins and whales are among the most fashionable and least interesting species, but I too often read about fauna. “Stalinist” is harsh and Thomas is not specific about titles and authors, but all of us carry around conscious and unconscious lists of books we wouldn’t read (or reread) on a bet. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s book is superb.

`I Usually Find Indirect Methods the Best'

Hubert Butler, the Irish essayist too little known and appreciated in the United States (and perhaps in Ireland), wrote a letter to a magazine editor in 1943 explaining his manner of writing (“technique” is too clinical a word for so humane a writer) as “putting an idea across and working on it at the same time.” In defense of an essay the editor had found “obscure,” Butler clarifies what might have been mistaken for slipshod amateurishness:

“…as I felt fairly certain where I wanted to get, and there wasn’t much space, my idea was to hustle the reader (for his own good) past all the forks and turns and not picnic at each cross-roads and take him into my confidence. That would have been a different kind of journey. I was quite ready to make it, but not in that article…I usually find indirect methods the best and have sympathy with the man who gave his son a good slap so that he would remember having seen a salamander.”

I borrow this excerpt from R.F. Foster’s essay on Butler collected in The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (2001). Foster, author of the definitive two-volume biography of Yeats, says of Butler: “...for his readers, the sense of delighted approbation and agreement is invariably moderated by a well-placed slap, reminding us that we have just encountered something special.”

One suspects the only slaps Butler ever delivered were metaphorical – admonishments, hard facts delivered as well-mannered hectoring, truths unburdened with fear or self-serving sympathy, all written with the utmost grace and without sermonizing. What honest writer in 20th-century Ireland, writing of matters Irish, would not resort to the strategic deployment of slaps? Odd to align them with “indirect methods,” but one understands. It’s a way to get the reader’s attention and keep it. To write indirectly is a matter of temperament, as is the use of slaps as mnemonic devices. A writer forever moving by indirection risks baffling readers; another, forever slapping, tedium and resentment. Another Irishman said as much in 1731 in “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift”:

“Yet malice never was his aim;
He lashed the vice but spared the name.
No individual could resent,
Where thousands equally were meant.
His satire points at no defect
But what all mortals may correct;
For he abhorred that senseless tribe
Who call it humor when they gibe.”

[The essays of Hubert Butler (1900-1991) were not collected in books until starting in 1985 with the publication of Escape from the Anthill, followed by The Children of Drancy (1988), Grandmother and Wolf Tone (1990) and In the Land of Nod (1996). The only American edition of Butler’s work, Independent Spirit: Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), is drawn from the four volumes published in Dublin by The Lilliput Press.]

`Waving Fancy's Banner'

Without taking care I opened a lovely 1963 edition of Andrew Young’s Quiet as Moss: Thirty-Six Poems and destroyed a nosegay of violets pressed between its pages. The petals were thinner than the pages that held them and turned to dust as they dropped to the kitchen table. The last stamp on the circulation card reads Jan. 20, 1998. The pressing left a pale brown shadow on page 19, on which appears a wood engraving of another bouquet by Joan Hassall and one of Young’s poems, “Spring Flowers”:

“Now we enjoy the rain,
When at each neighbor’s door we hear
`How big primroses are this year’–
Tale we may live to hear again—

“And dandelions flood
The orchards as though apple-trees
Dropped in the grass ripe oranges,
Boughs still in pink impatient bud.

“When too we cannot choose,
But one foot and the other set
In celandine and violet,
Walking in gold and purple shoes,

“Rain that through winter weeks
Splashed on our face and window pane,
And rising in these flowers again
Brightens their eyes and fats their cheeks.”

The poem is conventional and could have been written most any time in the last 200 years, though the second stanza, especially “as though apple-trees / Dropped in the grass ripe oranges,” is unexpected and pleasing. Thanks to Stephen Pentz for making me aware of Young (1885-1971) who was born in Scotland, served as a Presbyterian minister until he converted to the Church of England, and was an avocational botanist. Among his prose works is A Retrospect of Flowers (1950) which carries an interesting epigraph from “Amaturus” by another minor poet, William Cory: “Still holding reason’s fort / Though waving fancy’s banner.”

I like that a previous reader of Young’s book pressed his violets on the only poem in it to mention the flower. I’ve found flowers before in books, some of them my own, but never on a page that names the species. Thoreau carried with him a heavy book of music to serve as a press. In the penultimate paragraph of her second novel, The Bookshop (1978), Penelope Fitzgerald writes:

“Florence was left, therefore, without a shop and without books. She had kept, it is true, two of the Everymans, which had never been very good sellers. One was Ruskin’s Unto this Last, the other was Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. Each had its old bookmarker in it, Everyman I will be thy guide, in thy most need to go by thy side, and the Ruskin also had a pressed gentian, quite colourless. The book must have gone, perhaps fifty years before, to Switzerland in springtime.”

`The Illegitimate Branch of the Profession'

Another staffer and I went to the school library in the morning to pick books for reading aloud in class. She was more optimistic than I, choosing collections of stories by Jack London and W. Somerset Maughm, and the fat old Modern Library compendium of Donne and Blake, the edition in which I, as a boy, first read both poets. She wanted to read the “No man is an island” passage from Donne’s “Meditation XVII.”

I picked volumes of Hans Christian Andersen’s tales and Edward Lear’s nonsense verse, The Juniper Tree (Randall Jarrell’s selection from the Brothers Grimm) and one of my favorite story collections, also edited by Jarrell, The Best Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling.

With my lunch I had packed Basil Bunting’s Complete Poems but instead I read a Kipling story I picked almost at random, “A Matter of Fact.” Three journalists – an American, a Dutchman and an Englishman (the narrator) -- are aboard a tramp steamer “going to Southampton in ballast, and [we] shipped in her because the fares were nominal.” Kipling starts out steering us through Conrad’s seas, but the prose is more vivid and less portentous than the Pole’s, and Kipling is never at a loss for what he imagines, and seems to know how everything works and the proper name for everything:

“The sea was as smooth as a duck-pond, except for a regular oily swell. As I looked over the side to see where it might be following us from, the sun rose in a perfectly clear sky and struck the water with its light so sharply that it seemed as though the sea should clang like a burnished gong. The wake of the screw and the little white streak cut by the log-line hanging over the stern were the only marks on the water as far as eye could reach.”

I won’t disclose the story’s rather melodramatic central event, which verges on science fiction, but the journalists, portrayed as raffish and hard-boiled at the start, choose not to write about it, at least as journalism. It turns into a story about stories, without becoming tiresomely “metafictional,” and the title cliché earns layers of new meaning. Here’s the conclusion, starting with the American reporter asking the narrator:

“`What are you going to do?’

“`Tell it as a lie.’

“`Fiction?’ This with the full-blooded disgust of a journalist for the illegitimate branch of the profession.

“`You can call it that if you like. I shall call it a lie.'

“And a lie it has become; for Truth is a naked lady, and if by accident she is drawn up from the bottom of the sea, it behooves a gentleman either to give her a print petticoat or to turn his face to the wall and vow that he did not see.”

What a spirited defense of fiction as truth – in a work of fiction. In his introduction, Jarrell quotes a letter William James wrote his brother Henry about Kipling (both admired his work extravagantly):

“He has such human entrails, and he takes less time to get under the heartstrings of his personages than anyone I know. On the whole, bless him.”

Back home, I read more Kipling and some Bunting, including an ode written in 1924, when Kipling had another eleven years to live. Especially keep the second stanza in mind as you read Kipling’s story:

“Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise
mournful candles. Sad is spring
to perpetuate, sad to trace
immortalities never changing.

“Weary on the sea
for sight of land
gazing past the coming wave we
see the same wave;

“drift on merciless reiteration of years;
descry no death; but spring
is everlasting
resurrection.”

`I Am Willing to Omit the Gun'

In January the landlord and I spent 12 hours over several days insulating all of the south wall and parts of the east and west walls of our house. I’m not handy but the landlord, an engineer for Boeing, enjoys the work and he’s good company, a gifted, foul-mouthed story teller and listener. I lost a Saturday but gained two warmer, drier bedrooms and the respect of a fellow bullshitter.

Last week, before dawn, we woke to the sound of the Creusot steam hammer pounding on our bedroom wall. The noise was as loud, rapid and unvaryingly annoying and tiresome as a drum synthesizer. I assumed it was a woodpecker but the culprit was their equally beautiful and irritating cousin, the Northern flicker. By Saturday he had drilled eight holes, some more than an inch in diameter, into the newly insulated side of the house, and pulled a bushel of insulation – cotton candy-looking stuff – out of the wall and dropped it to the ground where it formed pink drifts.

The landlord restuffed the insulation, bolted steel strips over the larger holes, filled others with Bondo and hung shiny bands of foil from the eaves (I thought of Hopkins: “like shining from shook foil”). Sunday morning the bird was back, gleefully hammering. The landlord returned, resealed the holes, and sanded and painted them. I hung aluminum pie tins, which I had to remove Sunday night, while already in my pajamas, because they clattered too loudly in the wind and kept my wife awake. By Monday afternoon, no sign of the flicker, visual or auditory. Perhaps he has moved on to pinker pastures or succumbed to the carcinogenic qualities of home insulation.

I’m not alone in my flicker-related peevishness. The bird drove even Thoreau, arch-bird lover, to deride the “flicker cackle” and moved him to at least contemplate violence. This he wrote in his journal for May 3, 1852:

“Plenty of birds in the woods this morning. The huckleberry birds and the chickadees are as numerous, if not as loud, as any. The flicker taps a dead tree as some one uses a knocker on a door in the village street. In his note he begins low, rising higher and higher. Is it a wood pewee or a vireo that I hear, something like pewi pewit chowy chow? It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I am willing to omit the gun.”

`More Beautiful for Being Small and Unpretending'

Conversation with my brother reliably turns to the creek, fields and woods behind the house where we grew up in a suburb on the west side of Cleveland, and where he and his family now live. On Sunday, the temperature there was in the fifties, three months of snow had melted and the crocuses had come and gone. Ken was sitting in the backyard describing the bird life to me when I remembered a patch of pale-blue wildflowers that returned every spring in the grass near a crab apple tree in what we called the Second Field. Appropriately, they were forget-me-nots, small flowers about the color of a chicory blossom or a cloudless sky in June.

When I asked about them Ken said, “They’re long gone.” I knew the natural cycle in the 40 years since I lived there had transformed the fields into groves of softwoods, and the poplars and locusts had been succeeded by oaks and ashes, but the absence of the forget-me-nots still came as a sickening surprise.

The genus Myosotis consists of about 50 species, 11 of them in North America, known familiarly as forget-me-nots. Myosotis is from the Greek for “mouse’s ear,” which the plant’s leaf is said to resemble. Classical scholar Henry Thoreau knew the etymology. Witness his journal entry from June 12, 1852:

“Marsh speedwell, Veronica scultellata, lilac tinted, rather pretty. The mouse-ear forget-me-not, Myosotis laxa, has now extended its racemes (?) very much, and hangs over the edge of the brook. It is one of the most interesting minute flowers. It is the more beautiful for being small and unpretending; even flowers must be modest.”

Perhaps it’s the modesty of the forget-me-not, its uncomplicated beauty, that impressed itself on my memory: “More beautiful for being small and unpretending.” And for being unforgotten.

`Our Task Is Not to Solve Enigmas'

“There were many good secondhand bookshops, especially along the quays. One book barrow on a corner of Henry Street was extraordinary. Most of the books the barrow carried would now be described as modern classics. How the unusual Mr. Kelly acquired them we never asked. We assumed he stole them. Books were discussed and argued about around the barrow...”

That the remainder of this paragraph is devoted to the sexual and other moral machinations of Mr. Kelly – “…he observed no contradiction once his self-interest or pleasure came into play.” – will surprise no reader of John McGahern, a writer for whom the bookish and human are mortally twinned. Every workmanlike writer of fiction, especially short fiction, is eventually likened to Chekhov, seldom with justice. McGahern is indelibly his own man, writing a pared-down lapidary prose while extending the line of luminous realism pioneered by Chekhov and refined by the Joyce of Dubliners and the Leopold Bloom-centered heart of Ulysses. He is the less comic cousin of our own J.F. Powers. Roger Boylan nicely writes in tribute to McGahern, who died almost four years ago, on March 30, 2006:

“He never overwhelmed; he was unsparingly spare, even austere, more of a word-painter, adding a daub here, wiping away a stroke there, than a word-musician orchestrating vast themes. His language is luminous; he was a Vermeer of words.”

Of all the painters I know, the Dutch master is closest in spirit to the Irish master. In Still Life with a Bridle, Zbigniew Herbert includes “Letter,” an essay in the form of an imaginary letter written by Vermeer to his friend Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the Delft lens grinder, inventor of the microscope and pioneering microbiologist. Herbert has Vermeer question van Leeuwenhoek’s reductive approach to science, verging on pure materialism. The painter writes:

“Our task is not to solve enigmas, but to be aware of them, to bow our heads before them and also to prepare the eyes for never-ending delight and wonder.”

This is close to McGahern’s vision, though the “never-ending delight and wonder” may seem less in evidence. A writer of sophisticated realism renders enigmas – that is, human hearts and minds – without presuming to solve them like differential equations. They are not reducible to simpler forms.

The passage quoted at the top of this post is from McGahern’s memoir All Will Be Well (2005). “The Barrow” would make a fine name for a book-minded blog, and you have my permission to use it.

[On the back cover of the first American edition of Flann O’Brien’s final novel The Dalkey Archive (1965), under the rubric “If you enjoy Irish fiction, we recommend:” are listed books by Walter Macken, Mary Lavin, Michael McLaverty – and John McGahern, his first novel, The Barracks (1963).]

`A Stunned Repose'

With my lunch on Friday I packed Geoffrey Hill’s New and Collected Poems 1952-1992, intending to read it sequentially starting with his first collection, For the Unfallen (1959). Hill, like Eliot, J.V. Cunningham and a few other modern poets, I reread frequently, always rewarded, never tired of the familiar words. Among the most straightforward and least tortured of Hill’s poems, though it deals with a grotesque death, is “In Memory of Jane Fraser”:

“When snow like sheep lay in the fold
And wind went begging at each door,
And the far hills were blue with cold,
And a cloud shroud lay on the moor,

“She kept the siege. And every day
We watched her brooding over death
Like a strong bird above its prey.
The room filled with the kettle's breath.

“Damp curtains glued against the pane
Sealed time away. Her body froze
As if to freeze us all, and chain
Creation to a stunned repose.”

“She died before the world could stir.
In March the ice unloosed the brook
And water ruffled the sun's hair.
Dead cones upon the alder shook.”

For me, Jane Fraser’s death always seems Christ-like, a sacrifice: “Her body froze / As if to freeze us all, and chain / Creation to a stunned repose.” “Stunned” implies there’s an involuntary component in her death, as though it came as a surprise like a blow to the head. “Repose” connotes rest, but rest with dignity, not sloppy or vulgar, the look undertakers seek to lend to the faces and bodies of their subjects. “Stunned repose” suggests the dual nature of mortality – thoroughly expected yet unimaginable.

What do I find when I come home after school? Stephen Pentz’s post on poems by R.S. Thomas and James Reeves, both citing “repose.” Like me, Stephen likes the word and the idea, both rare today. The kids I work with seldom know repose. They are most of the time agitated, distracted or in pain, but so are most of the otherwise healthy people I know. Repose is not a medicated state. Nor is it purely willed. Rather – and I experience repose only occasionally, though I recognize it in others – it suggests an indirect achievement, a byproduct of right living and grace, certainly a clean conscience. Samuel Johnson suggests as much in “London” (1738):

“Grant me, kind Heaven, to find some happier Place,
Where Honesty and Sense are no Disgrace;
Some pleasing Bank where verdant Osiers play,
Some peaceful Vale with Nature's Paintings gay;
Where once the harass'd Briton found Repose,
And safe in Poverty defy'd his Foes;
Some secret Cell, ye Pow'rs, indulgent give.”

`From Splendour Into Drab'

Winter evenings, in defiance of the cold and only while lights burn in the kitchen, moths bounce against the sliding glass doors. Most are buff-colored, some gray, and all are small and shaped like triangles on the glass. They recall the final sentences of Bend Sinister: “Twang. A good night for mothing,” which Nabokov claimed a printer mistakenly typeset as “A good night for nothing,” quite another thing.

As a boy I tried collecting only butterflies but the big gaudy moths of Northern Ohio – cecropia, luna, Polyphemus -- proved seductive. Now my tastes have narrowed and matured, and I’m strictly a butterfly man. They are emblems of gratuitous beauty, reliably lifting me on the drabbest day. On Thursday, after three days of sunshine, I spied my first of the season, flitting from a flowering cherry in the neighbor’s yard, over his dormant vegetable garden, across the wooden fence that separates our properties, across the flowerless lawn and over another, taller fence, and gone. I never saw him light and he remained in my sight for less than a minute. He was a skipper, I’m certain, possibly a dreamy duskywing (lovely name), gray and tweedy-looking, conservative like an old-fashioned banker.

I read Charles Tomlinson’s “The Butterflies,” which taught me something obvious about them and their bittersweet beauty: It’s all in the wings. Picture a wingless butterfly and what do you see? A worm with legs, an anorexic lizard, a maggot with a three-segment body. Tomlinson notes “It is beauty of wings that reconciles us / To these spindles, angles, these inhuman heads.” A giant butterfly, despite its wings, would be monstrous, though none is carnivorous. Here’s the poem (from Annunciations, 1989, and Selected Poems, 1997):

“They cover the tree and twitch their coloured capes,
On thin legs, stalking delicately across
The blossoms breathing nectar at them;
Hang upside-down like bats,
Like wobbling fans, stepping, tipping,
Tipsily absorbed in what they seek and suck.
There is a bark-like darkness
Of patterned wrinkling as though of wood
As wings shut against each other.
Folded upon itself, a black
Cut-out has quit the dance;
One opens, closes from splendour into drab,
Intent antennae preceding its advance
Over a floor of flowers. Their skeletons
Are all outside – fine nervures
Tracing the fourfold wings like leaves;
Their mouths are for biting with – they breathe
Through stigmata that only a lens can reach:
The faceted eyes, a multiplying glass
Whose intricacies only a glass can teach,
See us as shadows if they see at all.
It is beauty of wings that reconciles us
To these spindles, angles, these inhuman heads
Dipping and dipping as they sip.
The dancer’s tread, the turn, the pirouette
Come of a choreography not ours,
Velvets shaken out over flowers and flowers
That under a thousand (can they be felt as) feet
Dreamlessly nod in a vegetative sleep.”

Tomlinson is exacting in his description of the unnamed species. He specifies no colors, size or habitat, yet clearly he pays attention to butterflies. “Nervures” are “stiff chitinous rods that form the supporting framework of an insect's wing.” Such precision is rooted in close observation, a gift shared by the best artists and scientists. In his essay “Louis Agassiz” (in The Geography of the Imagination), Guy Davenport writes:

“Scientific language (which, like poetry, is cared for word by word) is as interesting to the artist as the language of fine prose and poetry to the scientist.”

`A Shouting Flower'

Of all common wildflowers I’m fondest of dandelions, and the largest specimens I’ve ever seen grow in the Pacific Northwest. Stalks measure 15 inches or more and the sprawl of one plant’s serrated leaves on the ground can exceed two feet. Their beauty is the principle reason for my admiration, abetted by the repugnance they inspire in consumers of lawn care products. Dandelions are the crows of the herbaceous realm, humble, scorned and implacable.

Wednesday afternoon I accompanied my younger sons and other Cub Scouts as they distributed food-drive announcements. The boys walked door to door hanging flyers on doorknobs while I stood at the curb monitoring traffic and dogs. We’ll return Saturday to collect the hoped-for canned goods. I had plenty of time to observe the modest suburban neighborhood we were canvassing, including a grand old cedar that must have measured 12 feet in diameter at the base, but dandelions stole its glory.

At one street corner, in the crack where the pavement ought to meet the curb, I counted 14 of the yellow-flowered weeds. Carefully I pulled the largest from the gap in the cement, and its tap root was at least a foot long. Taraxacum officinale is an ideal creation – beautiful, adaptable, tough and edible. Emily Dickinson admired its brazen optimism in a poem from 1881:

“The Dandelion's pallid tube
Astonishes the Grass,
And Winter instantly becomes
An infinite Alas –

“The tube uplifts a signal Bud
And then a shouting Flower, --
The Proclamation of the Suns
That sepulture is o'er.”

Has any poet ever chosen unexpected words with more precision and aptness? “Astonishes,” “An infinite Alas,” “shouting,” “sepulture.” That last is tricky, easily mistaken for “sepulcher,” a close synonym. But “sepulture” also means burial or internment (from the Latin sepultus, “to bury”), Dickinson’s usage. Her line carries a hint of resurrection, of triumph over dormancy and winter’s false death. Even a weed is sometimes more than a weed.

`Never Heard of the Lad'

A learned former colleague in journalism, knowing of my interest in Keats, Thoreau and literary biography in general, has asked to contribute a guest post. This is a first at Anecdotal Evidence, so please give a warm St. Patrick’s Day welcome to Myles na Gopaleen:

“It is a considerable time since I related an anecdote from the life of John Keats. Here is one at last.

“When the poet was eighteen he decided to make a journey to the American continent to pick up some of the potatoes that even the brazenest fraud can garner by lecture-touring. In Boston he met a pretty lady, fat and forty, but beautiful with the bloom of cash and collateral. The poet instantly laid siege, praised her expensive fancy hats, and called her his Dark Lady of the Bonnets. She accepted his advances after a fashion, but made no move to buy him a pair-in-hand, and would not consent to meet him anywhere but in the local park by day. Desperate with greed, he decided to stake all on a bogus offer of marriage. The lady’s reply was peculiar.

“`Have you ever read the works of our great writer, Thoreau?’ she asked.

“`Never heard of the lad,’ Keats said.

“`Well, you are hearing about him now,’ said the lady. `I happen to be his wife.’

“`So what?’ asked the poet.

“`How could I marry you if I already have a husband?’

“`Easy,’ replied the great wit. `Why not get a divorce a mensa et thoreau?’”

[My friend is a product of the old Irish educational system, schooled in at least three languages. It might be useful for American readers without benefit of Latin to know that “a mensa et thoro” (literally, “from board and bed”) signifies a legal separation.]

After proofreading today’s post and finding himself pleased with the results, Myles has asked if he might contribute another Keats-related anecdote, and I have gratefully agreed:

“In New York’s swank Manhattan lives blond, smiling, plump James Keats, descendant of the famous poet John. No lover of poetry, James Keats is director of the million-dollar dairy combine Manhattan Cheeses and ranked Number Three in the Gallup quiz to find America’s Ten Ablest Executives. James lives quietly with slim dark attractive wife, Anna, knows all there is about cheeses, likes a joke like his distinguished forbear. Wife Anna likes to tell of the time he brought her to see the Louis-Baer fight.

“`He just sat there roaring “Camembert! Camembert!”’

“If the joke doesn’t interest you, do you derive amusement from this funny way of writing English? It is very smart and up-to-date. It was invented by America’s slick glossy Time and copied by hacks in every land. For two pins I will write like that every day, in Irish as well as English. Because that sort of writing is taut, meaningful, hard, sinewy, compact, newsy, factual, muscular, meaty, smart, modern, brittle, chromium, bright, flexible, omnispectric.”

[The Best of Myles, Walker and Company, 1968. Myles died on April Fools’ Day 1966.]

`First Known When Lost'

Let’s welcome Stephen Pentz, proprietor of First Known When Lost, to the civilized regions of the blogscape. In his first week on the job Pentz has cited, among others, Czeslaw Milosz, Leopardi, William Cowper and Samuel Johnson. You’ll note that Milosz, born in 1911, is the junior partner in this firm. The name of Pentz’s blog is the title of a poem by Edward Thomas (born 1878, died 1917 in the Battle of Arras):

“I never had noticed it until
‘Twas gone,---the narrow copse
Where now the woodman lops
The last of the willows with his bill.

“It was not more than a hedge o'ergrown.
One meadow's breadth away
I passed it day by day.
Now the soil is bare as a bone,

“And black betwixt two meadows green,
Though fresh-cut faggot ends
Of hazel made some amends
With a gleam as if flowers they had been.

“Strange it could have hidden so near!
And now I see as I look
That the small winding brook,
A tributary's tributary rises there.”

I’m reminded of Samuel Johnson’s poem “In Rivum a Mola Stoana Lichfieldiae diffuentem,” translated by David Ferry as “The Lesson,” which I wrote about here. In Pentz I detect, as Michael Oakeshott phrases it, “a disposition appropriate to a man who is acutely aware of having something to lose which he has learned to care for; a man in some degree rich in opportunities for enjoyment, but not so rich that he can afford to be indifferent to loss.” In short, a grownup, the rarest commodity in the bloggish realm. Thanks to Mike Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti – another grownup -- for alerting me to Pentz’s arrival.

One quibble: In his second post Pentz writes, “Things are pretty simple-minded around here.” You are mistaken, Mr. Pentz. Simple is seldom simple-minded. Johnson lauded the “simplicity of grandeur which fills the imagination.”

`Its Pretty Little Blue-Veined Face'

Nige made the sun rise a second time Sunday with this dazzling photo of Veronica, known on both sides of the Atlantic as speedwell. Like their lepidopteral cognates, the blues, distinctions among species are too fine for non-specialists to discern, but the genus Veronica has been a reliable sight in the five states where I’ve lived. Thoreau knew them in Massachusetts (probably Veronica serpyllifolia), and readers impatient for spring’s arrival will welcome this passage from the journal of May 27, 1852:

“The fruit of the sweet flag is now just fit to eat, and reminds me of childhood, -- the critchicrotches. They would help sustain a famished traveler. The inmost tender leaf, also, near the base, is quite palatable, as children know. I love it well as muskrats (?). The smooth speedwell, the minute pale-blue striated flower by the roadsides and in the short sod of fields, common now. The sweetness which appears to be wafted from the meadow…is indescribably captivating, Sabean odors, such as voyageurs tell of when approaching a coast.”

“Critchicrotches?” Thoreau means the fruit of the sweet flag or calamus, Acorus calamus, a common wetlands plant resembling cattail, much prized by Walt Whitman for obvious reasons. In 1860, the poet added the “Calamus Poems” to the third edition of Leaves of Grass. In 1882, Whitman’s friend, the naturalist John Burroughs, visited Thomas Carlyle’s grave in Scotland, picked from it “a spray of speedwell” and mailed it Whitman with a letter.

One of Thoreau’s most rhapsodic celebrations of wildflowers can be found in his journal entry for May 8, 1854. Read the whole thing but here’s a sample:

“Lee’s Cliff is now a perfect natural rockery for flowers. There gray cliffs and scattered rocks, with upright faces below, reflect the heat like a hothouse. The ground is whitened with the little white cymes of the saxifrage, now shot up to six or eight inches, and more flower-like dangling scarlet columbines are seen against the gray rocks, and here and there the earth is spotted with yellow crowfoots and a few early cinquefoils…To which is to be added the scent of bruised catnep [sic] and the greenness produced by many other forward herbs, and all resounding with the hum of insects. And all this while flowers are rare elsewhere. It is as if you had taken a step suddenly a month forward, or had entered a greenhouse. The rummy scent of the different cherries is remarkable. The Veronica serpyllifolia out, say yesterday. Not observed unless looking for it, like an infant’s hood, -- its pretty little blue-veined face.”

`And Never Will'

“There is much about this I have never spoken about, and never will.”

These poignantly revealing words, eloquent in their refusal of eloquence, were spoken by Anthony Hecht in the book-length interview Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy (Between the Lines, 1999). Hecht recounts atrocities he witnessed while serving with the U.S. 97th Infantry Division in Europe during World War II. He was among the troops in April 1945 who liberated the extermination and slave-labor camp at Flossenburg, an annex of Buchenwald, where 500 prisoners a day were dying of typhus. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, unknown to Hecht at the time, had been hanged there for “antiwar activity” a few days earlier. (His final words, as the executioners took him away: “This is the end – for me, the beginning of life.”) Hecht says:

“The place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake shrieking.”

Hecht’s poems famously describe gruesome events – decapitation, flaying, live burials, gas chambers – and yet never shriek. He was a master of prosody and form. The grimness of his subjects is matched by the elegance of his formal designs. A shriek – or howl – is never poetry. Consider this opening stanza of a poem Hecht published in The New Statesman in 1982:

“The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal
Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk
Down the fern trail. It doesn't matter where to,
Just so you're weeks and worlds away from home,
And among midsummer hills have set up camp
In the deep bronze glories of declining day.”

The scene is golden and elegiac. Only rereading discloses covert suggestions of horrors to come – “weeks and worlds away from home,” even “camp.” This is from “The Book of Yolek,” (collected in The Transparent Man, 1990). The poem is a rigorously fashioned sestina, the most difficult-to-write of forms. We marvel at the poem’s formal perfection as the horror – the murder of a 5-year-old boy by the Nazis -- approaches.

I reread Hecht’s poem after an anonymous reader sent me an “antiwar” poem that includes the lines “waterboard is meant to sound / like a seaside game.”

`Painful and Blinding Fits'

A reader with good taste and a long memory writes:

“My calendar tells me that At Swim-Two-Birds was published by Longmans, Green & Co. on March 13, 1939.”

And a fine antidote it is to next Wednesday’s wallow in green beer and “Danny Boy” (penned by an Englishman, Frederick Weatherly). My fondest St. Patrick’s Day memory combines the squalor of one with the sentimentality of the other. On that morning in 1982 I was riding the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan when three college-age boys entered the car, reeling and bellowing “From glen to glen, and down the mountain side.”

It was 8:30 and the boys were still marginally ambulatory. They sat and sang until one leaned into the aisle and released a long, pressurized spew of green. They laughed and resumed the song until another replicated, in his own lap, the first boy’s hydraulics demonstration. The third held his drink but the green puddles spread down the aisle and under the feet of noncelebrating commuters. By the time I left the train they had resumed singing. Flann O’Brien, of course, was way ahead of them in his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds:

“Notwithstanding this eulogy, I soon found that the mass of plain porter bears an unsatisfactory relation to its toxic content and I became subsequently addicted to brown stout in bottle, a drink which still remains the one that I prefer the most despite the painful and blinding fits of vomiting which a plurality of bottles has often induced in me.”

At Swim-Two-Birds, the funniest novel in the language, sold 244 copies before the London warehouse holding the first press run was destroyed in the blitz.

[Read Roger Boylan’s appreciation of the great man, “We Laughed, We Cried.”]

`Like All the Other Poetries'

“Zagajewski was seventeen when he met his first famous poet, Zbigniew Herbert, who paid a visit to his school. A fellow native of Lvov, Herbert lived in Warsaw and spent much time abroad. `Now I tend to mythologize it, but I was deeply impressed,’ Zagajewski told me. Herbert autographed the book that the youth brought him, signing it to his `colleague A.Z.’ Flattered as he was, Zagajewski says he knew he `was hopelessly underequipped in terms of writing.’ But he did now have a poet to model himself on.”

This is from a profile by Arthur Lubow of the Polish poet and essayist Adam Zagajewski, “The Last of His Kind,” in the spring issue of The Threepenny Review. It confirms what I know of the decency and generosity of Herbert, who inhabited an indecent and ungenerous time and place, and among whose poetic peers are Eliot, Auden and Cavafy. Lubow’s essay, as its title suggests, is valedictory in tone. He admires Zagajewski’s poetry and the politics forced on him and his nation by decades of Stalinism. In part, I dissent: I find much of his verse formless and sentimental, and draw more sustenance from his prose, but I admire his engagement with the world and reverence for the poetic tradition (Polish, European, Western) in which he works.

What’s disturbing in Lubow’s essay is the news that young Polish poets, like many in the West, have renounced tradition and given up the will to write well. Instead, they ape the fashionably self-indulgent, easy-to-write non-poetry of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, among others. Lubow quotes one of Zagajewski’s friends, the American poet Edward Hirsch:

“`I think Adam is the end of the line,’ Hirsch says. `The thing that I first found exciting about Polish poetry doesn’t interest these younger poets. They don’t like its seriousness, its commitment, its engagement with the world. They prefer a poetry that courts meaninglessness, that plays with language, that denies significance, that upsets consciousness. Polish poetry is now like all the other poetries.’”

How sad that Western-style poetic mediocrity has helped undo what decades of enforced Zhdanovian mediocrity could not. It takes a gift to write well but it also takes audacity, which today means dedication to truth and the glories of creation. I'm reading Emerson again and find in “Europe and European Books,” an essay published in 1843, an image that serves as a prescient profile of rare poets like Zbigniew Herbert:

“The poet, like the electric rod, must reach from a point nearer to the sky than all surrounding objects down to the earth, and down to the dark wet soil, or neither is of use. The poet must not only converse with pure thought, but he must demonstrate it almost to the senses. His words must be pictures, his verses must be spheres and cubes, to be seen, and smelled and handled. His fable must be a good story, and its meaning must hold as pure truth.”

In an untitled poem collected in Inscription (1969) Herbert writes (in Alissa Valles’ translation):

“what will poems become
when the breath departs
and the grace of speaking
is rejected”

`His Force and Terror Inundate Every Word'

“Talent alone cannot make a writer.”

Who can argue with this? Thomas Wolfe had talent. So did David Foster Wallace. So does a happy minority in the blogosphere. But Wolfe and Wallace were not writers nor are most bloggers. Talent is rare; discipline, rigorous self-criticism and linguistic prodigality, rarer.

“There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise; holding things because they are things.”

So, writing is more than a reliable reservoir of pretty words or fogbank of generalities. A forceful dedication to truth, the writer suggests, is the genuine writer’s sustaining engine.

“If he cannot rightly express himself to-day, the same things subsist, and will open themselves to-morrow. There lies the burden on his mind--the burden of truth to be declared,--more or less understood; and it constitutes his business and calling in the world, to see those facts through, and to make them known.”

This is encouraging. Perceiving and understanding truth, and learning to express it, perhaps understanding it by learning to express it, is a writer’s work-in-progress. We are unfinished. Work remains. Back to the keyboard.

“What signifies that he trips and stammers; that his voice is harsh or hissing; that this method or his tropes are inadequate? That message will find method and imagery, articulation and melody. Though he were dumb, it would speak. If not,--if there be no such God's word in the man,--what care we how adroit, how fluent, how brilliant he is?”

The writer’s optimism grows a little overbearing and Yoda-like, though I admire “trips and stammers” and “”harsh or hissing.” On to the next paragraph:

“It makes a great difference to the force of any sentence, whether there be a man behind it, or no. In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form; only some irresponsible shadow; oftener some monied corporation, or some dangler, who hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But, through every clause and part of speech of a right book, I meet the eyes of the most determined of men: his force and terror inundate every word: the commas and dashes are alive; so that the writing is athletic and nimble,--can go far and live long.”

Ghosts, stylized ectoplasm, emit what passes for writing in most learned journals and newspapers. But our writer transcends his funk and rouses himself to laud “the most determined of men: his force and terror inundate every word” – that is, the rarest of creatures in the writerly jungle, the real writer.

Our man here is Emerson in “Goethe; or, the Writer” (Representative Men, 1850). I thought of the essay while reading Lincoln’s Men: The President and His Private Secretaries (2009) by Daniel Mark Epstein. He refers in passing to a “curious lecture,” “On Discoveries and Inventions,” Lincoln wrote and delivered in 1858 “under the influence of Walt Whitman.” I had never read it before. Here’s the complete paragraph from which Epstein excerpts:

“Writing -- the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye -- is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination which necessarily underlies the most crude and general conception of it -- great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space; and great, not only in its direct benefits, but greatest help, to all other inventions. Suppose the art, with all conception of it, were this day lost to the world, how long, think you, would it be, before even Young America could get up the letter A. with any adequate notion of using it to advantage? The precise period at which writing was invented, is not known; but it certainly was as early as the time of Moses; from which we may safely infer that its inventors were very old fogies.”

`The Shakers for Us!'

During quiet time in the classroom a teacher played this video of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. The title, from Hart Crane’s The Bridge (from “The Dance” in the poem’s second section, “Powhatan’s Daughter”), was suggested to the composer by choreographer Martha Graham, who had commissioned the ballet score:

“O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge;
Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends
And northward reaches in that violet wedge
Of Adirondacks!”

Appalachian Spring is one of the glories of American music and Copland borrowed one of its themes from the lovely Shaker song “Simple Gifts,” written in 1848 by Elder Joseph Brackett. His lyrics, about holy simplicity, are a study in simplicity:

“'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.”

As the Blakean words suggest, the song was probably sung by Shakers as they danced. For the kids I sang the first four lines, all I could remember, along with Copland’s score. I’ve always admired the Shakers, and for almost 20 years lived in the Capital District of New York, near the epicenter of the earliest Shaker settlements in America. Mother Ann Lee, the sect’s English-born founder, was buried a mile from the newspaper where I worked for more than eight years.

Ronald Knox considers the Shakers in “Some Vagaries of Modern Revivalism,” the second-to-last chapter in Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (1950). After looking at other American religious and utopian communities of the 18th and 19th centuries he writes:

“A child, I think, can be happy anywhere; but the grown-ups – did the privileges of communal marriage compensate them, in fact, for such a drab existence? [The Shakers, in contrast, were doctrinally celibate.] There was more fun to be had, you feel, in the cloistered shades of Mount Lebanon. The Shakers for us!”

Twenty years ago I wrote a long newspaper story about the Darrow School, an exclusive private high school on the grounds of the Shaker settlement at Mount Lebanon, N.Y., the largest in the United States (from 1787 to 1947). It’s the site of the Great Stone Barn – 50 feet wide, four stories tall and almost 200 feet long. Guy Davenport admired Shaker aesthetics and was fond of citing Mother Ann Lee’s dictum that “every force evolves a form” (the title of his 1987 essay collection). He noted that it “sounds like Heraclitus or Darwin,” and went on to say:

“A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.”

`That Docile Edict of the Spring'

Through the classroom windows we watched snow fall on the flowering cherry trees and red-budded maples down the hill. Brilliant sunshine added to the March dissonance. One kid wanted to build a snowman and a teacher called the phenomenon “snizzle” = “snow” + “drizzle.”

She was inspired to bring out a jar of something I had never seen before – Super Snow. It starts out like sugar but when you add water it looks remarkably like semi-melted snow and feels like nano-sized caviar. The stuff is manufactured by DuneCraft, a company in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, a suburb on the east side of my hometown, Cleveland, and once home to Hart Crane. He lived there briefly with his father in 1929 while working on the “Quaker Hill” section of The Bridge. The opening stanza of that fourth section of the poem feels like part of Monday’s happy convergence of events:

“Perspective never withers from their eyes;
They keep that docile edict of the Spring
That blends March with August Antarctic skies:
These are but cows that see no other thing
Than grass and snow, and their own inner being
Through the rich halo that they do not trouble
Even to cast upon the seasons fleeting
Though they should thin and die on last year’s stubble.”

Late in that section, Crane refers to “Emily" and “Isadora” – Emily Dickinson and Isadora Duncan, who provide the epigraphs for “Quaker Hill.” The Dickinson lines are the first two from this poem, which also feels fitting for a day when nature behaves contrary to expectations:

“The Gentian weaves her fringes—
The Maple's loom is red—
My departing blossoms
Obviate parade.

“A brief, but patient illness—
An hour to prepare,
And one below this morning
Is where the angels are—
It was a short procession,
The Bobolink was there—
An aged Bee addressed us—
And then we knelt in prayer—
We trust that she was willing—
We ask that we may be.
Summer—Sister—Seraph!
Let us go with thee!

“In the name of the Bee—
And of the Butterfly—
And of the Breeze—
Amen!”

`More Curious to Me Than You Suppose'

Go here to watch a beautiful little film, “The Sandpit” by Sam O’Hare, devoted to a day in the life of New York City. It’s a “motion picture” consisting of more than 35,000 still photographs. O’Hare says he shot the film in five days and two evenings last August and that he was inspired by the tedious art-house favorite Koyaanisqatsi -- another case of the artist transcending the pretentious limitations of his conscious inspiration. To his credit, the soundtrack includes not a single repetitive note by Philip Glass.

I like the unsentimental everydayness of the scenes O’Hare chooses to depict – ferries and helicopters on the water front, heavy equipment at the title work site (which reminded me of Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit), pedestrians and traffic, a baseball field. If there’s a suggestion of 9/11 in the film, it’s left admirably unstated. The first artist I thought of in connection with O’Hare’s film was Grant Wood, many of whose paintings share the aerial perspective O’Hare adopts. His scenes have a gentle pathos about them, like a meticulously rendered HO-scale cityscape – a sprawling urban scene shot in miniature. Other New York City artists come to mind – Edith Wharton, A.J. Liebling, Daniel Fuchs – but the spirit who hovers around O’Hare’s portrait of city life is Walt Whitman’s. Think of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:

“On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me,
and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.”

And think especially of “Song of Myself.” This passage is from section 8 of that poem:

“The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls,
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous'd mobs,
The flap of the curtain'd litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd,
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes…”

Pnin in California

Dave Lull passes along this heartening Los Angeles Times story about the release of 80 endangered Palos Verdes blue butterflies into the wild. The insects were bred in captivity. Like many of the blues, this species keeps to a narrow menu -- locoweed and deerweed. The writer notes:

“The instant they were let out of their clear plastic cups, many of the butterflies opted first for food. They fluttered to the nearest sunflower shrub, uncurled their tiny snouts and started sucking up nectar from the yellow blossoms.”

Naturally I thought of that glorious passage from Pnin I’ve cited before:

“A score of small butterflies, all of one kind, were settled on a damp patch of sand, their wings erect and closed, showing their pale undersides with dark dots and tiny orange-rimmed peacock spots along the hindwing margins; one of Pnin’s shed rubbers disturbed some of them and, revealing the celestial hue of their upper surface, they fluttered around like blue snowflakes before settling again.”

`A Particular Respect'

There’s a charm to informed inconsistency. It’s the happy opposite of system-building and the theory-driven will to Ordnung! we see in the young, angry and drifting. The painter Fairfield Porter once wrote in a review: “Discipline is sweetened by compromise” – anathema to critics who confuse opinions with scientific laws.

On Friday, David Myers posted an amusing and useful “10 rules for criticism,” including “...give up the dream of a system altogether. There is no general system or theory of literature; there are only particular texts, with their own particular system of law, which demand a particular respect.”

Uncommon common sense. How many critics work from a stance of “respect?” I would make one addition to David’s list:

(11.) Enjoy what you’re doing – the reading and the writing – and communicate that enjoyment to your reader. Even a thoroughgoing demolition job ought to be a pleasure.

On the same page as the sentence quoted above from Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism 1935-1975, Porter writes:

“The value of conservatism is in direct relation to the sophistication of the artist.”

`The Dark Exactitude That Light Delivered'

Locals warn me to be grateful for the sunshine but not to mistake it for true spring. Forsythia, cherries, tulips and daffodils have blossomed. From a distance budding maples are smears of rufous-gray, and moss and grass are voluptuously green. The earth smells of minerals and rot. They warn a frost is certain to wither flowers and drive away migrating birds but I’m not listening.

Friday morning, for a lesson in crosswalk protocol, we escorted nine special-education students, three of them in wheelchairs, on an hour-long walk through the neighborhood. Some removed jackets in the sunshine. Some shouted at escaping squirrels and cats lolling on sun-warm pavement. Despite the calendar I sensed that all of us sensed spring, the season that brings out the proselytizer in some of us: “Do you feel the sun on your face? Can you smell the cedars?” But you have to be there and you must be amenable. In “Words” (from Moly, 1971) Thom Gunn recognizes the futility of efforts to capture such experiences in language:

“The shadow of a pine-branch quivered
On a sunlit bank of pale unflowering weed.
I watched, more solid by the pine,
The dark exactitude that light delivered,
And, from obsession, or from greed,
Laboured to make it mine.

“In looking for the words, I found
Bright tendrils, round which that sharp outline faltered:
Limber detail, no bloom disclosed.
I was still separate on the shadow's ground
But, charged with growth, was being altered,
Composing uncomposed.”

The best we can hope for in our “obsession” or “greed” is to encourage in others a comparable attentiveness to the glory of creation: “Look around. Take it in.” Some writers are greedy for the joy of the world and the joy of sharing it with others, and I remembered a passage in my favorite column by Theodore Dalrymple, “Reasons to be cheerful,” published more than six years ago in The Spectator:

“Thanks to the fact that I write, my life is satisfactory: I can inhabit gloom and live in joy. When something unpleasant happens to me, provided only that is potentially of literary use, my first thought is ‘How best can I describe this?’ I thereby distance myself from my own displeasure or irritation. As I tell my patients, much to their surprise — for it is not a fashionable view — it is far more important to be able to lose yourself than to find yourself.”

`Every Person Is a Book'

Because of a congenital deformation on chromosome 14 my new student, age 18, will never speak or read. She walks haltingly and must wear diapers. She’s tube-fed. New situations and people baffle and frighten her. She cries and stops crying abruptly. She suffers frequent seizures. She weighs 83 pounds and looks half her age. Each time she steps from one floor or ground covering to another – say, tile to carpeting, or concrete to grass -- she squats and runs her hands over it, palms down, fingers rippling. The act, repeated dozens of times daily, recalls a blind person reading Braille.

Her hearing and vision are unimpaired but her primary sense is tactile. She loves texture – the stitching on a football, the raised lettering on any plastic toy, Velcro and canvas, the metal spiral on a notebook. “Reading” such objects is her most intense pleasure. She reads things most of us never notice or deem readable and our job, performed haltingly and blindly, is to read her, to come to some understanding of her ways. She makes me think of the comedian Jackie Mason, of all people. In his profile of Mason, collected in New York Voices: Fourteen Portraits (University Press of Mississippi, 2006), Whitney Balliett quotes him as saying:

“I don’t get too self-involved. I never sit around immersed in myself. I like to go to the coffee shops and watch people. Every person is a book. The whole world is a performance.”

D.G. Myers at Jewish Ideas Daily

D.G. Myers, proprietor of The Commonplace Blog, is “surveying the history of American Jewish fiction, one book at a time, from the last decade of the nineteenth century to the present” at Jewish Ideas Daily. Go here for the complete list. Some titles are familiar, most are not, but I always welcome new books even if they’re old, particularly when they come recommended by so discerning a reader as David. First he looked at Other Things Being Equal (1892) by Emma Wolf. The second essay in the series, on Ezra Brudno's Fugitive (1904), appears today. Here’s David's conclusion:

“In short, Brudno seems to have conceived his book as a piece of propaganda for cultural assimilation. But in undermining its thesis with starkly contrary evidence, as well as in its ease with Jewish religion, Jewish sources, and Jewish idiom, the novel’s effect outruns its conception and establishes its lasting importance as a precursor to such better known (and more accomplished) works as The Rise of David Levinsky and Call It Sleep. Not incidentally, The Fugitive also serves as a useful reminder of a perennially relevant fact: Jews in the United States have never been terrorized by blood libel or pogrom.”

Mention of Henry Roth’s great novel is enough to goad any serious reader into at least auditing Prof. Myers’ seminar.

`A Cloudy World of Inference'

A reader in Dallas writes:

“In the last couple of weeks I've read The Man Who Loved Children and Stoner. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way indeed. I enjoyed both of them - thank you for mentioning them favourably on your blog; hence my knowledge of their existence - but was especially taken with Stoner. It began slowly, and Stoner himself seemed at first rather a dim character. The narrative became increasingly powerful as the story progressed, however, and Stoner himself came into sharper and sharper relief as his life moved along its course.”

The paraphrase of Anna Karenina’s opening is apt. The story writer Peter Taylor titled one of his collections Happy Families Are All Alike, and we might wonder where literature would be without unhappy home life (and its bastard spawn, adultery). In Christina Stead’s novel we meet monstrous parents (the father in particular is odious); in John Williams’, a memorably awful wife and mother. At the root of such misery is pathological selfishness, the sort that hardly acknowledges the existence of others, even children and spouses.

Turning diseased selves into literary art is tricky, especially when the impulse is autobiographical and produces what Anthony Hecht in his Paris Review interview calls “cheap feelings of self-pity.” The interviewer observes to Hecht that “bits of your early life are used to reveal a dark, abiding sadness,” and the poet agrees, reluctantly. His poems are never given to cheesy, vulgar confessions but Hecht admits that

“…some instinct in which I had complete trust told me that the interrelationships and interdependencies of my immediate family were draining and dangerous to me …. And a child who is told he is not good at anything is likely sooner or later to give in to a mood of defeat. And this was pretty much the situation in which I found myself…”

In “Apprehensions” (from Millions of Strange Shadows, 1977, and Collected Earlier Poems, 1990), Hecht turns unhappy childhood memories into Jamesian art. Read these lines, especially the first, and remember What Maisie Knew:

“I moved in a cloudy world of inference
Where the most solid object was a toy
Rake that my governess had used to beat me.”

Quietly, without insistence, childhood twines with the ominous events unfolding at the same time in Europe (Hecht was born in 1923). Of the dreams he had of his German governess, even after she left the family, Hecht writes:

“We two would meet in a darkened living room
Between the lines of advancing allied troops
In the Wagnerian twilight of the Reich.
She would be seated by a table, reading
Under a lamp-shade of the finest parchment.
She would look up and say, `I always knew
That you would come to me, that you’d come home.’
I would read over her shoulder, `In der Heimat,
Im Heimatland, da gibts ein Wiedersehen.’
An old song of comparative innocence,
Until one learns to read between the lines.”

A rough translation of the German quoted by Hecht: “At home, at home, there’s a reunion in the home.”

`Not to Work But to Be Worked Upon'

Nige’s mother, age 88, suffered a double stroke Sunday and remains, at last report, “in a very bad way.” Our thoughts turn to her and her family. The day she was stricken, Feb. 28, was the 477th anniversary of Montaigne’s birth. I reread the great “Apology to Raymond Sebond,” an essay I first read thirty-seven summers ago in Chambéry, 400 miles east of Montaigne’s native Bordeaux. I also reread Emerson’s “Montaigne; or, the Skeptic” (from Representative Men, 1850). His final sentences seem pertinent:

“Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal Cause:-

“`If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea.’”

Nige and I share admiration for his country’s Geoffrey Hill. I offer his “Offertorium: December 2002,” from Without Title (2006):

“For rain-sprigged yew trees, blockish as they guard
admonitory sparse berries, atrorubent
stone holt of darkness, no, of claustral light:
for late distortions lodged by first mistakes;
for all departing, as our selves, from time;
for random justice held with things half-known,
with restitution if things come to that.”

`My Life is Here'

My former boss at Rice University in Houston writes:

“There’s a flock of cedar waxwings outside my window, and watching them, I thought of the day they came through a few years ago. I hope everything is going well for you…

“For now, I’m enjoying watching the birds. They’re all sitting at the tops of two trees in the quad now, all facing in the same direction. I love the way they fly in with so much activity, then roost and sit so still (ah—it’s raining, that’s probably why they’re roosting).”

It was Ann, three years ago this week, who called me to her office when a cedar waxwing crashed into her window. Monday’s e-mail distilled most of what I miss about the four years we lived in Texas – my boss, the university library and the birds. I had a job interview Monday afternoon – me on one side of a conference table, seven people on the other side asking questions. Among the first:

“I see from your resume you worked at Rice University. Are you, ah, ah -- a Texan?”

I assured them I was not, which prompted audible relief from the committee, but I felt a pang of guilt. I’ve come to resent kneejerk anti-Texas bias. For many in the North, the Lone Star State is a sort of home-grown Polish joke. In Texas I befriended a lot of good people, my younger sons learned to read, I started this blog and read a lot of good books. Among the latter was J.A. Baker’s The Hill of Summer. Its final sentences, a sort of valedictory, express my sentiments for Texas, a possible new job and cedar waxwings:

“My life is here, where soon the larks will sing again, and there is a hawk above. One wishes only to go forward, deeper into the summer land, journeying from lark-song to lark-song, passing through the dark realms of the owls, the fox-holdings, the badger-shires, out into the brilliant winter domain, the sea-bleak world of the hawks.”

`This Canting World'

We can be grateful that every age has its literary palliatives. They are writers who cure nothing and don’t presume to do so, whose words ease our fevers, who do no harm but perform the thankless service of soothing distress with measured doses of wit and good humor. One of these bookish practitioners is Roger Boylan – novelist, essayist, critic, memoirist, blogger, Asclepian man of letters.

For optimum healing, proceed to Boylan’s first novel, Killoyle (Dalkey Archive Press, 1997). Then head to his web site, click on his blog, The Snug, and on the Essays link. Boylan is a rare writer who remains genuinely independent, free of schools (in both senses) and other entrapments. He makes room for the right people – Sterne, Nabokov, Flann O’Brien, Beckett – but ignores the facile diagnosis of “metafictionist” or, praise be, “postmodernist.” He’s big enough to embrace with comparable enthusiasm the likes of Solzhenitsyn, V.S. Naipaul, Jane Austen and John McGahern. Boylan is the opposite of provincial. What is the word? Capacious, catholic, cosmopolitan? He reads the book at hand and weighs its merits. Consider this from his review on Sunday of The Abyss of Human Illusion, a posthumous novel by Gilbert Sorrentino:

“With his experimental `metafiction’ — spoofing literary conventions, leaving sentences dangling, writing an entire novel (`Gold Fools’) in the form of questions — he seemed to place himself squarely in the postmodernist camp; but his ear for American, especially New York, speech, and his attention to the spirit of place and compassion for the average loser, all defined him as a kindred spirit of such great American humorists as Mark Twain and Peter De Vries. His true masters, however, were the black-humored Irish, notably Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien.”

Only a confident reader and critic will publicly announce admiration for such a mixed crowd. Boylan would, I presume, hold with Tristram Shandy:

“Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world, — though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst, — the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!”