`In a Cage of About Three Foot'

Across campus, a scene of bloodless carnage – limp bodies flat on the ground and draped over branches. When I cluck, heads turn and eyes brighten, and when I hold out a peanut, gray puddles of fluff resurrect. Squirrels are hurting in the prolonged dry heat of Houston, and are assuming oddly human poses to salvage a little relief. One sits regally upright in a gnarled throne of live oak root. Another molds himself along the length of a lower oak branch, tail curved along his back, and others lie prone like weaponless snipers on the shaded soil beneath shrubs.

We feel sorry for them but this isn’t the first summer of unrelieved heat, and squirrels adapted to this sort of thing long ago. Like rats, they have sweat glands only on their feet. They have a higher surface-to-mass ratio than humans and radiate heat more efficiently than we do. They shade themselves with their tails, which, though puffy with fur, are skinny appendages that readily disperse body heat. The word “squirrel” is rooted in two Greek words for “shade tail,” an etymology familiar to Thoreau. In a journal entry for Oct. 5, 1857, he writes of a red squirrel:

“He gets down the trunk at last on to a projecting knot, head downward, within a rod of you, and chirrups and chatters louder than ever. Tries to work himself into a fright. The hind part of his body is urging the forward part along, snapping the tail over it like a whip-lash, but the fore part, for the most part, clings fast to the bark with desperate energy. Squirr, `to throw with a jerk,’ seems to have quite as much to do with the name as the Greek skia oura, shadow and tail.”

The verb “to squirr” is new to me. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “to throw or cast with a rapid whirling or skimming motion,” and cites a 1711 usage by Eustace Budgell (1686-1737) in The Spectator: “I saw him squirr away his Watch a considerable way into the Thames.”

Budgell rang a distant bell and proves himself a footnote to superior writers. The Oxford Dictionary of Nation Biography informs us:

“The Scriblerian satirists had already identified Budgell as a soft whig target, and Pope in particular mocked his dependence on Addison, manic self-obsession, and litigious failures (in The Dunciad, `Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot,’ `Sober Advice from Horace,’ and other poems).”

To his friend William Fortescue, a lawyer and judge, Alexander Pope writes in a Sept. 17, 1720, letter:

“You are a superior genius to me in rambling: you, like a pigeon (to which I would sooner compare a lawyer than a hawk), can fly some hundred leagues at a pitch; I, like a poor squirrel, am continually in motion indeed, but it is a cage of about three foot; my little excursions are but like those of a shop-keeper, who walks every day a mile or two before his own door, but minds his business.”

`A Cloud of Cumbrous Gnats Do Him Molest'

The exquisitely finicky Oxford English Dictionary qualifies “wailful” as “chiefly poetic,” a judgment confirmed by my spell-check software, and goes on to offer four gradations of meaning, all implicit in the first:

“Of cries, complaints, speeches: Having the character of a wail, expressive of grievous pain or sorrow. Of sounds: Resembling a wail, plaintive.”

The earliest citation dates from twenty years before Shakespeare’s birth; the latest, 1906. Here is the sub-definition which includes two citations from Keats: “Of animals or inanimate things: Producing plaintive sounds.” In Monday’s post I quoted the lines from “Endymion” quoted by the OED:

“… so that a whispering blade
Of grass, a wailful gnat, a bee bustling
Down in the blue-bells, or a wren light rustling
Among sere leaves and twigs, might all be heard.”

My object was “sere,” but as I transcribed the lines, “wailful” briefly impressed me as a word one might punningly use to describe Moby-Dick, though Keats reverts to the opposite end of the animal scale and modifies the diminutive gnat. In her comment on the post, Laura Demanski, with a better memory than mine, cites Keats’ later convergence of “wailful” and “gnats” in the third stanza of “To Autumn”:

“Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn.”

Laura knows her Keats, as she proved almost three years ago. So did Bertram L. Woodruff in the April 1953 issue of Modern Language Notes. In a brief article, “Keats’s Wailful Choir of Small Gnats,” he notes that Keats, in his copy of Spenser’s Fairie Queen, underlined the stanza which includes these lines:

“A Cloud of cumbrous Gnats do him molest,
All striving to infix their feeble Stings,
That from their noyance he no where can rest,
He brushes oft, and oft doth mar their Mumurings.”

Keats’ gnats don’t sting but “Murmurings” is closer than wailings to the sound a cloud of gnats might make. Woodruff suggests Shakespeare’s “Bare ruin’d choirs” (Sonnet 73) as a possible precedent for the other half of “wailful choir,” though even he doesn’t sound convinced. More compellingly, he mentions a book published in 1815 and 1817, An Introduction to Entomology, by William Kirby and William Spence. Of gnats, the authors say they “form themselves into choirs, that alternately rise and fall with rapid evolutions.” Keats says they are “borne aloft / Or sinking.” The insects perform “choral dances,” the naturalists add.

Woodruff offers no evidence that Keats knew of Kirby and Spence’s volume, nor does he cite the “wailful gnat” passage from “Endymion.” Most of his article is speculative but interesting. He notes that Wordsworth in The Excursion was “personally attuned to hear the joy of life in the buzzing of the summer flies,” while Keats was “disposed to hear in the whirring of the May flies not the sound of animal joy but the wail for approaching death.” Of course, Keats wrote his ode on Sept. 19, 1819, and was dead seventeen months later. Wordsworth, twenty-five years Keats’ senior, outlived him by twenty-nine years. As Emily Dickinson put it:

“Others—extinguish easier—
A Gnat’s minutest Fan
Sufficient to obliterate
A Tract of Citizen—”

`A Grand Democracy of Forest Trees'

“The green leaf and the sere

Hang side by side.”

The summer-long drought has turned a green city brown. In “White Oak” (Poems Old and New 1918-1978), Janet Lewis distills in ten words what I see out the window. Trees in Houston are two-toned. The leaves on three post oaks in a nearby park are the color of cardboard, and while some possess remarkable recuperative powers, these brown giants look ready for the wood-chipper. Another source of anxiety is hurricane season. With parched roots and the ground like old brick, heavy winds topple trees like kindling.

“Sere” is a Keatsian word (as are “descry,” “tinct” and “pallid”). In “Endymion” he writes:

“… so that a whispering blade

Of grass, a wailful gnat, a bee bustling

Down in the blue-bells, or a wren light rustling

Among sere leaves and twigs, might all be heard.”

That’s the Keats I favor, the poet of specificity and detail, not the mellifluous sprite of folklore. This heartier, hardier Keats I find most often not in the poems but the letters. On Feb. 19, 1818, he begins one to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds like this:   

“I had an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner - Let him on a certain day read a certain page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander upon it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it: until it becomes stale - But when will it do so? Never –”

In his “distilled Prose,” Keats wanders with purpose. There’s a whimsy, wit and erudition reminiscent of Sir Thomas Browne’s, but suffused with friendly confidences, as we would expect of a letter to a friend. Follow the serendipitous path Keats traces in his letter to Reynolds to this happy crescendo:

“Man should not dispute or assert but whisper results to his neighbour and thus by every germ of spirit sucking the sap from mould ethereal every human might become great, and Humanity instead of being a wide heath of Furze and Briars with here and there a remote Oak or Pine, would become a grand democracy of Forest Trees!”

`The World Is Surely Wide Enough to Hold Both Thee and Me'

Among the pleasures of life in Houston is the profusion of insect life. Yes, we have fire ants but also butterflies exotic to my Northern eyes, though fewer than usual because of the drought. Friday afternoon, walking home from the mechanic’s garage where I had left my car, I saw a dull yellow something flitting about a lawn where a sprinkler was spraying. I took a closer look when it lighted on the moistened grass and identified it as a cloudless sulphur, surely among the loveliest of butterfly names. The edges of the insect’s wings looked frayed, like the cuffs of an old shirt. The summer has been long and dry.

Back at the garage, the mechanic I spoke with had been sympathetic. When I told him I was facing a three-mile walk to my house, with the thermometer topping one-hundred degrees, he gave me a bottle of water. I had noticed flies buzzing around his office, and suddenly the mechanic snatched one out of the air with his hand. I was surprised and impressed by his speed and dexterity, and further impressed when he opened the door and released the captured insect. 

“I don’t like killing them,” he said. The narrator of Tristram Shandy (Vol.2, Chap. XII) tells us his Uncle Toby “had scarce a heart to retaliate upon a fly”: 

“Go, says he, one day at dinner, to an overgrown one which had buzzed about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time, and which, after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him; I’ll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going across the room, with the fly in his hand, I’ll not hurt a hair of thy head: Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape; go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee? This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.” 

Tristram tells us he was ten when he witnessed Toby’s act of mercy, and that it “instantly set my whole frame into one vibration of most pleasurable sensation.” I felt something comparable, even in the heat of Houston.

`Blessed Day and Sweet Content'

Our sons were in Fredericksburg, Va., for the earthquake, forty miles from the epicenter, visiting their grandparents, unaware they were about to acquire a memory to last a lifetime. They were seated at a soda fountain, sipping milkshakes, when glasses started tinkling and the pharmacy sign started swinging. It lasted about seven seconds and sounded like a muffled cement mixer. They arrived back in Seattle Thursday night, in plenty of time to miss Hurricane Irene, thus escaping without harm two natural disasters in less than a week.

Serendipity led me to a happy convergence of thoughts on happiness and its absence. The poetry of William Cowper remains a mostly guilt-free pleasure, though I know all the good reasons not to read him. In Book II of The Task (1785) he writes, with a proto-Thoreauvian lilt:

“Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more!”

Suicidal depression haunted Cowper, lending poignancy to his lament, but most of us, in unhappy times, long for sanctuary. In Cowper’s line we hear an echo of Jeremiah 9:2 (King James): “Oh that I had in the wildernesse a lodging place of wayfaring men, that I might leaue my people, and goe from them…” Cowper knew only stray moments of happy lodging, fewer than most.

Another writer who knew vexation and found a measure of relief in writing about it was Robert Burton. In this passage from his great Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), he spells out a recipe for happiness and ticks off the reasons we choose not to follow it:

“How happy might we be, and end our time with blessed days and sweet content, if we could contain ourselves, and, as we ought to do, put up injuries, learn humility, meekness, patience, forget and forgive, as in God's word we are enjoined, compose such final controversies amongst ourselves, moderate our passions in this kind, and think better of others, as Paul would have us, than of ourselves: be of like affection one towards another, and not avenge ourselves, but have peace with all men. But being that we are so peevish and perverse, insolent and proud, so factious and seditious, so malicious and envious; we do invicem angariare, maul and vex one another, torture, disquiet, and precipitate ourselves into that gulf of woes and cares, aggravate our misery and melancholy, heap upon us hell and eternal damnation.”

Elsewhere in the Anatomy, in his chapter on blogs and how they might relieve the curse of melancholy, Burton says “we skim off the cream of other men’s wits, pick the choice flowers of their tilled gardens to set our own sterile plots.”

`Infinite Wonder, Infinite Pity'

Trees are crowded places. Many on campus are dense with cicadas and ants, ball moss and lichens. The latter are non-parasitic epiphytes that also grow on rocks and masonry, composite plants, part fungus, part algae, existing symbiotically. The Texas drought has turned them into papery, pale gray-green patches on tree trunks and branches. On Thursday, I scratched some with a fingernail and raised little puffs of dust.

Like sparrows, lichens are drab and easy to leave unnoticed. In The Perfumier and the Stinkhorn (Profile Books, 2011), Richard Mabey likens lichens to “superficial ornaments” – until he acquires a stereoscopic microscope:

“…magnified a hundred times they become labyrinths of complexity. And it isn’t just pretty structural patterns you see but whole unexpected life processes. Diving down in three dimensions through the architecture of the plant it becomes clear that it’s symbiotic, a partnership of two plants – a fungal shell impacted with the minute green cells of a food-producing algae. There are tiny insect eggs embedded in the fungus. And then, scurrying through the tangles of trunks and roots, is an insect itself, a grey, louse-like creature no bigger than the eye of a needle. It is browsing on the lichen. There are even microscopic toadstools growing on the fungal surfaces. There is an entire forest ecosystem in this one square centimetre. It is a fractal world, each magnified layer reflecting the structure and process on the one before.”

Coming on this passage unexpectedly induced vertigo, a sense of falling into a world I never knew existed – a Mabey specialty. It also recalled passages in stories by Italo Calvino, Steven Millhauser and Borges depicting little fractal worlds, immense realities in miniature. In “The Aleph,” Borges writes of the title object, “a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance”:

“The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid…”

And so on, in glorious profusion. At the end of a long paragraph cataloging the contents of The Aleph, Borges adds:

“I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.”

`The Deadliest Inertia Is to Conform With Your Times'

Poet I:

“Readers would be rightly insulted if they felt I'd assumed they were less smart or less sophisticated than I am. That would be unbearably condescending. And anyway they like some puzzlement, some baroque, perhaps, and certainly some material that doesn't release all its savor at a first lick. Really, writers and readers alike, as you know, we work beyond our own intelligence; necessarily so. That's the raison d'etre, the road to the trance that art exists to provide.”

Poet II:

“One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most `intellectual’ piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right—not an obligation—to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic.”

I’ve just finished reading Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) by Les Murray, speaker of the first passage above in his Paris Review interview. In this brief prose chronicle, the Australian poet describes his bouts of depression, “my brain boiling with a confusion of stuff not worth calling thought or imagery: it was more like shredded mental kelp marinaded in pure pain.” Most first-person accounts I’ve read of depression and other mental illnesses implicitly seek the reader’s pity or admiration, whereas Murray explicitly repudiates “victim-addiction, the sick love of our symptoms that causes us to clutch them to us and indulge them.” Murray’s book stands as writing, not a tawdry tell-all.

Throughout the book, despite obvious differences, I was reminded of the world’s other great living English-language poet, Geoffrey Hill, speaker of the second passage above. Hill was born in 1932; Murray, 1938. Both are blessed with linguistic virtuosity, deep immersion in literary tradition, devotion to religion, commanding but outsider status within their literary cultures – and pharmaceutically treated clinical depression. In his Paris Review interview, Hill says:

“There are certain kinds of chronic depression that have been traced to chemical imbalance in the brain. In retrospect, I don’t know how I survived almost sixty years without the medication I now have. From late childhood, I suffered from chronic depression, which was accompanied by various exhausting obsessive-compulsive phobias. Totally undiagnosed, of course. I now see that the kind of perfectionism at which I was aiming in the earlier books was, so to speak, the acceptable fact of this obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

The tone is clinical, admirably so, but from the inside and without pity. Both poets are candid about their illness, citing it in poems, prose and interviews, but neither wears it as a trophy. Murray says in his memoir: “Mental illness is apt to make you into a bore” – words true and politically proscribed in our faux-sensitive age. Both have been castigated for the prodigality of their gifts, their perceived “elitism” and, most severely, their Christianity. Murray is the more demotic of the two, more rageful, less careful and polite. With bracing, bullish candor he says to the Paris Review interviewer:

“I would never place myself on any left-right axis. That's `bullet in the back of the head’ language, gulag language. To hell with it. That is the terminology of those who are out to co-opt art and prevent it from moving on. It's the currency of those who fund our weak poets on condition that the baby boomers will never be superseded. . . . I'm a dissident author; the deadliest inertia is to conform with your times.”

The twenty-nine-page text of Killing the Black Dog is followed by a seven-page afterword and twenty-four “Black Dog Poems,” written during the period Murray calls the “Big Sick.” Among them is “Memories of the Height-To-Weight Ratio,” including this stanza:

“Modernism’s not modern: it’s police and despair.
I wear it as fat, and it gnawed off my hair
as my typewriter clicked over gulfs and birch spaces
where the passive voice muffled enormity and faces.”

`The Architectural Climax of Evolution'

Before we married I wrote a poem to my wife in which I likened her to a beech tree. The gesture was more romantic than it sounds. My wife was formerly a Canadian citizen, the fifth generation of her family born in Peru. They migrated north, like Fagus grandifolia, the American beech, which paleobotanists tell us was a South and Central American native millennia ago. The bark of the beech is smooth and often blemish-free, and irresistible to writers, including Daniel Boone: “D. Boon killed a bar [bear] in year 1760.”

In Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees (Chatto & Windus, 2007), the English naturalist Richard Mabey gives a memorable account of scribblings on the 350-year-old “Queen Beech” in Hertfordshire:

“One storey up there are mosquito pools in forks, old woodpecker holes, generations of graffiti. Some of the scratchings are in implausible positions: the higher you carve your message, the code reads, the more impressive your feelings. With my binoculars I can just make out some of the inscriptions. The names and homesick addresses of American servicemen stationed nearby during the Second World War. The linked pledges of sweethearts from the outbreak of the First. The copperplate initials of Victorian schoolboys, now stretched beyond deciphering. The letters `S.A.’ many times. A heart. A rose. Not really tree-abuse, as it’s so often reckoned, nor always a compulsion to leave one’s mark on the world. More, I think, the result of the world’s leaving a mark on you. No one encounters trees like this without some kind of conversation taking place, an exchange that deserves a memento. Beech-scribbling goes back to classical times, and has its own Latin epigram: Crescent illae, crescit amores. `As these letters grow so will our love.’”

Tree trunk as palimpsest, living manuscript, poor-man’s diary, arboreal social media. These are lovely thoughts, and for Mabey they signify our ancient intimacy with trees. Several weeks ago, talking on the phone with my brother, I described to him in detail the woods behind our childhood house, circa 1960, a virtual tour of a lost world. Both of us remembered the poplar grove (later decimated with an axe by a kid surnamed Forrester), the elms (blight-killed a half-century ago), wild cherries (gone), tulip trees, hawthorns, locusts, ash and crab apples. Most are erased, of course, with softwoods replaced by hardier species and fields filled in with softwoods and scrub. That’s one of Mabey’s themes – unceasing woodland evolution, despite our association of big trees with permanence.

This is the first of Mabey’s books I’ve read. His prose is sumptuous, not purple. He’s neither nature mystic nor dust-dry academic, and he punningly describes Thoreau as “the most grounded of the Transcendentalists.” The writer he strongly recalls is another Englishman, J.A. Baker, author of Peregrine, but he’s less poet and more scientist than Baker. It’s tempting to share the wealth and quote Mabey at length:

“Trees are the architectural climax of evolution, scaffolding for the rest of terrestrial life. Many widely different plant families – palms, club-mosses, buglosses – have produced them. If you were trying to devise a plant form that had the same strength and durability as rock, it would be the trunk of a tree. In their maturity, not quite like any other living thing, they become increasingly complex, vast elaborations in three dimensions. As their branching becomes more intricate, so do the niches formed among the branches. A full-grown tree is a catacomb of reticulations, rot-holes, snags, fissures. Even the twigs develop architectural layers – flakes of bark, small bosses where smaller twigs have broken off, velvet sheens of moss. It’s impossible to measure the area of a tree’s surface exactly. It’s what mathematicians call a `fractal’ quantity, one that increases indefinitely the closer you examine it.”

Mabey puts his epigraph at the end of Beechcombings -- the first four lines of “A Modest Love” by Sir Edward Dyer (1543-1607), friend to Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville:

“The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat;
The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small,
And bees have stings, although they be not great.”

[Dyer’s best-known poem is “My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is.”]

`Find Musical, Surprising Stuff to Say'

Every writer, maybe every person, looks to bolster what he’s already trying to do. Our efforts are like self-administered shocks of recognition, defibrillating jolts, reminders from others that say: “You’re fine. Keep it up. I get it.” Monday it came from the great Australian poet Les Murray:

“What does some phenomenon in the world mean? What does it lead to, what does it point to, what deeper dimension can you find in it? I do a lot of that, and I think of it as contiguous to what science does: working a thing out. Seeing its less obvious connections. Surprising yourself. But I wouldn't always want to be forensic like that. Sometimes you just want to play around and find musical, surprising stuff to say.”

That’s my routine: Think about some familiar, unsurprising thing and wait for it to surprise me. The description sounds too calculated – “forensic,” to use Murray’s word -- when it’s really more a matter of readiness. The connections and flashes of wonder are already latent. My job is to remain alert and look in the right direction. Fancying myself too hip to be surprised guarantees I won’t see a damned thing. Murray’s instinctive horror at pretentiousness, including most of what passes for art today, is almost savage . Elsewhere in the interview he says:

“A lot of modern art is very autistic. There is this arbitrary law that you're not supposed to be sentimental or have any feelings. What the bloody hell is that but autism, pretending to be some kind of automaton?”

Over the weekend a reader in New Hampshire, a woman in her seventies, wrote to me:

“Next week I'm going to be a sort of guest of honor at my cousin's Book Group. They are having a poetry evening because my cousin & I are known to `love poetry.’ I fear it will be an ordeal. We've each been assigned a poem to read & discuss, chosen by the group leader's poet daughter. They may all be feminist -- mine seems to be about hating one’s parents. Awful strong stuff for this group of New England ladies, most of a certain age. My cousin will probably insist on reading Emily Dickinson's `Further in summer than the birds’ as well – she’s strong-willed. I wish I could read Hardy's `Proud Songsters’ but I won't.”

`Something Dangerously Close to Our Own Life'

The morning passed with a book review finished, emails answered and an article about a professor’s retirement drafted. By then I longed for a reward so I picked up Stephen Kampa’s Cracks in the Invisible (Ohio University Press, 2011), his first collection of poems, and found one that made me laugh, “Not at the Grave of Dylan Thomas,” which concludes like this:

“Besides, as mentioned, I’m
Not at the grave of Dylan Thomas,
And I don’t care about childhood, grief, time,
Rage, or excessive commas.
I hate prophetic poets; they are wrong.
They ought to call
A spade a spade, stop stringing us along.
Death does, indeed, have dominion over all.”

Kampa’s razzing at Thomas’ neo-Romantic silliness lifted my weary spirits, so to prolong this happy state I opened Love of the World: Essays (Faber and Faber, 2009) by the late John McGahern, one of my favorite fiction writers of the last half-century, and read a piece titled “The Solitary Reader” (1991), which begins encouragingly with this sentence:

“I came to write through reading.”

How else? I might ask, but I know there are other routes, and know of writers who hardly read at all. As a boy in rural Ireland in the nineteen-forties, McGahern was given “free run” in the library of the Moroneys, eccentric and lovable neighbors who didn’t read the books they owned –

“Scott, Dickens, Meredith and Shakespeare, books by Zane Grey and Jeffrey Farnol, and many, many books about the Rocky Mountains. Some person in that nineteenth-century house must have been fascinated by the Rocky Mountains. I didn’t differentiate. I read for nothing but pleasure, the way a boy nowadays might watch endless television dramas.”

One of the pleasures of reading “for nothing but pleasure” is meeting, unexpectedly, people like ourselves – in this case, a smitten reader, one who instinctively fended for himself, foraging, trusting his own bookish instincts and tastes. McGahern gives one of the best descriptions I know of helpless childhood reading:

“There are no days more full in childhood than those days that were not lived at all, the days lost in a favourite book. I remember waking out of one such book in the middle of the large living room in the barracks to find myself surrounded. My sisters had unlaced and removed one of my shoes and placed a straw hat on my head. Only when they began to move the wooden chair on which I sat away from the window did I wake out of the book – to their great merriment.”

“Wake out of the book” – that precisely renders the deep dreamy enchantment of childhood reading, and occasionally today’s. I sense no nostalgia here, no burnishing of memory. Often when a writer recalls his childhood, in particular his experience of books, the result is unconvincing. We sense he wishes to impress us with his precocity. McGahern is too serious a writer, too unmindful of pleasing the reader (as opposed to respecting him), to give a damn about such things. Inevitably, we lose our innocence, in literature as in everything else, and we come to read differently. McGahern is good on this too:

“A time comes when the way we read has to change drastically or stop, though it may well continue as an indolence or pastime or drug. This change is linked with our growing consciousness, consciousness that we will not live forever and that all human life is essentially in the same fix. We have to discard all the tenets that we have been told until we have succeeded in thinking them out for ourselves. We find that we are no longer reading books for the story and that all stories are more or less the same story; and we begin to come on certain books that act like mirrors. What they reflect is something dangerously close to our own life and the society in which we live.”

Every worthwhile book, in my experience, is a dangerous mirror, and a good reader is brave or at least willing to learn.

`Here's a Pretty Thing, and There's a Pretty Thing!'

John Aubrey (1626-1697) on Andrew Marvell (1621-1678):

“He was of a middling stature, pretty strong sett, roundish faced, cherry cheek't, hazell eie, browne haire. He was in his conversation very modest, and of very few words: and though he loved wine he would never drinke in company, and was wont to say that, `he would not play the good-fellow in any man's company in whose hands he would not trust his life.’”

And Aubrey on John Denham (1615-1669), the poet and courtier:

“He was generally temperate as to drinking; but one time when he was a student of Lincolne's-Inne, having been merry at the taverne with his camerades, late at night, a frolick came into his head, to gett a playsterer's brush and a pott of inke, and blott out all the signes between Temple-barre and Charing-crosse, which made a strange confusion the next day, and 'twas in Terme time. But it happened that they were discovered, and it cost him and them some moneys. This I had from R. Estcott, esq., that carried the inke-pott.”

This is gossip, of course, glorious, irresistible gossip (like much of James and Proust), and we wouldn’t trade it for a sample of Marvell’s or Denham’s DNA. We cherish Aubrey’s Brief Lives not for its historical veracity, as though lives could be reduced to actuarial tables, but for the vigor of the prose (“a frolick came into his head”) and the homely details about people who lived half a millennium ago. We can thank Aubrey for telling us Shakespear [sic] “had been in his younger yeares a schoolmaster in the countrey.”

Aubrey was a sort of journalist before such a trade, or Daniel Defoe, even existed. He chronicled lives and in his notebooks often scrawled in the margins “quaere,” legal Latin for “inquire” or “query.” He would report a rumor, a would-be fact, and remind himself to dig further and verify it. My edition of Brief Lives and Other Selected Writings (The Cresset Press, 1949), comes with an introduction by the great Anthony Powell:

“His own writing is the best index to his character. He found difficulty in sustaining narrative…but his style is inimitable. Most of what is now reproduced was only intended to be unsifted material, scored in the original with `quaere’ or `from so-and-so’ to show Aubrey’s own uncertainty. When reporting first-hand, he sometimes confuses dates, but his good faith can be relied upon absolutely.”

I was sent back to Brief Lives after reading “John Aubrey’s Antique Shop,” by George Szirtes (New & Collected Poems, Bloodaxe Books, 2008):

“Certain objects find their way down here—

Grogged in glamour, porcelain faces peer

through flecks of emulsion and faint dust on collars;

shoes go manky, mortuary, scuffed;

the clocks with marbled gingerbread and barley

tell no time but one, the hour of breaking.

And one could find yet bigger, better, richer:

a bellows-organ say with some keys missing

that some doughty Noncomformist household

bright as a button, collars starched resplendent,

trained to Wesley, Lanier and Newton.

“As I’ve forgotten who once said of Andrewes,

his sermons were too playful. I believe it.

`Here’s a pretty thing, and there’s a pretty thing’

argues a serious lack of seriousness.

In Hell everybody goes dirty all the time.

I once knew a girl as clean as linen.

What would happen to all these did not

Such idle fellows as I note them down?”

Szirtes quotes the concluding sentence of Aubrey’s life of Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626):

“He had not that smooth way of Oratory, as now. It was a shrewd and severe animadversion of a Scotish [sic] Lord, who, when King James asked him how he liked Bp. A.’s sermon, sayd that he was learned, but he did play with his Text, as a Jack-an-apes does, who takes up a thing and tosses and playes with it, and then he takes up another, and playes a little with it. Here’s a pretty thing, and there’s a pretty thing!”

[See T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi” and his essay from For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, 1928.]

`They Are What I Had'

A biochemist I interviewed Friday used a phrase new to me – “epigenetic switching.” It refers to changes in gene expression without corresponding changes in the DNA sequence, but put that aside. What struck me was the profusion of English words with the prefix epi-: epitaph, epilogue, epitome, epicenter, epithet, episode, epinephrine, epilepsy, epidermis, epithalamium, epiglottis, epicarp, epidemic, Silas Marner’s adopted daughter and my current favorite, epigram. Language is promiscuous, so a good thing gets around.

The root is the Greek epi meaning “upon, at, close upon (in space or time), on the occasion of, in addition.” “Epigram” is from ἐπίγραμμα (epigramma), “inscription,” from a related verb meaning “to write on, inscribe.” For the Greeks, epigrams started as brief verses written on votive offerings or monuments to the dead. The epigram’s appeal, for this reader, is terseness and wit. It means something and is about something, and those are rare qualities in poetry today. Here is James Michie’s rendering of Martial’s IX.9 (Epigrams of Martial Englished by Divers Hands, edited by J.P. Sullivan and Peter Whigham, 1987):

“Although you’re glad to be asked out,
Whenever you go, you bitch and shout
And bluster. You must stop being rude:
You can’t enjoy free speech and food.”

And this, Martial’s XII.80, translated by Roy F. Butler:

“The worthy not to overpraise
And be misunderstood,
He praises all: if no one’s bad,
Who can he think is good?”

David Sanders recommended to me a book he edited, Steven Kampa’s first collection, Cracks in the Invisible (Ohio University Press, 2011), and it includes an epigram, “Lines for an Inspirational Poster”:

“Shoot for the moon, for even if you miss,
You’ll land amongst the stars. Hardly the case.
The more precise conclusion would be this:
You miss, you die, cold and alone in space.”

There’s a young poet to listen to, confirming the hardiness of a good form. In case we need more evidence, Paul Engle, a reader of this blog who lives in the Northeast, writes:

“Inspired by your recent blog post on epigrams, (which you may come to regret presently):

‘Now, now’ said the sinner in earnest to the saint:
‘Belief’ is what the novices and atheists debate.
You and I have seen too much to trot that nag a’mire,
The Miracle is here at hand, no leap of faith required.”

When I asked Paul, who is a research scientist, if I could post his epigram, he agreed and said:

“I have a pen and paper on my nightstand, and as I was drifting off the other night the lines just came to me, so I flipped on the light and scribbled them down. The real shock was in the morning; not only could I read my own handwriting, but the content was decent (at least by my standards)!”

I envy him the ease of composition. That never happens to me. About my stuff Martial writes in I.16 (J.A. Pott’s translation):

“Good work you’ll find, some poor, and much that’s worse;
It takes all sorts to make a book of verse.”

And here is J.V. Cunningham’s go at it (The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, 1997):

“Some good, some middling, and some bad
You’ll find here. They are what I had.”

`A Succinct Summary of a Major Transition'

At the back of each issue, the editors of First Things collect odds and ends, brief notices, often humorous, and publish them under the heading “While We’re At It.” In the August/September issue is this:

“We have very clever readers. Here is something from the poet David Middleton, apparently dashed off after reading a column on our website:

“History of an Idea - after J. V. Cunningham

“`I Am That I Am’ God said to Moses;
But nowadays all anyone knows is
`I gotta be me,’ as Me proposes.”

The clincher in Middleton’s epigram is the capitalized “Me,” but the juxtaposing of Cunningham and Sammy Davis Jr.’s ego-anthem is gorgeous. It’s probably useful to note that two of Davis’ autobiographies were titled Yes, I Can (1965) and Why Me? (1980). In “Epigrams: A Journal,” collected in The Judge is Fury (1947), Cunningham includes “History of Ideas”:

“God is love. Then by conversion
Love is God, and sex conversion.”

In his edition of The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (1997), Timothy Steele dates the epigram to 1943 and notes the allusion to John 4:8: “He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” About Cunningham’s use of “conversion” he writes:

“The word is used, first, with its meaning in logic—the transposition of the subject and predicate of a proposition—and, second, with its meaning in religion—the process by which an unbeliever acquires faith or by which a person switches affiliation from one church to another.”

Steele also quotes Yvor Winters’ comment on Cunningham’s epigram in Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (1967):

“These lines give us a succinct summary of a major transition: they take us from the New Testament to W.B. Yeats.”

From faith and hope to sex-crazed Irish occult maunderings. Or, in the case of Middleton’s epigram, from Exodus 3:14 to “What else can I be but what I am?” (Lyrics by Walter Marks.)

`A Catalog of the Foibles of the Human Condition'

Thanks to Ammon Shea, author of Reading the OED (Perigee, 2008), I’ve plugged another hole in the world with a word: wonderclout. It’s a noun and sounds like the name of a superhero or thoroughbred, but Shea defines it as “a thing that is showy but worthless.” Now do you see how essential a word it is? Here is Shea’s gloss:

“Surgically augmented breasts and a large vocabulary are two things that come to mind when I contemplate that which is showy and of little value, but I’m certain that you can think of others.”

Sure: Las Vegas, Avatar, Liberace, everything David Foster Wallace ever wrote.

The Oxford English Dictionary offers three citations for “wonderclout,” all dating from Shakespeare’s early years. The first is from an early dictionary, Manipulus vocabulorum (1570) by Peter Levens: “A Wonderclout, blabbe, garrulus linguax.” You can figure out the modern English cognates, but I’m already feeling an attack of vertigo for writing about a book devoted to reading a dictionary in which appears a word taken from another dictionary, and that word refers to excessive wordiness.

Next, from 1593, is Gabriel Harvey’s Pierces Supererogation, or; A New Prayse of the Old Asse: “Ô wretched Atheisme, Hell but a scarecrow, and Heauen but a woonderclout in their doctrine.” The book is a contentious reply to Thomas Nashe, author of The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). Harvey was a college friend of Edmund Spencer.

The third citation is from the same book by Harvey: “Her meritorious worke, a Wonderclowte.”

I remember years ago reading that Dr. Oliver Sacks read the OED for pleasure. That makes perfect sense, as I’ve just illustrated, and I’ve often done the same, but the only dictionary I’ve ever read sequentially, cover to cover, is Johnson’s. (In his “Exordium,” Shea says drily: “I had been meaning to read the OED for years, but I always found some way to put it off.”) Just as Johnson defined “lexicographer” as “a harmless drudge,” so Shea cites “a large vocabulary” as an example of “wonderclout.” This is either false humility or self-deprecating boasting. He has earned the right to indulge in the latter, though his prose is clear, modest and largely colloquial. Reading the OED is only 224 pages long (the twenty volumes of the OED total 21,730 pages). It can be read in a sitting, though I wish it were longer and more detailed. It inspired finifugal feelings in a reader with an engouement for the OED, winningly described by Shea as “a catalog of the foibles of the human condition.”

`The Ones We Can Be Secretly Most Proud Of'

In a memoir of his boyhood friend Donald Justice, Laurence Donovan says the poet “records in his writings the passing of a time and place that were truly unique, and that bred a type of American now disappearing from the scene.” (“Donald Justice’s Miami,” Certain Solitudes: On the Poetry of Donald Justice, edited by Dana Gioia and William Logan, 1997). Donovan cites as examples among Justice’s friends the poet Robert Boardman Vaughn and bassoonist John Lenox. Justice wrote poems about both (read them here and here, respectively). Of Lenox he said: “Lonely / In eminence he sat.”

What strikes me most powerfully about Donovan’s observation is his rueful reference to “a type of American now disappearing from the scene.” I think I know what he means, and judging from other poems and essays by Justice, he might have added to the list Sherwood Anderson, the composer Carl Ruggles (once Justice’s teacher), and the painter Charles Burchfield. What characterizes these artists, besides the “remarkable talent and interest” cited by Donovan, is their independence, refusal to play the careerist game and their proudly defiant amateur standing. Most would have gone on making art even without an audience and rewards. Justice elaborates in his book-length interview with Philip Hoy (BTL, 2001):

“Ruggles is one of those gifted amateurs of the arts that America produced, especially in the early modern period – Marsden Hartley and Charles Burchfield among the painters, Charles Ives and Roy Harris among the composers, and Sherwood Anderson, perhaps Hart Crane, among the writers. For me these artists have long seemed the truly American type of artist, though not necessarily as profound or world-shaking as some of their contemporaries. Nevertheless they may be the ones we can be secretly most proud of.”

Elsewhere, again in reference to Ruggles, Justice says: “He was one of those eccentric self-taught artists – homemade geniuses – of which America has had its share.” The type, never common, seems extinct. Once it was regularly observed among jazz and blues musicians, but those fields too have grown professionalized and commodified. No more Joe Sullivans among jazz pianists. No more Alec Wilders, Edward Hoppers or Edward Dahlbergs.

Thanks to David Sanders for passing along an essay by Anis Shivani, “Philip Levine and Other Mediocrities: What it Takes to Ascend to the Poet Laureateship,” which he rightly guesses I might find amusing. I had never heard of Shivani before but his critical gist, that American poetry has turned dreary, gutless and predictable, is no revelation. Few dedicated readers, I suspect, would defend the usual suspects he rounds up – Levine, Olds, Glück, Graham. Nor does he spare the parlor-revolutionaries, Language Poets and other self-styled avant-gardistes. Near the conclusion of his essay Shivani poses a series of pertinent, unanswerable questions:

“What to do then? Where do poets of broad imagination, genuine classical mooring, wit and irony and humor, and sympathy across the class lines come from? Can a culture, so decrepit and inhumane that it boasts of its own periodic death at every turn, produce broad-minded poets? Or are these the best we have to live with? Will their work survive, or will they be footnotes to a transitional age, where history took a break, prosperity made their kind of work possible, and lapsed standards of judgment let them get away with their fraud for so long?”

One can quibble with details. What do “class lines” have to do with anything? Is being “broad-minded” a virtue, among poets or anyone else? But Shivani’s central point is inarguable: Most prominent contemporary poets, several of whom, strictly speaking, have never written poetry, have come to believe the committees that award them prizes, academic berths and other blandishments. And why not? Everyone has a right to earn a living. If you’re rewarded for writing dreck, why suddenly become conscience-stricken? All of us have bills to pay and egos to soothe. What would you do in their place?

Forgotten are Justice’s “eccentric self-taught artists – homemade geniuses,” the writers, painters and musicians who work because they have little choice in the matter, who tinker in the home workshop, fumble uncertainly, without operating instructions or career counselors, and leave behind something some of us still care about. Shavani concludes, perhaps in partial answer to the questions he posed:

“Genius, it seems, can't necessarily be produced in factories. A strike just might be in order!”

`Literary Commentary'

David Myers announces welcome news. Congratulations, David -- and Commentary.

`Well-Tempered Wit Should Thrust and Cut'

I mentioned to Helen Pinkerton my growing interest in the epigram, a poetic form at once concise and extraordinarily difficult to master, and that I was reading Epigrams of Martial Englished by Divers Hands (edited by J.P. Sullivan and Peter Whigham, University of California Press, 1987). Included are “Englished” versions by seventy translators, including R.L. Barth, J.V. Cunningham and James Michie (the version I know best). To Helen I sent Martial's VII.62 as translated by Richard O'Connell, a poem neatly dispensing with much of today’s poetry and first-century Rome’s:

"Because the Muses turn their backsides on Aper
He writes his poems on toilet paper."

Helen replied:

“Epigrams are very hard to write well. Cunningham did so, because, I think, he worked so hard at it and wrote a great number. For many poets they are only a sideline. Also, as he notes somewhere, brevity was characteristic of his temperament and style from the beginning. No epics for him. I praised his work once to him when he was visiting us in Palo Alto and he responded quite self-deprecatingly that he hadn't written anything long or `major’ or words to that effect. Some critics (I can't recall who just now) have made an argument that his `To What Strangers What Welcome’ should be regarded as a unified sequence somewhat equivalent to a single poem. I find that hard to do. He really loved the Renaissance epigrammatists, More, George Buchanan, and John Owen, besides the Romans, and learned from them.”

Sullivan and Whigham select two of Cunningham’s translations, including IV.69:

“You serve the best wine always, my dear sir,
And yet they say your wines are not so good.
They say you are four times a widower.
They say…A drink? I don’t believe I would.”

An epigram customarily comes equipped with a barb, a sort of time-released punchline, like a joke but cooler and drier. Take one of R.L. Barth’s own, “Don’t You Know Your Poems Are Hurtful?” (Deeply Dug In, 2003), which epigrammatically defines the epigram:

“Yes, ma’am, like KA-BAR to the gut,
Well-tempered wit should thrust and cut
Before the victim knows what’s what;
But sometimes, lest the point be missed,
I give the bloody blade a twist.”

Martial’s/Cunningham’s above reads like a cross between a syllogism and one of La Rochefoucauld’s maximes. Like the latter, it packs a psychological or ethical insight. In the same vein but more complexly is one of Cunningham’s own epigrams, written in 1960 (according to Timothy Steele, editor of The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, 1997):

“I write you in my need. Please write
As simply, in terms black and white,
And do not fear hyperbole,
Uncompromising Flattery!
I can believe the best of me.”

And this, from 1966, with images perhaps drawn from Cunningham’s youth in Montana:

"There is a ghost town of abandoned love
With tailings of used hope, leavings of risk,
Deserted cherishings masked with new life,
Where the once ugly is now picturesque.”

Finally, from 1965, a mingling of sadness and acid (a Cunningham specialty), titled “On a Letter”:

“Unsigned, almost unsent, and all unsaid
Except the sending, which I take as read.”

For the sake of symmetry – and pleasure, of course – here is one of Helen’s epigrams (Taken in Faith, 2002):

“Poet admires the young man’s poem for this:
`It is your own. All is as you require it.’
But subject, tone, and feeling are all his.
I wrote this in his style. He may admire it.”

`Try to Burn a Piece of Granite'

My father-in-law passed along a tip which like so many kernels of information gleaned from the digital pastures of plenty he could no longer trace to its source. During the recent tantrums in London and elsewhere in England, it seems, vandals and thieves had spared the bookshops. On blocks where most businesses were sacked, W.H. Smith and others remained largely intact. A quick online search confirmed the happy rumor.

My first thought was that the rioters hadn’t recognized the paper artifacts arranged on tables and shelves, and correctly deduced they were not edible, potable or sellable, and moved elsewhere to enjoy “the sheer pleasure of assisting entropy in its great work of returning the world to chaos.” I remembered a piece I had read years ago by a forgotten English writer, Sir John Collings Squire (1884-1958), once the literary editor of The New Statesman. He was a poet and tastemaker in his day, and like most writers was politically naive and stupid, but he could tell a story and turn a phrase. What I remembered were his amusing efforts to destroy a cache of justifiably unwanted books:

“Now, no one would have bought these books. I therefore had to throw them away or wipe them off the map altogether. But how? There were scores of them. I had no kitchen range, and I could not toast them on the gas-cooker or consume them leaf by leaf in my small study fire - for it is almost as hopeless to try to burn a book without opening it as to try to burn a piece of granite.”

[Cynthia Haven takes on the same matter.]

`He Laughs Like a Rhinoceros'

“It should seem he had that day been in a humour for jocularity and merriment, and upon such occasions I never knew a man laugh more heartily. We may suppose, that the high relish of a state so different from his habitual gloom, produced more than ordinary exertions of that distinguishing faculty of man, which has puzzled philosophers so much to explain. Johnson’s laugh was as remarkable as any circumstance in his manner. It was a kind of good humoured growl. Tom Davies described it drolly enough: `He laughs like a rhinoceros.’”

That’s Boswell writing of his friend in 1775, when Johnson was age sixty-six. It serves as a corrective to the stubbornly lingering image of Johnson the humorless scold. Those looking for consistency among humans will always have trouble with Johnson, which is why efforts to psychoanalyze him, professional or amateur, are so amusing. As a reliable source of comedy, it’s tough to beat psychiatry.

Somewhere I learned of the early English psychiatrist L. Forbes Winslow (1844-1913), one of whose books is irresistibly titled Mad Humanity, Its Forms Apparent and Obscure (1898). My library has a copy. Chapter XII is “Madness of Genius,” a sort late-Romantic freak show of artists and thinkers diagnosed by the good doctor with “a morbid affection of the nervous system and a natural neurosis” – Swift, Rousseau, Smart, Cowper, Coleridge, Lamb (“Folie circulaire”), Poe, etc. At one point he uses the expression “congenital cretinism,” which I hope to work into copy some time soon. Here is Winslow’s capsule diagnosis of Johnson:

“As a child he was afflicted with the king’s evil, disfiguring his face, and impairing his eyesight. He published many works and pamphlets, The Life of Savage, and in 1747 his English Dictionary. There is no doubt that his system was afflicted with a strumous taint; and, indeed, when a child he was carried to Queen Anne at Kensington to be touched for the evil. He suffered from melancholia, and was constantly in terror, as he looked into futurity through the jaundiced medium of his malady. He used to say that he `inherited a violent melancholy from his father, which made him mad all his life; at least not sober.’ He always dreaded death, the thought being ever on his lips, `to die and go we know not where’; but when his system sank under disease, his terror of futurity waned and he died resigned. Johnson had himself to thank for much of his hypochondriac condition; he was a ravenous eater, and his digestion was never under his consideration.”

This makes me laugh “like a rhinoceros.”

`And Be Not Queasy To Praise Somewhat'

David Myers is back, and so the donnybrook resumes. I don’t know anyone who argues with such relish and surgical precision. Even when I have no stake in the contest, I enjoy the action when he’s involved. Besides, David writes better than anyone else in the bookish precincts of the blogosphere.

For one of his maiden outings he takes on one of those insufferable journalistic novelties that today pass for belles lettres. Slate asks fourteen writers to “confess their least favorite `must read.’” (“Confess” is melodrama. “Must read” is Madison Avenue.) Only four of the contributors are familiar to me, and only two of the four make consistent sense. While others say silly things about The Bostonians, Ulysses and Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Francine Prose reduces Beowulf to a cheesy swords-and-dragons fantasy, which it is.

It’s also nice to watch J.D. McClatchy dismiss Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams. Others take deserved potshots at The Catcher in the Rye and The Alexandria Quartet, but how revealing that most contributors, in a touchingly obtuse nineteenth-century holdover, limit themselves to novels. Congratulations to McClatchy for bucking the trend:

“The absolute worst, the gassiest, most morally and aesthetically bankrupt, the most earnestly and emptily studied and worshipped … that's an easy one. Ezra Pound.”

For a moment, take a cue from McClatchy and turn to the relentlessly overrated poets: John Ashbery, of course, and almost at random: Charles Olson, Frank Bidart, Sylvia Plath, Robert Creeley, Rita Dove, Theodore Roethke, Sharon Olds, Stephen Spender, Tony Hoagland, Ron Silliman, Philip Levine, Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, Jane Kenyon, George Oppen, Charles Simic, Anne Carson, James Schuyler, Robert Lowell, Franz Wright, Gary Snyder, William Stafford, Frank O’Hara, A.R. Ammons, Mary Oliver, Allen Ginsburg, W.S. Merwin, Anne Sexton, Ted and Langston Hughes – on and on, the long dreary parade of oversold mediocrities. Few honest readers can “confess” to reading them with pleasure, but as David wisely notes:

“The goal should be to encourage readers to put down bad books and pick up better ones—books that succeed where the overrated books fail.”

A better book to pick up is The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (edited by Timothy Steele, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1997), which includes “To My Contemporaries”:

“How time reverses
The proud in heart!
I now make verses
Who aimed at art.

“But I sleep well.
Ambitious boys
Whose big lines swell
With spiritual noise,

“Despise me not!
And be not queasy
To praise somewhat:
Verse is not easy.

“But rage who will.
Time that procured me
Good sense and skill
Of madness cured me.”

`Z-ed'

From office to library is a three-minute walk, during which I pass beneath the branches of seventeen trees, mostly live oaks and most equipped this time of year with a very loud cicada. The effect is of a vast, droning outdoor stereo system. As I leave one cone of sound, it Dopplers away and I enter the next. (In Transparent Things, the entomologist Nabokov has a character wearing “a Doppler shift over her luminous body.”) I enjoy the fritinancy (produced by their tymbals – another lovely word), though people complain about the racket.

A title in the library caught my eye: Evanescence and Form: An Introduction to Japanese Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) by Charles Shiro Inouye, and as I leafed through it a photograph caught my eye: a black-and-white close-up of an empty cicada shell fastened to a twig. The caption: “Utsusemi, cicada shell, epithet for this changing world.” Inouye brings up cicadas when examining Man'yōshū, a collection of Japanese poems assembled in the eighth century. The empty shell “characterizes the world as perceived by the ancient Japanese,” who linked the mortal world (yo) with the insect’s husk (utsusemi) – not the living cicada, the one making all the noise on campus.

Inouye makes no mention of the cicada’s sound, only the discarded shell, though a later Japanese poet, Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694), wrote a haiku that links them (translated by R.H. Blythe):

“A cicada shell;
it sang itself
utterly away.”

Walking back to my office I saw a cicada shell on the trunk of a live oak, about seven feet off the ground. The shell is translucent and buff-colored, like fine rice paper, with a fracture on the back from which the final instar emerged. My little utsusemi, a beautifully silent and delicate memento mori, sits on my desk. Thoreau notes in his journal for Sept. 2, 1856:

“Frank Harding has caught a dog-day locust [cicada] which lit on the bottom of my boat, in which he was sitting, and z-ed there. When you hear him you have got to the end of the alphabet and may imagine the &. It has a mark somewhat like a small writing w on the top of its thorax.”

A Conversation to Envy

Rosamund Bartlett reports in Tolstoy: A Russian Life (Profile Books, 2010):

“Before he died in 1910, Tolstoy lived to see the movie camera, the motor car, the phonograph and the typewriter, and even talked to Chekhov on the telephone.”

[In 1886, Chekhov had written a story titled "The Telephone."]

`Homeless at Home'

Children and the mad lack proportion. Their sense of scale, of relative importance, is unreliable. An ant is a monster, an eighteen-wheeler a toy. With maturity (and sanity) comes discernment, a lens for properly sizing the world. The trick is learning not to mistake small for insignificant, or large for important. In 1763, when Boswell expresses a fear that his journal includes “too many little incidents,” Johnson replies:

“There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery, and as much happiness as possible.”

Almost seven years after his death, Knopf has published the Selected Poems of Anthony Hecht. For old Hecht hands, there are no surprises, no previously unpublished or uncollected poems, but one hopes the new volume alerts new readers to the work of a very great American poet, and moves old readers to reread, as I’ve been doing. Included by the editor, J.D. McClatchy, from Millions of Strange Shadows (1977) is “Coming Home,” a curious poem for Hecht to write. In fact, it’s less written than assembled, deftly pieced together from passages in the journal John Clare (1793-1864) kept in July 1841.

Clare was often quite mad, once claiming to be Shakespeare. In 1841, he walked away from a private asylum in Essex. He wished to go home to be with his first love, Mary Joyce, to whom he believed he was married. In fact, she had died three years earlier and Clare had been married to Martha “Patty” Turner since 1820.

Hecht’s verse is the most elegant and intricate written by a major American poet in the twentieth century. Clare’s, often touchingly beautiful, is rough-hewn. Clearly, Hecht was touched by the plight of so gifted a poet and tormented a man. He arranges Clare’s prose, often naturally iambic, into lines, which moves the reader to listen carefully, to hear sound patterns, suggestions of rhyme and metrical variation.

I read the poem alongside Clare’s journal and confirmed that Hecht adds little but editing. It’s not an exact transcription but neither does it distort the text. I also noted the devotion to smallness, to seemingly insignificant details, in both poets. Compare the discovery of the gypsies’ hat as described in the first section of Hecht's poem with the corresponding passage in Clare’s journal (John Clare by Himself, 1996):

“On sunday I went and they were all gone—an old wide awake hat and an old straw bonnet of the plumb pudding sort was left behind—and I put the hat in my pocket thinking it might be useful for another oppertunity—as good luck would have it, it turned out to be so.”

The conclusion of Hecht’s found-poem is heartbreaking, but the journal passage is almost unbearably sad:

“…neither could I get any information about [Mary] further then the old story of her being dead six years ago which might be taken from a bran new old Newspaper printed a dozen years ago but I took no notice of the blarney having seen her myself about a twelvemonth ago alive and well and as young as ever—so here I am homeless at home and half gratified to feel that I can be happy any where”

On July 27, 1841, Clare wrote a letter to the now-dead Mary “Clare,” not cited by Hecht. It begins: “I have written an account of my journey of rather escape from Essex for your amusement and hope it may divert your leisure hours—”

Clare shared a publisher, John Taylor, with Keats and Hazlitt, and once met the latter at a party in London. He described Hazlitt as “a silent picture of severity.” In 1821, Hazlitt published one of his best essays, “On Great and Little Things,” in which he writes:

“We often make life unhappy in wishing things to have turned out otherwise than they did, merely because that is possible to the imagination which is impossible in fact.”

`An Impulse to Bring Glad Tidings'

How good of Nige to remind us of Marianne Moore’s goodness (and The Dabbler’s):

“Moore is to me one of those poets who seem to fill the world, and the business of living, with so many more possibilities and so much less ponderous necessity.”

Those aren’t the only reasons to read poetry, but try thinking of a poet who doesn’t “dwell in Possibilities” whose work you actually look forward to reading. I remember sitting on a school bus, against the window, reading Moore’s Collected Poems – a brand-new book in 1967. I already knew her “Poetry,” the earlier thirty-eight-line version, probably from an Oscar Williams anthology. In its Collected incarnation, the poem looks vandalized:

“I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.”

I read the freeze-dried version as a rare ungenerous gesture by Moore, hacked out of the “real” poem in a fit of petulance, and still do. Too much stress on “dislike” and “contempt.” Good poetry feels abundant, even when laconic, at once dense and nimble.

Gender politics aside, most of our (American) best poets have been women – Dickinson, Moore, Bogan, Lewis, Bishop, Pinkerton, Ryan (sounds like a Boston law firm). I don’t know what to make of this but it makes me happy, and Moore’s poems are a reliable antidote to life’s blues – and poetry’s. In 1966, in a letter to Writer’s Digest, Moore quotes John Cheever approvingly, as I quote her:

“I have an impulse to bring glad tidings. My sense of literature is one of giving, not diminishing.”

'They Heal the Stinging Asps in My Heart'

Like many autodidacts, Edward Dahlberg was fond of educating others, whether or not they wanted to be educated. A favorite strategy was devising reading lists and urging them on friends and antagonists (often, thereby, turning the former into the latter, a Dahlberg specialty). To the poet Isabella Gardner he advised:

“Go to school with some master, Ovid, Plutarch, Livy, Tacitus, and you will then find the river back to your own identity.”

This time, the good advice is gently, encouragingly delivered. We discover ourselves by learning what the best minds before us knew. But Dahlberg could be imperious and condescending. In a 1958 letter to Anthony Kerrigan, the poet and future translator of Borges and Unamuno, he writes:

“I am your friend, and the friend of your fate, but I have been writing, and making infernal mistakes for eighteen years longer than you have, and you must heed me, and READ. I want you to read Macrobius, Pausanias, Herodian, Suetonius, Clement of Alexandria, Josephus, the Moralia of Plutarch, the Elizabethans, the writers of the Comedy of the Restoration, Livy, Thucydides, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Dryden’s Essays, Ruskin’s Praeterita, Herzen, Saint-Simon, Pliny, Strabo, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and sundry other authors and savants.”

Again, no surprises, all good suggestions, but who wants to be told “you must heed me,” regardless of the list-maker’s wisdom? If I admire a writer (or reader) I naturally want to know what he has read, but I don’t want him to plot my reading life. A more effective way to encourage the reading of essential books is to share enthusiasm without proselytizing -- the modus operandi of Anecdotal Evidence.

I first read Samuel Johnson after an English professor off-handedly mentioned how much she loved him, before moving on to another subject. In contrast, an American novelist whose work I value published a new book several years ago, and a swarm of readers told me I had to read it. I bought the book but thus far have refused to open it.

In a 1958 letter to the novelist Josephine Herbst, Dahlberg names some of the volumes that soothe his spirits, and a good reader wants to join him:

“The finger is still inflamed. I have not one utensil in this apartment. My despondency has been too great for me to go out and buy these commodities. I sit here, however, with the Memoirs of Saint-Simon, Herzen, the letters of Coleridge, some remarkable passages from AE, and a good deal of John Ruskin. In the evenings I pore over the Confessions of St. Augustine, and they heal the stinging asps in my heart. The City of God, too, has been a great ecstasy for me. I am religious, but altogether profane and unchurchly. Coleridge dropped to his knees twice a day, and Samuel Johnson said that he could as lief kneel on Fleet Street with Kit Smart as not. But I too know what Ruskin meant when he said that gneiss in the Alps no longer moved him as it once did.”

[All quotes are from Epitaphs of Our Time: The Letters of Edward Dahlberg (1967). Fanny Howe reports another Dahlberg book list here.]

`Push Out with the Skunk-Cabbage in the Spring'

In May 1850, Thoreau pens an early paean to multicultural open-mindedness:

“I pray to be delivered from narrowness, partiality, exaggeration, bigotry. To the philosopher all sects, all nations, are alike. I like Brahma, Hari, Buddha, the Great Spirit, as well as God.” 

Fortunately, Thoreau confines this thought to his journal, and ninety-six years later J.V. Cunningham neatly refutes it with an epigram: 

“This Humanist whom no belief constrained
Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.” 

What follows in Thoreau’s journal is more interesting. There’s a gap, noted by the journal’s editors as “[Part of leaf missing here.],” followed by this: 

“A page with as true and inevitable and deep a meaning as a hillside, a book which Nature shall own as her own flower, her own leaves; with whose leaves her own shall rustle in sympathy imperishable and russet; which shall push out with the skunk-cabbage in the spring. I am not offended by the odor of the skunk in passing by sacred places. I am invigorated rather. It is a reminiscence of immortality borne on the gale. O thou partial world, when wilt thou know God? I would as soon transplant this vegetable to Polynesia or to heaven with me as the violet.” 

We don’t know what preceded this entry, but Thoreau’s journal, especially in its early years, is a gathering of sparks, hot and briefly illuminating like those struck by steel off flint. Only later and haltingly did he consistently catch fire. The skunk-cabbage passage reads like another of Thoreau’s writerly pep talks to himself. A year earlier he had published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which one hundred sixty-two years later remains unjustly unread. The publication of Walden was four years away; his death, at age forty-four, twelve years. 

Leave it to Thoreau to liken literary worth to the stink of skunk cabbage. He probably liked its Latin name: Symplocarpus foetidus. Because of a biochemical adaptation called thermogenesis, skunk cabbage generates heat sufficient to melt snow. I’ve seen it thriving and green in February in upstate New York. Of course Thoreau was invigorated by the smell. Skunk cabbage might stand as his emblem – scorned, cantankerous, tough and beautiful, a plant that grows downward with age, deeper into its native soil, growing more rooted. He calls for a literature as fierce and inevitable as the natural world, a literature true to the American landscape, and he was creating it, as was Melville. Only rarely since then have American writers heeded their example (Edward Dahlberg comes to mind). 

The subsequent passage in Thoreau’s journal begins with a familiar, Huckleberry Finn-like complaint: 

“Shoes are commonly too narrow. If you should take off a gentleman's shoes, you would find that his foot was wider than his shoe. Think of his wearing such an engine! walking in it many miles year after year!” 

Resuming his earlier botanical theme, Thoreau concludes:  

“When your shoe chafes your feet, put in a mullein leaf.”

`Held in Homer's Mind'

Shelby Foote, author of the three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative, tells an interviewer in 1987:

“I believed very much that the American Civil War is an experience central to our lives—all Americans but especially Southerners. The Civil War, for us, was very much similar to the Trojan War for Greeks; the Civil War is our Iliad. And I think it could be written any number of times by any number of writers, in part or as a whole, the way the Greeks did.”

The interviewer, William C. Clark, asks Foote if, when he started his twenty-year project, Homer was his model:

“I was aware of The Iliad as a model when I began, but it became even more a model as I went along and became fonder and fonder of it. I think The Iliad is our greatest narrative poem. To me, it’s an absolute model for anybody wanting to write anything, most especially history.”

Since reading in the Civil War again, and learning that Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve carried his “pocket Homer” into battle, I’ve kept in mind the commonplace that the conflict was our Trojan War. Looked at too closely, of course, the metaphor falls apart. The Greeks weren’t fighting a civil war, and it wasn’t waged on their soil. Brother seldom fought brother, and the scale was hardly comparable. The siege of Troy was a prolonged skirmish compared to Antietam and Gettysburg, but in both wars a nation was at stake and the national myth was under construction. As Foote says, the Civil War remains “central to our lives,” as the Trojan War remained vital for the Greeks, the Romans, the grand flourishing of Western Civilization, and for literate people today.

R.L. Barth, a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam, puts “Reading The Iliad” at the front of his collected poems, Deeply Dug In (2003, University of New Mexico Press). It hints at the French colonial past of Southeast Asia, and leaves the dead and those who killed them unidentified. It suggests a sense of solidarity among soldiers separated by millennia:

“Volume and desk, coffee and cigarette
Forgotten, the reader, held in Homer's mind,
Looks upon Greeks and Trojans fighting yet,
The heroes and foot soldiers, thin and blind,

“Forced-marching for the Styx. But suddenly
Stunned by the clamor under smoky skies,
Boastings and tauntings, he looks up to see —
Not the god-harried plain where Hector tries

 
His destiny, not the room; instead, a mountain
Covered with jungle; on one slope, a chateau
With garden, courtyard, a rococo fountain,

And, faces down, hands tied, six bodies in a row.” 

Thirty Americans and seven Afghan commandos were killed Saturday in a rocket attack on a helicopter in eastern Afghanistan. Melville, the great poet of the Civil War, has Ishmael say in “Loomings,” the first chapter of Moby-Dick:      

“And doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

“`Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States’
`Whaling Voyage by One Ishmael’
`BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN’”