Levi Stahl has reminded me of D.J. Enright’s death eight years ago today, New Year’s Eve, at age eighty-two. His was among the deaths early in the new century that accelerated our literary culture’s rendezvous with enfeeblement. On the cusp of the New Year let’s remember Guy Davenport, Saul Bellow, Anthony Hecht, Penelope Fitzgerald, Czeslaw Milosz, Edgar Bowers, W.G. Sebald, R.S. Thomas, William Maxwell, C.H. Sisson, Donald Justice and Thom Gunn – all gone in a bleak span of less than five years.
I’m reminded of a story Boswell tells in his Life of Johnson. It was April 20, 1781. David Garrick’s widow was hosting her first party since the death of her husband, the actor and friend to both Johnson and Boswell, more than two years earlier. In attendance were others from the Johnson Circle -- Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Dr. Burney. Boswell describes the widow’s grief as “sincere as wounded affection and admiration could produce,” but adds the company was “elegantly entertained.” He writes of the gathering:
“I spent with him [Johnson] one of the happiest days that I remember to have enjoyed in the whole course of my life.”
And adds:
“We were all in fine spirits [perhaps enhanced by the consumption of “Lichfield ale, which had a peculiar appropriate value,” Lichfield being Johnson’s birthplace and Garrick’s childhood home]; and I whispered to Mrs. Boscawen, `I believe this is as much as can be made of life.’”
What a happy celebration of a dear friend’s memory. That’s how I choose to remember Enright and his departed coevals in literature. No ostentatious mourning, only the spirit of what Enright says in an early poem, “Stop that clowning at once, if not sooner”:
“Giggling on the edge of a precipice –
Shameful! They’ll think you haven’t noticed it.
Or worse, that you’re the sort of person
for whom abysses don’t exist,
being one coarse-grained vacant space yourself…
“For the time needs –
stop giggling on the brink of precipices
while I’m talking to you –
heavyweight intellects, sober serious men.
“`Unfortunately it gets them,’
Giggling on the verge of nothing.
`Here’s a profound hole, yet no deeper than a coffin.’
Hoping that not too many (even that he may not) fall into it,
Wagging his arms and legs, and hoping…”
Friday, December 31, 2010
Thursday, December 30, 2010
`Bent Double by Fate's Blows'
The cover of A Trick of Sunlight (Swallow Press), Dick Davis’ 2006 book of poems, shows a detail from the Château de Chaumont Tapestry Set, the portion known as “Time” or “Triumph of Time.” Woven of silk and wool, the tapestry dates from the first decade of the sixteenth century and is in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Château de Chaumont, built around the same time, stands in Chaumont-sur-Loire, Loir-et-Cher, in north-central France.
The iconography is an elegant, darker variation on the theme of Baby New Year usurping the place of the Old Year, Father Time – this weekend’s allegory. In the tapestry, Youth attacks Age with a club. The figure behind them remains motionless and seems to be smiling. Davis describes the scene in “Edgar,” which carries the dedication “(i.m. Edgar Bowers, 1924-2000)”:
“A few things that recall you to me, Edgar:
“A stately ’80s Buick; hearing a car
Referred to by a coaxing soubriquet--
`Now come on, Captain, don't you let me down.’
French spoken in a conscious southern accent;
An idiom calqued and made ridiculous
(`Eh, mettons ce spectacle sur le chemin’).
`Silly,’ dismissive in its deep contempt,
`Oh he's a silly; an amiable silly,
But still a silly.’ The words I first
Encountered in your captious conversations,
`Tad,’ `discombobulated,’ `cattywampus.’
The usage that you gave me once for `totaled’–
`Oh cruel fair, thy glance hath totaled me.’
Most recently, in Cleveland's art museum,
The French Medieval Tapestries brought back
Your unabashed reaction to their beauty,
And how, for once, you'd stood there almost speechless,
Examining Time's Triumph inch by inch,
Enraptured by its richness, by the young man
Proud in his paradisal place, until
You saw what his averted gaze avoided-
The old man, beaten, bent double by fate's blows,
Driven from youth's charmed, evanescent circle:
And how you'd wanted to be sure I'd seen him.”
“To calque” is to borrow a word or phrase from another language and translate it literally, without regard for idiom. Thus, Bowers’ French is a word-for-word rendering of “Let’s put this show on the road” as he tries to start his Buick. “Captious” is carping or bitchy. “Cruel fair” is a conventional poetic phrase, as in Thomas Ford and John Dryden.
Davis’ account of Bowers’ reaction to “Time” is complicated. The poet first admires the beauty of the tapestry and of the young man with the averted gaze. Only then does he observe what the young man chooses not to – Youth assaulting Age. But Bowers wants Davis, twenty-one years his junior, to know he’s seen the youth who looks away from the beating. Was Bowers acknowledging his age and thus being self-deprecating? Was he admiring the youth’s haughty indifference, real or feigned? Some mingling of both?
Perhaps what Bowers saw was less erotic or philosophical than generational, a younger poet taking the place of a senior, viewed wryly, without rancor. In a paper he read during “How Shall a Generation Know Its Story: The Edgar Bowers Conference and Exhibition,” held at UCLA in 2003, Davis writes:
“One of the most briefly moving moments of my life I think was when Edgar read me `Adam’, the first poem in his sequence `Witnesses’, before the sequence was published [in For Louis Pasteur, 1990] and after he had said the last lines he said something like – I forget the exact words, I think because I was so touched and taken aback – he said, `I guess, Dick, you know who’s meant there”. Those last lines are:
“Children I might have had, remember me,
That, in your quiet house, your word emerge.”
The iconography is an elegant, darker variation on the theme of Baby New Year usurping the place of the Old Year, Father Time – this weekend’s allegory. In the tapestry, Youth attacks Age with a club. The figure behind them remains motionless and seems to be smiling. Davis describes the scene in “Edgar,” which carries the dedication “(i.m. Edgar Bowers, 1924-2000)”:
“A few things that recall you to me, Edgar:
“A stately ’80s Buick; hearing a car
Referred to by a coaxing soubriquet--
`Now come on, Captain, don't you let me down.’
French spoken in a conscious southern accent;
An idiom calqued and made ridiculous
(`Eh, mettons ce spectacle sur le chemin’).
`Silly,’ dismissive in its deep contempt,
`Oh he's a silly; an amiable silly,
But still a silly.’ The words I first
Encountered in your captious conversations,
`Tad,’ `discombobulated,’ `cattywampus.’
The usage that you gave me once for `totaled’–
`Oh cruel fair, thy glance hath totaled me.’
Most recently, in Cleveland's art museum,
The French Medieval Tapestries brought back
Your unabashed reaction to their beauty,
And how, for once, you'd stood there almost speechless,
Examining Time's Triumph inch by inch,
Enraptured by its richness, by the young man
Proud in his paradisal place, until
You saw what his averted gaze avoided-
The old man, beaten, bent double by fate's blows,
Driven from youth's charmed, evanescent circle:
And how you'd wanted to be sure I'd seen him.”
“To calque” is to borrow a word or phrase from another language and translate it literally, without regard for idiom. Thus, Bowers’ French is a word-for-word rendering of “Let’s put this show on the road” as he tries to start his Buick. “Captious” is carping or bitchy. “Cruel fair” is a conventional poetic phrase, as in Thomas Ford and John Dryden.
Davis’ account of Bowers’ reaction to “Time” is complicated. The poet first admires the beauty of the tapestry and of the young man with the averted gaze. Only then does he observe what the young man chooses not to – Youth assaulting Age. But Bowers wants Davis, twenty-one years his junior, to know he’s seen the youth who looks away from the beating. Was Bowers acknowledging his age and thus being self-deprecating? Was he admiring the youth’s haughty indifference, real or feigned? Some mingling of both?
Perhaps what Bowers saw was less erotic or philosophical than generational, a younger poet taking the place of a senior, viewed wryly, without rancor. In a paper he read during “How Shall a Generation Know Its Story: The Edgar Bowers Conference and Exhibition,” held at UCLA in 2003, Davis writes:
“One of the most briefly moving moments of my life I think was when Edgar read me `Adam’, the first poem in his sequence `Witnesses’, before the sequence was published [in For Louis Pasteur, 1990] and after he had said the last lines he said something like – I forget the exact words, I think because I was so touched and taken aback – he said, `I guess, Dick, you know who’s meant there”. Those last lines are:
“Children I might have had, remember me,
That, in your quiet house, your word emerge.”
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
`Consent to Be Dazzled'
The painter whose work I would most like to live with – I don’t mean own; rather, visit regularly -- is Adriaen Coorte. He was born in Middelburg, the Netherlands, around 1665, studied in Amsterdam and spent most of his life in the city of his birth. Some eighty signed works survive. Most are small still-life paintings depicting fruit and vegetables, lit from above and surrounded by darkness. Coorte died after 1707 and his work was virtually unknown until its rediscovery by scholars in the nineteen-fifties.
Coorte has no precise cognate among writers. How could he? One thinks of Francis Ponge’s Le parti pris des choses but words seem clumsy and approximate beside the precision and glow of Coorte’s asparagus and gooseberries. Describing the paintings in words risks sentimentality or banality, which they never possess. The word I’m trying to avoid is among the slipperiest -- “realism.” No one would mistake a Coorte melon for the real thing. He didn’t paint trompe-l'œil, which often is wonderful but suggests gimmickry, a joke by the painter on the viewer. Coorte’s paintings feel like sacraments, homages to creation.
In the essay “Still Life with a Bridle,” Zbigniew Herbert describes his reaction to seeing a painting in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum which also holds much of Coorte’s work. The still life was done by Johannes Symonsz van der Beeck (1589-1644), better known as Torrentius. Herbert writes of the experience the work evoked:
“A suddenly awakened intense curiosity, sharp concentration with the senses alarmed, hope for an adventure and consent to be dazzled. I experienced an almost physical sensation as if someone called me, summoned me.”
That approximates what I feel when looking at Coorte’s paintings, even in reproduction. Call it a heightened or sharpened state. To look at such work is to see the humblest objects with a new attentiveness and gratitude for their existence. Czeslaw Milosz in the poem “Realism” (from Facing the River, 1995, translated by Milosz and Robert Hass) writes:
“We are not so badly off, if we can
Admire Dutch painting.”
There’s no surprise in two Polish poets, veterans of their nation’s twentieth-century torment, admiring the Dutch masters of realism. Later in his poem Milosz writes:
“And thus abstract art is brought to shame,
Even if we do not deserve any other.”
Coorte has no precise cognate among writers. How could he? One thinks of Francis Ponge’s Le parti pris des choses but words seem clumsy and approximate beside the precision and glow of Coorte’s asparagus and gooseberries. Describing the paintings in words risks sentimentality or banality, which they never possess. The word I’m trying to avoid is among the slipperiest -- “realism.” No one would mistake a Coorte melon for the real thing. He didn’t paint trompe-l'œil, which often is wonderful but suggests gimmickry, a joke by the painter on the viewer. Coorte’s paintings feel like sacraments, homages to creation.
In the essay “Still Life with a Bridle,” Zbigniew Herbert describes his reaction to seeing a painting in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum which also holds much of Coorte’s work. The still life was done by Johannes Symonsz van der Beeck (1589-1644), better known as Torrentius. Herbert writes of the experience the work evoked:
“A suddenly awakened intense curiosity, sharp concentration with the senses alarmed, hope for an adventure and consent to be dazzled. I experienced an almost physical sensation as if someone called me, summoned me.”
That approximates what I feel when looking at Coorte’s paintings, even in reproduction. Call it a heightened or sharpened state. To look at such work is to see the humblest objects with a new attentiveness and gratitude for their existence. Czeslaw Milosz in the poem “Realism” (from Facing the River, 1995, translated by Milosz and Robert Hass) writes:
“We are not so badly off, if we can
Admire Dutch painting.”
There’s no surprise in two Polish poets, veterans of their nation’s twentieth-century torment, admiring the Dutch masters of realism. Later in his poem Milosz writes:
“And thus abstract art is brought to shame,
Even if we do not deserve any other.”
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
`Caress the Silence and the Light'
Days after the winter solstice, my favorite among Yvor Winters’ poems is “A Summer Commentary”:
“When I was young, with sharper sense,
The farthest insect cry I heard
Could stay me: through the trees, intense,
I watched the hunter and the bird.
“Where is the meaning that I found?
Or was it but a state of mind,
Some old penumbra of the ground,
In which to be but not to find?
“Now summer grasses, brown with heat,
Have crowded sweetness through the air;
The very roadside dust is sweet;
Even the unshadowed earth is fair.
“The soft voice of the nesting dove,
And the dove in soft erratic flight
Like a rapid hand within a glove,
Caress the silence and the light.
“Amid the rubble, the fallen fruit,
Fermenting in its rich decay,
Smears brandy on the trampling boot
And sends it sweeter on its way.”
The first stanza is dazzling. “Could stay me” almost stops the poem at the start of its third line, after the first two run-on lines. Try substituting “stop” for “stay.” The vowel sound is open, more pause than halt, a pause that implies suspense without melodrama: Now what?
“Some old penumbra of the ground” – “of,” not “on.” Some of Winters’ finest effects are accomplished by subtly odd word choices, unexpected but not conspicuously so. I connect “A Summer Commentary” with Helen Pinkerton’s “Degrees of Shade”: “Our darkness stays, the self-made dark we know.” Winters’ “dove in soft erratic flight” recalls Pinkerton’s “Red-Tailed Hawk”: “He seemed to shift from nothingness toward flight.”
Stanza four is ravishing, in particular the first two lines, the repetition of “soft” and “dove.” Read it aloud. Listen to the repeated “s” sounds. The “rapid hand within a glove” implies benign containment, feeling shaped by form, like the poem we are reading.
Anyone who has walked on windfall in late summer – plums and apples worked by bees and yellow jackets – recognizes the experience evoked by the final stanza. I smell it as I write about it. Earlier the “roadside dust” was sweet. The fermented fruit, the “brandy,” is sweeter still, carried into the world on the walker’s boot.
We return to the question posed in the second stanza: “Where is the meaning that I found?” The answer is the poem and the experiences it recalls. “A Summer Commentary,” like any great poem, defies glib paraphrase. It immerses us in sensory detail (auditory, visual, perhaps olfactory and gustatory) while connoting emotional and intellectual maturity. It renders a life’s education in twenty lines.
“When I was young, with sharper sense,
The farthest insect cry I heard
Could stay me: through the trees, intense,
I watched the hunter and the bird.
“Where is the meaning that I found?
Or was it but a state of mind,
Some old penumbra of the ground,
In which to be but not to find?
“Now summer grasses, brown with heat,
Have crowded sweetness through the air;
The very roadside dust is sweet;
Even the unshadowed earth is fair.
“The soft voice of the nesting dove,
And the dove in soft erratic flight
Like a rapid hand within a glove,
Caress the silence and the light.
“Amid the rubble, the fallen fruit,
Fermenting in its rich decay,
Smears brandy on the trampling boot
And sends it sweeter on its way.”
The first stanza is dazzling. “Could stay me” almost stops the poem at the start of its third line, after the first two run-on lines. Try substituting “stop” for “stay.” The vowel sound is open, more pause than halt, a pause that implies suspense without melodrama: Now what?
“Some old penumbra of the ground” – “of,” not “on.” Some of Winters’ finest effects are accomplished by subtly odd word choices, unexpected but not conspicuously so. I connect “A Summer Commentary” with Helen Pinkerton’s “Degrees of Shade”: “Our darkness stays, the self-made dark we know.” Winters’ “dove in soft erratic flight” recalls Pinkerton’s “Red-Tailed Hawk”: “He seemed to shift from nothingness toward flight.”
Stanza four is ravishing, in particular the first two lines, the repetition of “soft” and “dove.” Read it aloud. Listen to the repeated “s” sounds. The “rapid hand within a glove” implies benign containment, feeling shaped by form, like the poem we are reading.
Anyone who has walked on windfall in late summer – plums and apples worked by bees and yellow jackets – recognizes the experience evoked by the final stanza. I smell it as I write about it. Earlier the “roadside dust” was sweet. The fermented fruit, the “brandy,” is sweeter still, carried into the world on the walker’s boot.
We return to the question posed in the second stanza: “Where is the meaning that I found?” The answer is the poem and the experiences it recalls. “A Summer Commentary,” like any great poem, defies glib paraphrase. It immerses us in sensory detail (auditory, visual, perhaps olfactory and gustatory) while connoting emotional and intellectual maturity. It renders a life’s education in twenty lines.
Monday, December 27, 2010
`Life Itself is the Gift'
Of the countless essays, reviews, op-ed pieces, books and screeds written by Theodore Dalrymple (aka Anthony Daniels, and vice versa), the one I remember most fondly and reread most often (I keep a hard copy in the nightstand beside my bed) is “Reasons to Be Cheerful,” published in the Dec. 13, 2003, edition of The Spectator. I think of it again as the post-Christmas funk, that annual fog of discontent and irritability briefly suspended for the Yuletide season, settles on the world. Dalrymple writes:
“I’m never bored. I’m appalled, horrified, angered, but never bored. The world appears to me so infinite in its variety that many lifetimes could not exhaust its interest. So long as you can still be surprised, you have something to be thankful for (that is one of the reasons why the false knowingness of street credibility is so destructive of true happiness).”
The thought, hardly original though it seems that way in an age of codified ingratitude, is rooted in a simple truth: You and I and what we think we want are not terribly important. The world’s bounty – and certainly Christmas -- will never please those who dwell in a state of unsatisfied demand. Frank Wilson links to a piece by another English writer, Mark Vernon, who reminds us of the good fortune of existence, of being a being among other beings:
“At base, gratitude arises from existence – the how-wonderful-life-is-because-you-are kind of thanks. And the word `existence’ contains a clue. It's like the word `exit’. It means to be placed outside. So thanks is offered to the source of your existence. Gratitude is the recognition that life itself is the gift.”
Neither Dalrymple nor Vernon is a believer but they share a gift for recognizing gifts and responding appropriately. On Sunday I received an email from a reader in Australia who shares my admiration for the poetry of her countryman Les Murray: “It seems to combine an awareness of eternity and an affection for the smallest aspects of life…” She says what I’m fumbling to say: “an affection for the smallest aspects oif life."
“I’m never bored. I’m appalled, horrified, angered, but never bored. The world appears to me so infinite in its variety that many lifetimes could not exhaust its interest. So long as you can still be surprised, you have something to be thankful for (that is one of the reasons why the false knowingness of street credibility is so destructive of true happiness).”
The thought, hardly original though it seems that way in an age of codified ingratitude, is rooted in a simple truth: You and I and what we think we want are not terribly important. The world’s bounty – and certainly Christmas -- will never please those who dwell in a state of unsatisfied demand. Frank Wilson links to a piece by another English writer, Mark Vernon, who reminds us of the good fortune of existence, of being a being among other beings:
“At base, gratitude arises from existence – the how-wonderful-life-is-because-you-are kind of thanks. And the word `existence’ contains a clue. It's like the word `exit’. It means to be placed outside. So thanks is offered to the source of your existence. Gratitude is the recognition that life itself is the gift.”
Neither Dalrymple nor Vernon is a believer but they share a gift for recognizing gifts and responding appropriately. On Sunday I received an email from a reader in Australia who shares my admiration for the poetry of her countryman Les Murray: “It seems to combine an awareness of eternity and an affection for the smallest aspects of life…” She says what I’m fumbling to say: “an affection for the smallest aspects oif life."
Sunday, December 26, 2010
`This Frivolous and Charming World'
The epigraph to Moore Moran’s "Just Joking" won my heart, as did Moran’s poem and the rest of The Room Within (Swallow Press, 2010), a Christmas gift:
“Frivolity is the species’ refusal to suffer.”
John Lahr, senior drama critic at The New Yorker, made the remark in a 1987 television documentary, Vaudeville! The sentence that precedes it is pertinent:
“There is nothing more important – though we’ve lost it in our moment – than frivolity.”
“Frivolous” entered English in the mid-fifteenth century from the Latin frivolus, “silly, empty, trifling, worthless, brittle.” The deep etymology is revealing: Frivolus is from frivos, “broken, crumbled,” from friare, “to break, rub away, crumble.” Fancifully if not etymologically, the frivolous is what remains when something breaks – shards, fragments, remnants, Beckett’s realm. Here’s a nice symmetry: John Lahr’s father, the vaudevillian and comic actor Bert Lahr, played Estragon in the 1956 American premier of Waiting for Godot. And another, from Molloy:
“It was in this frivolous and charming world that I took refuge, when my cup ran over.”
The final lines of Moran's poem plumb a similar “frivolous and charming world”:
“I think what it comes to is
the bewildered heart in us,
Which year by year measuring our slim attainments
With mounting despair, still feeds
In its recesses some faint hope, despite
The certain knowledge that what it hopes for
Cannot change the tide,
“And in these moments, a joke,
Shaggy, cosmic, learned or foul,
Needs no defense.”
Some of us can't help laughing.
“Frivolity is the species’ refusal to suffer.”
John Lahr, senior drama critic at The New Yorker, made the remark in a 1987 television documentary, Vaudeville! The sentence that precedes it is pertinent:
“There is nothing more important – though we’ve lost it in our moment – than frivolity.”
“Frivolous” entered English in the mid-fifteenth century from the Latin frivolus, “silly, empty, trifling, worthless, brittle.” The deep etymology is revealing: Frivolus is from frivos, “broken, crumbled,” from friare, “to break, rub away, crumble.” Fancifully if not etymologically, the frivolous is what remains when something breaks – shards, fragments, remnants, Beckett’s realm. Here’s a nice symmetry: John Lahr’s father, the vaudevillian and comic actor Bert Lahr, played Estragon in the 1956 American premier of Waiting for Godot. And another, from Molloy:
“It was in this frivolous and charming world that I took refuge, when my cup ran over.”
The final lines of Moran's poem plumb a similar “frivolous and charming world”:
“I think what it comes to is
the bewildered heart in us,
Which year by year measuring our slim attainments
With mounting despair, still feeds
In its recesses some faint hope, despite
The certain knowledge that what it hopes for
Cannot change the tide,
“And in these moments, a joke,
Shaggy, cosmic, learned or foul,
Needs no defense.”
Some of us can't help laughing.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
`Authenticate the Cheerful Mystery'
In “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig” (Essays of Elia, 1823), Charles Lamb credits “M.” with providing the “Chinese manuscript” he cites in that savory essay. Lamb’s source was his friend Thomas Manning (1772-1840), to whom the essayist addressed some of his funniest, most thoughtful letters. Manning was a pioneering Chinese scholar and explorer, and the first European to visit Lhasa, the holy city of Tibet, and meet the Dalai Lama. He interviewed Napoleon on St. Helena, making him an early-nineteenth-century hybrid of Eric Newby and Oriana Fallaci. After twelve years in Asia, Manning returned to England for good at age forty-five.
Imagine being an Englishman in Canton one hundred ninety-five years ago, in the year of Waterloo. Your hosts speak little or no English. Though strong-minded and resourceful, you’re homesick for the comforts of the familiar and you receive a letter from your friend Charles Lamb, written Dec. 25, 1815:
“Dear Old Friend and Absentee,--This is Christmas Day, 1815, with us; what it may be with you I don't know,--the 12th of June next year, perhaps; and if it should be the consecrated season with you, I don't see how you can keep it. You have no turkeys; you would not desecrate the festival by offering up a withered Chinese bantam, instead of the savoury grand Norfolcian holocaust, that smokes all around my nostrils at this moment from a thousand firesides. Then what puddings have you? Where will you get holly to stick in your churches, or churches to stick your dried tea-leaves (that must be the substitute) in? What memorials you can have of the holy time, I see not. A chopped missionary or two may keep up the thin idea of Lent and the wilderness; but what standing evidence have you of the Nativity? 'Tis our rosy-cheeked, homestalled divines, whose faces shine to the tune of ‘unto us a child was born,’--faces fragrant with the mince-pies of half a century, that alone can authenticate the cheerful mystery. I feel, I feel my bowels refreshed with the holy tide; my zeal is great against the unedified heathen. Down with the Pagodas; down with the idols,--Ching-chong-fo and his foolish priesthood! Come out of Babylon, oh my friend, for her time is come, and the child that is native, and the Proselyte of her gates, shall kindle and smoke together! And in sober sense what makes you so long from among us, Manning? You must not expect to see the same England again which you left.”
Manning survived his friend Lamb by six years. He assisted others in translating works from the Chinese, and drafted a report on the consumption of tea in Bhutan, Tibet and Tartary. He left no written account of his adventures and bequeathed his library of Chinese books, said to be the largest in Europe at the time, to the Royal Asiatic Society. We remember him as the recipient of Lamb’s wonderful letters, some of the best in the language.
Whether you dine today on turkey or “withered Chinese bantam” (or roast pork), whether your halls are decked with holly or dried tea leaves -- no matter. Readers of Anecdotal Evidence, have a merry Christmas, be a friend as Lamb was a friend to Manning and pause to “authenticate the cheerful mystery.”
Imagine being an Englishman in Canton one hundred ninety-five years ago, in the year of Waterloo. Your hosts speak little or no English. Though strong-minded and resourceful, you’re homesick for the comforts of the familiar and you receive a letter from your friend Charles Lamb, written Dec. 25, 1815:
“Dear Old Friend and Absentee,--This is Christmas Day, 1815, with us; what it may be with you I don't know,--the 12th of June next year, perhaps; and if it should be the consecrated season with you, I don't see how you can keep it. You have no turkeys; you would not desecrate the festival by offering up a withered Chinese bantam, instead of the savoury grand Norfolcian holocaust, that smokes all around my nostrils at this moment from a thousand firesides. Then what puddings have you? Where will you get holly to stick in your churches, or churches to stick your dried tea-leaves (that must be the substitute) in? What memorials you can have of the holy time, I see not. A chopped missionary or two may keep up the thin idea of Lent and the wilderness; but what standing evidence have you of the Nativity? 'Tis our rosy-cheeked, homestalled divines, whose faces shine to the tune of ‘unto us a child was born,’--faces fragrant with the mince-pies of half a century, that alone can authenticate the cheerful mystery. I feel, I feel my bowels refreshed with the holy tide; my zeal is great against the unedified heathen. Down with the Pagodas; down with the idols,--Ching-chong-fo and his foolish priesthood! Come out of Babylon, oh my friend, for her time is come, and the child that is native, and the Proselyte of her gates, shall kindle and smoke together! And in sober sense what makes you so long from among us, Manning? You must not expect to see the same England again which you left.”
Manning survived his friend Lamb by six years. He assisted others in translating works from the Chinese, and drafted a report on the consumption of tea in Bhutan, Tibet and Tartary. He left no written account of his adventures and bequeathed his library of Chinese books, said to be the largest in Europe at the time, to the Royal Asiatic Society. We remember him as the recipient of Lamb’s wonderful letters, some of the best in the language.
Whether you dine today on turkey or “withered Chinese bantam” (or roast pork), whether your halls are decked with holly or dried tea leaves -- no matter. Readers of Anecdotal Evidence, have a merry Christmas, be a friend as Lamb was a friend to Manning and pause to “authenticate the cheerful mystery.”
Friday, December 24, 2010
`Christmas Compendium'
The Dabbler’s 2010 Christmas Compendium – Part I, including my contribution, has been posted.
`That Commodious Garden in Which Children Play'
The happiest human setting I know is a well-stocked library, one that is quiet and softly lit, staffed by discreetly intelligent, well-read librarians. Even a modest public library, overstocked with Dan Brown, DVDs and noisy patrons, and understocked with books, has its charms. I enter the smallest library with a sense of anticipation, trusting in the benign serendipity of books waiting to introduce themselves if only I’m sufficiently courteous to return their good manners. In “A Defense of the Book” (A Temple of Texts, 2006), William H. Gass pens a love song to the library:
“A few of us are fortunate enough to live in logotopia, to own our own library, but for many, this is not possible, and for them there is a free and open public institution with a balanced collection of books that it cares for and loans, with stacks where a visitor may wander, browse, and make discoveries; such an institution empowers its public as few do.”
My logotopia – lovely coinage – is portable and multiple. I have a substantial private library but regularly patronize its public cousins. On Thursday I discovered Martin Gardner’s annotated edition of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, Philip Larkin’s Selected Letters and C.V. Wedgewood’s The Thirty Years War, at a cost of driving eight miles round trip.
Thanks to Bill Vallicella at The Maverick Philosopher for linking to “Twelve Theses on Libraries and Librarians” by Benjamin Myers at his blog, Faith and Theology. Here’s Thesis 7:
“The library is also the safest and friendliest place on earth. More than that: the library is the institutionalisation of intellectual friendship. Which of us, admiring a shelf laden with the thoughts of dead authors, has never felt that these books love one another, even as they love to dispute and declaim? When I was a boy, I played hide-and-seek with my brothers among the stacks, while my mother slaved over her PhD. If history is a tangle of weeds and briers, the library is that commodious garden in which children play and every flower blooms.”
Think of another public institution you would miss so deeply as the library if it were suddenly to disappear. The Post Office? Congress? Please. The library is our intellectual agora. Myers writes in Thesis 5:
“The rule of silence – upheld in all libraries since time immemorial – is a ruse. It is the silence of a tiger crouching in the reeds.”
As a seasonal envoi, consider what the librarian Philip Larkin wrote in a letter to his friend Judy Egerton on Dec. 17, 1958:
“Have a happy Christmas. Drop laudanum on the children’s plum pudding, for a happy Xmas afternoon.”
“A few of us are fortunate enough to live in logotopia, to own our own library, but for many, this is not possible, and for them there is a free and open public institution with a balanced collection of books that it cares for and loans, with stacks where a visitor may wander, browse, and make discoveries; such an institution empowers its public as few do.”
My logotopia – lovely coinage – is portable and multiple. I have a substantial private library but regularly patronize its public cousins. On Thursday I discovered Martin Gardner’s annotated edition of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, Philip Larkin’s Selected Letters and C.V. Wedgewood’s The Thirty Years War, at a cost of driving eight miles round trip.
Thanks to Bill Vallicella at The Maverick Philosopher for linking to “Twelve Theses on Libraries and Librarians” by Benjamin Myers at his blog, Faith and Theology. Here’s Thesis 7:
“The library is also the safest and friendliest place on earth. More than that: the library is the institutionalisation of intellectual friendship. Which of us, admiring a shelf laden with the thoughts of dead authors, has never felt that these books love one another, even as they love to dispute and declaim? When I was a boy, I played hide-and-seek with my brothers among the stacks, while my mother slaved over her PhD. If history is a tangle of weeds and briers, the library is that commodious garden in which children play and every flower blooms.”
Think of another public institution you would miss so deeply as the library if it were suddenly to disappear. The Post Office? Congress? Please. The library is our intellectual agora. Myers writes in Thesis 5:
“The rule of silence – upheld in all libraries since time immemorial – is a ruse. It is the silence of a tiger crouching in the reeds.”
As a seasonal envoi, consider what the librarian Philip Larkin wrote in a letter to his friend Judy Egerton on Dec. 17, 1958:
“Have a happy Christmas. Drop laudanum on the children’s plum pudding, for a happy Xmas afternoon.”
Thursday, December 23, 2010
`To Praise and Remember'
What follows is a guaranteed antidote to mandatory Christmas cheer and the sensation of drowning in a flood of in-laws:
Step 1: Go here and listen to James P. Johnson perform “Snowy Morning Blues.”
Step 2: Repeat Step 1.
Step 3: Read “December, 1972” by Janet Lewis (from Poems Old and New: 1918-1978):
“Rosemary, bay and redwood spray—
I pray you, love, remember.
The hills are green, the skies are grey
Here in our mild December.
We bring our candles and our wreathes
In honor of a blessed day,
To praise and to remember.
“The nights grow longer, and there breathes
A coldness from the rainwet earth
Like sorrow rising in the heart,
A grief from wrongs in which our part
Was sometimes active, sometimes less
In hatred and neglectfulness.
But we are ever sinful men.
Earth’s heavy shadow hides our sun
As if all joy should be undone,
As if we and our race were run.
“Still in such darkness once was born
The very love that moves the stars;
Star of our night, first flower of spring,
The Holy Babe of Christmas morn;
Who is eternally reborn
For us in our remembering.
Therefore, though sorrowing, let us sing
In praise of God’s eternal joy,
And of that little Holy Boy.”
Step 4: Repeat Steps 1 and 3.
Step 1: Go here and listen to James P. Johnson perform “Snowy Morning Blues.”
Step 2: Repeat Step 1.
Step 3: Read “December, 1972” by Janet Lewis (from Poems Old and New: 1918-1978):
“Rosemary, bay and redwood spray—
I pray you, love, remember.
The hills are green, the skies are grey
Here in our mild December.
We bring our candles and our wreathes
In honor of a blessed day,
To praise and to remember.
“The nights grow longer, and there breathes
A coldness from the rainwet earth
Like sorrow rising in the heart,
A grief from wrongs in which our part
Was sometimes active, sometimes less
In hatred and neglectfulness.
But we are ever sinful men.
Earth’s heavy shadow hides our sun
As if all joy should be undone,
As if we and our race were run.
“Still in such darkness once was born
The very love that moves the stars;
Star of our night, first flower of spring,
The Holy Babe of Christmas morn;
Who is eternally reborn
For us in our remembering.
Therefore, though sorrowing, let us sing
In praise of God’s eternal joy,
And of that little Holy Boy.”
Step 4: Repeat Steps 1 and 3.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
`Imbibe What Is Useful to You'
If we can read a man by the books he reads, here’s an exercise in oblique autobiography, an annotated list of the books I purchased on Tuesday from Henderson Books in Bellingham, Washington. My Virgil and driver was Stephen Pentz, proprietor of First Known When Lost, who found, among other things, a lovely edition of John Clare’s poems edited by Edmund Blunden. My finds:
Aldo Buzzi: Journey to the Land of the Flies and Other Travels.
[From “Chekhov in Sondrio”: “One has the idea that Tolstoy was born before Dostoyevsky, while in fact he was seven years younger: it was only that he aged more. Until the age of eighty he always went on horseback. His last horse was called Delirium. He knew horses better than anyone else. He spoke to them. He could read the tiredness in the eye of an old horse. He wrote the best story about a horse: `Kholstomer.’”]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Inquiring Spirit: A New Presentation of Coleridge from His Published and Unpublished Prose Writings (edited by Kathleen Coburn).
[A phrase from Table Talk referring to Samuel Johnson: "his bow-bow manner."]
Edward Dahlberg: The Confessions of Edward Dahlberg.
[From Chapter 28: “Don’t listen to anybody who seriously alludes to scientific literary criticism, for it is an idle blab. The best advice to be given the reader is to abide by this sentence in one of Chekhov’s letters: `I divide literary works into two classes: those I like and those I do not like.’ Go through Aristotle’s Poetics, Horace, Dryden’s essays, La Bruyère’s The Characters and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Imbibe what is useful to you, and you will forget the rest anyway.”]
D.J. Enright: Man is an Onion: Reviews and Essays.
[Signed by Enright and inscribed “From DJE to W & LV Nov. ’72.” A label on the facing page reads “Leila Vennewitz 6400 Larch Street Vancouver, B.C.” There’s a story there.]
D.J. Enright: A Mania for Sentences.
[From “Lifting Up One’s Life a Trifle: “There are times when one finds oneself engaged in championing an author, and even finding it hard to do effectively, while knowing full well how comically gratuitous one’s efforts are.”]
Richard Holmes: Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage.
[“Whenever modern biographers set out on the long journey of research and writing, somewhere behind them walk the companionable figures of these two eighteenth-century presences, talking and arguing through a labyrinth of dark night streets, trying to find a recognisable human truth together.”]
Charles Lamb: Essays of Elia.
[My third copy but I couldn’t resist. Slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes, published by Donohue, Henneberry & Co. of Chicago. The bookplate shows five cupids hold a banner with the name J. Vila Blake and the Horatian tag “Aere pernnius” (“more lasting than bronze,” the approximate color of the book’s pages).]
Janet Lewis: Poems Old and New 1918-1978.
[In her introduction Helen Pinkerton writes: “To have seen and understood so much that is central to human experience and to have contained the understanding in enduring poetry is Janet Lewis’ art.”]
Janet Lewis: The Trial of Soren Qvist.
[The first sentence: “The inn lay in a hollow, the low hill, wooded with leafless beech trees, rising behind it in a gentle round just high enough to break the good draft from the inn chimneys, so that on this chill day the smoke rose a little and then fell downward.”]
William Maxwell: The Outermost Dream: Essays and Reviews.
[From Maxwell’s “Note”: “Reading is rapture (or if it isn’t, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door). A felicitously turned sentence can induce it. Or a description. Or unexpected behavior. Or ordinary behavior raised to the nth degree. Or intolerable suspense, as with the second half of Conrad’s Victory. Or the forward movement of prose that is bent only on saying what the writer has to say. Or dialogue that carries with it the unconscious flowering of character. Or, sometimes, a fact.”]
L.E. Sissman: Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman.
[From “Nocturne, Central Park South":
“It is amazing how the heart locks out
All interference and clear-channels galaxies
Into one-chambered worlds. Doubt
Is the house dick and time whistles taxies.”]
L.E. Sissman: Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s.
[From “The Constant Rereader’s Bookshelf”: “A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign.”]
Only the Coleridge anthology and Janet Lewis’ novel I haven’t read before. Two of the twelve volumes I already own and three others I’ve owned in the past. All I intend to read or reread. All, because they are good books, remain inspirations to readers and writers. Enright says in his “Author’s Note” to A Mania for Sentences: “As for language, it is a bad workman who blames his tools.”
ADDENDUM: There is a story behind the Enright/Vennewitz book signing, though not the one I expected. Leila Vennewitz translated into English the works of Heinrich Böll. A reader in Dallas sends this obituary.
Aldo Buzzi: Journey to the Land of the Flies and Other Travels.
[From “Chekhov in Sondrio”: “One has the idea that Tolstoy was born before Dostoyevsky, while in fact he was seven years younger: it was only that he aged more. Until the age of eighty he always went on horseback. His last horse was called Delirium. He knew horses better than anyone else. He spoke to them. He could read the tiredness in the eye of an old horse. He wrote the best story about a horse: `Kholstomer.’”]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Inquiring Spirit: A New Presentation of Coleridge from His Published and Unpublished Prose Writings (edited by Kathleen Coburn).
[A phrase from Table Talk referring to Samuel Johnson: "his bow-bow manner."]
Edward Dahlberg: The Confessions of Edward Dahlberg.
[From Chapter 28: “Don’t listen to anybody who seriously alludes to scientific literary criticism, for it is an idle blab. The best advice to be given the reader is to abide by this sentence in one of Chekhov’s letters: `I divide literary works into two classes: those I like and those I do not like.’ Go through Aristotle’s Poetics, Horace, Dryden’s essays, La Bruyère’s The Characters and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Imbibe what is useful to you, and you will forget the rest anyway.”]
D.J. Enright: Man is an Onion: Reviews and Essays.
[Signed by Enright and inscribed “From DJE to W & LV Nov. ’72.” A label on the facing page reads “Leila Vennewitz 6400 Larch Street Vancouver, B.C.” There’s a story there.]
D.J. Enright: A Mania for Sentences.
[From “Lifting Up One’s Life a Trifle: “There are times when one finds oneself engaged in championing an author, and even finding it hard to do effectively, while knowing full well how comically gratuitous one’s efforts are.”]
Richard Holmes: Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage.
[“Whenever modern biographers set out on the long journey of research and writing, somewhere behind them walk the companionable figures of these two eighteenth-century presences, talking and arguing through a labyrinth of dark night streets, trying to find a recognisable human truth together.”]
Charles Lamb: Essays of Elia.
[My third copy but I couldn’t resist. Slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes, published by Donohue, Henneberry & Co. of Chicago. The bookplate shows five cupids hold a banner with the name J. Vila Blake and the Horatian tag “Aere pernnius” (“more lasting than bronze,” the approximate color of the book’s pages).]
Janet Lewis: Poems Old and New 1918-1978.
[In her introduction Helen Pinkerton writes: “To have seen and understood so much that is central to human experience and to have contained the understanding in enduring poetry is Janet Lewis’ art.”]
Janet Lewis: The Trial of Soren Qvist.
[The first sentence: “The inn lay in a hollow, the low hill, wooded with leafless beech trees, rising behind it in a gentle round just high enough to break the good draft from the inn chimneys, so that on this chill day the smoke rose a little and then fell downward.”]
William Maxwell: The Outermost Dream: Essays and Reviews.
[From Maxwell’s “Note”: “Reading is rapture (or if it isn’t, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door). A felicitously turned sentence can induce it. Or a description. Or unexpected behavior. Or ordinary behavior raised to the nth degree. Or intolerable suspense, as with the second half of Conrad’s Victory. Or the forward movement of prose that is bent only on saying what the writer has to say. Or dialogue that carries with it the unconscious flowering of character. Or, sometimes, a fact.”]
L.E. Sissman: Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman.
[From “Nocturne, Central Park South":
“It is amazing how the heart locks out
All interference and clear-channels galaxies
Into one-chambered worlds. Doubt
Is the house dick and time whistles taxies.”]
L.E. Sissman: Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s.
[From “The Constant Rereader’s Bookshelf”: “A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign.”]
Only the Coleridge anthology and Janet Lewis’ novel I haven’t read before. Two of the twelve volumes I already own and three others I’ve owned in the past. All I intend to read or reread. All, because they are good books, remain inspirations to readers and writers. Enright says in his “Author’s Note” to A Mania for Sentences: “As for language, it is a bad workman who blames his tools.”
ADDENDUM: There is a story behind the Enright/Vennewitz book signing, though not the one I expected. Leila Vennewitz translated into English the works of Heinrich Böll. A reader in Dallas sends this obituary.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
`That Odd Journey'
One has grown so accustomed to hearing academics and their camp followers saying stupid things that the appearance among them of an intelligent, common-sensical voice is cause for astonishment and gratitude. Thanks to Frank Wilson for linking to this digital conversation with Sarah Ruden, poet, classicist, translator and research fellow at Yale Divinity School. Here’s a sample:
“Why should we hugely compress the range of historical time from which we cause students to read, and also the array of permitted thematic questions? (In many schools, you're now not only kept to race, gender, and class, but you're punished if you say anything ABOUT race, gender, or class that quite a tiny elite wouldn't also say.) And why at the same time do we tell students that, anyway, it's all about their expressing their own concerns, when they don't yet know what an intellectual concern is? Isn't that going to produce little more than a confused boredom and a little skill at parroting?”
Such thinking is a cool breeze in August, and based on the interview I picked up Ruden’s most recent book, Paul Among the People, and her translations of The Aeneid and Satyricon. I’ve read only the preface to the first volume but have already found this:
“Rather than repressing women, slaves, or homosexuals, [Paul] made—for his time—progressive rules for the inclusion of all of them in the Christian community, drawing on (but not limited by) traditional Jewish ethics.”
And this:
"No other intellect contributed as much to making us who we are."
Contrarian honesty in scholarship is always rare and bracing. I write this post quickly, based on minimal familiarity with Ruden and her work, but in a spirit of appreciation and affinity. Ruden is a serious person who appears not to take herself seriously. Here’s a link to another interview with her and a poem, “A Fortieth Birthday Poem to Myself,”she published in 2003 in The New Criterion:
“What a long way my children have to go
To come from me. About them, all I know
“Is that odd journey. Through a crowding wind
They bike to church. They queue for an exam.
“They lurch on bumping airline aisles. They pace
Museums, tap the car to work, and race
“To elevators. I have not been kind.
From a great distance I have called behind.
“Children are weak and naked—so I hear—
Yet these exacting years they must endure
“And trust that they will meet me in some green
Home neither they nor I have ever seen.”
With most contemporary poets, a title like that -- “A Fortieth Birthday Poem to Myself” – would set off the Solipsism Alarm. Ruden writes about her children.
“Why should we hugely compress the range of historical time from which we cause students to read, and also the array of permitted thematic questions? (In many schools, you're now not only kept to race, gender, and class, but you're punished if you say anything ABOUT race, gender, or class that quite a tiny elite wouldn't also say.) And why at the same time do we tell students that, anyway, it's all about their expressing their own concerns, when they don't yet know what an intellectual concern is? Isn't that going to produce little more than a confused boredom and a little skill at parroting?”
Such thinking is a cool breeze in August, and based on the interview I picked up Ruden’s most recent book, Paul Among the People, and her translations of The Aeneid and Satyricon. I’ve read only the preface to the first volume but have already found this:
“Rather than repressing women, slaves, or homosexuals, [Paul] made—for his time—progressive rules for the inclusion of all of them in the Christian community, drawing on (but not limited by) traditional Jewish ethics.”
And this:
"No other intellect contributed as much to making us who we are."
Contrarian honesty in scholarship is always rare and bracing. I write this post quickly, based on minimal familiarity with Ruden and her work, but in a spirit of appreciation and affinity. Ruden is a serious person who appears not to take herself seriously. Here’s a link to another interview with her and a poem, “A Fortieth Birthday Poem to Myself,”she published in 2003 in The New Criterion:
“What a long way my children have to go
To come from me. About them, all I know
“Is that odd journey. Through a crowding wind
They bike to church. They queue for an exam.
“They lurch on bumping airline aisles. They pace
Museums, tap the car to work, and race
“To elevators. I have not been kind.
From a great distance I have called behind.
“Children are weak and naked—so I hear—
Yet these exacting years they must endure
“And trust that they will meet me in some green
Home neither they nor I have ever seen.”
With most contemporary poets, a title like that -- “A Fortieth Birthday Poem to Myself” – would set off the Solipsism Alarm. Ruden writes about her children.
Monday, December 20, 2010
`Our Books Choose Us'
When asked for gift ideas I have only one response: books. This irks friends and relatives who believe a gift embodying self-improvement, like a new shirt or wallet, is what I really need though I’m too unimproved to appreciate it. This year I’ve asked for the usual hodgepodge of books for Christmas – Janet Lewis, Thomas Traherne, Étienne Gilson, Moore Moran – and I’m confident most will magically appear beneath the tree Saturday morning. Canadian novelist Robertson Davies wrote in the New York Times in 1991 (“Christmas Books” is collected in The Merry Heart, 1996):
“There are many people – happy people, it usually appears – whose thoughts at Christmas always turn to books. The notion of a Christmas tree with no books under it is repugnant and unnatural to them.”
On Sunday, I found myself in a minor moral dilemma. My seven-year-old, no mean reader, has been nagging my wife to take him to the store so he can buy me a book for Christmas, and my wife found a lucrative coupon good at the chain-bookstore near our house. I couldn’t name a title off the top of my head so we agreed to go as a family. I would browse and identify a title, and together she and David would buy it while my head was turned.
For half an hour I searched and found nothing. I read more books in six months than most Americans read in a lifetime, but the cupboard was bare. I even looked for paperbacks of old favorites missing from my shelves, but turned up nothing. For David the syllogism was self-evident: Dad reads a lot. Dad is in a bookstore. Ergo, Dad will find a book to read. I hated to disappoint him. I apologized and he forgave me, holding three books he wanted against his chest. More importantly, my wife forgave me. I used the coupon, dated to expire Sunday, to buy her a book she wanted for Christmas, a denouement less Dickensian than worthy of O. Henry.
In another essay, “A Rake at Reading,” Davies writes:
“Logan Pearsall Smith was wrong: reading is not a substitute for life, because it is indivisible from life. Indeed, it is a reflection of the spirit of the reader, and I am truly convinced that we who are committed readers may appear to choose our books, but in an equally true sense our books choose us.”
“There are many people – happy people, it usually appears – whose thoughts at Christmas always turn to books. The notion of a Christmas tree with no books under it is repugnant and unnatural to them.”
On Sunday, I found myself in a minor moral dilemma. My seven-year-old, no mean reader, has been nagging my wife to take him to the store so he can buy me a book for Christmas, and my wife found a lucrative coupon good at the chain-bookstore near our house. I couldn’t name a title off the top of my head so we agreed to go as a family. I would browse and identify a title, and together she and David would buy it while my head was turned.
For half an hour I searched and found nothing. I read more books in six months than most Americans read in a lifetime, but the cupboard was bare. I even looked for paperbacks of old favorites missing from my shelves, but turned up nothing. For David the syllogism was self-evident: Dad reads a lot. Dad is in a bookstore. Ergo, Dad will find a book to read. I hated to disappoint him. I apologized and he forgave me, holding three books he wanted against his chest. More importantly, my wife forgave me. I used the coupon, dated to expire Sunday, to buy her a book she wanted for Christmas, a denouement less Dickensian than worthy of O. Henry.
In another essay, “A Rake at Reading,” Davies writes:
“Logan Pearsall Smith was wrong: reading is not a substitute for life, because it is indivisible from life. Indeed, it is a reflection of the spirit of the reader, and I am truly convinced that we who are committed readers may appear to choose our books, but in an equally true sense our books choose us.”
Sunday, December 19, 2010
`When the Leaf Falls Off in the Fall'
I don’t like games but do enjoy challenges, the private sort, invitation only. I like identifying the author of an unattributed line of verse, or the composer or performer of music on the radio. Before resorting to the internet I try to deduce at least the era and nationality. When I say “invitation only” I mean one invitation, sent only to me. Such recreations, like the content of our dreams, are inevitably tedious to others though riveting to ourselves.
I’ve been reading Winter Twigs by Helen M. Gilkey (1886-1972), first published in 1962 as an Oregon State Monograph. The edition I have, revised by Patricia L. Packard, was put out in 2001 by the Oregon State University Press. It’s a field guide to the deciduous plants of northwestern Oregon and western Washington. Identifying leafless trees in winter (or dead ones any time of year) is another of my private amusements, so Gilkey’s book is doubly attractive, though I wish the new edition included information about Gilkey and her work. The introduction quotes this quatrain:
“When winter woods are leafless and bare,
And Nature is stripped of her splendor;
When twigs and branchlets stand out 'gainst the sky
Graceful and dark and slender . . .”
There’s no attribution. First I thought of Bryant, maybe Emerson. The feel is American, nineteenth or early twentieth century. It’s not great verse. Rhythmically, it's a Clydesdale crossing a wooden bridge. “Leafless and bare” is redundant and “splendor”/”slender” is a teeth-grating rhyme. Still, I couldn’t let go of it but the internet turned up nothing. Could the lines be Gilkey’s? Consider this an invitation, dear readers: Who wrote it?
Gilkey’s prose is a model of precision and concision, true to the physical world, as a botanist’s ought to be. This is from her description of Populus trichocarpa, the cottonwood:
“Twigs slender to moderately stout, usually curved and pebbly, lustrous, brown with shades of red or orange, green on shaded sides; lenticels conspicuous, orange, becoming pale, not raised, vertically elongated; older branches gray; leaf spurs present.”
In her introduction she shares an anecdote that tells us something of her tastes in prose and scientific observation:
“In winter, beneath a lateral bud at each node is found a leaf scar. Perhaps as good a definition as any for this structure was once written in an examination paper by a freshman: `A leaf scar is a scar that a leaf leaves when the leaf falls off in the fall.’ Whether this was composed innocently or by design, the instructor will never know, but at least it expresses the situation.”
I’ve been reading Winter Twigs by Helen M. Gilkey (1886-1972), first published in 1962 as an Oregon State Monograph. The edition I have, revised by Patricia L. Packard, was put out in 2001 by the Oregon State University Press. It’s a field guide to the deciduous plants of northwestern Oregon and western Washington. Identifying leafless trees in winter (or dead ones any time of year) is another of my private amusements, so Gilkey’s book is doubly attractive, though I wish the new edition included information about Gilkey and her work. The introduction quotes this quatrain:
“When winter woods are leafless and bare,
And Nature is stripped of her splendor;
When twigs and branchlets stand out 'gainst the sky
Graceful and dark and slender . . .”
There’s no attribution. First I thought of Bryant, maybe Emerson. The feel is American, nineteenth or early twentieth century. It’s not great verse. Rhythmically, it's a Clydesdale crossing a wooden bridge. “Leafless and bare” is redundant and “splendor”/”slender” is a teeth-grating rhyme. Still, I couldn’t let go of it but the internet turned up nothing. Could the lines be Gilkey’s? Consider this an invitation, dear readers: Who wrote it?
Gilkey’s prose is a model of precision and concision, true to the physical world, as a botanist’s ought to be. This is from her description of Populus trichocarpa, the cottonwood:
“Twigs slender to moderately stout, usually curved and pebbly, lustrous, brown with shades of red or orange, green on shaded sides; lenticels conspicuous, orange, becoming pale, not raised, vertically elongated; older branches gray; leaf spurs present.”
In her introduction she shares an anecdote that tells us something of her tastes in prose and scientific observation:
“In winter, beneath a lateral bud at each node is found a leaf scar. Perhaps as good a definition as any for this structure was once written in an examination paper by a freshman: `A leaf scar is a scar that a leaf leaves when the leaf falls off in the fall.’ Whether this was composed innocently or by design, the instructor will never know, but at least it expresses the situation.”
Saturday, December 18, 2010
`Distant Courtesies and Formal Salutations'
On Thursday it was the school choir accompanied by synthesizer performing eleven “holiday” songs, not one of which employed the word “Christmas.” The playlist was dominated by relentlessly up-tempo numbers, “My Favorite Things” among them, though not the Coltrane arrangement. On Friday, twenty band members – clarinets, trumpets, flutes, trombone – filled the halls with similarly Christmas-free “holiday” songs, though they worked in “Jingle Bells.” Charles Lamb, that happy writer, would have been appalled. In “A Few Words on Christmas,” an essay he published in The London Magazine in December 1822, Lamb writes:
“One mark and sign of Christmas is the music; rude enough, indeed, but generally gay, and speaking eloquently of the season.”
Eloquence is the last thing on the minds of Christmas censors. The phrase "safe as milk" comes to mind, thin fat-free stuff with little value as sustenance. One need not number among the faithful to feel gypped. The censors not only deny us “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” they substitute deracinated inspiration, offending only those who love music and Christmas.
The musical news grew even grimmer Friday when my oldest son told me of Captain Beefheart’s death at age sixty-nine. I remember listening to Trout Mask Replica for the first time, in 1969, when a high-school friend played it on the stereo in his bedroom. This was weirdness I could understand. Here’s a favorite Beefheart lyric, from “Steal Softly Thru Snow,” from that album:
“Steal softly thru sunshine,
Steal softly thru snow.
The wild goose flies from winter,
Breaks my heart that I can’t go.”
Imagine a Christmas celebration on which Lamb and Beefheart collaborated. In Lamb’s words:
"Oh! merry piping time of Christmas! Never let us permit thee to degenerate into distant courtesies and formal salutations. But let us shake our friends and familiars by the hand, as our fathers and their fathers did. Let them all come around us, and let us count how many the year has added to our circle. Let us enjoy the present, and laugh at the past. Let us tell old stories and invent new ones--innocent always, and ingenious if we can. Let us not meet to abuse the world, but to make it better by our individual example. Let us be patriots, but not men of party. Let us look of the time--cheerful and generous, and endeavour to make others as generous and cheerful as ourselves.”
“One mark and sign of Christmas is the music; rude enough, indeed, but generally gay, and speaking eloquently of the season.”
Eloquence is the last thing on the minds of Christmas censors. The phrase "safe as milk" comes to mind, thin fat-free stuff with little value as sustenance. One need not number among the faithful to feel gypped. The censors not only deny us “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” they substitute deracinated inspiration, offending only those who love music and Christmas.
The musical news grew even grimmer Friday when my oldest son told me of Captain Beefheart’s death at age sixty-nine. I remember listening to Trout Mask Replica for the first time, in 1969, when a high-school friend played it on the stereo in his bedroom. This was weirdness I could understand. Here’s a favorite Beefheart lyric, from “Steal Softly Thru Snow,” from that album:
“Steal softly thru sunshine,
Steal softly thru snow.
The wild goose flies from winter,
Breaks my heart that I can’t go.”
Imagine a Christmas celebration on which Lamb and Beefheart collaborated. In Lamb’s words:
"Oh! merry piping time of Christmas! Never let us permit thee to degenerate into distant courtesies and formal salutations. But let us shake our friends and familiars by the hand, as our fathers and their fathers did. Let them all come around us, and let us count how many the year has added to our circle. Let us enjoy the present, and laugh at the past. Let us tell old stories and invent new ones--innocent always, and ingenious if we can. Let us not meet to abuse the world, but to make it better by our individual example. Let us be patriots, but not men of party. Let us look of the time--cheerful and generous, and endeavour to make others as generous and cheerful as ourselves.”
Friday, December 17, 2010
`Nothing Is More Human Than a Book'
A vibrant mind is never inert and never squanders the gift of consciousness, and the most vibrant mind I’ve engaged of late is Marilynne Robinson’s in her Paris Review interview. Humility and assertiveness verging on pugnacity are rarely found in combination, especially among writers, a self-preening bunch:
“I don’t think that living writers should be treated with the awe that is sometimes reserved for dead writers, but if a well-known writer whose work tends to garner respect takes ten years to write a novel and it’s not the greatest novel in the world, dismissiveness is not an appropriate response. An unsuccessful work might not seem unsuccessful in another generation. It may be part of the writer’s pilgrimage.”
Reading this passage by Robinson, I thought immediately of the stupid things said about Ralph Ellison, author of one of the small number of great American novels. That he never again approached the achievement of Invisible Man caused Ellison much unhappiness and certainly disappointed readers, but who are we to disparage him? Writers, at least the good ones, are not trained seals performing tricks on demand. In a more intimate connection, Robinson tells Sarah Fay, her interviewer:
“I’m kind of a solitary. This would not satisfy everyone’s hopes, but for me it’s a lovely thing. I recognize the satisfactions of a more socially enmeshed existence than I cultivate, but I go days without hearing another human voice and never notice it. I never fear it. The only thing I fear is the intensity of my attachment to it. It’s a predisposition in my family. My brother is a solitary. My mother is a solitary. I grew up with the confidence that the greatest privilege was to be alone and have all the time you wanted. That was the cream of existence. I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone. It’s a good predisposition in a writer. And books are good company. Nothing is more human than a book.”
Yes, I feel kinship, the pleasantly unexpected sense of someone articulating what has remained in me a thought without form. More than that, how bracing to know a writer of monastic dedication is working out there, without interest in the supposed “lifestyle” of a successful writer. No back-biting, no talk of parties, agents, advances.
It strikes me that most of the best writers at work in the United States are female – Robinson, Cynthia Ozick, Helen Pinkerton, Kay Ryan – and I draw no conclusions from their sex. It’s a convergence of little significance. Each is gifted and works hard, and we could say the same thing of their male counterparts. Here are Robinson’s final words in the interview:
“There’s always something that I feel I’ve missed. I should travel more, for instance. I went to Paris last fall, which was a great departure for me. I flew Air India, which in itself was quite remarkable. I had a lovely time in France and I thought, I should do this more often. But then I come home and I think, I have all of this work to do. Look at all of these books I haven’t read. Frankly, you get to a certain point in your life where you can do unusual things with your mind. So then, I think, do them.”
Words to live and write by.
“I don’t think that living writers should be treated with the awe that is sometimes reserved for dead writers, but if a well-known writer whose work tends to garner respect takes ten years to write a novel and it’s not the greatest novel in the world, dismissiveness is not an appropriate response. An unsuccessful work might not seem unsuccessful in another generation. It may be part of the writer’s pilgrimage.”
Reading this passage by Robinson, I thought immediately of the stupid things said about Ralph Ellison, author of one of the small number of great American novels. That he never again approached the achievement of Invisible Man caused Ellison much unhappiness and certainly disappointed readers, but who are we to disparage him? Writers, at least the good ones, are not trained seals performing tricks on demand. In a more intimate connection, Robinson tells Sarah Fay, her interviewer:
“I’m kind of a solitary. This would not satisfy everyone’s hopes, but for me it’s a lovely thing. I recognize the satisfactions of a more socially enmeshed existence than I cultivate, but I go days without hearing another human voice and never notice it. I never fear it. The only thing I fear is the intensity of my attachment to it. It’s a predisposition in my family. My brother is a solitary. My mother is a solitary. I grew up with the confidence that the greatest privilege was to be alone and have all the time you wanted. That was the cream of existence. I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone. It’s a good predisposition in a writer. And books are good company. Nothing is more human than a book.”
Yes, I feel kinship, the pleasantly unexpected sense of someone articulating what has remained in me a thought without form. More than that, how bracing to know a writer of monastic dedication is working out there, without interest in the supposed “lifestyle” of a successful writer. No back-biting, no talk of parties, agents, advances.
It strikes me that most of the best writers at work in the United States are female – Robinson, Cynthia Ozick, Helen Pinkerton, Kay Ryan – and I draw no conclusions from their sex. It’s a convergence of little significance. Each is gifted and works hard, and we could say the same thing of their male counterparts. Here are Robinson’s final words in the interview:
“There’s always something that I feel I’ve missed. I should travel more, for instance. I went to Paris last fall, which was a great departure for me. I flew Air India, which in itself was quite remarkable. I had a lovely time in France and I thought, I should do this more often. But then I come home and I think, I have all of this work to do. Look at all of these books I haven’t read. Frankly, you get to a certain point in your life where you can do unusual things with your mind. So then, I think, do them.”
Words to live and write by.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
`Doubtless You Are a Good Sort of Fellow'
Tackiness and excess have always been a part of the way we celebrate Christmas, and some of us work hard not to be stiff-necked prigs when it comes to Yuletide observances. Wednesday evening, in the rain and without umbrellas, we toured the Garden d’Lights at the Bellevue Botanical Garden. We wandered paths and admired flowers, a banana slug, scarecrow, peacocks and waterfall complete with leaping salmon, all fashioned from half a million lights. Imagine the kitschiest, most crowded, best-natured acid trip in the world. To object, to uphold standards of taste, to have behaved like an art critic, would have been smug and enormously annoying. We were having too much fun for that.
G.K. Chesterton would have approved. Unlike many writers, he knew how to celebrate, how to have a good time, how to be happy. In “Christmas,” an essay from his 1908 collection All Things Considered, he writes:
“Let us be consistent, therefore, about Christmas, and either keep customs or not keep them. If you do not like sentiment and symbolism, you do not like Christmas; go away and celebrate something else; I should suggest the birthday of Mr. M'Cabe.”
I didn’t notice much “sentiment and symbolism” at the Garden d’Lights, but did observe a lot of happy people, in particular children, enchanted and amused by the Las Vegas-like spectacle. Chesterton continues:
“No doubt you could have a sort of scientific Christmas with a hygienic pudding and highly instructive presents stuffed into a Jaeger stocking; go and have it then. If you like those things, doubtless you are a good sort of fellow, and your intentions are excellent. I have no doubt that you are really interested in humanity; but I cannot think that humanity will ever be much interested in you.”
G.K. Chesterton would have approved. Unlike many writers, he knew how to celebrate, how to have a good time, how to be happy. In “Christmas,” an essay from his 1908 collection All Things Considered, he writes:
“Let us be consistent, therefore, about Christmas, and either keep customs or not keep them. If you do not like sentiment and symbolism, you do not like Christmas; go away and celebrate something else; I should suggest the birthday of Mr. M'Cabe.”
I didn’t notice much “sentiment and symbolism” at the Garden d’Lights, but did observe a lot of happy people, in particular children, enchanted and amused by the Las Vegas-like spectacle. Chesterton continues:
“No doubt you could have a sort of scientific Christmas with a hygienic pudding and highly instructive presents stuffed into a Jaeger stocking; go and have it then. If you like those things, doubtless you are a good sort of fellow, and your intentions are excellent. I have no doubt that you are really interested in humanity; but I cannot think that humanity will ever be much interested in you.”
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
`I'm Going to Buy All My Food at the Bookstore'
A female teacher asked me to fetch a fifth-grade boy from the restroom he preferred not to leave. I know him as a quiet, stammering kid, a loner, indifferent to pleasing or displeasing others, usually with a book in his hands. In short, I identify with his plight as a public-school student. He was in the locked stall but sounded reasonable enough when I asked if anything was bothering him.
“No, I’m fine. I’m reading,” he said.
It seems his teacher wanted him to put down his book long enough to finish his math assignment. Impertinent, I know, but I pointed out that one builds character by occasionally indulging the demands of others. I suggested fifteen minutes of uninterrupted, academically un-coerced reading in the middle of the day was certainly a treat, one that I envied, but perhaps he ought to return to class and finish his math. Without an argument, he walked out of the stall holding a copy of The Last Olympian, the latest installment in Rick Riordan’s “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” saga, much favored and obsessively reread by my younger sons.
“You’ve read all of them?”
“Yeah. Five times. I don’t like to stop reading when I get started.”
“Me too, but life gets in the way.”
“Yeah. They don’t even want us to read in the cafeteria. When we read we’re not eating fast enough.”
Two days before Christmas 1953, Groucho Marx wrote in a letter to Fred Allen:
“For Christmas I bought the cook a cookbook. She promptly fried it and we had it for dinner last night. It was the first decent meal we had in three weeks. From now on I’m going to buy all my food at the bookstore.”
“No, I’m fine. I’m reading,” he said.
It seems his teacher wanted him to put down his book long enough to finish his math assignment. Impertinent, I know, but I pointed out that one builds character by occasionally indulging the demands of others. I suggested fifteen minutes of uninterrupted, academically un-coerced reading in the middle of the day was certainly a treat, one that I envied, but perhaps he ought to return to class and finish his math. Without an argument, he walked out of the stall holding a copy of The Last Olympian, the latest installment in Rick Riordan’s “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” saga, much favored and obsessively reread by my younger sons.
“You’ve read all of them?”
“Yeah. Five times. I don’t like to stop reading when I get started.”
“Me too, but life gets in the way.”
“Yeah. They don’t even want us to read in the cafeteria. When we read we’re not eating fast enough.”
Two days before Christmas 1953, Groucho Marx wrote in a letter to Fred Allen:
“For Christmas I bought the cook a cookbook. She promptly fried it and we had it for dinner last night. It was the first decent meal we had in three weeks. From now on I’m going to buy all my food at the bookstore.”
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
`But the Shore Is a Long Way Off'
In her celebration of Polish Christmas carols, Cynthia Haven cites a passage by Czeslaw Milosz from A Year of the Hunter (1994):
“Without a doubt, Polish carols possess a particular charm, freshness, sincerity, good humor, that simply cannot be found in such proportions in any other Christmas songs, and perhaps one ought to look at them for the essence of Polish poetry.”
The claim exceeds my ability to evaluate it but the qualities Milosz enumerates – “charm, freshness, sincerity, good humor” – seem characteristic, to varying degrees, of the Polish poets whose work I know best in English translation – Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Aleksander Wat, Wisława Szymborska, Adam Zagajewski and Tadeusz Rozewicz. All are predisposed to irony, bluffness, reverence, whimsy and wit, and constitute one of the great artistic flowerings of the last wretched century.
I’ve just found an online homage to Herbert edited by John Zbigniew Guzlowski, including translations of the poet’s work and testimonials by twelve Polish and Polish-American poets. Among the latter is a poem by Guzlowski, “Polish Poets,” which concludes:
“These poets know
Poetry’s only a bit of wood
“But the shore
Is a long way off”
Cynthia emphasizes the pan-Slavic nature of the concert she attended last week in Berkeley, which brings to mind a recent email from a reader on the other coast, in New York City. She mentions my recent post on the birthday of Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov, and describes another concert:
“…on Saturday night we went to what has become an annual holiday event for us, a concert by the Russian Chamber Chorus of NY, in a nearby church. Not holiday music -- sometimes a little as an encore, none this year -- but splendid Russian choral music.
“You had a translation of Lermontov's "The Pine Tree" on 10/15…but the Chorus sang it on Saturday. Here is their translation -- more detailed -- freer:
“`In the wild north country
a solitary pine tree stands
upon a barren peak,
and it dreams, as it waves to and fro,
clothed with powdery snow
as with a robe.
And in its dreams it imagines
that somewhere in a faraway desert,
in that land where the sun makes its rising,
alone and in sadness, upon a burning crag
a beautiful palm tree grows.’”
Herbert might be answering Lermontov’s poem with his own “An Answer”:
“this will be night after hard reality
a conspiracy of the imagination
it has a taste of bread and lightness of vodka
but the choice to remain here
is confirmed by every dream about palm trees”
“Without a doubt, Polish carols possess a particular charm, freshness, sincerity, good humor, that simply cannot be found in such proportions in any other Christmas songs, and perhaps one ought to look at them for the essence of Polish poetry.”
The claim exceeds my ability to evaluate it but the qualities Milosz enumerates – “charm, freshness, sincerity, good humor” – seem characteristic, to varying degrees, of the Polish poets whose work I know best in English translation – Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Aleksander Wat, Wisława Szymborska, Adam Zagajewski and Tadeusz Rozewicz. All are predisposed to irony, bluffness, reverence, whimsy and wit, and constitute one of the great artistic flowerings of the last wretched century.
I’ve just found an online homage to Herbert edited by John Zbigniew Guzlowski, including translations of the poet’s work and testimonials by twelve Polish and Polish-American poets. Among the latter is a poem by Guzlowski, “Polish Poets,” which concludes:
“These poets know
Poetry’s only a bit of wood
“But the shore
Is a long way off”
Cynthia emphasizes the pan-Slavic nature of the concert she attended last week in Berkeley, which brings to mind a recent email from a reader on the other coast, in New York City. She mentions my recent post on the birthday of Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov, and describes another concert:
“…on Saturday night we went to what has become an annual holiday event for us, a concert by the Russian Chamber Chorus of NY, in a nearby church. Not holiday music -- sometimes a little as an encore, none this year -- but splendid Russian choral music.
“You had a translation of Lermontov's "The Pine Tree" on 10/15…but the Chorus sang it on Saturday. Here is their translation -- more detailed -- freer:
“`In the wild north country
a solitary pine tree stands
upon a barren peak,
and it dreams, as it waves to and fro,
clothed with powdery snow
as with a robe.
And in its dreams it imagines
that somewhere in a faraway desert,
in that land where the sun makes its rising,
alone and in sadness, upon a burning crag
a beautiful palm tree grows.’”
Herbert might be answering Lermontov’s poem with his own “An Answer”:
“this will be night after hard reality
a conspiracy of the imagination
it has a taste of bread and lightness of vodka
but the choice to remain here
is confirmed by every dream about palm trees”
Monday, December 13, 2010
`Let Well-Tuned Words Amaze'
We’ve had three days of uninterrupted rain, the gray relentless kind ignored by natives, who pull up their hoods and go jogging. Almost poetically the weather service identifies the cause as “a plume of very moist, warm Pacific air.” “Plume” is a lovely word for something that causes mudslides and floods. Closer to home it fogs windows, pools on roofs and clogs sewers with pine needles. The air smells like rotting leaves, not at all like Christmas. Supermarkets heat a brew of spices near the front door as olfactory incitement to Yuletide covetousness. I love the smell but its pecuniary impact is nil. It just makes me think about dancing with the Fezziwigs:
“There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind. The sort of man who knew his business better than you or I could have told it him.) struck up ‘Sir Roger de Coverley.’ Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs Fezziwig. Top couple, too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no notion of walking.”
Most years I reread A Christmas Carol – this must be my fortieth immersion – and always notice something new. In the preceding paragraph, the fiddler “went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches.” I reread Dickens for the small touches, human cartoons and linguistic turns, not convoluted plots, sentimentality and social-justice hectoring. My turn to Dickens in December – at least A Christmas Carol and parts of Pickwick Papers -- is instinctive, like migrating birds. I take the advice of Thomas Campion (1567-1620):
“Let well-tun'd words amaze
With harmonie diuine.”
Campion urges us to accept the long cold darkness of winter by transplanting summer pleasures indoors. The urge to nest, to hunker down in a state of ambulatory hibernation, is hard to resist in December:
“The Summer hath his ioyes,
And Winter his delights;
Though Loue and all his pleasures are but toyes,
They shorten tedious nights.”
“There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind. The sort of man who knew his business better than you or I could have told it him.) struck up ‘Sir Roger de Coverley.’ Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs Fezziwig. Top couple, too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no notion of walking.”
Most years I reread A Christmas Carol – this must be my fortieth immersion – and always notice something new. In the preceding paragraph, the fiddler “went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches.” I reread Dickens for the small touches, human cartoons and linguistic turns, not convoluted plots, sentimentality and social-justice hectoring. My turn to Dickens in December – at least A Christmas Carol and parts of Pickwick Papers -- is instinctive, like migrating birds. I take the advice of Thomas Campion (1567-1620):
“Let well-tun'd words amaze
With harmonie diuine.”
Campion urges us to accept the long cold darkness of winter by transplanting summer pleasures indoors. The urge to nest, to hunker down in a state of ambulatory hibernation, is hard to resist in December:
“The Summer hath his ioyes,
And Winter his delights;
Though Loue and all his pleasures are but toyes,
They shorten tedious nights.”
Sunday, December 12, 2010
`Tender, Ravishing, Almost Human Happiness'
A seasonally appropriate passage from The Diary of the Reverend Francis Kilvert, culminating with a heart-piercing image. Kilvert dates it “Septuagesima Sunday, St. Valentine’s Eve [1870]”:
“Preached at Clyro [Wales] in the morning (Matthew xiv, 30). Very few people in Church, the weather fearful, violent deadly E. wind and the hardest frost we have had yet. Went to Bettws in the afternoon wrapped in two waistcoats, two coats, a muffler and a mackintosh, and was not at all too warm. Heard the Chapel bell pealing strongly for the second time since I have been here and when I got to the Chapel my beard moustaches and whiskers were so stiff with ice that I could hardly open my mouth and my beard was frozen on to my mackintosh. There was a large christening party from Llwyn Gwilym. The baby was baptized in ice which was broken and swimming about in the Font.”
This is the prose of a man attuned equally to body and spirit. The humor is quiet and never pleads for laughs. Kilvert catalogs his elaborate winter wardrobe with deadpan precision, like a comic vaudeville act, and observes he “was not at all too warm.” Nature’s revenge on a preacher: “I could hardly open my mouth.” It’s the baby christened in freezing water, with the detail of ice “swimming about in the Font,” that strikes us as both shocking and stirring, an artifact from a sturdier, long-gone world.
The alignment of child and ice reminded me of Nabokov’s “Christmas,” a story written in Russian in 1925, translated by the author and published in English in Details of a Sunset (1976). Sleptsov’s young son has died in Petersburg and the father returns to his country manor after the body is interred in the family vault. It’s Christmas Eve. The snow is deep and the windows are frosted: “He was amazed to be still alive, and able to perceive the brilliance of the snow and feel his front teeth ache from the cold.”
Sleptov looks at his son’s butterfly collection, his net, spreading boards and “an English biscuit tin that contained a large exotic cocoon which had cost three rubles. It was papery to the touch and seemed made of a brown folded leaf. His son had remembered it during his sickness, regretting that he had left it behind, but consoling himself with the thought that the chrysalid inside was probably dead.”
Sleptov takes the tin to his warm room and the cocoon bursts open. The final two paragraphs are unbearably beautiful, concluding with this sentence:
“And then those thick black wings, with a glazy eyespot on each and a purplish bloom dusting their hooked foretips, took a full breath under the impulse of tender, ravishing, almost human happiness.”
“Preached at Clyro [Wales] in the morning (Matthew xiv, 30). Very few people in Church, the weather fearful, violent deadly E. wind and the hardest frost we have had yet. Went to Bettws in the afternoon wrapped in two waistcoats, two coats, a muffler and a mackintosh, and was not at all too warm. Heard the Chapel bell pealing strongly for the second time since I have been here and when I got to the Chapel my beard moustaches and whiskers were so stiff with ice that I could hardly open my mouth and my beard was frozen on to my mackintosh. There was a large christening party from Llwyn Gwilym. The baby was baptized in ice which was broken and swimming about in the Font.”
This is the prose of a man attuned equally to body and spirit. The humor is quiet and never pleads for laughs. Kilvert catalogs his elaborate winter wardrobe with deadpan precision, like a comic vaudeville act, and observes he “was not at all too warm.” Nature’s revenge on a preacher: “I could hardly open my mouth.” It’s the baby christened in freezing water, with the detail of ice “swimming about in the Font,” that strikes us as both shocking and stirring, an artifact from a sturdier, long-gone world.
The alignment of child and ice reminded me of Nabokov’s “Christmas,” a story written in Russian in 1925, translated by the author and published in English in Details of a Sunset (1976). Sleptsov’s young son has died in Petersburg and the father returns to his country manor after the body is interred in the family vault. It’s Christmas Eve. The snow is deep and the windows are frosted: “He was amazed to be still alive, and able to perceive the brilliance of the snow and feel his front teeth ache from the cold.”
Sleptov looks at his son’s butterfly collection, his net, spreading boards and “an English biscuit tin that contained a large exotic cocoon which had cost three rubles. It was papery to the touch and seemed made of a brown folded leaf. His son had remembered it during his sickness, regretting that he had left it behind, but consoling himself with the thought that the chrysalid inside was probably dead.”
Sleptov takes the tin to his warm room and the cocoon bursts open. The final two paragraphs are unbearably beautiful, concluding with this sentence:
“And then those thick black wings, with a glazy eyespot on each and a purplish bloom dusting their hooked foretips, took a full breath under the impulse of tender, ravishing, almost human happiness.”
Saturday, December 11, 2010
`She Put Her Finger Inside the Cup'
In her 1963 essay “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” first delivered as a lecture at Georgetown University ten months before her death, Flannery O’Connor writes:
“My own approach to fiction, at least when I have to talk about it, is very like the one Dr. Johnson’s blind housekeeper used when she poured tea. She put her finger inside the cup. I think that if there is any value in hearing writers talk, it would be in hearing what they can witness to, and not what they can theorize about. I think it would be in hearing what some of their larger concerns are—the really important things that make details fall into place without too much sinister calculation on the writer’s part.”
Theory, beyond question, is a dreary business, and O’Connor’s plain-spoken dismissal of writers spouting off is refreshing. What interests me more, though, is her use of the Johnson anecdote about Anna Williams (I wrote about O’Connor’s affinities with Johnson here). She was the daughter of a Welsh physician, Zachariah Williams, who, as John Wain writes in his life, belonged to “Johnson’s odd collection of friends.” The elder Williams “had a vein of originality, not to say eccentricity.” His daughter was three years older than Johnson and, Wain says, “a gifted woman with literary ambitions.” Another biographer, W. Jackson Bate, tells us she “wrote poems and knew French and Italian,” and became a companion to Tetty Johnson, the lexicographer’s wife, shortly before Tetty’s death in 1752.
She remained a member of Johnson’s household for the rest of her life, except for six years in her own lodgings. Even then, Johnson was her guest for a cup of tea each evening. Johnson enabled her to have cataract surgery, which proved unsuccessful. He raised £100 in 1766 by arranging for her writings to be published, and scholars believe some of the contents were written by Johnson. By all accounts Williams was a difficult person but Johnson’s devotion remained stalwart. He wrote of her in a letter after her death:
“Her curiosity was universal, her knowledge was very extensive, and she sustained forty years of misery with steady fortitude. Thirty years and more she had been my companion, and her death has left me very desolate.”
Johnson’s reserves of compassion, of simple human love, were immense. His houses served as informal ramshackle sanctuaries for Williams, his servant Frank Barber (Bate says “Johnson regarded him as though he were a son…”) and Dr. Robert Levet, about whom he wrote one of his finest poems. O’Connor makes no further mention of Williams and her blindness in the essay but in the sixth paragraph writes:
“No one taking part in these discussions [of Catholic writers in the South] seems to remember that the eye sees what it has been given to see by concrete circumstances, and that the imagination reproduces what by some related gift it is able to make live.”
Perhaps this picks up from O’Connor’s earlier mention of writers “witnessing,” conventionally a visual act. As Anna Williams’ blindness was the “concrete circumstance” she learned to live with, so too writers adapt by putting their fingers inside the cup of tea. In the essay’s final paragraph O’Connor writes:
“The poet is traditionally a blind man. But the Christian poet, and the story-teller as well, is like the blind man Christ touched, who looked then and saw men as if they were trees—but walking. Christ touched him again, and he saw clearly. We will not see clearly until Christ touches us in death, but this first touch is the beginning of vision, and it is an invitation to deeper and stranger visions that we shall have to accept if we want to realize a Catholic literature.”
“My own approach to fiction, at least when I have to talk about it, is very like the one Dr. Johnson’s blind housekeeper used when she poured tea. She put her finger inside the cup. I think that if there is any value in hearing writers talk, it would be in hearing what they can witness to, and not what they can theorize about. I think it would be in hearing what some of their larger concerns are—the really important things that make details fall into place without too much sinister calculation on the writer’s part.”
Theory, beyond question, is a dreary business, and O’Connor’s plain-spoken dismissal of writers spouting off is refreshing. What interests me more, though, is her use of the Johnson anecdote about Anna Williams (I wrote about O’Connor’s affinities with Johnson here). She was the daughter of a Welsh physician, Zachariah Williams, who, as John Wain writes in his life, belonged to “Johnson’s odd collection of friends.” The elder Williams “had a vein of originality, not to say eccentricity.” His daughter was three years older than Johnson and, Wain says, “a gifted woman with literary ambitions.” Another biographer, W. Jackson Bate, tells us she “wrote poems and knew French and Italian,” and became a companion to Tetty Johnson, the lexicographer’s wife, shortly before Tetty’s death in 1752.
She remained a member of Johnson’s household for the rest of her life, except for six years in her own lodgings. Even then, Johnson was her guest for a cup of tea each evening. Johnson enabled her to have cataract surgery, which proved unsuccessful. He raised £100 in 1766 by arranging for her writings to be published, and scholars believe some of the contents were written by Johnson. By all accounts Williams was a difficult person but Johnson’s devotion remained stalwart. He wrote of her in a letter after her death:
“Her curiosity was universal, her knowledge was very extensive, and she sustained forty years of misery with steady fortitude. Thirty years and more she had been my companion, and her death has left me very desolate.”
Johnson’s reserves of compassion, of simple human love, were immense. His houses served as informal ramshackle sanctuaries for Williams, his servant Frank Barber (Bate says “Johnson regarded him as though he were a son…”) and Dr. Robert Levet, about whom he wrote one of his finest poems. O’Connor makes no further mention of Williams and her blindness in the essay but in the sixth paragraph writes:
“No one taking part in these discussions [of Catholic writers in the South] seems to remember that the eye sees what it has been given to see by concrete circumstances, and that the imagination reproduces what by some related gift it is able to make live.”
Perhaps this picks up from O’Connor’s earlier mention of writers “witnessing,” conventionally a visual act. As Anna Williams’ blindness was the “concrete circumstance” she learned to live with, so too writers adapt by putting their fingers inside the cup of tea. In the essay’s final paragraph O’Connor writes:
“The poet is traditionally a blind man. But the Christian poet, and the story-teller as well, is like the blind man Christ touched, who looked then and saw men as if they were trees—but walking. Christ touched him again, and he saw clearly. We will not see clearly until Christ touches us in death, but this first touch is the beginning of vision, and it is an invitation to deeper and stranger visions that we shall have to accept if we want to realize a Catholic literature.”
Friday, December 10, 2010
`A Command of the Potentialities of Language'
Almost anything is readable, even John Ashbery, in carefully selected, bite-size nuggets. I draw the line at Writer’s Lament, the mewling of self-ordained novelists, poets and bloggers who bewail their lonely task. I read a prominent blogger carrying on this way and thought: Get a job cutting hay or laying asphalt -- real work, the kind that wrings out your brain and might shorten your life. Of all emotions, self-pity is the most insufferable, as anger is the most tiresome – I mean to others, not to the self-pitying and angry, who fuel themselves with unhappiness.
Hard work freely undertaken is a privilege and often a pleasure, and writing is a vocation, part gift, part application, part joy. No one makes you do it and you look silly complaining about it, like a toddler whining about too much ice cream. In “The Plain Style Re-Born,” written in 1961 and collected in Forms of Discovery (1967), Yvor Winters writes:
“During the Romantic movement a great deal of sentimental nonsense was written about the isolation of the artist, and the nonsense usually verges on self-pity; there is a trace of self-pity in [J.V.] Cunningham's poems `Envoi’ and `Forgiveness.’ The fact remains, however, that the artist, if he is really an artist, is really isolated, and his personal life in this respect is a hard one. There are few people with whom he can converse freely without giving offense or becoming angry. It is no accident that so many great writers have sooner or later retreated from society; they retreat because they are excluded.”
Who else could get away with accusing Cunningham of self-pity? And who else refuses to ignore the obvious: Writing is not a social activity. One undertakes it in a sort of double aloneness: Physical isolation, of course, a pushing away of the world, but also mental solitude, maintaining a preserve within, a one-person deer park. There, one can play undisturbed with words and ideas, for that’s essentially what a writer does. In “Three Poets,” written in 1948 and included in Uncollected Essays and Reviews (1976), Winters writes:
“The two marks by which we most readily recognize a poet [writer], I presume, are first an ability to grasp and objectify a particular subject so that it is rendered comprehensible both as an individual thing and as a symbol of general experience, and second a command of the potentialities of language, phrase by phrase, including the rhythmic potentialities. Neither of these abilities will ever develop very far by itself; the subject cannot be defined satisfactorily in general; unless it is defined well in detail, and the language, phrase by phrase, cannot be made to say much unless the poet knows what he is trying to say.”
It’s remarkable how many writers with nothing to say and no gift for saying it are eager to tell us how tough it is being a writer.
Hard work freely undertaken is a privilege and often a pleasure, and writing is a vocation, part gift, part application, part joy. No one makes you do it and you look silly complaining about it, like a toddler whining about too much ice cream. In “The Plain Style Re-Born,” written in 1961 and collected in Forms of Discovery (1967), Yvor Winters writes:
“During the Romantic movement a great deal of sentimental nonsense was written about the isolation of the artist, and the nonsense usually verges on self-pity; there is a trace of self-pity in [J.V.] Cunningham's poems `Envoi’ and `Forgiveness.’ The fact remains, however, that the artist, if he is really an artist, is really isolated, and his personal life in this respect is a hard one. There are few people with whom he can converse freely without giving offense or becoming angry. It is no accident that so many great writers have sooner or later retreated from society; they retreat because they are excluded.”
Who else could get away with accusing Cunningham of self-pity? And who else refuses to ignore the obvious: Writing is not a social activity. One undertakes it in a sort of double aloneness: Physical isolation, of course, a pushing away of the world, but also mental solitude, maintaining a preserve within, a one-person deer park. There, one can play undisturbed with words and ideas, for that’s essentially what a writer does. In “Three Poets,” written in 1948 and included in Uncollected Essays and Reviews (1976), Winters writes:
“The two marks by which we most readily recognize a poet [writer], I presume, are first an ability to grasp and objectify a particular subject so that it is rendered comprehensible both as an individual thing and as a symbol of general experience, and second a command of the potentialities of language, phrase by phrase, including the rhythmic potentialities. Neither of these abilities will ever develop very far by itself; the subject cannot be defined satisfactorily in general; unless it is defined well in detail, and the language, phrase by phrase, cannot be made to say much unless the poet knows what he is trying to say.”
It’s remarkable how many writers with nothing to say and no gift for saying it are eager to tell us how tough it is being a writer.
Thursday, December 09, 2010
`Delicate Mocking Feet'
I grew up thinking coyotes lived only in the more picturesque regions of the American West, in the vicinity of late-night campfires. In Cleveland, coyotes were as scarce as coatamundis. In upstate New York about twenty years ago I first heard them in the wild, always at night, a lonesome, grieving sound like souls abandoned.
For three months in the spring of 1994, I worked the late shift as a copy editor for the newspaper in Schenectady. The building stood on a bluff above the Mohawk River. I would leave after midnight, following a winding river road home, and most nights I saw pairs of glowing disks ahead of me – the eyes of coyotes reflecting the beams of my headlights. Skinny, furtive, feral creatures, they stared and then ran into the trees.
I’d read of coyote sightings in greater Seattle but hadn’t seen one until Wednesday evening. Two blocks from home, I was driving to the mall to pick up my ten-year-old. From the left, two pairs of blue-white agates moved across the pavement and stopped in the rain. They looked like dogs but bonier, with gray, matted, washed-out fur. Shaky and frightened, like escapees on the lam, they disappeared between two houses. Among the poems Yvor Winters included in his first book, The Immobile Wind (1921), was “Two Songs of Advent”:
I
“On the desert, between pale mountains, our cries --
Far whispers creeping through an ancient shell.
II
“Coyote, on delicate mocking feet,
Hovers down the canyon, among the mountains,
His voice running wild in the wind's valleys.
“Listen! Listen! for I enter now your thought.”
In his introduction to Selected Poems: Yvor Winters (2003), Thom Gunn describes his former teacher’s early work as “short gnomic poems that might mean either nothing or a great deal.” About this poem, I vacillate between Gunn’s alternatives. Winters was age twenty and not yet a great poet when he wrote "Two Songs of Advent." “I enter now your thought” is uncomfortably close to Carlos Castaneda’s flummery, but “delicate mocking feet” is precise and memorable. The poet no doubt knew the coyote was a Trickster figure among American Indians. Is Winters suggesting the poet, too, is a Trickster, perhaps juggling “nothing” and “a great deal?”
For three months in the spring of 1994, I worked the late shift as a copy editor for the newspaper in Schenectady. The building stood on a bluff above the Mohawk River. I would leave after midnight, following a winding river road home, and most nights I saw pairs of glowing disks ahead of me – the eyes of coyotes reflecting the beams of my headlights. Skinny, furtive, feral creatures, they stared and then ran into the trees.
I’d read of coyote sightings in greater Seattle but hadn’t seen one until Wednesday evening. Two blocks from home, I was driving to the mall to pick up my ten-year-old. From the left, two pairs of blue-white agates moved across the pavement and stopped in the rain. They looked like dogs but bonier, with gray, matted, washed-out fur. Shaky and frightened, like escapees on the lam, they disappeared between two houses. Among the poems Yvor Winters included in his first book, The Immobile Wind (1921), was “Two Songs of Advent”:
I
“On the desert, between pale mountains, our cries --
Far whispers creeping through an ancient shell.
II
“Coyote, on delicate mocking feet,
Hovers down the canyon, among the mountains,
His voice running wild in the wind's valleys.
“Listen! Listen! for I enter now your thought.”
In his introduction to Selected Poems: Yvor Winters (2003), Thom Gunn describes his former teacher’s early work as “short gnomic poems that might mean either nothing or a great deal.” About this poem, I vacillate between Gunn’s alternatives. Winters was age twenty and not yet a great poet when he wrote "Two Songs of Advent." “I enter now your thought” is uncomfortably close to Carlos Castaneda’s flummery, but “delicate mocking feet” is precise and memorable. The poet no doubt knew the coyote was a Trickster figure among American Indians. Is Winters suggesting the poet, too, is a Trickster, perhaps juggling “nothing” and “a great deal?”
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
The Dark Season Runs Into Sunshine'
“Quiet. It is winter and the frost
Stretches away into the mist;
A circle of dark closes in
Under the predicated stars.
How, under them, can you be content
With the light, the fire and the Christmas tree?
Or the gesticulating screen
There by the bottles in the corner?
What spirits move? What memory
Stirs in the human race today?”
With the seasonal cusp approaching, the year takes on the feel of rotary motion, turning but remaining in place. By afternoon the sun is setting behind the cedars and firs. Twilight stretches, dimming into darkness, like autumn into winter. Bound Christmas trees lashed to car roofs. Houses and shrubs modestly decorated with lights, nothing excessive. The odd garish displays are reassuring, recalling less guilty times.
In the mall stands a six-foot menorah built of Starbucks coffee cups. I’ve heard “Feliz Navidad” twice. Christmas music, even the cheesiest, makes me think of Caliban’s “Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.” We first saw Christmas trees and lights for sale in September, when leaves were green. Rain belies the season. Time to read Dickens and cherish the darkness.
“The dark season runs into sunshine
In which nothing more is illuminated,
The paradise of snow that the cold holds.
Do not turn that into imagination.
It is better to see the peace the New York brings,
The sky blue as it need be, sunlit branches
Motionless on the beech, waiting for green.
Spring will come, and after it the summer
Extending across the moors like a bow drawn,
Waiting to shoot its arrow into autumn,
The line of hills which always promise winter
And beyond that.”
[The quoted passages are the opening and closing lines of C.H. Sisson’s “Across the Winter” (Exactions, 1980).]
Stretches away into the mist;
A circle of dark closes in
Under the predicated stars.
How, under them, can you be content
With the light, the fire and the Christmas tree?
Or the gesticulating screen
There by the bottles in the corner?
What spirits move? What memory
Stirs in the human race today?”
With the seasonal cusp approaching, the year takes on the feel of rotary motion, turning but remaining in place. By afternoon the sun is setting behind the cedars and firs. Twilight stretches, dimming into darkness, like autumn into winter. Bound Christmas trees lashed to car roofs. Houses and shrubs modestly decorated with lights, nothing excessive. The odd garish displays are reassuring, recalling less guilty times.
In the mall stands a six-foot menorah built of Starbucks coffee cups. I’ve heard “Feliz Navidad” twice. Christmas music, even the cheesiest, makes me think of Caliban’s “Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.” We first saw Christmas trees and lights for sale in September, when leaves were green. Rain belies the season. Time to read Dickens and cherish the darkness.
“The dark season runs into sunshine
In which nothing more is illuminated,
The paradise of snow that the cold holds.
Do not turn that into imagination.
It is better to see the peace the New York brings,
The sky blue as it need be, sunlit branches
Motionless on the beech, waiting for green.
Spring will come, and after it the summer
Extending across the moors like a bow drawn,
Waiting to shoot its arrow into autumn,
The line of hills which always promise winter
And beyond that.”
[The quoted passages are the opening and closing lines of C.H. Sisson’s “Across the Winter” (Exactions, 1980).]
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
`It Must Be Scorching in Africa Now'
My friend in Sudan sends his latest dispatch:
“You might recall the tiny library I brought with me here. I've given it all away except for one volume, Chekhov's Stories in the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation of thirty jewels.
“My view is that Chekhov `hit a home run’ about 50% of the time from the moment he became ill in 1889, starting with `A Boring Story.’ It might be argued that he was just as successful from the moment in 1886 when he was `discovered’ and began taking his art seriously.”
Despite the sports metaphor, my friend is correct. Few writers matured so quickly (Chekhov turned twenty-nine in 1889) or maintained so consistently high a level of accomplishment. Even his early newspaper fluff, cranked out to support his family and pay his way through medical school, is amusing and worth reading. Chekhov’s death from tuberculosis at age forty-four makes the accomplishment almost supernatural.
The Pevear/Volokhonsky Stories (Bantam Books, 2000) gathers work from all periods of Chekhov’s writing life and includes some of the gems – “A Boring Story,” “Gusev,” “Ward No. 6,” “Anna on the Neck,” “The Lady with the Little Dog,” “In the Ravine,” “The Bishop.” P/V also translated The Complete Short Novels (Everyman’s Library, 2004), which collects five longer stories including Chekhov’s masterpiece, “My Life.”
The prospect of whittling down an already reduced library is daunting but my friend exercised prudence, especially in so remote and difficult a place as Sudan. He went not for stylistic elegance (Wilbur) or a too-close-to-home parable of Africa (Heart of Darkness) but for the human touch: “To [Chekhov] life is neither horrible nor happy, but unique, strange, fleeting, beautiful and awful.” So writes William Gerhardie in Anton Chehov [sic]: A Critical Study (1923), the first book in English devoted to the great Russian.
In the final act of Uncle Vanya (1896) a map of Africa hangs on the wall, and a stage direction describes it as “obviously out of place here.” Near the play’s end, Astrov pauses to look at the map and says:
“It must be scorching in Africa now.”
“You might recall the tiny library I brought with me here. I've given it all away except for one volume, Chekhov's Stories in the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation of thirty jewels.
“My view is that Chekhov `hit a home run’ about 50% of the time from the moment he became ill in 1889, starting with `A Boring Story.’ It might be argued that he was just as successful from the moment in 1886 when he was `discovered’ and began taking his art seriously.”
Despite the sports metaphor, my friend is correct. Few writers matured so quickly (Chekhov turned twenty-nine in 1889) or maintained so consistently high a level of accomplishment. Even his early newspaper fluff, cranked out to support his family and pay his way through medical school, is amusing and worth reading. Chekhov’s death from tuberculosis at age forty-four makes the accomplishment almost supernatural.
The Pevear/Volokhonsky Stories (Bantam Books, 2000) gathers work from all periods of Chekhov’s writing life and includes some of the gems – “A Boring Story,” “Gusev,” “Ward No. 6,” “Anna on the Neck,” “The Lady with the Little Dog,” “In the Ravine,” “The Bishop.” P/V also translated The Complete Short Novels (Everyman’s Library, 2004), which collects five longer stories including Chekhov’s masterpiece, “My Life.”
The prospect of whittling down an already reduced library is daunting but my friend exercised prudence, especially in so remote and difficult a place as Sudan. He went not for stylistic elegance (Wilbur) or a too-close-to-home parable of Africa (Heart of Darkness) but for the human touch: “To [Chekhov] life is neither horrible nor happy, but unique, strange, fleeting, beautiful and awful.” So writes William Gerhardie in Anton Chehov [sic]: A Critical Study (1923), the first book in English devoted to the great Russian.
In the final act of Uncle Vanya (1896) a map of Africa hangs on the wall, and a stage direction describes it as “obviously out of place here.” Near the play’s end, Astrov pauses to look at the map and says:
“It must be scorching in Africa now.”
Monday, December 06, 2010
`Their Whinnering at Night'
In a Jan. 30, 1855, journal entry, Thoreau notes a conversation he had with a neighbor, the farmer George Minott:
“Said the raccoon made a track very much like a young child’s foot. He had often seen it in the mud of a ditch.”
Several things are poignant in this report of a friend’s anecdote. Despite the myth, Thoreau was no hermit. More than most he was comfortable in his own company but relished companionship on his own terms. Minott shows up in Thoreau’s journal more frequently than Emerson, and among humans only Ellery Channing appears more often. Thoreau calls Minott “the most poetical farmer” and seems to have seen an unliterary reflection of himself in his neighbor.
Before Sunday morning I hadn’t noticed the resemblance of a racoon's track to a child’s foot. Through the kitchen window I watched one navigate the backyard, pausing to scratch like a dog, before climbing our fence and the neighbor’s, and disappearing behind their empty rabbit hutch. He was corpulent and moved like a sack of puppies but his prints in the mud looked undeniably like a kid’s in a freshly poured sidewalk. In the “Brute Neighbors” chapter in Walden, Thoreau writes:
“It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret in the woods, and still sustain themselves in the neighborhood of towns, suspected by hunters only. How retired the otter manages to live here! He grows to be four feet long, as big as a small boy, perhaps without any human being getting a glimpse of him. I formerly saw the raccoon in the woods behind where my house is built, and probably still heard their whinnering at night.”
Webster’s Third gives “whinny” and “whicker” as synonyms for “whinner,” and defines it as “to whine feebly,” another quality raccoons share with some children.
“Said the raccoon made a track very much like a young child’s foot. He had often seen it in the mud of a ditch.”
Several things are poignant in this report of a friend’s anecdote. Despite the myth, Thoreau was no hermit. More than most he was comfortable in his own company but relished companionship on his own terms. Minott shows up in Thoreau’s journal more frequently than Emerson, and among humans only Ellery Channing appears more often. Thoreau calls Minott “the most poetical farmer” and seems to have seen an unliterary reflection of himself in his neighbor.
Before Sunday morning I hadn’t noticed the resemblance of a racoon's track to a child’s foot. Through the kitchen window I watched one navigate the backyard, pausing to scratch like a dog, before climbing our fence and the neighbor’s, and disappearing behind their empty rabbit hutch. He was corpulent and moved like a sack of puppies but his prints in the mud looked undeniably like a kid’s in a freshly poured sidewalk. In the “Brute Neighbors” chapter in Walden, Thoreau writes:
“It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret in the woods, and still sustain themselves in the neighborhood of towns, suspected by hunters only. How retired the otter manages to live here! He grows to be four feet long, as big as a small boy, perhaps without any human being getting a glimpse of him. I formerly saw the raccoon in the woods behind where my house is built, and probably still heard their whinnering at night.”
Webster’s Third gives “whinny” and “whicker” as synonyms for “whinner,” and defines it as “to whine feebly,” another quality raccoons share with some children.
Sunday, December 05, 2010
`One Foot Will Lift and the Split Resolve'
One splits hairs, atoms, rails and infinitives. One splits and splices genes. Splitting implies sharing and breaking, leaving and taking. In Shakespeare, it’s the heart or breast most often split. In King Lear, the Duke of Albany says: “Let sorrow split my heart if ever I / Did hate thee, or thy father!” The word entered English around Shakespeare’s sixteenth birthday. Slangily, to split is to leave the scene, divorce or perform gymnastics. We split tickets, screens and the difference. Kay Ryan has a new poem, “Splitting Ice,” at The Threepenny Review:
“Like standing
on splitting ice
one foot on one
one on the
other piece.
Distressed like
the family of man
at the divorce
of the plates:
some cast into
a suddenly new
world as though
having sinned;
those kept behind
trapped and
bereft. But in
a person, one
foot will lift
and the split
resolve. So
why do the
self-saved
feel half left?”
“Plates” suggests dinnerware and tectonics. Families and continents split. The religious resonance is new to Ryan’s poems – “as though having sinned,” “self-saved.” The rupturing of a family, like Eliza and little Harry braving ice floes on the Ohio River, is perilous and painful. Masters split slave families. Alone, Ryan suggests, we survive splits: “one / foot will lift / and the split / resolve.” Of course, wholeness has a price: we, the “self-saved,” feel “half left.” Another California poet who lived in the neighborhood of the San Andreas Fault, Janet Lewis, writes in “Morning Devotion”:
“To bind despair and joy
Into a stable whole.”
“Like standing
on splitting ice
one foot on one
one on the
other piece.
Distressed like
the family of man
at the divorce
of the plates:
some cast into
a suddenly new
world as though
having sinned;
those kept behind
trapped and
bereft. But in
a person, one
foot will lift
and the split
resolve. So
why do the
self-saved
feel half left?”
“Plates” suggests dinnerware and tectonics. Families and continents split. The religious resonance is new to Ryan’s poems – “as though having sinned,” “self-saved.” The rupturing of a family, like Eliza and little Harry braving ice floes on the Ohio River, is perilous and painful. Masters split slave families. Alone, Ryan suggests, we survive splits: “one / foot will lift / and the split / resolve.” Of course, wholeness has a price: we, the “self-saved,” feel “half left.” Another California poet who lived in the neighborhood of the San Andreas Fault, Janet Lewis, writes in “Morning Devotion”:
“To bind despair and joy
Into a stable whole.”
Saturday, December 04, 2010
`Poems of the Night'
My review of two books of poems by Jorge Luis Borges appears in issue 22 of The Quarterly Conversation.
`Listing Toward Oblivion'
By nature, lists are funny. It’s their pretensions to comprehensiveness, the idea that mapping the human genome, for instance, a grand sort of list-making, will somehow tell us all we need to know about homo sapiens. There’s also the randomness of juxtapositions, as in Borges’ sample from the catalog of books in “The Library of Babel”:
“…the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Balilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.”
In “The Joy of Lists,” Arthur Krystal cites the cosmic list in “The Aleph,” another story by Borges, whom Krystal calls “the great contemporary list maker”:
“This list is Borges, and it suggests — does it not? — the continuing incalculable exchange between the self and the world. So we catalog as we go, itemizing things seen and unseen, as we move inexorably forward, listing toward oblivion.”
Krystal notes the reaching after comprehensiveness implied by lists – he calls them “reassuring” and says they possess “a precision and formality that makes us think we’ve got a handle on things” – but doesn’t dwell on what I deem their fundamental quality: comedy. Think of the writers not mentioned by Krystal who reveled in cataloging the stuff of the world. Let’s start our list with the Irish – Sterne, Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien. Let’s add Rabelais, Montaigne, Burton, Browne, Coleridge, Lamb, Melville, Liebling, Bellow and Ian Frazier, among others. Whitman listed like Homer – too often too solemnly. In contrast, O’Brien was a master of the straight-faced, almost scholarly list as parody – here, from At Swim-Two-Birds, is part of the list of the boasting Finn Mac Cool:
“I incline to like pig-grunting in Magh Eithne, the bellowing of the stag of Ceara, the whingeing of fauns in Derrynish. The low warble of water-owls in Loch Barra also, sweeter than life that. I am fond of wing-beating in dark belfries, cow-cries in pregnancy, trout-spurt in a lake-top. Also the whining of small otters in nettle-beds at evening, the croaking of small-jays behind a wall, these are heart-pleasing. I am friend to the pilibeen, the red-necked chough, the parsnip land-rail, the pilibeen mona, the bottle-tailed tit, the common marsh-coot, the speckle-toed guillemot, the pilibeen sléibhe, the Mohar gannet, the peregrine plough-gull, the long-eared bush-owl, the Wicklow small-fowl, the bevil-beaked chough, the hooded tit, the pilibeen uisce, the common corby, the fish-tailed mud-piper, the cruiskeen lawn, the carrion sea-cock, the green-lidded parakeet, the brown bog-martin, the maritime wren, the dove-tailed wheat-crake, the beaded daw, the Galway hill-bantam and the pilibeen cathrach.”
This always cracks me up though I’m also easily amused by dictionaries, books of quotations, encyclopedias, manuals, pharmacopoeia, almanacs, handbooks, field guides, grammars, enchiridia, books of quotations, directories, atlases, phrase books, concordances, anatomies, gazetteers, thesauri and other compendia.
“…the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Balilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.”
In “The Joy of Lists,” Arthur Krystal cites the cosmic list in “The Aleph,” another story by Borges, whom Krystal calls “the great contemporary list maker”:
“This list is Borges, and it suggests — does it not? — the continuing incalculable exchange between the self and the world. So we catalog as we go, itemizing things seen and unseen, as we move inexorably forward, listing toward oblivion.”
Krystal notes the reaching after comprehensiveness implied by lists – he calls them “reassuring” and says they possess “a precision and formality that makes us think we’ve got a handle on things” – but doesn’t dwell on what I deem their fundamental quality: comedy. Think of the writers not mentioned by Krystal who reveled in cataloging the stuff of the world. Let’s start our list with the Irish – Sterne, Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien. Let’s add Rabelais, Montaigne, Burton, Browne, Coleridge, Lamb, Melville, Liebling, Bellow and Ian Frazier, among others. Whitman listed like Homer – too often too solemnly. In contrast, O’Brien was a master of the straight-faced, almost scholarly list as parody – here, from At Swim-Two-Birds, is part of the list of the boasting Finn Mac Cool:
“I incline to like pig-grunting in Magh Eithne, the bellowing of the stag of Ceara, the whingeing of fauns in Derrynish. The low warble of water-owls in Loch Barra also, sweeter than life that. I am fond of wing-beating in dark belfries, cow-cries in pregnancy, trout-spurt in a lake-top. Also the whining of small otters in nettle-beds at evening, the croaking of small-jays behind a wall, these are heart-pleasing. I am friend to the pilibeen, the red-necked chough, the parsnip land-rail, the pilibeen mona, the bottle-tailed tit, the common marsh-coot, the speckle-toed guillemot, the pilibeen sléibhe, the Mohar gannet, the peregrine plough-gull, the long-eared bush-owl, the Wicklow small-fowl, the bevil-beaked chough, the hooded tit, the pilibeen uisce, the common corby, the fish-tailed mud-piper, the cruiskeen lawn, the carrion sea-cock, the green-lidded parakeet, the brown bog-martin, the maritime wren, the dove-tailed wheat-crake, the beaded daw, the Galway hill-bantam and the pilibeen cathrach.”
This always cracks me up though I’m also easily amused by dictionaries, books of quotations, encyclopedias, manuals, pharmacopoeia, almanacs, handbooks, field guides, grammars, enchiridia, books of quotations, directories, atlases, phrase books, concordances, anatomies, gazetteers, thesauri and other compendia.
Friday, December 03, 2010
`The Morning Star Climbs Above Mount Ida'
In 1947, Helen Wadell, author of The Wandering Scholars (1927) and The Desert Fathers (1936), delivered the eighth W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture at the University of Glasgow and published it the following year as Poetry in the Dark Ages. Midway through the slender volume she inserts an anecdote about her reading of Virgil’s Aeneid:
“The Aeneid is not a popular schoolbook, nor the hero of it always a heroic figure: but if all else goes from the schools, let us at least keep the second book of Virgil. I speak of it with passion, for after half a lifetime of neglect, something sent me to it on that September afternoon when the Luftwaffe first broke through the defences of London, and that night it seemed as though London and her river alike burned.”
To read with deliberation is to attend to the world. In no sense is it “escape,” though escape is a perfectly acceptable reason for performing other sorts of reading. Waddell sought not “relevance” but a reader’s consolation. She cites Aeneas’ pitiful words in a dream to Hector, now dead and no longer the heroic defender of Troy -- “O lux Dardaniae!” -- as the Nazis prepare to level London. Aeneas, she says:
“…finds them, the housefolk and a herd of fugitives, soldiers, mothers, and most pitiful of all, collectam exsilio pubem, a huddle of young things gathered up for exile. I saw them, the young things gathered up for exile, with their little bags and bundles, at the end of that cloudless, endless September day, when the mothers and babies were herded out of London: now at evening huddled like lambs in a green field after a whole day’s travelling, and bleating like lambs `with their weak human cry’ – collectam exsilio pubem. And the night passes, and the morning star climbs above Mount Ida, and Aeneas looks down, and sees Troy burning still, and the Greeks at every gate.”
Waddell neither aestheticizes violence nor sentimentalizes literature. Her resort to Virgil as the bombs drop is humbling and ennobling. She feels the pity and horror no less knowing pity and horror have precedent. In 1978, hospitalized and in fear of sanity burning away, I asked for my copy of Dickinson’s Complete Poems. Now it stands on my desk between Helen Pinkerton’s Taken in Faith and Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm. The poem I underlined and annotated most heavily, and have reread most often, is #539 in the Johnson edition:
“The Province of the Saved
Should be the Art -- To save --
Through Skill obtained in Themselves --
The Science of the Grave
No Man can understand
But He that hath endured
The Dissolution -- in Himself --
That Man -- be qualified
To qualify Despair
To Those who failing new --
Mistake Defeat for Death -- Each time --
Till acclimated -- to –”
“The Aeneid is not a popular schoolbook, nor the hero of it always a heroic figure: but if all else goes from the schools, let us at least keep the second book of Virgil. I speak of it with passion, for after half a lifetime of neglect, something sent me to it on that September afternoon when the Luftwaffe first broke through the defences of London, and that night it seemed as though London and her river alike burned.”
To read with deliberation is to attend to the world. In no sense is it “escape,” though escape is a perfectly acceptable reason for performing other sorts of reading. Waddell sought not “relevance” but a reader’s consolation. She cites Aeneas’ pitiful words in a dream to Hector, now dead and no longer the heroic defender of Troy -- “O lux Dardaniae!” -- as the Nazis prepare to level London. Aeneas, she says:
“…finds them, the housefolk and a herd of fugitives, soldiers, mothers, and most pitiful of all, collectam exsilio pubem, a huddle of young things gathered up for exile. I saw them, the young things gathered up for exile, with their little bags and bundles, at the end of that cloudless, endless September day, when the mothers and babies were herded out of London: now at evening huddled like lambs in a green field after a whole day’s travelling, and bleating like lambs `with their weak human cry’ – collectam exsilio pubem. And the night passes, and the morning star climbs above Mount Ida, and Aeneas looks down, and sees Troy burning still, and the Greeks at every gate.”
Waddell neither aestheticizes violence nor sentimentalizes literature. Her resort to Virgil as the bombs drop is humbling and ennobling. She feels the pity and horror no less knowing pity and horror have precedent. In 1978, hospitalized and in fear of sanity burning away, I asked for my copy of Dickinson’s Complete Poems. Now it stands on my desk between Helen Pinkerton’s Taken in Faith and Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm. The poem I underlined and annotated most heavily, and have reread most often, is #539 in the Johnson edition:
“The Province of the Saved
Should be the Art -- To save --
Through Skill obtained in Themselves --
The Science of the Grave
No Man can understand
But He that hath endured
The Dissolution -- in Himself --
That Man -- be qualified
To qualify Despair
To Those who failing new --
Mistake Defeat for Death -- Each time --
Till acclimated -- to –”
Thursday, December 02, 2010
`Fall, That's When Life Begins'
In The New Yorker Book of Poems (1969) I found “Walden in July,” a poem by Donald Justice I had never read and that is not included in his Collected Poems (2004). There’s a happy personal and utterly meaningless convergence here: I first visited Walden Pond at age sixteen, in July 1969.Disappointingly, the poem is static, one image following another like photos in an album, with little discernable structure. The last of its four stanzas is the most memorable:
“The smell
of warm fresh water
wafted toward the shore;
across the cove, where
Thoreau built his
hut, seventy frogs
were bulling
`chug-a-rum,
chug-a-rum.’
The night was opening
like a cotyledon.”
The smell Justice notes is one of summer’s familiar scents, though “wafted” has always sounded false to me, a word in ad copy hawking perfume. “Bull” as a verb is pleasing and rare, and “chug-a-rum” is a traditional and accurate transcription of the bullfrog’s call. “Cotyledon” is Justice’s gift to us from botany. The first four lines, oddly, possess another association with 1969. Reading them, I thought immediately of the opening lines of “King Harvest,” a song from that year on The Band’s eponymous second album:
“Corn in the fields.
Listen to the rice when the wind blows 'cross the water,
King Harvest has surely come.”
It’s a great song on their best album, with lyrics by Robbie Robertson, a songwriter with a gift for storytelling, evocative Americana (though he’s Canadian) and the music of words. Listen to these lines from later in the song:
“Scarecrow and a yellow moon,
and pretty soon a carnival on the edge of town,
King Harvest has surely come.”
And this:
“The smell of the leaves,
from the magnolia trees in the meadow,
King Harvest has surely come.”
These scenes Justice, born in Miami in 1925, might have drawn, though I’m not suggesting influence in either direction. The Band’s song is almost certainly set in the American South during the twenties or thirties. The mention of rice in the first verse suggests Louisiana or East Texas. (Another song on the album, “Up on Cripple Creek,” cites Lake Charles, La.) Justice had an eye for the marginal, neglected and discarded, and the sadness and nostalgia such things evoke in us. He never addressed the subject of farm workers organizing, as “King Harvest” does. The echo’s in the mood, setting and details. Take this poem, the second of three collectively titled “Memories of the Depressions Years,” which carries the subtitle “Boston, Georgia, c. 1933”:
“The tin roofs catch the slanting sunlight.
A few cows turn homeward up back lanes;
Boys with sticks nudge the cattle along.
A pickup whines past. The dust rises.
Crows call. Cane sweetens along the stalk.
All around, soundlessly, gnats hover.
And from his stoop now my grandfather
Stands watching as all this comes to pass.”
Justice leaves us a sweetly, sadly American inheritance. Robertson says of his song:
“In the story to me, it’s another piece I remember from my youth, that people looking forward, people out there in the country somewhere, in a place … we all know it, may have been there, may have not … but there’s a lot of people that the idea of come Autumn, come Fall, that’s when life begins. It is not the Springtime where we kinda think it begins. It is the Fall, because the harvests come in.”
“The smell
of warm fresh water
wafted toward the shore;
across the cove, where
Thoreau built his
hut, seventy frogs
were bulling
`chug-a-rum,
chug-a-rum.’
The night was opening
like a cotyledon.”
The smell Justice notes is one of summer’s familiar scents, though “wafted” has always sounded false to me, a word in ad copy hawking perfume. “Bull” as a verb is pleasing and rare, and “chug-a-rum” is a traditional and accurate transcription of the bullfrog’s call. “Cotyledon” is Justice’s gift to us from botany. The first four lines, oddly, possess another association with 1969. Reading them, I thought immediately of the opening lines of “King Harvest,” a song from that year on The Band’s eponymous second album:
“Corn in the fields.
Listen to the rice when the wind blows 'cross the water,
King Harvest has surely come.”
It’s a great song on their best album, with lyrics by Robbie Robertson, a songwriter with a gift for storytelling, evocative Americana (though he’s Canadian) and the music of words. Listen to these lines from later in the song:
“Scarecrow and a yellow moon,
and pretty soon a carnival on the edge of town,
King Harvest has surely come.”
And this:
“The smell of the leaves,
from the magnolia trees in the meadow,
King Harvest has surely come.”
These scenes Justice, born in Miami in 1925, might have drawn, though I’m not suggesting influence in either direction. The Band’s song is almost certainly set in the American South during the twenties or thirties. The mention of rice in the first verse suggests Louisiana or East Texas. (Another song on the album, “Up on Cripple Creek,” cites Lake Charles, La.) Justice had an eye for the marginal, neglected and discarded, and the sadness and nostalgia such things evoke in us. He never addressed the subject of farm workers organizing, as “King Harvest” does. The echo’s in the mood, setting and details. Take this poem, the second of three collectively titled “Memories of the Depressions Years,” which carries the subtitle “Boston, Georgia, c. 1933”:
“The tin roofs catch the slanting sunlight.
A few cows turn homeward up back lanes;
Boys with sticks nudge the cattle along.
A pickup whines past. The dust rises.
Crows call. Cane sweetens along the stalk.
All around, soundlessly, gnats hover.
And from his stoop now my grandfather
Stands watching as all this comes to pass.”
Justice leaves us a sweetly, sadly American inheritance. Robertson says of his song:
“In the story to me, it’s another piece I remember from my youth, that people looking forward, people out there in the country somewhere, in a place … we all know it, may have been there, may have not … but there’s a lot of people that the idea of come Autumn, come Fall, that’s when life begins. It is not the Springtime where we kinda think it begins. It is the Fall, because the harvests come in.”
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
`An Exercise in Perpetual Discretion'
I look forward to the days when a retired middle-school teacher volunteers for lunchroom and recess duty. He’s seventy-eight and carries himself with soldierly rectitude and élan. His crew cut is silver and square, and his speech is clipped. He puts on his fluorescent orange vest as though preparing for a ritual or rite. We get along, in part, because we share a stoic sense of humor: We find enduring amusing. He’s a Civil War buff and we talk Gettysburg.
His wife is a critical-care nurse and a few years his junior. Recently she had to stop working because of fainting spells, dizziness and occasional loss of sensation in her feet and hands. She’s making the round of specialists but there’s no consensus. By collating offhand remarks I deduce she, like her husband, is no creampuff. Tuesday on the playground he told me:
“I was a teacher for thirty years before I had a nervous breakdown. I took a leave, and then I worked one more year. I couldn’t do it anymore.”
I said nothing for a while and then asked, “You miss it?”
“Why do you think I’m here?”
A nearby group of boys was playing four-square, a game opaque to me, as most games are. Two boys started a shoving match, pushing with open hands against each other’s chests. We watched until one kid fell backwards. He was wet and embarrassed but unharmed. The retired teacher walked over, helped the kid to his feet and asked what it was all about. The usual heated explanations and excuses followed. The old man listened, asked a few questions and never raised his voice.
“All right, you two, knock it off. And shake hands.”
They did and the game resumed. Both boys are well-known hotheads and finished recess without incident. Jacques Barzun turned one hundred and three on Tuesday. In a 1991 essay, “The Art of Making Teachers” (A Jacques Barzun Reader, 2002), he writes:
“There is no such thing as the child -- at any age. Teaching is not the application of a system, it is an exercise in perpetual discretion. One pupil, too timid, needs to be cheered along; another calmed down for the sake of concentration. Correcting faults and errors must take different forms (and words) in individual cases and must be accomplished by the praise for the good achieved.”
His wife is a critical-care nurse and a few years his junior. Recently she had to stop working because of fainting spells, dizziness and occasional loss of sensation in her feet and hands. She’s making the round of specialists but there’s no consensus. By collating offhand remarks I deduce she, like her husband, is no creampuff. Tuesday on the playground he told me:
“I was a teacher for thirty years before I had a nervous breakdown. I took a leave, and then I worked one more year. I couldn’t do it anymore.”
I said nothing for a while and then asked, “You miss it?”
“Why do you think I’m here?”
A nearby group of boys was playing four-square, a game opaque to me, as most games are. Two boys started a shoving match, pushing with open hands against each other’s chests. We watched until one kid fell backwards. He was wet and embarrassed but unharmed. The retired teacher walked over, helped the kid to his feet and asked what it was all about. The usual heated explanations and excuses followed. The old man listened, asked a few questions and never raised his voice.
“All right, you two, knock it off. And shake hands.”
They did and the game resumed. Both boys are well-known hotheads and finished recess without incident. Jacques Barzun turned one hundred and three on Tuesday. In a 1991 essay, “The Art of Making Teachers” (A Jacques Barzun Reader, 2002), he writes:
“There is no such thing as the child -- at any age. Teaching is not the application of a system, it is an exercise in perpetual discretion. One pupil, too timid, needs to be cheered along; another calmed down for the sake of concentration. Correcting faults and errors must take different forms (and words) in individual cases and must be accomplished by the praise for the good achieved.”
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