`Backward Into Dubious Time'

Two mornings in a row on the way to work I waited in line for a freight train to pass, an inexpensive variation on the drive-in theater. Only on Monday did I get a front-row seat, but even on Tuesday I was close enough to read the graffiti. I’m never in a hurry when driving, and a miles-long string of reefers, boxcars and gondolas (“Lugging cattle, coal, and lumber, / Crying, `alack, alack.’”) is always a stirring sight. Houston is a dense weave of train tracks, as John Bainbridge, a staff writer for The New Yorker, observed fifty years ago in his book about Texas, The Super-Americans:

“Along with its big-city overtones, Houston has a few small-town undertones, such as the fact that there are some three thousand grade crossings within the city limits; it is not unusual, when driving about town, to be obliged to stop while a train goes by.”

That mélange of big city and small town is one of the qualities I most appreciate about Houston. Trains remind us of the city’s nineteenth-century origins, and railroad sidings are weedy, disregarded places that suggest moving on and staying put. It’s tempting to lull one’s self into sepia-tinted reveries when watching trains pass, but as Eric Ormsby cautions in “Railway Stanzas” (Coastlines,1992):

“I do not write this from nostalgia.
I who once revered as a mercy of
certitude the benignity of fact
am skeptical of every reverie
that leads me backward into dubious time.”

`Dirt Still Clinging to Their Roots'

“It is the roots of things that fascinate me—their bulbs, their rhizomes, etymologies.”

This is A.E. Stallings, an American poet living in Greece, in a piece she wrote for Poetry, “All the Greens Whose Names I Do Not Know.” Her prose is unusually good for a contemporary poet, not silly, earnest or pretentious. To extend her metaphor a little, her prose, like her poetry, feels rooted in the real world. Every writer ought to be so roots-minded.

A few hours before I read Stallings’ greens piece, my boss told me a story about her recent encounter with rooted greenery. Several inches of rain fell last week at the farm, enough for her drought-dried pond to accumulate a few inches of water. The fish are gone, probably consumed by passing herons, but the rain revived the shrubs growing around the pond’s edge. She and her husband call them “coffee bean plants,” which in fact is one of the common names for Sesbania drummondii, better known as rattlebox. They remind me of black locust but are classified as toxic legumes.

The shrubs block the cows’ right of way to the pond, but rattlebox roots sink eighteen inches or more into the drought-parched ground. Pulling them by hand is a waste of time, so my boss’ husband welded together a de-rooter from chain and scrap-iron and fastened it to the tractor. One of the welds broke, then the tractor got mired in the newly moistened pond, and he hooked up their second tractor, this one with four-wheel drive, to the first, which started to tip over with my boss at the helm. They righted it and spent too much time pulling too few roots from the ground. The cows seem uninterested in rattlebox as fodder, so the de-rooting can resume without urgency next weekend.

Stallings says she was browsing in a glossary of Linear B, “the pre-alphabetic system of writing used by Mycenaean Greeks,” and found

“…among the hardware of war and the tackle of trades…the flavors of daily fare and feasts, the containers of wine and oil and flour. Here I find ko-ri-ja-da-na (coriander), mi-ta (mint), pa-ko-we (sage), se-ri-no (celery), ma-ra-tu-wo (fennel)—words nearly identical to the modern Greek three millennia later. How fresh and fragrant these ancient syllables are, as if someone just harvested them this Monday morning and put them on a truck bound for the farmers’ market in Neos Kosmos, with the Cretan, Attic, and Laconic dirt still clinging to their roots. I go out with my shopping basket, to make my own anthology.”

The root of root, crusted with centuries of rich linguistic soil, is in Old English: “Nim horsellenes rota & eftgewæxen barc, & dry swyðe & mac to duste.” The Oxford English Dictionary traces this tidbit to the deliciously named Thomas Oswald Cockayne’s deliciously named three-volume Leechdoms, Wortcunning, & Starcraft (1864-66). The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says of Cockayne, famed for his researches in Anglo-Saxon:

“Although Cockayne was a gifted and productive philologist, his pugnacious personality and abrasive ad hominem attacks on influential critics closed the doors to higher academic positions. He was a well-intentioned but impolitic man whose life was driven by a love of language but whose life was ultimately ruined by the unbridled use of language.”

`Metre Is a Brain-Altering Drug'

“It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn’t sure what it meant.”

One outgrows such thinking, usually by age sixteen, about the time we start feeling guilty for having fallen for the flummery of Dylan Thomas. The poet who wrote the lines above, P.K. Page, died last year at age ninety-six. She wrote them, in “Falling in Love with Poetry” (collected in The Filled Pen: Selected Non-fiction), in 2005. Some of us mature more slowly than others.

In the best, most memorable poems, sound and sense are inseparable. It’s not surprising that among the first poems to excite me as a boy were Poe’s “The Bells” and "Annabel Lee,” the usual well-oiled suspects. Today, I can’t read Poe on a bet, and for diametrically opposite reasons I can’t read Allen Ginsberg. At the start of her essay, Page suggests an explanation for our early, faulty infatuations:

“I fell in love with poetry before I knew what poetry was. I loved the rhythms and the rhymes.”

   Bad poetry can be very powerful and seductive, whether transparently bad like Poe’s or “skillfully obscure” like Hart Crane’s, in the words of Yvor Winters. Too much emphasis on sound results in nonsense; too much on sense, propaganda that might as well be prose. One reason we can’t fall in love with contemporary poetry is that most of it possesses too much sound and too little sense, or vice versa. Good poems dwell in a taut equilibrium. Formlessness invites self-indulgent senselessness. We need something to chafe against, in literature as in life. Free verse, in most hands, is slavery. Sonnets liberate. In another essay, “A Writer’s Life,” Page says:

   “I suspect that metre is a brain-altering drug – one we ignore at our peril. Just consider what we know, but take for granted: that iambic is the lub-dub of the heart, and iambic pentameter that lub-dub repeated five times – roughly the number of heartbeats to a breath. It is difficult for me to believe this is accidental.”

   You can dispute Page’s understanding of physiology but not her conclusion. Just read, at random, a poem by William Carlos Williams. With few exceptions, it’s thin, anemic, tuneless stuff, undistinguished even when transcribed as prose. In his introduction to the anthology English Renaissance Poetry (1963), John Williams, author of Stoner, writes of Ben Jonson's verse:

“It is, finally, a language that has passed from the starkness and bareness of outer reality through the dark, luxuriant jungle of the self, and has emerged from that journey entire and powerful.”

`A Book With a Local Lineage'

At thirty-seven thousand feet, with snow-covered mountains glowing below us, and books from a public library in Washington and a university library in Texas stacked on my tray-table, I read these cheering words:

“If the idea of a public library was civilizing, so was the place, with its comforting quiet, its tidy shelves, its knowledgeable, dutiful employees who weren’t teachers. The library wasn’t simply where one had to go to get the books, it was a kind of exacting haven to which a city youngster willingly went for his lesson in restraint and his training in self-control. And then there was the lesson in order, the enormous institution itself serving as instructor. What trust it inspired—in both oneself and systems—first to decode the catalogue card, then to make it through the corridors and stairwells into the open stack, and there to discover, exactly where it was supposed to be, the desired book.”

That's Philip Roth, from an op-ed piece he published in The New York Times in 1969. In the wake of the riots that gutted the black neighborhoods in Roth’s home town, Newark, N.J., in 1967, the city council voted to remove from the budget $2.8 million already allocated to maintain the city museum and public library. Public protest, including Roth’s letter, eventually persuaded council to reverse its decision. The letter is collected in Roth’s Reading Myself and Others (1975), which I was reading in a copy borrowed from the King County Public Library in Bellevue, Washington.

I think of public libraries as the frontline of American democracy, places where any of us by virtue of simple citizenship can read any book we wish, without a penny in our pocket, pursue any bookish whim, meet the great minds that shaped us, no college degree or bank statement required, and become better citizens. Roth ups the ante by adding civilization to democracy. I first read Roth in a library, even before he published Portnoy’s Complaint – Goodbye, Columbus in the Parma Heights Public Library. 

Sometimes I think the direst threat facing public libraries comes from within. I refer to administrators who cull from their collections books they’ve never read, while stocking video games, Desperate Housewives DVDs, books about zombies and vampires, and collections of criticism devoted to writers whose books are not on their shelves. I’m not convinced it’s even possible for most of us to achieve full literacy without access to well-stocked public libraries (including interlibrary loan). Without them, my hunger for books might never have evolved, let alone ever had a chance of being satisfied. Roth writes: 

“For a ten-year-old to find he actually can steer himself though tens of thousands of volumes to the very one he wants is not without its satisfactions. Nor did it count for nothing to carry a library card in one’s pocket; to pay a fine; to sit in a strange place, beyond the reach of parent and school, and read whatever one chose, in anonymity and peace; finally, to carry home across the city and even into bed at night a book with a local lineage of its own, a family tree of Newark readers to which one’s name had now been added.”

`Any Greenness is Deeper Than Anyone Knows'

“Through Harry Levin, Nabokov met the poet Richard Wilbur, whose work he came to rate very highly. Wilbur had read in Partisan Review Nabokov’s memoir `First Poem,’ and commented on the extraordinary minutiae, such as a drip glissading from a wet leaf’s tip, that Nabokov’s memory preserved for decades. Alas, every detail was true, Nabokov replied, because he was a victim of total recall.”

So Brian Boyd reports in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. “First Poem” appeared in Partisan Review in 1949 and eventually became the eleventh chapter of Speak, Memory, the most beautiful autobiography in the language. Nabokov describes a day at Vyra, the family estate, in July 1914, on the cusp of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution that would destroy his world. Boyd notes that Nabokov had actually been writing poems in three languages for several years, and that the “first poem” he describes, “The Rain Has Flown” (Дождь пролетел), was actually composed in 1917. Perhaps it was “first” in a deeper, non-chronological sense as Nabokov implies by making it the first poem in Poems and Problems (1969). Here is Nabokov’s translation of his Russian original:

“The rain has flown and burnt up in flight.
I tread the red sand of a path.
Golden orioles whistle, the rowan is in bloom,
the catkins on sallows are white.

“The air is refreshing, humid and sweet.
How good the caprifole smells!
Downward a leaf inclines its tip
And drop from its tip a pearl.”

Here, from Speak, Memory, is Nabokov’s rendering of the event that inspired the poem. Note, as Wilbur notes, the “glissading” of the water drop:

“Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the center vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip relief—the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes.”

No wonder Wilbur admired “First Poem.” With Nabokov he shares an acuity of eye and ear. For both, knowledge and mystery coexist. Creation deserves attentiveness. To be less than devoted to detail is to be lazy, soft-headed and immune to the gifts around us. Nabokov saw a poem in a plant. “The Beautiful Changes” is the title poem of Wilbur’s first collection, published in 1947:

“The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.”

In a footnote to the passage quoted at the top, Boyd adds:

“Once when Wilbur came to Cornell for a poetry reading, arriving weary and unfed after a delayed flight, he looked down and saw Nabokov `sitting alone in the very front row, and passionately wished I had eaten something, that I felt better, that my poems were better.’”

`In the Throes of Self-Discovery'

A passage in John Cheever’s journals read on the morning of Thanksgiving Day, though ostensibly having nothing to do with the holiday, pushed to the surface an early Thanksgiving memory. Cheever is writing in 1955:

“The child is vomiting. Into town on a Sunday night to get an antidote. For this corner drugstore, a Sunday night is its finest hour. All its prosperous competitors have shut. It is the only lighted store on the street. The jumble of displays in the window—a picture of Pythagoras, Venus in a truss, douche bags and perfumes—is continued in the store itself. It is like a pharmaceutical curiosity shop, a fun house, a storeroom for cardboard women anointing themselves with suntan lotion, cardboard forests advertising pine-scented soap, bookshelves and bins filled with card-table covers and plastic water pistols, and a little like a household, too, for the druggist’s wife is at the soda fountain, a neat, anxious-looking woman with photographs of her three sons in uniform arranged on the shelf at her back.”

One Thanksgiving not many years after the events recorded above I overindulged in shrimp cocktail (an exotic appetizer in our family), pickles, olives and dinner rolls even before the entrée was on the table, and proceeded to vomit on the floor in the bathroom and, eventually, into the toilet. We were out of Pepto-Bismol. For some reason my father took me with him to Avallone’s Pharmacy. I was woozy and sweaty but remember that the familiar drugstore, our home away from home for comic books and candy bars, cheered me more than the dose of pink stuff. The Thanksgiving Days of childhood were surrogate Sundays, days of dolor and dullness, and the sanctuary of the drugstore came as relief that exceeded the merely medicinal.

Cheever sketches an unmistakably American scene, one that mingles medicine and consumer bounty, hospital and home. Karl Shapiro begins his “Drug Store” (1942) with this line: “It baffles the foreigner like an idiom.” After bookstores, good drugstores were my favorite. They promised not only pleasure (polar air conditioning in summer) but a delicious discomfort in the face of adult mysteries (tubing and unguents, half-torsoed mannequins in trusses). The pharmacist at Avallone’s, in bow tie and pale blue lab coat, was Chuck. His business and the world that sustained it is long extinct. When he leaves the drugstore, Cheever observes a group of “hoods” swaggering down the street, “stinking of marijuana and baying like she-wolves at the new moon.” He writes:

“The only relationship we seem to have with them is scorn or bewilderment, but they belong somewhere on the dark prairies of a country that is in the throes of self-discovery.”

`The Liberty of Any Things'

While pushing the grocery cart back to the cart-corral I noticed a crow hopping off but not flying away. As I turned to the car he launched an impressive spew of corvine invective, strutting ever closer to me. The spectacle of so small a creature haranguing one twenty times his size is always amusing. In his journal Thoreau consistently modifies caw with “angry.” Such self-indulgence we would never tolerate in humans. In a crow it’s charming. I realized my cart had blocked the crow’s access to a plump Kaiser roll getting sodden in the rain, so I moved the cart. In his “In a Bird Sanctuary” (The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, 1947), Richard Wilbur almost gets it wrong:

“It's hard to tell the purpose of a bird:
for relevance it does not seem to try.
No line can trace no flute exemplify
its traveling: it darts without the word.
Who wills devoutly to absorb, contain,
Birds give him pain.”

They are not us but sometimes resemble us. I entirely understood the “purpose” of the parking lot crow. He wasn’t dumb and I wasn’t deaf. His caws caused me to act, so he was not entirely “without the word.” I drove the next day to our storage unit to fetch the Christmas lights and decorations. On the roof of the building across from ours, two crows observed as I loaded boxes in the trunk. They muttered and nodded, interested in my doings, Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo to my Mr. Interlocutor. They seemed to want nothing but got all the best lines. Wilbur says in his final stanza:

“The liberty of any things becomes
the liberty of all. It also brings
their abolition into anythings.
In order’s name let’s not turn down our thumbs
on routine visions; we must figure out
what all’s about.”

`Have a Book Open on Your Dressing Table'

“For the general practitioner a well-used library is one of the few correctives of the premature senility which is so apt to overtake him. Self-centered, self-taught, he leads a solitary life, and unless his every-day experience is controlled by careful reading or by the attrition of a medical society it soon ceases to be of the slightest value and becomes a mere accretion of isolated facts, without correlation.”

On the self-help shelf in the library bookshop I found a third edition (1932) of William Osler’s extravagantly titled Aequanimitas, with Other Addresses to Medical Students, Nurses and Practitioners of Medicine, first published in 1904. We no longer expect doctors to be literate (or writers to know anything about medicine and science), though recently I interviewed the nation’s top thrombosis man and learned not only that he once treated Mikhail Gorbachev but has read all of Solzhenitsyn in English. At my urging he’s now reading Dead Souls. He had never heard of Osler (1849-1919).

I paid four dollars for the book. On the endpaper in black ink is inscribed “Ralph M. Lechausse, Richmond, Va. 1935.” Below that, in the same hand: “To A.B. – Montreal Oct. 1936.” The identity of “A.B.” is revealed at the bottom of the endpaper in another hand: “A. Bernard Gray.” Tucked between pages 436 and 437 is a memo written on the letterhead of “Eli Lilly and Company, Indianapolis, U.S.A.” It’s dated “Nineteen Thirty-Five,” addressed “Dear Doctor,” and begins:

“Together with congratulations on your attainment of a medical degree, this volume of addresses by Sir William Osler, who adorned your profession in the United States for many years, is cordially presented.”

Here is the third of four paragraphs:

“May you share with him his `relish of knowledge’ and his absorbing love and passionate, persistent search for truth.”

One can hardly imagine the world suggested by this gift and message, even if we dismiss it as promotional boilerplate. It implies respect for a physician dead sixteen years and a pharmaceutical company’s understanding that a collection of his medical addresses might constitute “graft.” Also, that a doctor might be engaged in a “search for truth.”

One of Osler’s lectures is titled “Men and Books,” from which the passage quoted above is taken. In it he quotes or alludes to Dr. Johnson, Bunyan, Milton, Cotton Mather, Horace, James Russell Lowell, Washington Irving and many physicians. Osler writes: “I should like to see in each library a select company of the Immortals set apart for special admiration.” At the end of the volume, perhaps to clarify that by books he means more than just medical texts, Osler adds a “Bed-side Library for Medical Students.” A liberal education, he assures us, “may be had at a very slight cost of time and money.” He urges medical students to “get the education, if not of a scholar, at least of a gentleman,” and suggests:

“Before going to sleep read for half an hour, and in the morning have a book open on your dressing table. You will be surprised to find how much can be accomplished in the course of a year.”

Here is Osler’s prescription for a liberal education:

I. Old and New Testament.
II. Shakespeare.
III. Montaigne.
IV. Plutarch’s Lives.
V. Marcus Aurelius.
VI. Epictetus.
VII. Religio Medici.
VIII. Don Quixote.
IX. Emerson.
X. Oliver Wendell Holmes—Breakfast-Table Series.

[An eagle-eyed reader in Dallas informs us that Dr. A. Bernard Gray, an orthopedic surgeon, died last March at the age of ninety-eight: "During his lifetime of medical practice he treated many patients who were unable to pay, and performed many unique and creative surgical procedures.  Bernard was not only a man of great professional accomplishment and dedication, he was a loving patriarch.  His family was his greatest pleasure." Read his complete obituary here.]

`It Domiciliates Me in Nature'

Shuttling between homes, I’ve come to understand that the Pacific Northwest is meteorologically (and culturally) antipodal to Houston. While Texas remains in a protracted drought, we wake to the purr of rain on the roof, the sound of Puget Sound, its elevator music. With it comes a socked-in feeling and the certainty of limits – welcome reminders. Last week my brother posted a photo of the sun setting behind a neighbor’s house in suburban Cleveland. Turneresque displays are routine in Houston; in Seattle they would make the front page, if anyone still read the newspaper.

Residents at both ends of my bipolar existence complain about the weather, of course, and most everything else. Chesterton reminded us that “travel narrows the mind,” a side-effect I’m encouraging. I like to like where I am, even if I’m deluded, in contrast to the scout leader I spoke with on Saturday who explained to me that the abundant rain in Washington is the result of “climate change.” From the drought and unceasing rain I’ve relearned something about proper proportions, personal and species-wide.

Thoreau took a walk in the rain on May 17, 1858. He watched a farmer try to finish his planting “while slowly getting a soaking, quietly dropping manure in the furrows.” Thoreau implicitly approves of the farmer’s uncomplaining stoicism, and writes:

“The rain is good for thought. It is especially agreeable to me as I enter the wood and hear the soothing dripping on the leaves. It domiciliates me in nature. The woods are the more like a house for the rain; the few slight noises sound more hollow in them; the birds hop nearer; the very trees seem still and pensive. The clouds are but a higher roof. The clouds and rain confine me to near objects, the surface of the earth and the trees.”

“Domiciliates” – makes a home for – is a word Thoreau the Latinist deploys with pleasure. He, too, made a home in nature, first in 1845, and then for the rest of his life.

`He Seldom Mentions Sin'

The only proselytizing I experienced was the passive sort, the mingled scents of coffee and fresh-cut cedar and pine in the lobby of the Lutheran church. My eight-year-old was the top seller of wreathes, garlands and centerpieces in his Cub Scout pack, which meets at the church. We were there to deliver greens to the parishioners he had sweet-talked last week.

At the center of the lobby were two tables set with coffee urns, another for tea, and many platters of cookies. Nearby, already bagged, were the Yuletide trimmings, redolent of the forest where just a week ago they were growing. A scout leader and I checked the list of orders, collected money, and piled her son and mine with trash bags of greenery so they could help customers carry them out to their cars.

We were an L-shaped corridor away from the sanctuary where the service was underway. Hanging from the ceiling in the lobby was a video screen broadcasting the hymn-singing and sermon. The camera was set up in the second-floor balcony and aimed down the middle aisle at the altar. We could see a miniature image of the minister in white robes. If I understood his sermon properly, the theme was encouragement – we all need it, we’re all obliged to dispense it to others. His message, a sort of sacred-but-almost-secular pep talk, sounded characteristically American: Strive, work hard, persevere, help others in their striving. There was no darkness in the minister’s words. He sounded like a good, friendly man, like all the other Lutherans I met. He was no Father Mapple.

I thought of ministers in the novels of Peter De Vries and of a sonnet by a much-neglected poet, once among the most celebrated in the nation, Phyllis McGinley. She published in The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies Home Journal, as well as The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Auden loved her and wrote an introduction to Times Three (1960), her collected poems that went through seven printings in six years. Here is “This Side of Calvin”:

“The Reverend Dr. Harcourt, folk agree,
Nodding their heads in solid satisfaction,
Is just the man for this community.
Tall, young, urbane, but capable of action,
He pleases where he serves. He marshals out
The younger crowd, lacks trace of clerical unction,
Cheers the Kiwanis and the Eagle Scout,
Is popular at every public function,

“And in the pulpit eloquently speaks
On divers matters with both wit and clarity:
Art, Education, God, the Early Greeks,
Psychiatry, Saint Paul, true Christian charity,
Vestry repairs that shortly must begin—
All things but Sin. He seldom mentions Sin.”

McGinley’s satire is gentle, as is mine.

`Such Is November'

The kids had raked some of the leaves and left them in piles around the yard, but more had fallen and everything was coated with a thin veneer of ice. The grass crunched and kept precise footprints until the low sun had risen enough to soften the outlines but not erase them.

“The sunlight is a peculiarly thin and clear yellow, falling on the pale-brown bleaching herbage of the fields at this season. There is no redness in it. This is November sunlight.”

We raked and lifted leaf piles frozen into ragged clumps. Dumped into the bin they remained in sheets liked rotting plywood and had to be tamped down with rakes and brooms. The bare spots under the leaves gave off the earthy fragrance of a mid-winter thaw, rich with rot.

“Much cold, slate-colored cloud, bare twigs seen gleaming toward the light like gossamer, pure green of pines whose old leaves have fallen, reddish or yellowish brown oak leaves rustling on the hillsides, very pale brown, bleaching, almost hoary fine grass or hay in the fields, akin to the frost which has killed it, and flakes of clear yellow sunlight falling on it here and there, -- such is November.”

Leaf-covered grass, denied sunlight, bleaches into pale tubers. Among the exposed roots, earthworms writhe in the cold and a shiny black beetle skitters for shelter. Fingers ache with the cold and damp.

“The fine grass killed by the frost, withered and bleached till it is almost silvery, has clothed the fields for a long time. Now, as in the spring, we rejoice in sheltered and sunny places. Some corn is left out still even.”

[The quoted passages are from Thoreau’s journal for Nov. 18, 1857.]

`All Our Ladies Read Now'

Another flight to Seattle, another calibration of print requirements: How to carry sufficient reading matter to fill the four-hour-and-forty-minute flight, plus time seated in the terminal, but not over-burden one’s self with cargo, and yet to budget thirty minutes or so for the crossword puzzle in the airline magazine? Such are the trials facing the savvy traveler, especially one accustomed to reading three or four books simultaneously, and who likes to mix genres and subjects.

The latest issue of First Things arrived Thursday, and I was strong – I saved it for the flight. Next, Janet Lewis’ first novel, The Invasion (1932), which I recently bought with birthday money and started reading on Thursday. Call it consumer testing: I like to be certain a book will occupy my attention. How frustrating to start one midair and find out it’s unreadable (hardly likely with Lewis – I’ve read all of her other novels and poetry). Not only could I not read it, I’d have to lug it around for the rest of the trip unless it was so bad I gave it to my seatmate, which I once did with a much-touted George V. Higgins novel.

I’m also packing the latest volume by the prolific Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (Bloomsbury Press, 2010). In the first essay, “Why Study War?” he writes: “Few classicists seemed to remember that most notable Greek writers, thinkers, and statesmen—from Aeschylus to Pericles to Xenophon—had served in the phalanx or on a trireme at sea and that such experiences permeated their work.”

The new books I carry are devoted to old themes and the old ones read like new. In the latter category is Boswell’s Life of Johnson in the zaftig little Everyman’s edition. I know it as though it were my biography, and that’s a comfort. Why risk reading a bestseller or some unreadable title that reflects an “established convention of literary culture in America?” Boswell reports Johnson’s table talk on April 29, 1778:

“`It has been maintained that this superfoetation, this teeming of the press in modern times, is prejudicial to good literature, because it obliges us to read so much of what is of inferiour value, in order to be in the fashion; so that better works are neglected for want of time, because a man will have more gratification of his vanity in conversation, from having read modern books, than from having read the best works of antiquity. But it must be considered, that we have now more knowledge generally diffused; all our ladies read now, which is a great extension. Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients. Greece appears to me to be the fountain of knowledge; Rome of elegance.’”

`To Fill a Great Barrel of Silence'

When Boswell complained of attending a dinner “without hearing one sentence of conversation worthy of being remembered,” Johnson replied, “Sir, there seldom is any such conversation,” and in two and a half centuries, the conversational well has only run drier. Ours is a noisy but empty age. Chatter is not conversation. A friend on campus writes:

“I was thinking about you today while getting a manicure. They had three televisions on, all tuned to a ladies' talk show. I can honestly say I've never seen anything so imbecilic, so completely vacuous, in my entire life. It was so painfully stupid that I was embarrassed to be watching it even though I had no choice. And this is how the Vietnamese manicurists learn English! God help us.”

The problem, of course, is democracy. Because they have a right to speak, people feel obliged to do so when they have nothing to say. Egos throb and blather proliferates. It’s a shame, because good conversation ranks among the chief pleasures of civilization.

Helen Pinkerton has passed along Exemplary Lives (University of George Press, 1990) by the late David Levin, a scholar of American literature whose teachers included Perry Miller and F.O. Matthiessen at Harvard and Yvor Winters and Wallace Stegner at Stanford.

When Levin arrived at Stanford in 1952, he was writing his Ph.D. thesis on four American historians – Bancroft, Prescott, Motley and Parkman. On their first meeting, Winters, then age fifty-two, asked Levin, who was twenty-seven, “Which one was the best?” Knowing Winters by reputation, he reluctantly answered, “I suppose Parkman was the best historian.” Winters replied, “Parkman’s the worst. Motley’s the best.” Some would judge Winters’ forthright pugnacity a conversation-killer. Not Levin. That first conversation was, he says, “an epitome of the most exemplary service that Winters’s criticism and his personal conduct performed for me and others.”

I sense that the model for most contemporary conversation is the therapy session: “And how did that make you feel?” Or, the flip side of that inanity, the drunken rage. Both parts are scripted and neither calls for listening or thinking. Levin goes on:

“That first laconic exchange also left me with the feeling that I was somehow obliged to fill a great barrel of silence, which Winters himself had opened. Even after I had come to know him well, he remained one of several friends who left silences for others to fill, friends whose mute, expectant bearing suggested that their own silence had been provoked by the inadequacy of their interlocutors. Winters was not at ease in idle conversation. He frequently spoke with startling wit, and he was an excellent raconteur, but casual speech often seemed to make him uncomfortable. He preferred to write, and he often did.”

In Winters we have a man who embodied an old-fashioned strain of American laconicism. No one is obliged to talk – or listen. “The young are quick of speech,” he reminds us, as are the middle-aged and older. In another poem Winters writes:

“That in this room, men yet may reach,
By labor and wit’s sullen shock,
The final certitude of speech
Which Hell itself cannot unlock.”

`Let Nothing Be a Toy Too Small'

Chris Arthur, an Irish essayist whose work I recently discovered, was born in Belfast in 1955 and is a literary descendant of the great Hubert Butler. His latest collection is Irish Elegies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). For the book’s epigraph Arthur uses the sestet of a sonnet by John Hewitt (1907-1987), also born in Belfast and previously unknown to me. Here is the complete poem, “Nourish Your Heart,” from The Collected Poems of John Hewitt (Blackstaff Press, 1991):

“Nourish your heart through all the ports of sense;
let sight’s salute constrain them to come in
that furtive lurk in shadow; let touch spin
her dragging spider-threads with diligence,
no anchor-cable these, a net to freight,
meshed close as flesh, from the reluctant tide
the veering atomies; let the rest provide
all they can bundle through each closing gate.

“See you miss nothing proffered. Name and store
and set in order all. Let nothing be
a toy too small, a trophy overpast
the weighing palm that reckons less or more;
for all you know, or I know, these must last
the slow attritions of eternity.”

Reading the final six lines unaccompanied even by title, with only the poet’s name and the dates of his birth and death, I recognized a voice I wanted to pursue. The diction is faintly old-fashioned – “proffered,” “overpast” – but charmingly so, finicky and unostentatiously wise. “Atomies” are minute particles, atoms or motes. Shakespeare writes in As You Like It: “It is as easie to count Atomies as to resolue the propositions of a Louer.” Soon it came to mean a fairy or mite, a diminutive being. Even “veering atomies” are worthy of perception.

“Nourish Your Heart” was first collected in Time Enough: Poems New and Revised, published in 1976 when Hewitt was almost seventy. Its title is off-putting, setting us up for pop medicine or New Age confections. Hewitt has sustenance in mind, but something substantial. In a word, attentiveness. Once a friend urged the Buddhist notion of mindfulness on me, openness, a refusal of dullness and sensory passivity: “Name and store / and set all in order.” It’s a Thoreauvian injunction. See this from the journal for June 13, 1851:

“We live but a fraction of our life. Why do we not let on the flood, raise the gates, and set all our wheels in motion? He that hath ears to hear, let him hear [Matthew 11:15, Mark 4:9]. Employ your senses.”

In Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist (1873), William Ellery Channing writes that his friend’s “senses lived twice.” Like Hewitt, Channing resorts to gustatory metaphors:

“He loved the multum in parvo [much in little] or potluck; to boil up the little into the big. Thus, he was in the habit of saying,--Give me healthy senses, let me be thoroughly alive, and breathe freely in the very flood-tide of the living world. But this should have availed him little, if he had not been at the same time copiously endowed with the power of recording what he had imbibed. His senses truly lived twice.”

A writer lives everything twice, at least.

`His Old Man's Thoughts Like Embers'

Helen Pinkerton tipped me off to another poem about Samuel Johnson, found in a book she is reading for review – Under the Pergola (Louisiana State University Press, 2011) by Catharine Savage Brosman. "Dr. Johnson in the Hebrides" has six eight-line stanzas and is too long to quote in full, but Helen expresses a fondness for the final stanza that I share. Here’s part of it:

“Then to Oban and Glasgow,
leaving the prison of the isles, the water’s hazards,
turning home, his old man’s thoughts like embers,
ruddy in the sunset’s radiance, brighter still
in darkness—deepening, illuminating times
that would not be again, an old and honest order
lost, life mostly gone, but washed and fired by grace.”

Johnson was sixty-three when touring Scotland in 1773 with Boswell, and would live another eleven years. In an earlier passage, Brosman writes: “Worn by work, by words, / yet he had not tired of London, Litchfield, Streathem, / nor of life.” She silently echoes Johnson’s declaration in Boswell’s Life: “Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

More than most people in our time and even his, Johnson contemplated his mortality. He found it a subject of bottomless terror and fascination, and it fueled his life, as did the fear of madness. His appetite for life was directly proportional to his dread of death – a rare sort of human algebra. Boswell asks, as reported in the Life: “But is not the fear of death natural to man?” Johnson replies: “So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it.” Brosman’s stanza is tactful. The closest she gets to writing “death” is “life mostly gone,” a Beckett-like phrase. Her best image: “his old man’s thoughts like embers.” That is, softly glowing, providing dim illumination but still likely to flare and burn. More than twenty years before the journey to Scotland, Johnson writes in The Rambler #111:

“A perpetual conflict with natural desires seems to be the lot of our present state. In youth we require something of the tardiness and frigidity of age; and in age we must labour to recall the fire and impetuosity of youth; in youth we must learn to respect, and in age to enjoy."

Despite his reputation for gloom and ferocity, Johnson was a world-class enjoyer. Brosman, who cites John Wain’s Samuel Johnson: A Biography as her source, writes in the second and third stanzas:

“…he sought a time and place
half-known, remote: wild prospects, feudal law,

“savage battles in the glens, fierce independence,
Stuart pride, and landscapes like no other, stony, harsh,
and mountainous, with treeless wastes for miles,
and then the sea.”

That reads like an external reflection of Johnson’s internal landscape.

`They Are Always Reactionary'

On the conclusion of the recent unpleasantness on Wall Street:

"Rowdies are never revolutionaries, they are always reactionary. It is among the young that the greatest conformists and Philistines are found, e.g., the hippies with their group beards and group protests. Demonstrators at American universities care as little about education as football fans who smash up subway stations in England care about soccer. All belong to the same family of goofy hoodlums--with a sprinkling of clever rogues among them."

[From the interview Vladimir Nabokov gave Philip Oakes in The Sunday Times, June 1969; collected in Strong Opinions, 1973.]

`The Part That Sings'

“Beauty – her triumph is that she has found it where few have before, and convinced us of it. Conciseness and symmetry. Liberty. Tough, even cantankerous individuality.”

The writer is Guy Davenport and the object of his celebration is Marianne Moore, born 124 years ago today in St. Louis. Like Aaron Copland, whose 111th birthday we observed on Monday, Moore is a pleasure giver among American Modernists, an artist who never settles for a monochromatic palette. Look and you’ll find silver and gold shimmering among the grays and blacks of sorrow and loss: “Beauty is everlasting / and dust is for a time” (“In Distrust of Merits,” written during World War II).

In The Art of Celebration (1992), the Nabokov scholar Alfred J. Appel Jr. assembled what he termed a “Yes Celebratory Shelf” of Modernism ranging from Louis Armstrong and Laurel and Hardy to Ulysses and Richard Wilbur. Among them he includes, with supreme appropriateness, Marianne Moore.

In “The Pleasures of Music,” an article he wrote for The Saturday Evening Post in 1959, Copland lauds Beethoven as “one of the great yea-sayers among creative artists” and Bach for the “marvelous rightness” of his work. He celebrates adroitness, energy, what Moore praises as “gusto”: “All of us … can understand and feel the joy of being carried forward by the flow of music. Our love of music is bound up with its forward motion.”

Both artists note the primacy of song, the most joyous of human expressions. In the final verse of “What Are Years,” Moore writes:

“So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.”

In his introduction to Music and Imagination (1952), the published version of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he gave at Harvard, Copland says:

“…if poets and composers take flight from a similar impulse, then perhaps I am more of a poetry professor than I had thought. The music of poetry must forever escape me, no doubt, but the poetry of music is always with me. It signifies that largest part of our emotive life—the part that sings.”

[Go here to listen to Copland’s “Quiet City,” and here, here and here for his “Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson.”]

`A Connoisseur's Sense of Things for Their Own Sake'

“The land is full of what was lost.”

I grew up a hunter-gatherer, with the emphasis on hunter. Truly, hunting is the thing, not the gathering. Stalking the butterfly is the adventure, not the netting, pinching and pinning. Trolling the dim shelves of a book shop, alert and expectant, outweighs the pleasure of finding the three-volume Everyman’s edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy priced at $10. Ordering the same from Amazon.com is not the same. My Burton carries an addendum of happy memory, a covert connection to an autumn afternoon in Schuylerville, N.Y.

The line quoted above is from A.E. Stallings’ “Arrowhead Hunting” (Hapax, 2006). For her, hunting connects us with the anonymous past, with ancestors whose existence we could otherwise never have guessed.  Stallings notes that hunting for arrowheads echoes the archaic hunter’s hunt for game. She puns on “hart,” and in time’s lost-and-found she finds futility and hope:

“And the sharpness honed with longing, year by year,

Buried deeper, found someday, but not by you.”

Pressed to name the literary work with the most lasting influence on my thinking, I might propose “Finding,” an essay by Guy Davenport published in Antaeus in 1978 and later collected in The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981). It recounts the weekend expeditions his family took “to look for Indian arrows.” Davenport was born in 1926 in Anderson, S.C. His essay is a delicate balance of memoir and meditation on many things – family, lost time, the importance of attentiveness and the formation of sensibility.  Go here and scroll down to read it.

Davenport says he hopes the meaning of those childhood expeditions “elude[s] me forever,” that he will never find the meaning of finding. But he can’t help speculating:

“Its importance has, in maturity, become more and more apparent—an education that shaped me with a surer and finer hand than any classroom, an experience that gave me a sense of the earth, of autumn afternoons, of all the seasons, a connoisseur’s sense of things for their own sake.”

We learn best by doing and by watching others do. Learning one thing (finding arrowheads) later may teach us another (reading texts, writing others). Davenport writes:

“I know that my sense of place, of occasion, even of doing anything at all, was shaped by those afternoons. It took a while for me to realize that people can grow up without being taught to see, to search surfaces for all the details, to check out a whole landscape for what it has to offer.”

You Must Raise Your Hat'

Thanks to Frank Wilson and Dave Lull for alerting me to a wonderful conversation with Jacques Barzun about his arrival in New York City in 1920. Barzun, who celebrates his 104^th birthday on Nov. 30, embodies civilization. He seems to have read everything and his memory for detail is phenomenal. He recalls that wristwatches were for “sissies” until American soldiers returning from Europe after the Armistice were seen wearing them. Spaghetti was an “exotic dish” until almost overnight it became thoroughly Americanized. Barzun moves on to hats:

“Men always wore hats. There was a famous businessman who was interviewed as he landed back from a trip to Europe and he was asked what the great movements were that he was apprehensive about. He said, `Communism and hatlessness!’”

President Kennedy forty years later is often credited with pushing the nation, at least the male portion, into hatlessness. In photos of my father taken after World War II, in which he’s dressed up for some formal occasion (wedding, funeral), he’s usually wearing a variation on the homburg, along with a brown pin-stripe suit and a wide, garish tie that barely reaches his navel. In the preface to his Collected Stories (1977), John Cheever’s remembrance of New York City in the nineteen-thirties, when he was starting out as a writer, includes this:

“These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationary store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.”

Here is A.J. Liebling on the denizens of Izzy Yereshevsky’s cigar store at Forty-ninth Street and Seventh Avenue in the nineteen-thirties:

“Most of Izzy’s evening guests – their purchases are so infrequent it would be misleading to call them customers – wear white felt hats and overcoats of a style known to them as English Drape. Short men peer up from between the wide-flung shoulders of these coats as if they had been lowered into the garments on a rope and were now trying to climb out.”

Yes, this is civilization. As Barzun says:

“This is a very strange thing, isn’t it, to have given up hats altogether? I remember hats on the streets. Certainly when I first came, everybody wore a hat. I wore a hat in college. What would you do if you met a lady of your acquaintance or of your family’s acquaintance? You must raise your hat.”

`Airy, Rounded Masses of Light Green'

I love the poetry of botanical language, the Latinate specificities and richness of useful metaphor. In “Olives,” A.E. Stallings refers to “A rich and dark and indehiscent meat / Clinging tightly to the pit.” The rare word, “indehiscent,” refers to “fruits that do not split open when mature, but retain the seed till they decay.” Olives, like other indehiscent plants, do not open when ripe. The word's root is the present participle of dehiscere, “to open in chinks, gape, yawn.”

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use of “indehiscent” to 1832, when John Lindley (1799-1865) writes in An Introduction to Botany: “Cells one-seeded, indehiscent, dry, perfectly close at all times.” Logically, “dehiscent” showed up much earlier, in 1649. Think of the distinction in human terms. A dehiscent person, when mature, opens to the world and gives something. One who is indehiscent first must rot or otherwise be compelled to open and deliver his gift.

Take the botanically related word “caducous,” from cadere, “to fall.” The OED defines it as “Applied to organs or parts that fall off naturally when they have served their purpose [in both plants and animals]; fugacious, deciduous,” Examples are the calyx of the poppy and gills of a tadpole.

Early in 1842, Emerson’s oldest son, Waldo, died of scarlet fever. In his essay “Experience,” published two years later, Emerson says his son’s death “falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caduceus.” When I first wrote about this passage more than four years ago, I was more forgiving than I am today. Judging the grief of another, especially at the loss of a child, is probably indecent, but Emerson’s blithe Yankee coolness is creepy, as is the use of a precise but clinical word.

A final example from botany: “falcate.” This means sickle-shaped, usually referring to leaves, from the Latin falx for scythe or sickle. I know it from Quercus falcata, the Southern red oak, but I can’t help thinking of the Grim Reaper. In a journal passage from Aug. 5, 1858, about a boating excursion along the Assabet River, Thoreau writes:

“The black willows are perhaps in their best condition, - airy, rounded masses of light green rising one above another, with a few slender black stems, like umbrella handles, seen here and there in their midst, low spreading cumuli of slender falcate leaves, buttressed by smaller sallows, button-bushes, cornels, and pontederias, -- like long green clouds or wreaths of vapor resting on the riverside. They scarcely leave the impression of leaves, but rather of a low, swelling, rounded bank, even as the heaviest particles of alluvium are deposited nearest the channel. It is a peculiarity of this, which I think is our most interesting willow, that you rarely see the trunk and yet the foliage is never dense.”

Leave it to Thoreau to precisely observe the phenomenon of seeing something he can’t see or not seeing something he can.

[Go here for a “Dictionary of Botanical Epithets” and here for a “Dictionary of Botany.”]

`But Words He Loved and Mastered'

Early in the life of Anecdotal Evidence, I proposed that someone assemble an anthology of poems about Henry James, starting with Auden’s elegy to the “Master of nuance and scruple,” and now I suggest a second festschrift, a gathering of verse about Samuel Johnson. His life of scholarship, labor, torment and triumph supplies ample material for good poems.

I’ll get things started with Ben Downing’s “On First Looking into Bate’s Life of Johnson” (The Calligraphy Shop, 2003), which lauds his “peerless prose / with its lapidary dominoes / augustly toppling, clause after clause.” Johnson shows up in several poems by David Ferry, and in Howard Baker’s “Samuel Johnson,” which suggests “We are all Boswells harkening the worms.”

A reader who identifies himself as Donald volunteered a poem in a comment on last Sunday’s post. “Samuel Johnson Talking” is by R.F. Brissenden (1928-1991), an Australian previously unknown to me, and carries the subtitle “Two things he was afraid of--madness and death...”:

“His great body shambled, groaned and stank,
Kicked stones, climbed mountains, rolled through
London streets;
Or snorted clumsy joy between the sheets
With ageing Tetty. When he ate and drank
Sweat dewed the straining forehead. Every breath
With every year grew harder: the huge frame,
Always ungovernable, in the end became
An enemy he hated more than death.

“But words he loved and mastered: when he talked
Confusion died; the world grew still to hear
His voice commanding chaos into art.
Language became the tight-rope which he walked
Above the mindless rush of guilt and fear
That thundered like Niagara in his heart.”

The final line in the first stanza reminds us of Johnson’s final coherent words, as reported by his friend and biographer Sir John Hawkins, which remind us of the gladiator’s salutation to Caesar: “Iam moriturus” – “I who am about to die.” In Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (1998), Lawrence Lipking describes a scene shortly before his death:

“Bloated with dropsy, Johnson tries to discharge the water by stabbing his legs with a lancet and scissors until the bedclothes are covered with blood. He even reproaches his surgeon for not daring to delve far enough.”

Johnson ranks among those writers whose life, at least for some readers, eclipses the work. That’s the curse of being the subject of the greatest of all biographies, but in Johnson both life and work are inextricably bound together, compelling and worthy of lifelong study. Brissenden brings his poem back to the work – “when he talked / Confusion died” and “His voice commanding chaos into art.”

Go here for an archive of poems and prose about Johnson from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and please pass along additional contributions to the Johnson anthology.

`Your Country Consists of Two Things'

Helen Pinkerton writes:

“I was in the middle of the Boswell-Johnson tour of the Hebrides, when I had to stop, and now I can resume reading it. What a delight it is! though neither man really seems to be interested in the birdlife or plants, except Johnson's lament at the lack of trees on those barren islands.”

Boswell and Johnson spent eighty-three days in the summer and fall of 1773 touring Boswell’s homeland, an irresistible target for Johnson’s prickly sense of humor. Scotland was his favorite punch line, the eighteenth-century counterpart to Polish jokes, and now he was touring the butt of his comedy in person for the first time, as though collecting ammunition. He was sixty-three, Boswell thirty-two, and together they visited Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Aberdeen, Inverness, Skye, Raasay, Coll, Mull, and Glasgow. Helen may be referring to this passage in Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), though there are several to choose from:

“A tree might be a show in Scotland as a horse in Venice. At St. Andrews Mr. Boswell found only one, and recommended it to my notice; I told him it was rough and low, or looked as if I thought so. This, said he, is nothing to another a few miles off. I was still less delighted to hear that another tree was not to be seen nearer. Nay, said a gentleman that stood by, I know but of this and that tree in the county.”

The solitary Scottish tree reminds me of the opening stage direction in Waiting for Godot: “A country road. A tree.” In1785, the year after Johnson’s death, Boswell published his own account of their visit to Scotland, A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. The paucity of trees is revived as a topic of conversation in the entry for Aug. 20:

“We went and saw Colonel Nairne’s garden and grotto. Here was a fine old plane tree. Unluckily the Colonel said, there was but this and another large tree in the county. This assertion was an excellent cue for Dr. Johnson, who laughed enormously, calling to me to hear it. He had expatiated to me on the nakedness of that part of Scotland which he had seen. His Journey had been violently abused, for what he had said upon this subject. But let it be considered, when Dr. Johnson talks of trees, he means trees of good size, such as he was accustomed to see in England; and of these there are certainly very few upon the eastern coast of Scotland.”

Part of the fun is watching Boswell navigate his conflicting loyalties to Johnson and the land of his birth, which explains why the italicized phrase in the sentence just quoted is amusing. In 1993, Yale University Press made the job easier by publishing an interleaved edition of the two books, Johnson and Boswell in Scotland, edited by the eighteenth-century scholar Pat Rogers. Corresponding passage in the texts can be read and compared on facing pages, and Rogers amply quotes from their correspondence and other books. In his introduction Rogers writes:

“For both men the trip had been a challenge and an experiment. Johnson wanted to see an area about as remote from London as Tibet is today; he had never been out of England before, though he was to make short peregrinations to north Wales and to Paris in later years. He wished to explore a more primitive landscape…”

Despite the exertions of travel, Johnson enjoyed himself, in part because he encountered so many opportunities to pester Boswell and his fellow Scots. Boswell quotes him in the Journal saying:

“Your country consists of two things, stone and water. There is, indeed, a little earth above the stone in some places, but a very little; and the stone is always appearing. It is like a man in rags; the naked skin is still peeping out.”

And later, in the Life of Johnson:

“What enemy would invade Scotland, where there is nothing to be got?"

`No Blanks, Just Thanks'

As a reporter I wrote thousands of profiles varying in length from a phrase to many pages of copy. It’s a form – no, it’s not a form. That’s presumptuous. A profile is not a sestina. The rules of composition are dictated by the subject and the writer’s sensibility, not an objective set of strictures. Call it a template or simply another good excuse for writing. Whatever we call it, a profile is an approach I’ve always found congenial.

I had plenty of models, from Chekhov and Pritchett to Liebling and Balliett. A gifted writer of profiles works in two equally essential media – words and human beings. People are almost the only mysteries I’m interested in reading. When writing a profile, you’re forced to push yourself out of the way and try to get close to your subject. A good profile can be revelatory of the writer but only indirectly. The focus is fixed on the subject – good discipline for writers, a notably narcissistic crowd.

Recently I was given a dangerous assignment. Next month, my in-laws celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary, testimony to modern medicine and the wonder of human adaptation. My wife asked me to write the story of her parents’ half-century marriage. I’ve known them for fourteen years and picked up much of the story incrementally along the way, but the act of formally interviewing them in two sessions totaling ninety minutes helped me find a latent narrative.

Their lives hardly resemble mine, at least in externals. Canadian by birth, Peruvian by residence, trilingual, well-traveled on three continents, they are cosmopolitans. My mother-in-law was a registered nurse. My father-in-law was a pilot, owned an oceanfront marina and for forty years has sold commercial real estate. They live down the hill from the battlefield in Fredericksburg, Va. The challenge was to make it cohere and amuse without offending.

I’ve been reading No Second Eden, the late Turner Cassity’s collection from 2002. The concluding lines of “The Grateful Minimalist” stand as a stoically amusing life summation, especially the final lines:

“Few works;
Some quirks.

“No blanks,
Just thanks.”

That concluding rhyme brought to mind Auden’s “Lullaby,” a late poem, a sort of self-elegy or settling of accounts, an acceptance of one’s life and death. These lines are from the start of the third stanza:

“Let your last thinks all be thanks:
praise your parents who gave you
a Super-Ego of strength
that saves you so much bother,
digit friends and dear them all,
then pay fair attribution
to your age, to having been
born when you were.”

`And Now in Age I Bud Again'

I had just walked out of the library with two books in my bag – The English Poems of George Herbert (edited by Helen Wilcox, Cambridge University Press, 2007) and The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor (1969) – when I noticed a spring-like spray of white flowers on the lawn outside the entrance to the Fondren Library. They grow in sparse irregular patches in the northwest corner of the quadrangle, and I knelt on the grass to get a closer look.

Each blossom has four white petals and is about the diameter of an 18-point “O.” The leaves are ovate and green, though some are tinged reddish-purple on their undersides. The plant grows close to the soil and forms a dense spidery mat in the surrounding grass. The roots are shallow and I easily pulled one from the dry ground. I wasn’t able to identify it online, and suspect it may have been cultivated as ground-cover. It could be indigenous to anywhere in the world, though I’m hoping it’s a native species.

I’m still floored by plants flowering in the second week of November. When we lived in Houston the first time, we bought a house from a lady who had lived in it since she and her husband had it built in 1955. She had landscaped the yard so at least two or three species were flowering every day of the year.

Wilcox, an English professor at Bangor University in North Wales, quotes with approval a critic who describes the sixth stanza of George Herbert’s “The Flower” as “the most perfect and most vivid stanza in the whole of Herbert’s work”:

“And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my onely light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.”

I picked two blossoms from the flower I brought back to my office and marked “The Flower” (pages 566-567) with them. If you find these nameless pressed beauties, please let me know.

`The Realm of Hope'

Two emails arrived almost simultaneously on Sunday. The first was from an old friend and former newspaper colleague, Bob Whitaker. Both of us were friends with Chris Ringwald when we worked together as reporters more than twenty years ago in upstate New York. Inexplicably, Chris committed suicide on Sept. 26. Bob was writing to tell me of a college fund set up by another friend for Chris’ three children. At the end of his email, Bob says:

“I know I am still in shock. I just can't quite imagine how this came to be.”

As always, Bob is precise with words: When I think about Chris and his final moments, reality staggers even my imagination. It’s like trying to contemplate a previously unknown color or the experience of my own death, and I can’t do it. In the Life, Boswell asks, “But is not the fear of death natural to man?” and Johnson answers: “So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it.”

The second email came from a stranger, Rhoda Koening, a New York-born writer who has lived in England for twenty-five years. She told me about her new book, The New Devil's Dictionary: A New Version of the Cynical Classic (Lyons Press). It’s her reworking of Ambrose Bierce’s vitriolic lexicon, written “to celebrate its centenary,” she said, “and full of peppy pessimism for our times.”

I find Bierce’s savoring of imbecility a little cheap and self-righteous. (He defined "self-esteem" as "an erroneous appraisement.") Even when he’s right, or almost right, his lip-smacking seems indecent. Yes, he spent almost four years in the Union army during the Civil War, fought at Shiloh, Stones River and Chickamauga, and was wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, and thus earned his right to cynicism honestly. But his connoisseurship of human failing too often stinks of Schadenfreude. Here’s his definition of “present,” as in this moment:

“That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.”

`I Have to Admire Somebody Like That'

One stoned night – probably morning – some forty years ago we sat around the living room, as sophomores will, playing with ideas and issuing diktats. Sense is fluid in such settings, alternately ignored and imposed, and at some point the subject of privileged times and places materialized: If you could transport yourself to any time anywhere in history, when and where would that be?

A friend, a history major and today a museum curator, promptly chose Munich, November 1923. His object was at once noble and romantic. He would kill Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch before he could be sent to Landsberg and write Mein Kampf.

My time-travel fantasy was equally romantic but less focused and, typically, rooted in books: London, circa 1760. I had recently been introduced to eighteenth-century England by a professor and had fallen hard for it (and her, in my customary unrequited fashion). I had no mission in mind and just wanted to hang around with Johnson, Boswell, Sterne, Hogarth, Smollett, Fielding, Goldsmith and Burke. A few decades earlier it would have been Swift and Pope. The thought that most of these men would have had nothing to do with an ill-mannered, underbred youth from the Colonies never entered my head.  

If the parlor game were revived today, my reply would remain the same, and I’m pleased to know the poet-novelist Fred Chappell shares my taste in historical eras and is more articulate about it than I could ever be. Asked to pick an alternate time and place by Irv Broughton (The Writer’s Mind: Interviews with American Writers, Vol. III, 1990) he explains:

“In the eighteenth century, there was the freedom to be a writer. It’s the first time we had professional writers, and also I admire the thought and impulse of the eighteenth century. Rationalism seems to me a tenable way of thought…That was the clearest period of human thought—the most detailed, the most involved, sometimes the most despairing. But it gave us, besides all the eighteenth-century literature we usually think of, it gave us our American Constitution.”

I wish I had said that, and he almost makes me contemplate changing my answer to late-twentieth-century North Carolina, but Chappell is just warming up. Asked to name his favorite eighteenth-century thinker, he replies:

“Samuel Johnson. I like a man who knows his own mind. I don’t like these wishy-washy guys who pussyfoot around with their statements. I like somebody who says something definite. I like all The Lives of the Poets. The judgments sometimes seem to us right on and sometimes they seem to us scatterbrained these days. Nevertheless, the authority of the prose, the ability to handle abstractions in such a way that they don’t seem abstract in the least but have the conviction of concrete statements, the ability to read and perceive the inner outlines, the inner structure of work, that seems to me to be very rare; and the ability to put things in definite form with seeming ease, even in conversation—I have to admire somebody like that.”

I might add to Chappell’s explanatory list of virtues Johnson’s human sympathy, his humility, his humor and ferocity, and the enormity of his learning. Few people have known as much about so many bodies of knowledge, from chemistry and theology to lexicography and the history of English poetry, as Johnson. Who wouldn’t want to meet him?  

`A Realization of the Poignancy of Light'

The morning was clear and bright. The unaccustomed chill lent a New England crispness to an autumn morning in Houston. A shaft of sunlight flickered through the live oak behind the house and illuminated a patch of wooden deck. Casting small shadows across the grain of the wood were two fallen leaves and a stick – a random still life of unexpected beauty and, true to the season, wistfulness.

In 2009, the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco published Edward Hopper & Company, a collection of three Hopper oils, four watercolors and three drawings, accompanied by forty-four photographs taken by eight photographers. In his introduction, Jeffrey Fraenkel explains that none is a “Hopper imitator.” Rather, the photographers are “artists who had found aspects of Hopper’s spirit echoing in their own sensibilities.”

The pictures in the volume are selected and organized with remarkably good taste. One of the photographers, Robert Adams, famed for his depiction of the “New West,” contributes a brief essay, “The Difference a Painter Makes.” He describes growing up in New Jersey and moving with his family at age 12 to Wisconsin, where he first saw Hopper’s paintings in a magazine:

“The pictures were a comfort but of course none could permanently transport me home. In the months that followed, however, they began to give me something lasting, a realization of the poignancy of light. With it, all places were interesting.”

In this video, Adams talks about the centrality of light, as energy and metaphor, to human life. In “Celebration” (Taken in Faith, 2002), Helen Pinkerton writes:

“In this loved scene being and essence shine,
It is and is itself, like Dante’s wheel,
While whole and part, each subatomic spark,
Dependent for existence, undivine,
Disclose the self-existent, first and real.
Light springs from light and not from primal dark.”

`Peoples the Vacuum with American Light'

Hotel lobbies are transient places, or places that accommodate transience. We pass through them on the way to somewhere else. They simulate the rootedness and comfort of a living room – couches, lamps, carpets – while resonating with adventure, illicit or otherwise. Think of all the hotel lobbies in films noir. This is from Raymond Chandler’s final complete novel, Playback (1958):

“The main part of the lobby was up three steps and through an arch. There were people in it just sitting, the dedicated hotel lounge sitters, usually elderly, usually rich, usually doing nothing but watching with hungry eyes. They spend their lives that way.”

On the second page of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956), Tommy Wilhelm passes through the lobby of the building where he lives in Manhattan, the Hotel Gloriana:

“After breakfast the old guests sat down on the green leather armchairs and sofas in the lobby and began to gossip and look into the papers; they had nothing to do but wait out the day.”

Edward Hopper painted “Hotel Lobby” in 1943. I’ve just read Harriet G. Warkel’s Paper to Paint: Edward Hopper’s `Hotel Lobby’ (2008), published by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which owns the painting. Warkel works there as curator of American painting and sculpture, and her monograph supplies interesting details about the evolution of the painting. She notes, for instance, that the fourth figure in picture, the night clerk whose face is barely visible above the lamp shade on the right, was a late addition. She says:

“The final placement of the shadowy clerk may be the artist’s suggestion of the mystery surrounding people waiting in a hotel lobby.”

Well, yes. Like many Hopper paintings, “Hotel Lobby” suggests an enigmatic narrative, and the clerk adds another layer of mystery. But Warkel, like many who write about art, consumes much space saying little. There’s a lot of psychological speculation, many paragraphs about “alter egos” and “the inner workings of the artist’s mind,” but sixty pages devoted to a single painting have to be filled with something. When she writes “Perhaps this explains why a Hopper painting is difficult to interpret even though it is rooted in reality,” she fails to see that the two parts of that sentence don’t go together.

A deeper reader of Hopper’s paintings is L.S. Sissman. In the first section of “The West Forties: Morning, Noon, and Night,” titled “Welcome to Hotel Majesty (Singles $4 Up),” Sissman renders a Bellow-like portrait of another Broadway hotel lobby. Its guests carry bags

“…containing their one best
Suit, shirt, tie, Jockey shorts, and pair of socks,
Half-empty pint, electric-razor box,
Ex-wife’s still-smiling picture, high-school ring,
Harmonica, discharge, and everything.”

Among his other gifts, Sissman shares Hopper’s eye for evocative detail. He admired Hopper’s paintings, as “American Light: A Hopper Retrospective” (Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman, 1978) suggests. Describing “Sun in an Empty Room,” painted by Hopper four years before his death in 1967, Sissman writes:

“…leaving a sizeable memorial
To his life and to the state he lived in:
A green tree blowing outside; streaming in
Through the two-light window, forming cream oblongs
On window wall and alcove wall and on
The bare wood floor, a shaft of morning sun
Peoples the vacuum with American light.”

`A Great Scythe Laid Down There and Forgotten'

The last book Sherwood Anderson published during his lifetime was Home Town (1940), a collection of photographs from the archive assembled during the Great Depression by the Farm Security Administration. Pictures by Dorthea Lange, Russell Lee, Marion Post, Arthur Rothstein and Ben Shahn, among others, accompany Anderson’s impressionistic essay, along with seven by Walker Evans. The other photos seldom rise above the level of competent photojournalism, while the classical austerity and absence of sentimental pleading in Evans’ work distinguish it from the rest of the book, prose and photos. Evans turns documentary into art or, rather, he makes art that happens to have documentary value.

For more than forty years I’ve casually associated Anderson and Evans, and it’s pleasing to learn their indelibly American art overlapped. Since then, Edward Hopper and Donald Justice have joined this informal, non-critical gathering of kindred American artists. All reflect on nostalgia for a passing or gone America, with varying degrees of fondness and disaffectedness. Anderson’s work, the most severely marred by sentimentality, mingles nostalgia and alienation. In a magazine piece from 1929, “In a Strange Town,” he writes:

“I may stay here in this town another day or I may go on to another town. No one knows where I am. I am taking this bath in life, as you see, and when I have had enough of it I shall go home feeling refreshed.”

Corny and unconvincing, I know. But read the entire piece, which amounts to little more than a string of folksy anecdotes written by a one-time acquaintance of Gertrude Stein, and you can hears whispers of the loneliness sometimes captured by Evans. Justice, a Florida native, admired both Anderson and Evans. To “Mule Team and Poster” (The Sunset Maker, 1987), he adds “on a photograph by Walker Evans (Alabama, 1936).” Some critics have read Evans’ photograph as a critique of racial segregation and the tawdriness of life in the South, but that’s misguided. Justice sees something more interesting and sublime. Here are the closing lines of his poem:

“And a long shadow- / the last shade perhaps in all of Alabama- / Stretches beneath the wagons, crookedly, / like a great scythe laid down there and forgotten.”

Evans was born on this date in 1903 in St. Louis, Mo., birthplace a generation earlier of T.S. Eliot and Marianne Moore.

`The Bite of Word on Reality'

“And so the barriers fell: now nearly everyone in the developed world is literate, there is plenty to read, and reading material is dirt cheap. But still people don’t read. Why? The obvious answer—though one that is difficult for us to admit—is that most people don’t like to read.”

The truth is bitter but preferable, I suppose, to sweet lies. The writer, Marshall Poe, posits a “Reading Class,” about which I’m skeptical. He says its members make up “a good portion of the cultural elite in the developed world,” and adds: “We love reading.” That’s wishful thinking. I know a lot of smart people, ostensibly part of the “cultural elite,” who don’t read, and plenty of dullards who do, and political-economy, fashionable or otherwise, has nothing to do with it.

It may seem I’m introducing Poe only to dismiss him, but I endorse his core conclusion – “most people don’t want to read and, therefore, don’t read.” It’s his proposed causes and solutions for this state of affairs that I reject. For instance:

“Why don’t most people like to read? The answer is surprisingly simple: humans weren’t evolved to read.”

Nor were we evolved to perform microsurgery or compose the Brandenburg Concertos. Natural selection can’t account for everything, particularly in highly evolved organisms. Darwin wasn’t a vulgar determinist, despite what some of his acolytes claim. People don’t read for many complicated reasons. Chief among them is that reading is work, active engagement, which suggests odious labor. Other diversions, though less rewarding, are seductively passive and easy. Poe writes:

“…we have misidentified the `problem’ facing us: it is not the much-bemoaned reading gap, but rather a seldom-mentioned knowledge gap. Though it is immodest to say, we readers genuinely know more than those who do not read. Thus we are usually able to make better-informed decisions than non-readers can.”

This is self-flattery, nothing more. I see no correspondence between the number of books read and the quantity of wisdom acquired. Knowledge, of course, is not wisdom. Too many readers, or at least people who like to talk about the books they claim to have read, are as comparably foolish as their bookless brethren. Reading a good book presents us with the opportunity to acquire wisdom, scholarship and common sense – in addition to pleasure -- but we’re under no obligation to accept it.

Inevitably, Poe gets around to digital solutions, “using audio and video to share what we know with the public at large.” That we /they dichotomy still rankles, the presumption that “we” are morally obligated to enlighten the blinkered masses:

“We need to face facts: people do not want to read, they want to watch and listen. Our task, then, is to give them something serious to watch and listen to, something that conveys the richness and complexity of our written work in pictures and sounds.”

How is this different from force-feeding Mozart, like musical spinach, to infants? We’re readers, not missionaries. Like most people, I resent being proselytized. If you tell me I have to read something, unless I’m paid to do so I probably won’t. There are other ways to make palatable “the best which has been thought and said,” beginning with reading it ourselves and not frittering away time on J.K. Rowling and her Harry Potter books. Dumbing down is never the answer, assuming there is an answer. Action, not words: Read good books and share your enthusiasm. Read bad books and share your distaste. Don’t be shy and don’t be cowed by any class, reading or otherwise. The only lifetime reading plan that ever worked for me was organized serendipity. Here, for example, is something I reread on Monday, on the final page of Hugh Kenner’s A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett (1973), a book I reviewed thirty-eight years ago:

“He believes in the cadence, the comma, the bite of word on reality, whatever else he believes, and his devotion to them, he makes clear, is a sufficient focus for a reader’s attention. In the modern history of literature at least he is a unique moral figure, not a dreamer of rose-gardens but a cultivator of what will grow in the waste land, who can make us see the exhilarating design that thorns and yucca share with whatever will grow anywhere.”

`The Portentous Manner in Which He Said It'

From Anthony Hecht’s The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden (Harvard University Press, 1993) I’ve learned that Auden coined a word useful enough to be enshrined in the Oxford English Dictionary: soodling. From sound alone, without a context, what do you think it means? First I thought of noodling, as in a musician idly playing, working out a part or simply killing time. The same goes for doodling, another idle pastime. Because of its faintly comic sound, I guessed it might refer to that fine American folk art, goofing off.

In fact, the OED defines “soodling” as an “adj. poet. Rare” meaning “flows or moves slowly.” Auden uses it in the poem “Under Sirius” in Nones (1952): “…the baltering torrent / Shrunk to a soodling thread.” The dictionary says the word is “Of obscure origin,” but goes on to cite two uses from 1821, both by John Clare in his poem “The Village Minstrel”: “To go so soodling up and down the street” and “While I as unconcern'd went soodling on.” Hecht apparently is incorrect when he describes Auden, a lifelong reader of the OED, as “inventing” the word.

The OED also gives soodly, “adj. dial. leisurely, slow,” and cites the same poem by Clare: “The horse-boy, with a soodly gait, / Slow climbs the stile.” Soodling is a word we would expect Clare to use. When not in the insane asylum he was an inveterate soodler, a wanderer in nature, at once drifting and attentive to plants and animals. He writes in a letter: “…I find more pleasure in wandering the fields than in musing among my silent neighbors who are insensible to every thing but toiling and talking of it and that to no purpose.”

Clare is cited 765 times in the OED; Auden, 749 times. Among the latter is Auden’s use of “baltering” in the line from “Under Sirius” quoted above. The first sense of “to balter” is defined as an intransitive verb meaning “To tumble about, to dance clumsily.” In his biography of the poet, when describing Auden’s undergraduate days at Christ Church, Humphrey Carpenter reports:

“In his conversation as in his poetry, he used a vocabulary drawn from scientific, psychological and philosophical terminology, and from his discoveries among the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary. Words like 'glabrous', 'sordes', 'callipygous', 'peptonised' (which all appeared in his poetry during this period) delighted him but disconcerted his listeners. ‘I did not understand much of what Wystan said,’ recorded one undergraduate contemporary, who nevertheless `felt it was important because of the portentous manner in which he said it.’”

Even if he didn’t coin the word we can surely describe Auden as a devoted soodler in the OED.