`Bursting the Petty Bonds of Art'

Today is Memorial Day, a holiday enacted in the shell-shocked wake of the Civil War, and we also observe the one hundred ninety-first birthday of Walt Whitman, the great poet of that conflict and tireless caregiver in Union field hospitals. The first-hand experience of so much suffering and death transformed the poet and his work, though who wouldn't be transformed and remain human? Though one hundred fifty-six poems had already appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman described the war as “pivotal” to his life’s book. In a letter written March 19-20, 1863, to his friends Nathaniel Bloom and John F. S. Gray, and with another two years of war to follow, Whitman says:

“These Hospitals, so different from all others—these thousands, and tens and twenties of thousands of American young men, badly wounded, all sorts of wounds, operated on, pallid with diarrhea, languishing, dying with fever, pneumonia, &c. open a new world somehow to me, giving closer insights, new things, exploring deeper mines than any yet, showing our humanity, (I sometimes put myself in fancy in the cot, with typhoid, or under the knife,) tried by terrible, fearfulness tests, probed deepest, the living soul's, the body's tragedies, bursting the petty bonds of art.”

A moving admission for a poet. It’s characteristic of Whitman to project himself imaginatively, “in fancy,” into the lives of sick and wounded soldiers and in doing so, “bursting the petty bonds of art.” His imagination was absorbent and empathetic, characterized by what he would have called, using a phrenological term, “adhesiveness.” He viewed the sick and wounded not as conventional heroes but fellow humans, in no way alien to him, and this radical democratizing of imagination called for a new art. These sentences immediately follow the ones above in the letter to Bloom and Gray:

“To these, what are your dramas and poems, even the oldest and the tearfulest? Not old Greek mighty ones, where man contends with fate, (and always yields)—not Virgil showing Dante on and on among the agonized & damned, approach what here I see and take a part in.”

Never one to feign humility, Whitman elbows aside Homer, the Greek dramatists, Virgil and Dante, and usurps their artistic and national primacies with his witness of the American Civil War. Walker Percy’s description of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative as “an American Iliad” echoes with Whitman’s boast. Today, to honor Whitman and the war dead, read some of his war poems, letters and miscellaneous prose, and recall what he said to his friend Horace Traubel in 1888 (from Walt Whitman in Camden, Vol. 2), four years before his death:

“The merit of the war pieces is not chiefly literary—if they have merit, it is chiefly human; it is a presence-statement reduced to its last simplicity—sometimes a mere recital of names, dates, incidents –no dress put on anywhere to complicate and beautify it.”

[Coming in this decade are the bicentennials of three writers who collectively define what America and American literature can be: Thoreau, born July 12, 1817; Whitman, May 31, 1819; Melville, Aug. 1, 1819. The truest way to celebrate this constellation of birthdays is to read and reread their work, and aspire to write with their audacious American eccentricity.]

`A Kind of Gradual Accumulation of Information'

One hundred fifty-eighty years ago today, a Sunday, Thoreau writes in his journal:

“Now is the summer come. A breezy, washing day. A day for shadows, even of moving clouds, over fields in which the grass is beginning to wave. Senecio in bloom. A bird’s nest in grass, with coffee-colored eggs. Cinquefoil and houstonia cover the ground, mixed with grass and contrasting with each other. Strong lights and shades now.”

Senecio – you’ve seen them, part of the daisy family, ragworts and groundsels, with ragged yellow flowers. So drably beautiful we walk past them and register, if anything, “yellow,” as though they were dandelions. Paul Klee painted “Senecio” in 1922, annus mirabilis.

Cinquefoil – “five-leaf,” a flower in the genus Potentilla, of the rose family. Buttery yellow blossoms. I see them everywhere, even in our front lawn – a pleasing contrast against the richly green moss, of which we have more than grass.

Houstonia – bluets, probably Houstonia caerulea, known as Quaker ladies (note the shape and color of the petals).

“Coffee-colored eggs” – lovely, though we know Thoreau disapproved of the life-enhancing beverage. “I believe that water,” he writes in Walden, “is the only drink for a wise man. Wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them!” A sublime writer but a misguided man.

Thoreau’s passage amounts to an Imagist poem. One wonders if he wrote it in a hurry, prose shorthand, or if the effect of discrete snapshots is intentional, the product of craft. The parts become a whole. The sentences impress because we have seen such scenes and ignored them; also, because Thoreau suggests we can never see or know or understand enough. In a July 1962 interview in the wake of Pale Fire, Nabokov says:

“Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects -- that machine, there, for instance. It's a complete ghost to me--I don't understand a thing about it and, well, it's a mystery to me, as much of a mystery as it would be to Lord Byron.”

Nabokov doesn't say reality is nonexistent. Rather, it is “a kind of gradual accumulation of information.” It will always outpace our knowledge and imagination. The more we know, the more there is, the more there is to know.

`I Borrowed Several Books'

Reading The Life of Charles Lamb by E.V. Lucas, first published in two volumes in 1905, rekindles my love for the essayist, for his life and work, and for the example he sets as man and writer. Those of us not indiscriminately social, not small talkers or flannel-mouths, will envy Lamb’s easy grace at conversation and his gift for befriending such world-class wits and talkers as Coleridge and Hazlitt. Lamb and his circle were not afraid to talk about books with enthusiasm. They read voraciously and with discrimination, and possessed vast memories. Books were food and drink, consumed for sustenance and pleasure not show. Lucas quotes Crabb Robinson’s diary entry for Jan. 10, 1824:

“I looked over Lamb’s library in part. He has the finest collection of shabby books I ever saw; such a number of first-rate works of genius, but filthy copies, which a delicate man would really hesitate touching, is I think nowhere to be found. I borrowed several books.”

The last sentence, amusingly understated, cinches my point. Lamb & Co. were readers not collectors or otherwise dilettantes. Lamb confirms as much in one of his Essays of Elia, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading”:

“Thomson’s Seasons, again, looks best (I maintain it) a little torn, and dog’s-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond Russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old `Circulating Library' Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield! How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that have turned over their pages with delight!—of the lone sempstress, whom they may have cheered (milliner, or harder-working mantua-maker) after her long day’s needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their enchanting contents! Who would have them a whit less soiled? What better condition could we desire to see them in?”

Typical of Lamb to laud not an aristocrat but a “lone sempstress” for her late-night devotion to reading. More than three years ago I reported an anecdote about Lamb recounted by Hazlitt in “Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen.” While playing a parlor game, Lamb says of all English authors he would most like to meet Fulke Greville and Sir Thomas Browne – superb, provocative choices. Who can imagine having such a conversation today? Seldom is book talk devoted to books. Instead it turns to money and reputation – in short, vanity – and quickly devolves into self-centered argument. Hazlitt, a chronic arguer, writes in “On the Conversation of Authors”:

“The fault of literary conversation in general is its too great tenaciousness. It fastens upon a subject, and will not let it go. It resembles a battle rather than a skirmish, and makes a toil of a pleasure.”

Hazlitt might be writing about the bookish corner of the blogosphere.

`The Art and Wisdom Rare'

We visited the school library to collect books for reading aloud in class. Most of our kids are non-verbal so you might argue that a careful perusal of the shelves is a waste of time, except that I do most of the reading and have a good sense of what holds their attention – strongly rhythmic poetry and anything allowing me to improvise sound effects and funny voices. Most of the stridently message-laden kiddie lit favored by right-minded teachers and librarians is a flop with this crowd.

A quick browse through the 800s turned up a treasure – Walter de la Mare’s time-tested anthology Come Hither (1923), a 1966 hardcover reprint by Knopf that looks pleasingly beaten-up. Of course: Almost 800 pages of English poetry, most of it formal, much of it appropriate for a classroom of special-education students who know little about poetry but know what they like. Back in class I first trolled de la Mare’s chapter devoted to “Beasts of the Field: Fowls of the Air.” At reading time I started with Tennyson’s “Song – The Owl,” which de la Mare titles “When Cats Run Home” after its first line, followed by another Tennyson (no one like him, the Stan Kenton of Victorian poetry, for swing), “The Eagle.” I don’t know much about Ralph Hodgson but I threw in “Stupidity Street” for the sake of its title (I know people who live there).

I used my plummiest voice, milking the vowels and rolling the R’s, and the staff laughed and the kids listened, so I took a chance, leafed forward to de la Mare’s “Summer: Greenwood: Solitude” chapter and read aloud William Drummond ‘s “The Book” (elsewhere titled “Human Folly”):

“Of this fair volume which we World do name
If we the sheets and leaves could turn with care,
Of him who it corrects, and did it frame,
We clear might read the art and wisdom rare.

“Find out His power which wildest powers doth tame,
His providence extending everywhere,
His justice which proud rebels doth not spare
In every page, no period of the same.

“But silly we, like foolish children, rest
Well pleased with colour'd vellum, leaves of gold,
Fair dangling ribbands, leaving what is best,
On the great Writer's sense ne'er taking hold;

“Or if by chance we stay our minds on aught,
It is some picture on the margin wrought.”

Drummond (1585-1649) was a younger Scottish contemporary of Shakespeare but this sonnet has more of Spenser about it. I like the sustained bookish conceit coupled with conversational ease -- “But silly we, like foolish children…” De la Mare writes in his notes:

“This poem, I think, carries with it the thought that in study of that great book, that fair volume called the World, there is no full stop, no limit, pause, conclusion. Like bees, with their nectar and honeycomb, man stores up his knowledge and experience in books. These and his houses outlast him; the things he makes; and here and there a famous or happy or tragic name is for a while remembered. Else, we are given our brief chequered busy lives – then vanish away, seeming but restless phantoms in Time’s panoramic dream.”

I’d lost my audience, of course, and somebody had to go to the bathroom but there's always another day at school. One who reads a poem aloud is also its listener, like singers who know their lyrics from the inside and deliver them with relaxed conviction. I had my chance to "read the art and wisdom rare."

`Buried Above Ground'

My student lives in an eight-unit group home two miles from our high school in a wooded neighborhood of ranch-style homes with SUVs parked in most of the driveways. The house is almost conspicuously inconspicuous, shrouded in cedars and firs. The school nurse and I drove there in the rain for a meeting with the staff, a nurse and someone from the state.

Five hours earlier my student had suffered another seizure, eight days after the last, and had not come to school. When I saw her mid-morning Wednesday she was seated in a recliner, legs crossed, watching television. She saw me, smiled and wagged her arms, heaved herself from the chair and ran in my direction. She embraces no one voluntarily, not even her parents, but the recognition was gratifying. This was the first time I'd seen her away from school.

The house was clean, a conventional middle-class dwelling but deceptively spacious, organized around a common room and two long hallways. Her room looked like one in a college dormitory but neater. No Dickensian horrors here, no squalor or neglect. The staff appeared hardworking not hard-hearted, working stiffs and professionals alike. I couldn’t hope for better in my dotage.

Last weekend the generously learned Stephen Pentz sent me back to William Cowper (1731-1800), whose work is always on my desk. Today we would say Cowper had a severe affective disorder. He suffered periodic depressions and tried suicide at least three times but experienced spells of elevated recovery which he judged miraculous, evidence of God’s grace. Despite these respites, Cowper wrote in “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity” that he was “Buried above ground.”

My student, almost nineteen years old, will never speak let alone write poetry, and her diagnosis, ring 14 chromosome disorder, is far more severely disabling than even the violent roller coaster Cowper rode most of his life. In an Oct. 12, 1785 letter to his cousin Harriet Hesketh he writes:

“Dejection of Spirits, which I suppose may have prevented many a man from becoming an Author, made me one. I find constant employment necessary, and therefore take care to be constantly employ'd. Manual occupations do not engage the mind sufficiently, as I know by experience, having tried many. But Composition, especially of verse, absorbs it wholly ...”

Optimism about my student is fatuous and I even try to steel myself against hope. I dislike happy talk and pity is self-congratulatory. It keeps you from the more important work of making sure a kid is safe and reasonably happy. Like Cowper, I find Composition useful in sorting out these things.

`Ironical Pleasure in the Spectacle of Human Folly'

The least we expect of a writer is that he write well and possess a well-exercised sense of humor of either species -- raucous bawdy or rarified wit. David Cecil, rare for a critic or biographer, was amply gifted with both virtues and so was one of his favorite subjects, Max Beerbohm. Early in Max: A Biography, Cecil says of “the child Max’s daydream world”:

“It was a comic world. Here once more it differs from that of most imaginative children. Children often have a sense of fun, but it is very rare for them to take a predominantly humorous view of life, still less an ironical pleasure in the spectacle of human folly. If humour comes into their daydreams at all, it is as comic relief to thrills and romance. None of these generalizations applied to Max. He was the most humorous of all the humorous Beerbohms; born liking jokes of all kinds, broad and subtle, practical and intellectual, hoaxes and grotesques and puns and comic songs.”

Cecil documents Beerbohm’s undiminished love of comedy and child-like (not childish) capacity for enjoyment and unsullied happiness throughout his eighty-three years. These qualities, as Cecil suggests, are not unrelated, though which comes first is difficult to say. Describing Beerbohm the septuagenarian, Cecil writes:

“His favourite activity was still making jokes. Of all sorts too; he still enjoyed practical jokes. Even when he was over fifty he was not above making an apple-pie bed [in the U.S. we call it “short-sheeting” though I prefer the English term] for his wife’s young niece…A visitor inspecting the book-shelves would be struck by unexpected titles: The Love Poems of Herbert Spenser, for instance, or a slender volume named The Complete Works of Arnold Bennett. Close examination revealed them both to be wooden dummies.”

Beerbohm’s omnidirectional sense of humor, paired with superb prose and a little boy’s ability to enjoy himself, reminds me of no other writer so much as Dr. Johnson, who once described the eighteenth century’s mania for writing as “the epidemical conspiracy for the destruction of paper.” The key text here is Chapter 27, “Humor and Wit,” of W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson. Bate writes:

“…there is the sheer range and variety of his humor – from the playful to the aggressive, from the naïve to the intellectually complicated, and from his unexpected talent for buffoonery and mimicry to almost every kind of wit. In other words, it is not a special or minor aspect of his personality but something interwoven with it at almost every point.”

Not surprisingly, Johnson was a great enthusiasm of Beerbohm’s. His account of Johnson laughing in “Laughter” is brief but epical. Cecil writes:

“Max also projected an essay on Johnson. He had come deeply to revere and delight in his personality; and now thought Boswell’s Life the best book of any kind in the English language.”

`A Sort of Spiritual Bank Balance'

We celebrated the twenty-first birthday of a student in our special-education class and though he had little idea what was going on except more noise and fuss than usual, he enjoyed himself in a manly fashion. After lunch his mother brought cupcakes, apple juice and noisemakers, and I fit three of the latter in my mouth at once and blew a satisfyingly flatulent sound which made him laugh. His mother lit a candle shaped like a “21” and he almost burned his finger but we sang “Happy Birthday” and cheered and I remembered my twenty-first.

Rather, I remember not remembering most of it. I got off work at five o’clock, visited the liquor store where I was disappointed because they didn’t ask to check my newly legitimate ID, and the rest is a vacuum. Legally, I was no longer a child though I remained one for another seven or eight years, when adulthood belatedly began. I’m reading Lord David Cecil’s Max: A Biography (1965) and came upon this passage about the enviably happy Max Beerbohm:

“Along with his prolonged childhood Max kept the child’s confidence in the possibility of happiness. Unlike so many sensitive artists, he suffered no premature disillusionment, was not brought up against the brutality and ugliness of life before he was old enough to stand it. In consequence, he did not suffer from any of those inner wounds and hidden resentments that lead people unhappy in childhood to set up later as outsiders and rebels. Thirteen years of happiness had given him a basic faith in life which was to be like a sort of spiritual bank balance on which he could always draw for reassurance when things went wrong.”

My path was different but eventually almost as confident and self-reliant as Beerbohm’s, at least as described by Cecil. One of Beerbohm’s attractions as a writer is his good-natured equanimity, his sunniness and bonhomie, qualities I don’t always possess but always admire in others. After reading Monday’s post a rabbi among my readers wrote:

“Ah, you have touched on a deep enthusiasm here. So besotted am I with Max that the also incomparable Joseph Epstein has done me the honor, when breaking up part of his library, of dispensing a bit of old Max to me (a book of his illustrations.)

“`A Clergyman’ -- what a great essay. His really was a rare spirit; a steady state one, writing at 25 (in the theater book) as he did in And Even Now which is my favorite of his books.

“I am not a collector. I am a reader, and happy to give a book away if I know I'll never read it again. But the one extravagance in my reading life was paying 1200 for a signed set of Beerbohm over a decade ago.”

Another sunny spirit, one able to appreciate even a flatulent noisemaker like me.

`One Large and Luminous Whole'

A few weeks ago in an otherwise undistinguished anthology of essays I came upon and reread Max Beerbohm’s “Laughter” (collected in And Even Now, 1920), and afterwards asked myself: Why don’t I read Beerbohm more often? I suspect it’s the old taint of “minor” coupled with that other kiss of death, “dandyish.” Both accusations hold enough truth to be acknowledged but neither is fatal. Beerbohm wrote better than most of his critics, he is reliably funny and his prose is precise and often unexpectedly serious. In “Laughter” he writes with rare critical humility:

“Many years ago I wrote an essay in which I poured scorn on the fun purveyed in music halls, and on the great public for which that fun was quite good enough. I take that callow scorn back. I fancy that the fun itself was better than it seemed to me, and might not have displeased me if it had been wafted to me in private, in presence of a few friends. A public crowd, because of a lack of broad impersonal humanity in me, rather insulates than absorbs me. Amidst the guffaws of a thousand strangers I become unnaturally grave. If these people were the entertainment, and I the audience, I should be sympathetic enough. But to be one of them is a position that drives me spiritually aloof.”

The best essays are seldom banally autobiographical but could never be mistaken for the work of anyone but their author. An indelibly strong, intelligent, prickly sensibility suffuses every line. Beerbohm begins by admitting an earlier critical error and explaining it as a foible of his character, an odd one for a theater critic to claim, which makes the admission even more interesting and worth paying attention to. “A lack of broad personal humanity” is oxymoronic and priceless. I confess to sharing Beerbohm’s distaste for the mob, humanity en masse, which may explain my lifelong spiritual aloofness from rock concerts, political rallies, sporting events, any gathering in which individual personality evaporates and is replaced by the collective will of an ant colony.

So I’ve been wandering among Beerbohm’s collected works, enjoying myself exceedingly, even reading Around Theatres, five hundred eighty-four pages of theater criticism, written between 1898 and 1910, and published in one volume in 1954, two years before Beerbohm’s death at age eighty-three. Beerbohm was twenty-five when he succeeded George Bernard Shaw as the dramatic critic for the Saturday Review in London. I’m an ignoramus about the stage and have seen relatively few productions, in part for the reasons enumerated above by Beerbohm, though I’ve read and reread Shakespeare, Chekhov & Co. The reviews are studded with memorable jewels and Beerbohm (and presumably his editors) are not averse to digressions.

In 1909, Beerbohm reviewed The High Bid, a three-act, post-Guy Domville play by Henry James. Beerbohm first met James in 1896 at a party hosted by Edmund Gosse. James at the time sported a beard, prompting Beerbohm to say he “looked like a Russian Grand Duke of the better type.” His review could not be published today because Beerbohm devotes pages to extolling James’ famed “late manner” in fiction, and returns to his now forgotten play (by us, by the critic) only in the final paragraph. The effect is quite wonderful:

“And you need search heart and brain for epithets to describe the later James – the James who has patiently evolved a method of fiction entirely new, entirely his own, a method that will probably perish with him, since none but he, one thinks, could handle it; that amazing method by which a novel competes not with other novels, but with life itself; making people known to us as we grow to know them in real life, by hints, by glimpses, here a little and there a little, leaving us always guessing and wondering, till, in the fulness of time, all these scraps of revelation gradually resolve themselves into one large and luminous whole, just as in real life. To read (say), `The Golden Bowl’ or `The Wings of the Dove’ is like taking a long walk uphill, panting and perspiring and almost of a mind to turn back, until, when you look back and down, the country is magically expanded beneath your gaze, as you never saw it yet; so that you toil on gladly up the heights, for the larger prospects that will be waiting for you.”

I’ve always fancied James’ late novels as an ineffable string of Alps, beautiful and not accessible to every reader. Those who reach the summits where the air is thin and the view unsurpassed will recognize in Beerbohm an unexpected comrade in mountaineering. No dandy writes like that, and so much for “minor.”

`Our Knowledge of Things Would Perish'

Today we celebrate the 303rd birthday of the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, father of taxonomy and the scientist most responsible for devising binomial nomenclature, the lingua franca, or lingua Latina, of modern biology. Appropriately for a man whose legacy is as much linguistic as scientific, there’s a story behind his name. Here’s how Heinz Goerke tells it in Linnaeus (1973, translated from the German by Denver Lindley):

“Nils, the father [of the future botanist, and a minister], was remarkably sensitive to the beauties of nature, especially of vegetation. The name Linnaeus, which he adopted when he began his theological studies, is symbolic of this. A tall linden tree that stood close to his father farmhouse prompted him to call himself Linnaeus, from the tree’s Swedish name, lind. A generation earlier, according to tradition, the same tree had inspired one of his mother’s brothers to choose the family name Tiliander, from the Latin name [tilia] for the linden tree.”

Thoreau approved of the custom, as he indicates in his journal entry for Nov. 15, 1851:

“I am pleased to read in Stoever’s Life of Linnaeus (Trapp’s translation) that his father, being the first learned man of his family, changed his family name and borrowed that of Linnaeus (Linden-tree-man) from a lofty linden tree which stood near his native place,--`a custom,’ he says, `not unfrequent in Sweden, to take fresh appellations from natural objects.’ What more fit than that the advent of a new man into a family should acquire for it, and transmit to his posterity, a new patronymic? Such a custom suggests, if it does not argue, an unabated vigor in the race, relating it to those primitive times when men did, indeed, acquire a name as memorable and distinct as their characters.”

On July 1, 2000, I planted a cherry laurel tree (Prunus laurocerasus) in front of our house, where two lindens already grew, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. My middle son was born that day and laurel suggests victory and Stan Laurel, my favorite actor. The fruit is inedible but the blossoms are lovely and I’ve always admired the smooth, reddish bark. Had my son been born female we might have named him Cherry. Nearby I planted a rose for my wife. My mother’s middle name was Rose and the cherry is a member of the Rosaceae or rose family. “Kurp” is a Polish name, shortened from Kurpiewski, and in Latvian means, pleasingly, “whither” (As when Hamlet asks: “Whither wilt thou lead me?") Linnaeus wrote: “nomina si pereunt, perit et cognitio rereum” [“Without names, our knowledge of things would perish.”]

`Idle Rumination, Daydreaming'

Two years ago when Kay Ryan was named U.S. Poet Laureate she told an interviewer:

“I've always taught part time, to a great extent, so that I could have most of my life for wool-gathering. You have to do it about 100 pounds of wool-gathering for an ounce of really good language. So it's very inefficient, and it takes an awful lot of time…”

This week as she prepared to step down from her laureateship Ryan told another interviewer:

“I plan to do a lot more bicycle riding. I got a beautiful new bike and am looking forward to riding it more. I also want to do more woolgathering—idle rumination, daydreaming—which is absolutely essential for poetry, and which I can do on the bicycle.”

Some of my favorite writers are woolgatherers and I’m not surprised Ryan savors the word. “Woolgathering” entered English in the mid-sixteenth century meaning “indulging in wandering fancies and purposeless thinking.” It was a vestige of the pastoral past and literally meant “gathering fragments of wool torn from sheep by bushes.” Such literary woolgatherers as Swift and Lamb (naturally) use it and Sterne and Coleridge embody it. Johnson defines it in his Dictionary as “an old expression coupled with wits, and applied to an inattentive, careless person,” and cites Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy: “Their wits are a wool-gathering.”

To woolgather is diverting and productive. I do it throughout the day, which explains why I’m seldom bored and never feel as though I’ve wasted my time. Woolgathering is what a writer does, except when he's writing. Here’s Ryan’s “A Hundred Bolts of Satin” (from Say Uncle, 2000) a poem about the virtues of woolgathering:

"All you
have to lose
is one
connection
and the mind
uncouples
all the way back.
It seems
to have been
a train.
There seems
to have been
a track.
The things
that you
unpack
from the
abandoned cars
cannot sustain
life: a crate of
tractor axles,
for example,
a dozen dozen
clasp knives,
a hundred
bolts of satin—
perhaps you
specialized
more than
you imagined.”

`A Disease that Afflicts Amateurs'

An artist is a maker; he or she makes art, whether sonnets or sonatas. The only “lifestyle” an artist practices that distinguishes him from others is making art. You cannot identify artists, whether in Paris, Houston or Bellevue, Wa., by haircut, eyeglasses, clothing, vocabulary, politics, bank account or home address. Cosmetologists, painters of murals on vans, cooks, graffiti-vandals, “web designers,” body builders, orthodontists and tattoo-makers are not artists. An artist is more likely to look bourgeois than Bohemian, more like Wallace Stevens than Rob Zombie. An artist spends more time making art than talking about it or convincing you he is an artist.

A poster hanging in the hall near the art rooms in a public high school assures us: “Everyone’s an artist. Join us.” Accompanying the invitation is a photograph of a smiling young couple – she with dreadlocks, he with a shaved head – exposing improbably large teeth. G.K. Chesterton writes in Heretics (1905):

“The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men not having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being. It is healthful to every sane man to utter the art within him; it is essential to every sane man to get rid of the art within him at all costs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily, or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament. Thus, the very great artists are able to be ordinary men – men like Shakespeare or Browning. There are many real tragedies of the artistic temperament, tragedies of vanity or violence or fear. But the great tragedy of the artistic temperament is that it cannot produce any art.”

The artistic temperament, as diagnosed by Chesterton, sounds like a bad case of constipation.

`Where the Meanings Are'

Anthony Hecht, the foremost American poet of his day, died of lymphoma, age eighty-one, on Oct. 20, 2004. Less than two weeks later The New Yorker published his final poem, “Motes,” and here is one of its five octaves:

“They wandered out of gloom
Into some golden shaft
Of late-afternoon light,
Those tiny filaments
That filled me with delight,
Lifted by an updraft
Or viewless influence
There in the living room.”

Eight lines of iambic trimeter, one sinuous sentence with the concision of poetry and naturalness of good prose. The first echo, at least to old-fashioned common readers, is the title, Matthew 7:3: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” Even dust is not negligible. It glows – one thinks of light bulb filaments – and they fill the speaker with delight (from the Latin delectare, “to allure, delight,” spelled in English “delite” until the sixteenth century, “when it changed under influence of light, flight, etc.”) Then, of course, Emily Dickinson:

“There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

“Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

“None may teach it anything,
'Tis the seal, despair,--
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.”

“When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 't is like the distance
On the look of death.”

Her poem has trained us, I suppose, to attend to afternoon sunlight, those slowly swirling bars of glowing dust. It “oppresses” though “When it comes, the landscape listens...” The last word is “death.” Hecht, a newly dead poet, watches motes in the “living room.” In his final collection, The Darkness and the Light (2001), Hecht includes a poem with the Dickinsonian title “A Certain Slant”:

“Etched on the windows were barbarous thistles of frost,
Edged everywhere in that tame winter sunlight
With pavé diamonds and fine prickles of ice
Through which a shaft of the late afternoon
Entered our room to entertain the sway
And float of motes, like tiny aqueous lives.
Then glanced off the silver teapot, raising stains
Of snailing gold upcast across the ceiling,
And bathed itself at least in the slop bucket
Where other aqueous lives, equally slow,
Turned in their sad, involuntary courses.
Swiveled in eel-green broth. Who could have known
Of any elsewhere? Even of out-of-doors,
Where the stacked firewood gleamed in drapes of glaze
And blinded the sun itself with jubilant theft,
The smooth cool plunder of celestial fire.”

In a note to “A Certain Slant,” Hecht writes “The poem had its origin in a sentence in a story called `The Boys,’ by Anton Chekhov.” I wrote about the story, titled “Boys” in Constance Garnett’s translation, here.

`Time, the Literalist'

A new word, at least to me: “henge.” It turns up in two poems by Charles Tomlinson, “Hay” and “Harvest.” In the first he writes of “A henge of hay-bales to confuse the track / Of time…” The first and last lines of the second poem are identical: “After the hay was baled and stacked in henges.”

First I thought of Stonehenge, without knowing the etymology but seeing how box-shaped bales of hay might have suggested to Tomlinson the stone slabs on the Salisbury Plain. The etymology of “Stonehenge” is contested (“hanging stones,” it seems) but thanks to something lexicographers call “back-formation,” it contributed “henge” to the language, defined in Webster’s Third as “a circular Bronze Age structure (as of wood) with a surrounding bank and ditch found in England.” The word signifies not stones but mounded earth and ditch. See here and here. On the cover of the American edition of Neal Ascherson’s Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland is a beautiful aerial photograph of a henge. In his book Ascherson consistently refers to “henge monuments.”

One summer about 15 years ago, inspired by Verlyn Klinkenborg’s first book, Making Hay, I decided to write a feature about the cutting of hay and spent several days with a farmer and his family in Saratoga County, N.Y., on their dairy farm in the foothills of the Adirondacks. From the northern end of their land I could see the Green Mountains of Vermont to the east; to the south, the Catskills. The work was hot and dirty but the smells were intoxicating and this city boy learned new words: “tedding” and “silage.” Here is Tomlinson’s “Hay”:

“The air at evening thickens with a scent
That walls exude and dreams turn lavish on –
Dark incense of a solar sacrament
Where, laid in swathes, the field-silk dulls and dries
To contour out the land’s declivities
With parallels of grass, sweet avenues:
Scent hangs perpetual above the changes,
As when the hay is turned and we must lose
This clarity of sweeps and terraces
Until the bales space out the slopes again
Like scattered megaliths. Each year the men
Pile them up close before they build the stack,
Leaving against the sky, as night comes on,
A henge of hay-bales to confuse the track
Of time, and out of which the smoking dews
Draw odours solid as the huge deception.”

Tomlinson likens the annual ritual of cutting hay to the ancient ruins of England, as though the Neolithic and Bronze Age builders have been reborn as farmers. The work of both is inarguably exhausting, and his description of the “huge deception” is matter-of-fact, not derogatory. Our affinities with ancestors may be unconscious but are less attenuated than we imagine. Here is Tomlinson’s “Harvest”:

“After the hay was baled and stacked in henges,
We walked through the circles in the moonlit field:
The moon was hidden from us by the ranges
Of hills that enclosed the meadows hay had filled.

“But its light lay one suffusing undertone
That drew out the day and changed the pace of time:
It slowed to the pulse of our passing feet upon
Gleanings the baler had left on the ground to rhyme

“With the colour of the silhouettes that arose,
Dark like the guardians of a frontier strayed across,
Into this in-between of time composed --
Sentries of Avalon, these megaliths of grass.

“Yet it was time that brought us to this place,
Time that had ripened the grasses harvested here:
Time will tell us tomorrow that we paced
Last night in a field that is no longer there.

“And yet it was. And time, the literalist,
The sense and the scent of it woven in time's changes,
Cannot put by that sweetness, that persistence
After the hay was baled and stacked in henges.”

Again, hints of ancient ritual and the juggernaut of time. Close to the earth, even to stone, we are closest to time and its inexorable harvest.

`Good Fortune Is a Reassuring Ruse'

Perhaps the rest of the world already knows the life and work of Catherine Davis (1924-2002), a poet who studied with J.V. Cunningham and Yvor Winters, but I first saw her name over the weekend when a reader suggested I read her villanelle “After a Time”:

“After a time, all losses are the same.
One more thing lost is one thing less to lose;
And we go stripped at last the way we came.

“Though we shall probe, time and again, our shame,
Who lack the wit to keep or to refuse,
After a time, all losses are the same.

“No wit, no luck can beat a losing game;
Good fortune is a reassuring ruse:
And we all go stripped the way we came.

“Rage as we will for what we think to claim,
Nothing so much as this bare thought subdues:
After a time, all losses are the same.

“The sense of treachery—the want, the blame—
Goes in the end, whether or not we choose,
And we go stripped at last the way we came.

“So we, who would go raging, will go tame
When what we have can no longer use:
After a time, all losses are the same;
And we go stripped at last the way we came.”

The same grim matter written in free verse, without the ameliorating discipline of meter and rhyme, might read like a teenager’s diary. Form is freeing, not constricting. The art is not in the emotion but in its elegant containment. Anyone can feel; only poets craft.

What little I know about Davis’ life suggests she learned first-hand that “Good fortune is a reassuring ruse.” Perhaps her poem is an oblique retort (“So we, who would go raging, will go tame…”) to Dylan Thomas’ blustering, booze-bloated “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” I hear echoes of King Lear, as when Edgar says “A most poor man, made tame to fortune’s blows, / Who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows, / Am pregnant to good pity.”

The reader who sent me Davis’ poem added, “I thought of your student when I saw this.” I know what she means and appreciate the thought but it doesn’t quite apply. My student and the other kids in our classroom nurse no aggrievement (“the sense of treachery”), no notion of loss or incapacity. When they suffer – and not all suffer -- there is no “great rage,” as the doctor says of Lear at the end of the play. My student, most days smiling and good-natured, cried much of Monday. I fretted but the women in the room assured me the cause of her unhappiness was merely menstrual.

`I Read for Aesthetic Pleasure'

My kids were splashing in the pool at the YMCA and I was seated on a poolside bench reading when a seven-year-old girl holding a clipboard walked up to me and asked, “May I read you a poem?” “Of course,” I said, and she recited “Sand” by Meish Goldish, mostly from memory but with peeks at the printed-out poem on her clipboard. The rhythm is both sing-song and irregular, and swimming pool acoustics are less than optimal, but she belted out the final stanza with a gesture I associate with hoisting a beer stein:

“Sand on an island,
Sand in the sea.
Sand in a sandbox
For you and me!”

She was grinning and pleased with herself, I applauded and patted her on the shoulder, and could see her mother near the door, grinning and pleased with her daughter. She asked me to add my name to a list of her other poetry auditors and a comment if I wished. I wrote, “You are a charming little girl. Thank you for the poetry reading.” She read it and said, “You’re welcome. I like poetry,” and I said I did too. The book I happened to be rereading was Narcissus Leaves the Pool, Joseph Epstein’s essay collection from 1999. In “The Pleasures of Reading” he writes:

“My motives in reading are thoroughly mixed, but pure pleasure is always high among them. I read for aesthetic pleasure. If anything, with the passing of years, I have become sufficiently the aesthetic snob so that I can scarcely drag my eyes across the pages of a badly or even pedestrianly written book.”

Lousy writing in prose or verse is disproportionately unpleasant, like listening to singer with no sense of rhythm or pitch. The little girl at the pool and I may share few tastes but we would agree that we know what we like, and that when we hear it or read it, it gives us unrivalled pleasure. That’s how I feel when reading Basil Bunting. A reader in England has given me more pleasure than I have a right to expect. He shipped the deluxe edition of Briggflatts recently published by Bloodaxe Books. The book includes the poem, photos of Bunting, excerpts from his prose, a biography of the poet and other goodies. Also in the package are a CD with an audio recording of Bunting reading the poem in 1967 and a DVD of Peter Bell’s 1982 film about the poet. I lusted after this indulgence but frugality held me back. My reader has performed a minor miracle of generosity, one of those rare alignments of ideal gift with ideal recipient. Quoted in the book is an interview Bunting gave Jonathan Williams and Tom Meyer in 1976:

“I believe that the fundamental thing in poetry is the sound, so that, whatever the meaning may be, whatever your ultimate intention in that direction might be, if you haven’t got the sound right, it isn’t a poem. And if you have got it right, it’ll get across, even to the people who don’t understand it.”

At the end of the paragraph I quoted above Epstein writes:

“Along with the love of style, I read in the hope of laughter, exaltation, insight, enhanced consciousness, and dare I say it, wisdom; I read, finally, hoping to get a little smarter about the world.”

`Look, My Lord, It Comes'

A reader in Texas reminds us:

“On May 16, 1763 Samuel Johnson and James Boswell first met at Thomas Davies's bookshop in London.”

Boswell recounts the meeting like this:

“At last, on Monday the 16th of May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies's back-parlour, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him through the glass-door in the room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us, -- he announced his awful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's ghost, `Look, my Lord, it comes.’”

Boswell was twenty-two; Johnson, fifty-three. W. Jackson Bate describes the young Scot and future biographer as “romantically imaginative, sexually promiscuous, impulsively idealistic and open-natured, pliable, and with an impressionable genius for mimicry.” He was also dissolute, pox-plagued and given to drunkenness. According to Bate, Boswell was searching for a father-figure and found one of genius. In his journal he admonished himself to “be Johnson.”

Without their meeting and friendship, what would remain of Boswell? Little except what social historians of 18th-century England might squirrel away in footnotes. Without Boswell, what would we have of Johnson? The work might stand, the life less so, which in turn would diminish the currency of the work. Today, thanks in part to Boswell, we prize even Johnson’s most topical journalism. Without Boswell’s great Life, we might consign Johnson to mere literary history rather than the moral history of humanity. Together, thanks to Boswell’s “presumptuous task,” this unlikely pair, fatherless son and sonless father, befriended, sustained and immortalized each other.

G.K. Chesterton sometimes dressed as Johnson and lectured in his persona (a photo of Chesterton in wig and tricorn is reproduced in Michael Ffinch’s G.K. Chesteron: A Biography). Self-revealingly, Chesterton writes of Johnson:

“He may seem to be hammering at the brain through long nights of noise and thunder; but he can walk into the heart without knocking.”

`A Fierce Pleasure in Things Being Themselves'

I came late to Chesterton and regret the decades of pleasure and solace I’ve denied myself. Somewhere I picked up the notion he was “minor,” as though that explained anything. He was much admired by Borges, Hugh Kenner and Evelyn Waugh, and that’s more than enough endorsement for me.

What most attracts me to Chesterton, man and writer, is his self-description as “always perfectly happy.” I detect no idle boast here, no masking of misery. Rather, it’s an expression of Chesterton’s essential thankfulness. After a conflicted spell in early manhood, he was grateful to be alive, a stance that assures some degree of contentment, a gift for happily engaging the world. The notebook Chesterton kept when he was about the age of twenty contains this passage:

“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”

This is a lovely echo of Charles Lamb’s “Grace Before Meat,” from The Essays of Elia:

“I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, these spiritual repasts -- a grace before Milton -- a grace before Shakspeare -- a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen?…”

I’m moved by such unlikely sanity. During his long engagement to Frances Blogg (they married in 1901), her sister Gertrude was killed in a bicycle accident. In her grief, Frances went to Italy to recover and Chesterton wrote to her in a letter:

“I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me; the fierceness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud…I will not ask you to forgive this rambling levity. I, for one, have sworn, by the sword of God that has struck us, and before the beautiful face of the dead, that the first joke that occurred to me I would make, the first nonsense poem I thought of I would write, that I would begin again at once with a heavy heart at times, as to other duties, to the duty of being perfectly silly, perfectly trivial, and as far as possible, amusing. I have sworn that Gertrude should not feel, wherever she is, that the comedy has gone out of our theatre.”

In another letter to Frances he writes:

“All good things are one thing. Sunsets, schools of philosophy, cathedrals, operas, mountains, horses, poems – all these are mainly disguises. One thing is always walking among us in fancy-dress, in the grey cloak of a church or the green cloak of a meadow.”

On Friday, some of us and our students were seated on the synthetic turf of the football field as the marching band moved around us. The sun was bright and I wished I had worn a short-sleeve shirt. Minute pieces of the artificial grass stuck to our hands and pants, and my student put some in her mouth. As I removed it with tissue a wave of vertigo washed over me. Large, flat, open spaces do that to me sometimes, as do tall buildings. I felt as though I were falling up and I thought of Chesteron and his “ fierce pleasure in things being themselves.”

`He Recorded It Beautifully'

Another of my teachers was Edward Dahlberg (1900-1977) whose name my professors never uttered. Instead, I learned of him from an itinerant guitar player of unlikely bookishness who showed up in 1973 and abruptly disappeared. Within two years I had acquired and read nearly all of Dahlberg’s books, and within another two he was dead. I’ve met few readers who know his books, even the best and best-known among them, the memoir Because I Was Flesh (1964). Dahlberg reminds me of his contemporary Basil Bunting (1900-1985) in his obscurity and neglect, his contrariness, brilliance and late flowering.

I took Can These Bones Live (1941) off the shelf to reread his chapter on Thoreau, and stayed up too late reading the entire book. Dahlberg says foolish things about the author of Walden, overstating his eminence as a political thinker, but he also understands some of the important things about Thoreau:

“He went wherever life sent him and made no credo of his private experience. He recorded it beautifully, and, if we have eyes, we can profitably read it and then pursue our own private follies, tinctured by his.”

Those who make credos of their private experience are delusional and often psychopathic. Thoreau without the refulgent gift of language is a crank, no more. “If we have eyes” is a vexing qualification for readership. Most of us substitute prejudices and big ideas. Thoreau demands of readers the same attentiveness he lavishes on words and the natural world. I like the notion of being “tinctured” by Thoreau’s follies. Dahlberg writes:

“Thoreau eschewed all doctrine and all saviorism. Whitman’s humanitarian bathos, his democratic rhodomontade -- `I will not exclude you until the sun excludes you,’ – was wholly alien to that quieter individual.”

If Dahlberg is suggesting Whitman was a blowhard, we can’t argue with him. But to accuse the man who volunteered for more than two years as a nurse to sick and wounded Union soldiers of “humanitarian bathos” is cheap and cynical. He also misquotes the line from a bad poem, “To a Common Prostitute.” Dahlberg’s refreshing refusal to demarcate a writer’s life and work will infuriate born-again New Critics, but so be it. Common readers have no such scruples. Dahlberg echoes Keats later in the Thoreau chapter:

“Great lives are moral allegories and so soon become deniable myths because we cannot believe that such good men could have existed in such an evil world.”

Calling Dr. Johnson and Dr. Chekhov.

`A Spiritual Music in Words'

In the “Postscript” to Twelve Stories (1997), a selection from four earlier collections of his short fiction, Guy Davenport writes:

“Instigations, however, are deceptive guides into imaginative structures, and the maker of the structure may be as deceptive a guide. The imagination sees with the eyes of the spirit; the maker, finished with his making, must then see what he has done, like the reader, with corporeal eyes. Thoreau on an afternoon in 1852 when he had been looking at birds, trees, cows, squirrels, and flowers for hours raged that he had no words for the music he felt in every muscle of his body.”

I’m unable to locate the passage Davenport is describing in Thoreau’s journals, letters or essays. How peculiar it is that so punctilious a writer offers neither attribution nor direct quotation. I’d be grateful to a reader with sharper eyes than mine who can find it. Davenport’s paraphrase carries an irony, for few writers have with such regularity transmuted “music” into words as Thoreau. A journal entry dated Sept. 2, 1851, sounds like an antidote to the “rage” Davenport describes:

“We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. The body, the senses, must conspire with the mind. Expression is the act of the whole man, that our speech may be vascular. The intellect is powerless to express thought without the aid of the heart and liver and of every member. Often I feel that my head stands out too dry, when it should be immersed. A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing. It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart.”

“Gusto” is an artistic quality also valued by two other writers, an unlikely pair – William Hazlitt and Marianne Moore (for the latter it was one in an admirable trinity of virtues: “humility, concentration, and gusto”). To express gusto (from the Latin gustare, “to taste”) – enthusiasm, vitality, savory appreciation – in prose is among the rarest writerly gifts, the product of much hard work. In the next paragraph of his “Postscript” Davenport writes:

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

Note the presence of three familiar constellations of words among these few lines from Thoreau and Davenport: corporeal, body, muscle, vascular; mind, essences; spirit, spiritual. To write well, to compose “spiritual music in words,” calls for wholeness. We too must be “coherent and harmonious,” at least as we write.

`Which So Proudly We Hail'

While we walked our students around the track the marching band entered through the south gate hammering away at “When the Saints Go Marching In,” “We Are Family,” “You Can Call Me Al” and “Oye Como Va.” No Sousa marches but a marching band is always a crude and effective instrument for rousing latent emotion and under-caffeinated educators. The band reassembled in the bleachers and under the baton of a student-teacher launched into a snare-drum-heavy arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

That our national anthem should be written to the tune of an English drinking song, and its lyrics celebrate an American victory against the English, is a fitting celebration of our roots as a republic of rabble. That it’s both rousing and difficult to sing well is also fitting. The band ran through the song four and a half times while one of our autistic kids, standing in the middle of the football field, conducted them with histrionic gestures. Some of the young musicians applauded her. A little histrionically, Whitman described himself as “an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos … / No sentimentalist . . . . no stander above men and women or apart from them . . . . / no more modest than immodest.”

Guy Davenport’s Flowers and Leaves (1966) is a book-length poem written under the spell of Pound but without entirely abandoning coherence, decency, rhyme and the iambic line. Part IV, “Fire, October, Eyes,” is a quilt sewn from scraps of Americana and throughout it run the lyrics of Francis Scott Key’s poem. This is the first stanza:

“O say can you see by the dawn’s early
Light peeled birch and folded brier
And western distance in September blue?
Either comedy or incomparable love
Holds our question posed by magic eyes
In a hung mist and red maple of the mind,
Imagination’s country and blizzard of gold
And chill Housatonic and the church
In the wild wood, the question neither yes
Nor no but what landlord of this sweet land
Set the hills which so proudly we hail.”

On March 12, 1862, the euphoniously named Lt. Silas S. Soule, who had been corresponding with Whitman, wrote to the poet:

“I think we made the biggest march on record, we understood that Sibley was making an attack on Fort Union the word came to us about sundown after the men had marched 40 miles and had not had their supper and they threw their hats in the air and swore they would march 40 miles farther before they slept and they did they started off singing the Star spangled banner, Red White & Blue and Yankee doodle so you can imagine what kind of material this Reg[iment] is composed of…”

`It Is Mot-Juste Improvising'

When Johnny Hodges, alto saxophonist and longtime miracle worker in the Ellington band, died forty years ago today, I had never heard of him. I knew of his boss, at least by name, but my knowledge of jazz was largely cloistered among the other big names – Armstrong, Goodman, Davis, Monk. Musically, I was preoccupied with Dylan, The Band and The Beatles, which is nothing to be ashamed of. Also, I was about to graduate from high school, and the shootings at Kent State University, sixty miles from where I lived, had occurred a week earlier. So-called big-band music and one of its great practitioners, who also excelled in small groups, had little to do with my parochial little world.

Only in college, following my autodidactic tastes as I already did with books, did I piece together a history of jazz and figure out the centrality of Ellington’s band, especially at its musical pinnacle around 1940. That was the era of Ben Webster, Harry Carney, Lawrence Brown, Jimmy Blanton – and Hodges. Terry Teachout is writing a biography of Ellington, and surely one of the most difficult parts of his job – along with demythologizing -- will be dealing equitably with so many gifted musicians clustered around him.

Hodges joined Ellington in 1928 and remained with him for the rest of his life, but for a four-year hiatus in the nineteen-fifties when he led a band of his own. His tone, like Ben Webster’s, is often sweet but he remains a romantic rooted in the blues. In 1961, Whitney Balliett writes:

“Hodges’ bent toward sweetness did not emerge until the mid-thirties, when he began recording, with Ellington, a series of slow ballad solos. On such occasions, which he still indulges in, Hodges employs a tone that seems to be draped over the notes like a lap robe. Hodges does little improvising in these ballads. Instead, he issues languorous statements of the melody and long glissandi topped by an almost unctuous vibrato. Hodges’ Edgar Guest strain is generally well concealed, though, and it is nowhere in sight when he plays the blues, which have long provided his basic materials.”

"That "Edgar Guest strain" is priceless. Elaborating on Hodges’ blues playing, Balliett adds, as though he were writing about good prose:

“There is no extraneous matter, and no thinness. There is no opacity. It is mot-juste improvising, and because of its basic understatement it illuminates completely the elegance and purity of the blues.”

Nine years later, shortly after Hodges’ death, Balliett writes in The New Yorker:

“…when Ellington called on him to solo, he would get up slowly (it seemed to take forever, though he was only about five and a half feet tall), roll like a sailor to the front of the stage, give Ellington a quick, ferocious look for having disturbed him, and start to play. And out would come one of the most lyrical and eloquent sounds of the century.”

Few man-made sounds are so lovely and reassuring. Listen for yourself: “All of Me,” “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street.”

[All Balliett quotes are drawn from Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954 – 2000.]

`His Reading Is Pure and Interests Me'

A young reader or would-be reader, feeling intimidated by the surfeit of books and the pressures imposed by critics and other readers, writes to ask where he ought to begin:

“It’s kind of overwhelming. So many books sound like they’re interesting that I end up feeling kind of paralyzed. I start a book and don’t finish it and then I pick up another one and the same thing happens. I’m talking about good books that are supposed to be important, that all educated people read.”

He goes on to ask for a list of titles, but advice is a dangerous business that puts giver and receiver in jeopardy. I have only my idiosyncratic experience with reading to offer, and it may be of no use to others. I’m constitutionally incapable of creating or following reading lists and crackpot systems of self-improvement. Truly, I don’t care what other people read, though I assume most ambitious common readers will eventually get around to reading many of the same books. Emerson puts it like this in his journal (quoted by Robert D. Richardson in First We Read, Then We Write):

“If a man reads a book because it interests him and reads in all directions for the same reason, his reading is pure and interests me. No matter where you begin, read anything for five hours a day and you will soon be knowing.”

I quibble with the “knowing” part but otherwise Emerson’s observations are sound, especially reading “in all directions.” That’s something my brother and I started when we were young. Pick any book that attracts you and learn to trust such intuitions. Read attentively, perhaps with a pencil in hand. Note the books and writers its author alludes to. See what use he makes of them, and the ones that interest you, pursue. You can’t start in the wrong place. I’m certain there no wrong books, at least to begin with. Pick up Tristram Shandy, for instance, which has the advantage of being funny. Note some of Sterne’s sources – Rabelais, Burton, Locke – and you’re already on your way to a respectable education. Then follow his literary descendents – Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien – and that should keep you laughing.

This is the important thing – laughing, working hard and otherwise enjoying yourself. As a reader, you have no one to please but yourself. Critics are just readers with pretensions. Some of them are reliable but learn to follow your interests and rely on your first-hand experience with a given text. The best reading is motivated by the selfish pursuit of literary pleasure, and the supply of such pleasure, which I once described as “That Other Internet,” is bottomless:

“The late Guy Davenport believed every book was created by its author, often unknowingly, as a response, one half of a virtual dialogue, sometimes disguised, to an already existing book. If we accept this highly ecological premise, and I do, then every book is linked inevitably to every other book in a vast Borgesian weave of overt and occult connections.”

`A Name Naming None'

A reader writes:

“I just returned from Toronto. I had a strange experience. While reading Helen Vendler's Last Looks, Last Books, her review of 5 American poets' `last looks’ at life in their final books, I looked out Air Canada's window to see what looked like a cemetery. It was Toronto, its buildings dwarfed by altitude appearing to me as tombstones.”

Reading Vendler puts me in a funereal mood too. It’s easy to joke, “I had not thought death had undone so many,” and so forth, but cemeteries are certainly cities, and vice versa, with good and bad neighborhoods. Once I toured the beautifully landscaped Vale Cemetery in Schenectady, N.Y., with Robert V. Wells, author of Facing the `King of Terrors’: Death and Society in an American Community, as my guide. It was an excellent place for bird watching. Wells pointed out the Italian, General Electric Co., and influenza neighborhoods, all segregated and plotted like plats on graph paper. Even in death we choose order.

None of the poets in Vendler’s book – Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill – came to mind as I read my reader’s e-mail. No, I thought of the opening of Briggflatts. A boy and girl accompany her father, a stonemason, who carves a tombstone. The boy and girl return to her house and make love. That’s it. Here is Bunting’s second stanza:

“A mason times his mallet
to a lark's twitter,
listening while the marble rests,
lays his rule
at a letter's edge,
fingertips checking,
till the stone spells a name
naming none,
a man abolished.
Painful lark, labouring to rise!
The solemn mallet says:
In the grave's slot
he lies. We rot.”

`A Route of Evanescence'

The morning cool and clear, the sky a burning blue. Staying indoors felt like a cheat so we took the kids on the long walk around campus, past firs and down a shaded corridor of cedars. On the east side of the building is the commons, a terraced palazzo of concrete landscaped with shrubbery and ornamental trees from East Asia, none in flower, I thought. Moving among their shadows I spied a quick, fat, un-moth-like moth that flitted out of the tangle into the sunlight and turned into a rufous hummingbird.

He worked the foliage efficiently, wasting little time and energy: Hover, dart, hover, flit. I held my student’s hand and we stayed still, watching the soundless marvel trolling for nectar, which he found. Five feet from us stood a low bush with clusters of small white flowers, invisible at a distance. He quickly probed them, making course adjustments along the way. I was an avid follower of the space program as a kid, and the words “pitch and yaw” came to mind. Then he flew to the roof in a long arc and disappeared, lapsed time perhaps forty-five seconds. Without naming her subject Emily Dickinson captures the hummingbird:

“A Route of Evanescence,
With a revolving Wheel –
A Resonance of Emerald
A Rush of Cochineal –
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts its tumbled Head –
The Mail from Tunis – probably,
An easy Morning’s Ride –”

The third and fourth lines nail the bird’s coloration precisely. My student, I’m certain, had never seen a hummingbird. I saw her eye follow the moving shadow, so close was its purposeful path: “A Route of Evanescence.”

`Sometimes the One, Sometimes the Other'

Self-revelation in the wrong hands – self-important hands, meaning most hands -- can be deadly. The temptation is to counterfeit strong emotion and pass it off as sincerity, something important and true, in the expectation of readers congratulating our “searing honesty.” If lanced and drained of false sentiment our essays, blogs and memoirs would heal without scars. The anomaly is a writer who reveals himself reluctantly, without posturing or preening, an after-thought more powerful for being oblique.

In the May issue of The New Criterion, Theodore Dalrymple (dba Anthony Daniels) concludes “A Shared Wretchedness” (subscription required), his comparative assaying of Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson, with intimate but carefully reticent self-disclosure:

“The Swift-Johnson dialectic, between uncontrollable, or at any rate uncontrolled, rage on the one hand (which has its illicit pleasures) and Augustan detachment on the other (a short step from indifference), is one that I have felt myself. My entire medical career has been spent among civil wars that pitted injustice against ambition or in situations in which vice and folly had no penalty and wisdom and virtue no reward. How was I to react? By shrugging my shoulders and accepting that ’twas ever thus and that the problem lies with Original Sin? Or that saeva indignatio, which suggests that things ought to be different? Should I take Johnson for my model, deeply and humanely understanding, or Swift, deeply outraged, at the risk of the accusation of misanthropy? The odd thing is that these two responses arise from the same apprehension. I still do not know the answer; I veer between the two. Detachment or involvement? Sometimes the one, sometimes the other.”

Placed at the conclusion of a moral/literary essay, Daniels’ shift to first person is bracing. The voice, though scholarly, is not a scholar’s. In its balancing of phrases and weighing of almost identical opposites, the stance is closer to Johnson’s than Swift’s, though both abhorred cant, that most Johnsonian of words. One of his definitions of it in the Dictionary is “a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms.” Along similar lines, Dalrymple’s soft allusion to Twelfth Night is revealing. Olivia (Act IV, Scene 1) says to Sir Toby Belch:

“Will it be ever thus? Ungracious wretch,
Fit for the mountains and the barbarous caves,
Where manners ne'er were preach'd! out of my sight!”

`The Art of Bearing Natural Calamities'

I attended a meeting on Wednesday in which we discussed my student in terms cognitive, behavioral, medical, academic and human. The purpose was to evaluate her status in a public high school. I shared a conference room with her parents, two teachers, the school nurse, the school psychologist, an occupational therapist, and a speech/hearing therapist. My student, almost nineteen years old, cannot speak, cannot understand speech, wears diapers, is fed through a tube in her stomach and will never have an occupation. Being in class five days a week with other kids and conforming to classroom routine is for her a victory, perhaps the grandest she will ever know.

The meeting was cordial and free of surprises. Only the psychologist spoke in jargon and remained in professional character, clinical, unbending and remote, accompanied by a veneer of sensitivity and warmth. Her smile was a rictus. Even with the medical history of this damaged child on the table, she sounded a note Mencken characterized as “moronic Kiwanian optimism.”

With diplomacy, self-control and candor, my student’s mother spoke. All the paperwork substantiates an obvious clinical conclusion, she said: Years of seizures have ravaged her daughter’s cognitive capacity. She once looked with curiosity and attentiveness at books. No longer. She once laughed and moved when hearing music. Not now. She doesn’t recognize the sound of her name or the people in her life. “She has lost a lot,” the mother said, raising her eyes from the table to the psychologist.

I subscribe to only one magazine, The New Criterion, and the May issue arrived on Wednesday. Most welcome is the return of Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple) to a literary subject, “A Shared Wretchedness” (subscription required), an essay exploring the congruences of Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson, two of my favorite writers. Daniels is a retired psychiatrist but writes with insight and compassion of the torments both writers endured:

“…both responded to their poverty with a prickly insouciance born of pride; both were extremely ambitious yet knew prolonged fallow periods of indolence; both suffered serious ill-health for much of their lives (indeed, disease of the ear hardened the hearing of both); both had relations with the female sex that were far from straightforward or uncontorted; both strove to be religious but were tormented by doubt and were unable to achieve a trouble-free and unquestioning faith; both, despite their forbidding exteriors, were generous to the poor; both were terrified of going mad; both often used wit to wound.”

Both were, in effect, unable to fain professional amiability and glibness while remaining icily aloof. I thought, of course, of the psychologist. Daniels, as always, is generous with quotation, and his citation from The Rambler #32, published July 7, 1750, reminds me of my student’s mother:

“So large a part of human life passes in a state contrary to our natural desires, that one of the principal topics of moral instruction is the art of bearing natural calamities. And such is the certainty of evil, that it is the duty of every man to furnish his mind with those principles that may enable him to act under it with decency and propriety.”

`Homespun Simplicity and Dignity'

Perhaps my religious education was less attenuated than I have always believed. Monday evening in the Lutheran church where my younger sons’ Cub Scout meeting is held I found sheet music for “O How Amiable.” The composer is Ralph Vaughan Williams; the lyricists, Isaac Watts and King David. The text is adapted from Psalms 84 and 90. What attracted me to the eight-page score published by Oxford University Press was the lovely Latinate “amiable,” rooted in amare but unshaded with the sexual or romantic, at least in modern English. Rather: friendly, good-natured, companionable. In an 1852 letter to John Parker Hale, Whitman lauds “a manly and amiable spirit.”

I read the words of the hymn and when I came to the chorus I recognized it and remembered the melody: “O God, our help in ages past, / Our hope for years to come, / Our shelter from the stormy blast, / And our eternal home.” And I remembered how I knew them. When my brother and I were kids the elderly German woman who lived next door would occasionally walk us to services at a nearby Presbyterian church. I don’t know how this started or why my un-churchgoing parents permitted it. Mostly I associate the memories with tedium and starched collars in summer, but I enjoyed the readings, in particular the Old Testament, and the hymns. Millions of people must know “O How Amiable,” but I had forgotten even the title though the words and music remained latent.

All of which confirms in a round-about fashion the central argument of Robert Alter’s recently published Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible. Alter has taught Hebrew and comparative literature at Berkeley since 1967, and published four books of translations from the Old Testament, most recently The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (2007). In the new book he looks at how the language of the King James Bible (1611) suffuses the work of Melville, Faulkner, Bellow, Hemingway, Marilynne Robinson and Cormac McCarthy. In the first two novelists the impact is obvious but Alter traces the Biblical presence in the later writers “even when the fervid faith in Scripture as revelation had begun to fade.”

Most interesting and unexpected, at least by this reader, is Alter’s chapter devoted to Seize the Day, Bellow’s great short novel from 1956. Alter’s purpose is not merely to identity Biblical quotations, paraphrases or other overt allusions. Rather, he looks at something more elusive – literary style, often at the level of individual words. He defines style as “ultimately a mode of thinking” and “never merely a technical or `aesthetic’ procedure but a way of imagining the world, of articulating value.” After citing memorable passages by Bellow (of a minor character, Mr. Rappaport: “Purple stains were buried in the flesh of his nose and the cartilage of his ear was twisted like a cabbage heart.”), Alter writes:

“This efflorescence of figuration does not, as one might imagine, lead to any kind of florid literary diction. On the contrary, Bellow consistently grounds his exuberant similes and metaphors in plain language…What gives this writing tensile strength is its adherence to ordinary terms where the temptation to use fancy literary language might beckon…These choices are not exactly vernacular but have a kind of homespun simplicity and dignity, like the style of ancient Hebrew narrative as it is for the most part justly represented in the King James Version -- `and the ark went upon the face of the waters.’”

Conventional wisdom, assuming conventional minds still read the King James Version, associates its language with archaisms and bombast. Alter proves otherwise. Our thinking – the thinking of great novelists and common readers alike – is bathed in the language of a Bible translation published almost four hundred years ago. Such continuity of cultural memory gives a common reader hope in an age of literary hopelessness. Near the end of his book Alter writes:

“The business of making new literature is intrinsically conservative, at least formally, even when the writer means to be spectacularly iconoclastic (witness Joyce’s Ulysses), because few writers want to turn their backs on the rich resources of expression that antecedent literary tradition makes available to them.”

`With Every Leaf a Miracle'

The life of flora, for humans, insects and a few fortunate birds, is a sequential handing-off of blooming duties. The previous owner of our house in Houston made sure at least two or three species were in blossom in the yard year-round. Here in Washington just two weeks ago the cherries and dogwoods turned drab neighborhoods into “floral censers swinging light in air.” Now the cherry petals have fallen and the dogwood blossoms have grown curled and brown. As Nige notes, it’s the lilac’s turn, “the bushes heavy with great swags of bloom.”

We have only one in our yard, an emaciated specimen sparsely flowered that stands beside the backdoor. The blossoms are white and fragrant but the bush is so scrawny it elicits more pity than admiration, though the bees don’t seem to mind. Nige writes:

“For me, lilac is associated not with the cruellest month or the dead earth, but with a cherished memory from decades ago - of holding my daughter, then a toddler, up to smell a spray of lilac blossom overhanging a fence, seeing the lacy shadow of the flowers on her face, and knowing something very like perfect happiness.”

During a brief hail storm Monday afternoon not a petal fell from our bush. Such tough beauty is enhanced by transience. I can’t see a lilac without thinking of Whitman and April one hundred forty-five years ago:

“In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash'd palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle -- and from this bush in the dooryard,
With delicate-color'd blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig with its flower I break.”

It took Whitman, who died sixty years before my birth, to make me notice the lilac’s leaves are “heart-shaped,” perfectly so. But what of the quintessential lilac color, a lavender or pale violet. We trace our “lilac” eastward through French, Spanish, Arabic to Persian and, finally, to Sanskrit, nilah, “dark blue.” The color pre-dates the flower. This is how Guy Davenport begins “The Bicycle Rider,” a story collected in The Death of Picasso (2003):

“They could see through the grime of the barnloft windows, Anders and Kim, how far the field of sunflowers they’d walked across stretched down to where the sawgrass begins back of the beach, sunflowers higher than their heads, bitter green and dusty to smell. They could see yellow finches working the panniers, butterflies dipping and fluttering, the glitter and lilac blue of the sea where they’d been horsing around on the sand.”

`Short and Nimbly-Lofty'

“Poetry should be rather like a coranto, short and nimbly-lofty, than a dull lesson of a day long.”

There’s a sentence I wish I had written. “Coranto” has unjustly evaporated from the language. It entered English the year of Shakespeare’s birth, from the French courir, “to run,” and referred to early precursors of newspapers. (Two-hundred year later, au courant – “with the current” – made the leap from French unmodified.) Corantos were one-page collections of news items, often reprinted from foreign journals, and their name survives on the masthead of the Hartford Courant.

Our author is Owen Feltham (or Felltham, c. 1602-1668), a poet best known for an eccentric collection of brief prose essays, Resolves: Divine, Morall, Politicall (1623). I found the Edward Lear-like sentence above in “Of Poets and Poetry,” and the first poet it called to mind was Kay Ryan, whose poems are “short and nimbly-lofty” -- brief, agile, sublime -- such as “Great Thoughts” (from Say Uncle, 2000):

“Great thoughts
do not nourish
small thoughts
as parents do children.

“Like the eucalyptus,
they make the soil
beneath them barren.

“Standing in a
grove of them
is hideous.”

Here are Feltham’s sentences following the one above:

“Nor can it be but deadish, if distended; for when ’tis right, it centers conceit, and takes but the spirit of things, and therefore foolish poesy is of all writing the most ridiculous. When a goose dances and a fool versifies, there is sport alike. He is twice an ass, that is a rhyming one. He is something the less unwise, that is unwise but in prose.”

Feltham’s prose feels natural yet utterly original, never straining after self-conscious oddity. In another essay from Resolves, “Of the Soul,” he defines the conscience as “a shoot of everlastingness.” Henry Vaughan liked the phrase enough to adopt it as his own in “The Retreat”:

“Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinful sound,
Or had the black art to dispense
A several sin to every sense,
But felt through all this fleshy dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.”

`We Have As Short a Spring'

The first of May, with chill winds and pewter skies, felt like the first of November, though Frank Wilson enlisted Robert Herrick to remind us of “spring-time, fresh and green" and related recreations. Our weekly visit to the garden was unproductive. Even the weeds are slow. The radishes planted two weeks ago are two-leaf seedlings of pale green, with no sign of carrots or beans. We’re not gathering rosebuds or anything else but nothing is dead. We need sun and soft rain and we’re getting only the latter. “We have short time to stay, as you, / We have as short a spring.”

Herrick invites us to sing even without a melody. Try reading “The Argument of His Book” aloud without hearing the tune:

“I SING of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,
Of April, May, of June, and July-flowers;
I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides and of their bridal-cakes;
I write of youth, of love, and have access
By these to sing of cleanly wantonness;
I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece
Of balm, of oil, of spice and ambergris;
I sing of times trans-shifting, and I write
How roses first came red and lilies white;
I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
The court of Mab, and of the fairy king;
I write of Hell ; I sing (and ever shall)
Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.”

“Hock-carts” are the last carts from a presumably bountiful harvest (a hock is a joint in the hind leg of a horse). “Wakes” here are held not in memory of the dead, Irish-fashion, but on the dedication day of for a church – a celebration mingling the festive and devout. I covet the phrases “cleanly wantonness” and “times trans-shifting.” For Queen Mab, “the fairies’ midwife,” see Mercutio’s speech in Romeo and Juliet (Act I, Scene 4). And has anyone noticed the resemblance of Herrick to Balzac?

`Known By What We Call His Prose Style'

The most radically misunderstood and misrepresented of great American writers is Henry Thoreau, and this willful misreading is rooted in politics and the refusal to accept any writer as precisely and essentially that – a writer. Not an ecologist, “environmentalist,” naturalist, anarchist, abolitionist or homespun philosopher, despite what Thoreau and his more misguided cheerleaders insist. Thoreau’s politics are contradictory, ill-reasoned and essentially adolescent. The clearest non-ideological, revisionist reading of his work I know is Jacques Barzun’s “Thoreau the Thorough Impressionist,” first published in The American Scholar in 1987 and collected in The Jacques Barzun Reader (2002).

The first portion of Barzun’s essay is largely a demolition of “On Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau’s all-too-influential tantrum of 1849. At his snottiest he describes his fellow citizens as “a distinct race from me,” a stance Barzun calls “political solipsism.” Instead, he argues Thoreau must be judged a poet who wrote “bad verse, like other great prose writers.” Barzun continues:

“Why, then do I call Thoreau a poet? The answer comes down to what I call visions. A poet’s vision is not anything fanciful or vague. It is an actual sight with a glow and a hard edge. The glow comes from the fusion of the material core of sensation with any number of associations – emotional, intellectual, spiritual; present or remote; fleeting or permanent. In a word, it is a vivid image, recorded in faultless words; I see in Thoreau the earliest and greatest of American Imagists.”

With this verdict Guy Davenport, himself a great American Imagist, would have concurred. Thoreau’s masterpiece is not Walden, masterful though it often is, but his Journals, the two-million words of which amount to ten-thousand brief essays written across a quarter-century. I read them repeatedly not primarily for Thoreau’s observations of the natural world (though I love them) but for the words with which he crafts those observations. Barzun writes:

“Now, one way to be unjust to an author is to praise him for qualities he does not possess. To be sure, the error about Thoreau is due to the assured, masterly tone of his conclusions, particularly in the Journals. But these are marvelous not for any system that dictated their writing or emerges from them gradually. In them too inconsistency is the rule, not the exception. No: the marvel is Thoreau’s fidelity to the successive visions; the marvel depends on the inconsistency.”

Such a reading is anathema to system-builders and system-seekers, readers for whom literature is a code to be cracked or a banner waved. Thoreau’s words are to be read – across a lifetime, with growing comprehension and pleasure. A writer could find no better teacher but he must pay attention to the words not some trifling philosophy. Barzun tells us:

“Writing prose is a much more difficult craft than writing poetry. One proof of that truth is that all peoples have produced poetry – and this at the very beginning of their literature – but not all have developed a tolerable prose. There is none in English or French until the early seventeenth century. Up to that time, sentences meander at great length by the addition of clauses in no special order. The result is talk, not prose. But once the canons of order and lucidity come into force, the paradoxical result is that every good writer employs a prose of his own; he can be known by what we call his prose style.”