`I Would Set Up My Tabernacle Here'

“And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?”

Fortunately, no. My books wait patiently, half-formed as they are without someone to read them. Is a book on a shelf like a tree in the forest? Can it make a sound without a human partner? A book unaccompanied by eyes and hands is resolutely mute, a sentiment shared by Charles Lamb in “New Year’s Eve” (Essays of Elia, 1823). Only as we read does a book come to life. 

“No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference,” Lamb reminds us. As of Sunday, three people asked if I had made my New Year’s resolutions. On learning I had not, one half-accused me of sacrilege, but I’ve always thought resolutions were a mug’s game, evaporating like frost on the window with the rising of the sun. I’ve reconsidered. One resolution I’ll keep private, as being both too mundane and too important. The others by their nature are bookish, appropriate to the venue. 

I resolve not necessarily to reread fewer books, as I’ve done with growing frequency in recent years, but to read worthy books from the past I’ve never read or those started but left unfinished. Among the former is Murasaki Shikubu’s The Tale of Genji, which is daunting less for its bulk than its immersion in Heian culture. Among the latter is Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, where I’ve previously only hunted and pecked like a distracted chicken. 

My third resolution is one I make silently every day, and that is to write better, with more concision and fewer lazy patches where I trust the first, easy words. Put it this way, in the form of  a writer’s Golden Rule: Let me write so as to craft something I would enjoy reading, which bears a familial resemblance to the resolution I’m keeping to myself. Give Lamb the last word: 

“I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here.”

`More Entertaining Than He Was Serious'

“Slant” conjures Dickinson; “madding,” Gray. “Fruitfulness” and “clammy” are forever Keats’. The personal stamp of some poets is so indelible, so poetically DNA-specific, as to lay claim not only to stanzas, lines and phrases but individual words. Perhaps this is the ultimate memorability, to wield a word so forcefully that readers, centuries later, recognize its ownership. One can hardly imagine this happening today, as Joseph Epstein suggests in his review of a new book about Yip Harburg: 

“I wouldn't be the first critic to say that the real American poets of the past century were our lyricists. If memorability be the standard, they defeat the poets resoundingly. I walk the streets with dozens of song lyrics in my head and, with the exception of the verse of Philip Larkin, not a single line from a poem written after 1960. Which makes one wonder, in the realm of creative fantasy, if it would have been better to write `Over the Rainbow’ than `The Waste Land’ or `It's Only a Paper Moon’ than `Sunday Morning.’” 

My father-in-law attended St. Andrew’s College in Ontario, Canada’s largest all-boys boarding school. His bookshelves in the basement hold a dozen volumes, all published by Oxford University Press, he was awarded as academic prizes. Among them is The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1918, edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. First published in 1900, this edition dates from 1949. The paper is translucent onion-skin. And the cover is leather. A bookplate at the front says J.M.P. Wood won the “Writing and Spelling Prize, Lower School,” in “A.D. MCMLI.” 

One can quibble with the selection. Quiller-Couch devotes twenty-two and a half pages to five poems by Matthew Arnold, but leaves out “Dover Beach.” He includes two poems by Dr. Johnson, neither of them “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” Donne gets three pages, Herbert four. But I’m struck by the number of poems Quiller-Couch includes that I hold in memory. Not every line, but rhythmic fragments, starting with the first in the collection, “Cuckoo Song,” by the prolific Anonymous (with parodic assistance from Ezra Pound).  And John Masefield’s “Captain Stratton’s Fancy,” with these familiar lines: 

“Oh, some are fond of red wine and some are fond of white,

And some are all for dancing by the pale moonlight,

But rum alone's the tipple and the heart's delight

Of the old, bold mate of Henry Morgan.” 

Before I read the poem again, I couldn’t have given you more than “rum alone’s the tipple,” but that would have been sufficient. And there’s Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar,” which stirred me as a boy and still stirs me: 

“Sunset and evening star,

   And one clear call for me!

 And may there be no moaning of the bar,

   When I put out to sea.” 

Epstein tactfully describes Harburg’s politics as “sentimental leftism.” In fact, when it came to politics, the lyricist was downright stupid. But I can recall and sing, without straining, six or eight of his songs, just as I know lyrics by Kipling and Masefield. Epstein writes:  

“Art anchored in politics is almost always art condemned to early demise. And so should Yip Harburg's less ambitious art have been, except for his great good luck in having been far more entertaining than he was serious.”

`His Prose Is Nonpareil in American Literature'

For years I’ve relied on a falling-apart paperback of the Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, so on Thursday when I found the Library of America edition of Grant’s Memoirs and selected letters in a bookshop in Fredericksburg, Va., and the price was ten dollars, I grabbed it. Earlier in the day in the battlefield gift shop, I’d picked up a postcard image of Grant, an engraving based on this wartime photograph of the general. I wrote of my good fortune to Helen Pinkerton, who replied: 

“The LOA edition of Grant's Memoirs is one of my all-time favorite books. His prose is nonpareil in American literature. I think the War was won, essentially, the day he took over command of the Armies [March 2, 1864]. Not only did he know `how to fight,’ he `fought,’ as Lincoln said.” 

Lincoln’s ringing endorsement of Grant after the Battle of Shiloh is recounted by Alexander McClure, an editor, Republican politician from Pennsylvania and biographer of the president: “[Lincoln] then gathered himself up in his chair and said in a tone of earnestness that I shall never forget: 'I can't spare this man; he fights.’” Grant’s life, like Lincoln’s, embodies the American Dream – that a man can reinvent himself; poverty and scant education are not a straitjacket; social class is no reason for social paralysis; hard work, discipline, self-sacrifice and determination are rewarded. Grant writes of his father, Jesse R. Grant, a farmer and tanner born in 1794 in Pennsylvania, a man virtually without schooling: 

“…his thirst for education was intense. He learned rapidly, and was a constant reader up to the day of his death in his eightieth year. Books were scarce in the Western Reserve during his youth, but he read every book he could borrow in the neighborhood where he lived. This scarcity gave him the early habit of studying everything he read, so that when he got through with a book, he knew everything in it. The habit continued through life….He made himself an excellent English scholar.”

Grant’s prose is never less than crystalline. From years of writing military dispatches, memoranda and letters, Grant had learned concision and precision, and was impatient with vagueness, padding, evasiveness and self-display. When describing his father, a man he deeply admired, Grant is not bombastic. He’s reporting the facts. His tone is nearly clinical, yet suffused with filial devotion. He might, of course, have been writing about himself. 

Clearly, the image of Grant as a backwoods drunken lout is purest myth, confabulated by political adversaries. Again like Lincoln, he was never polished, fitted with a veneer of Eastern sophistication. He was born and raised on the American frontier. He was shrewd, observant, skeptical and deeply intelligent, though not an exceptional president. In a passage from Chapter LXX of the Memoirs, Grants contrasts Lincoln and his Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton. Grant writes, without bitterness but with clinical insight: 

“They were the very opposite of each other in almost every particular, except that each possessed great ability. Mr. Lincoln gained influence over men by making them feel that it was a pleasure to serve him. He preferred yielding his own wish to gratify others, rather than to insist upon having his own way. It distressed him to disappoint others. In matters of public duty, however, he had what he wished, but in the least offensive way. Mr. Stanton never questioned his own authority to command, unless resisted. He cared nothing for the feelings of others. In fact it seemed to be pleasanter to him to disappoint than to gratify.” 

These are not the words of a bumpkin, thug or political hack. Remember, too, Grant was dying of throat cancer as he was writing them. His gift for narrative and reflection kept him alive in the little house at Mount McGregor, N.Y., a place I visited several times a year when living nearby in Saratoga Springs. Read the passage in Chapter LI of the Memoirs describing, after the Union defeat at Battle of the Wilderness, how the Signal Corps put up telegraph lines even at the fighting raged. Or the way he tactfully but fatally diagnoses the general largely responsible for the Union disaster at Fredericksburg: 

“General Burnside was an officer who was generally liked and respected. He was not, however, fitted to command an army. No one knew this better than himself. He always admitted his blunders, and extenuated those of officers under him beyond what they were entitled to. It was hardly his fault that he was ever assigned to a separate command.” 

In 1904, when Henry James returned to the United States for the first time in twenty years, among the places he visited was Grant’s Tomb in Morningside Heights, overlooking the Hudson River. Grant died in 1885, and his memorial was completed in time for the seventy-fifth anniversary of his birth, on April 27, 1897. In The American Scene, James judges the tomb a fittingly democratic monument, in contrast to Napoleon’s tomb in Les Invalides: 

“The tabernacle of Grant's ashes stands there by the pleasure-drive, unguarded and unenclosed, the feature of the prospect and the property of the people, as open as an hotel or a railway-station to any coming and going, and as dedicated to the public use as builded things in America (when not mere closed churches) only can be.”

`Melt Like Snow Coming Down Over Warm Ground'

The echo is uncanny. Belarius, a banished lord in Cymbeline, defending Britain against the invading Roman armies, says in Scene II, Act 2, 

“Stand, stand! We have the advantage of the ground;

    The lane is guarded: nothing routs us but

    The villany of our fears.” 

The words might have been spoken by a Confederate officer on Dec. 13, 1862, on Marye’s Heights, at the northern end of the battlefield at Fredericksburg. I had reread Cymbeline Wednesday night on impulse, not thinking of the battle scenes late in the play, and on Thursday walked along the stone wall, on a lane known before the battle as Telegraph Road and afterwards called Sunken Road. Confederate Maj. Gen. Lafayette McLaws stationed 2,000 infantry behind the wall. He had 7,000 men in reserve on the ridge to the south. Fourteen times throughout the day, seven Union divisions advanced across the open field. Confederate infantry and artillery pushed back wave after wave. By day’s end, Union casualties numbered between 6,000 and 8,000; Confederate, about 1,200. Union Gen. Darius Couch witnessed the slaughter and later wrote: 

“As they charged, the artillery fire would break their formations, and they would get mixed; then they would close up, go forward, received the withering infantry fire, and those who were able would run to the house as best they could. As each unit came up in succession, they would do their duty and melt like snow coming down over warm ground.” 

On Thursday, two weeks after the ceremonies and reenactments commemorating the sesquicentennial of the battle, the stone wall along the Sunken Road was strewn with red and white carnations. The battlefield, on a cold but sunny morning in Fredericksburg, was almost deserted. Later in the same scene in Cymbeline, the Roman general Caius Lucius says: 

“Away, boy, from the troops, and save thyself;

    For friends kill friends, and the disorder's such

    As war were hoodwink'd.”

`Future Ancient Tradition'

Readerly bliss: roaming relatives’ half-remembered shelves, almost without purpose, trusting in serendipity, knowing you’ll find the volume you want though you don’t know in advance what it is. The exercise never fails. The Brownings? No. Kipling? Not now, though Stalkey and Co. might be fun later in the week. Volume 2 of The Complete Works of O. Henry (Doubleday, 1953)?  There’s no Volume 1 in sight, though the bounty is more than generous -- 173 stories filling 1,692 pages. Guy Davenport reminds us of what Cesare Pavese said of O. Henry, whom he translated and deeply admired: “He ended sentences the way no one had ever before ended them, except Rabelais.” Consider this passage from near the beginning of “Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen”: 

“Stuffy Pete took his seat on the third bench to the right as you enter Union Square from the east, at the walk opposite the fountain. Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years he had taken his seat there promptly at 1 o'clock. For every time he had done so things had happened to him--Charles Dickensy things that swelled his waistcoat above his heart, and equally on the other side.” 

A sly confident voice, almost trustworthy, Twain-ish, one that knows the rhythms of stories and paces them with cunning and precision, with a gentlemanly nod to another master storyteller. Earlier in the day, Stuffy Pete had been waylaid by the servant of an old lady on Washington Square, who dragged him indoors in an act of aggressive philanthropy, and fed him a grand meal: 

“…Stuffy Pete was overcharged with the caloric produced by a super-bountiful dinner, beginning with oysters and ending with plum pudding, and including (it seemed to him) all the roast turkey and baked potatoes and chicken salad and squash pie and ice cream in the world. Wherefore he sat, gorged, and gazed upon the world with after-dinner contempt.” 

I was pre-lunch hungry when I read this, and Stuffy Pete’s repast induced salivation. In Union Square, Stuffy Pete, already stuffed, waits to meet the Old Gentleman who for nine years has treated him to another act of involuntary philanthropy – another sumptuous meal. The narrator tells us his benefactor wishes to create an “Institution,” as he has no son of his own to carry on the “future ancient Tradition.” 

Stuffy Pete is full to bursting but doesn’t want to disappoint the old man. Both men are locked into ritual. In another note, Davenport reports William James was a devoted fan of O. Henry’s stories (both died in 1910, as did Twain and Tolstoy – annus horribilis), and may have been influenced by the fiction writer in his chapter on habit in Principles of Psychology. To cut to the obligatory and very pleasing O.Henry-ending: Stuffy rounds the corner from the restaurant, “Then he seemed to puff out his rags as an owl puffs out his feathers, and fell to the sidewalk like a sunstricken horse.” He’s taken to the hospital where doctors are baffled by his condition. Soon, the Old Gentleman, Stuffy Pete’s benefactor, arrives and is placed in another bed. One of the doctors tells a nurse (“whose eyes he liked”):

“That nice old gentleman over there, now,’ he said, `you wouldn't think that was a case of almost starvation. Proud old family, I guess. He told me he hadn't eaten a thing for three days.’” 

Irony applied with a putty knife? Of course. But also a sly satire on charity and the unintended consequences of good intentions. And in language more tartly demotic than much of Twain and anything by Damon Runyon. Davenport writes: 

“It is not, however, the plot that the reader who has come to like O. Henry reads him for; it is the charm of his comic eye, the accuracy of his ear, and, in this day and age, the rude honesty of his moral sense.”

`The Paths of Glory Lead But to The Grave'

On the drive from the airport, on the way to my in-laws' house, we passed a sliver of the battlefield in Fredericksburg – a visitor's center, stone monuments, headstones. The sesquicentennial observances concluded last week (Dec. 11-15), and on Christmas the place was deserted. The finest allusion I know to a line of poetry came to mind. Abraham Lincoln said his early life on the American frontier, in Kentucky, “could be condensed into a single sentence” from Thomas Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”: “The short and simple annals of the poor.” Lincoln's early years were spent in near-feudal conditions, as were the lives of many of the men who died here in Fredericksburg. In less than four days of fighting, casualties topped 18,000.

I received two books as Christmas presents from my wife's parents: Marye's Heights: Fredericksburg (2001) by Victor Brooks and The Fredericksburg Campaign (fourth printing, 2012) by Francis Augustin O'Reilly. The latter writes: 

“Close to 8,000 men had fallen in front of the stone wall, while Franklin lost 5,000 more at Prospect Hill. Burnside had sustained more casualties in his diversion than in his main attack. Correspondingly, the Confederates lost approximately 1,000 men on the Marye's Heights sector of the battlefield, and Jackson suffered close to 4,000 casualties in repulsing the Union First Corps.” 

Brooks notes: “Of 15,243 Civil War soldiers resting here, only 2,473 are in identified graves. You will see small stones which mark the graves of the unknown.” 

Four lines after the one recalled by Lincoln, Gray writes: “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

`Spangled the Butterflies of Vertigo'

Two fat volumes of verse beneath the Christmas tree: The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett and The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin. Neither man was notably Yule-minded. Larkin has two poems titularly devoted to the holiday but neither is memorable, both Audenesque. Both poets are neat correctives to the seasonal bloat, what can’t be salvaged from the humbug. In the park, remarkably, we walked through a cloud of ladybugs, the big ones, Harmonia axyridis, densely spotted, signifying many years of good fortune. And in the back yard, on Christmas Eve, monarch butterflies flitted among the lantana blossoms. Larkin’s editor, Archie Burnett, dates “Butterflies” to 1939, the year the poet turned seventeen. We wouldn’t recognize the opening lines as Larkin’s: 

“Side-stepping, fluttering, quick-flecking,

dropping like tops under the blue sky

Skipping white under the sultry pall of green

summer trees

Or side-slipping over rich green hedges

of cottage gardens, with red and

yellow flowers…” 

In a note to the poem, Burnett quotes Larkin’s self-written comment on the manuscript: “written variously on a cycle tour. not very good. pretty bloody, actually. ANUS.” 

I find no mention of butterflies among Beckett’s poems, but his 1932 novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women has a nice passage spoken by Belacqua:

“The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement, between the flowers that cannot coexist, the antithetical (nothing so simple as antithetical) season of words, his experience shall be the menace, the miracle, the memory, of an unspeakable trajectory….I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.” 

That's for you, Roger. Merry Christmas to all. We’re off to Virginia.

`Mutual Murmurs Urge the Slow Disease'

Like his younger contemporary Charles Darwin, the poet, doctor, clergyman and opium addict George Crabbe loved, admired and collected Coleoptera. In 1790, he published a natural history of the Vale of Belvoir. The essay appeared in John Nichols’ Bibliotheca Topographia Britannica, VIII, Antiquities in Leicestershire, and included a list of more than seventy indigenous beetles. In an 1834 memoir of his father, the poet’s son, also named George Crabbe and also a minister, writes:

 “After more than usual ceremony, or more abundant conviviality, I have heard him speak of the relief and pleasure of wandering through the deep glades and secluded paths of the woods, catching beetles, moths, and butterflies, and collecting mosses, lichens, or other botanical specimens; for this employment carried his imagination to those walks in which he had wandered  so frequently…”

Crabbe’s imagination straddled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Augustan and Romantic. How many poets were prized and praised by both Dr. Johnson and Lord Byron? (Not to mention Burke, Scott, Wordsworth and T.S. Eliot. Jane Austen claimed he was her favorite poet.) Donald Justice, while a student at Stanford University in the late nineteen-forties, remembered his first class with Yvor Winters, who read a passage from one of Crabbe’s poems – nature description, heroic couplets -- and instructed his students to write a poem in Crabbe’s manner. Justice completed the assignment effortlessly and wrote “Et Cetera” beneath the poem, implying that Crabbe’s style was formulaic and simple to imitate. Winters, reportedly, was not amused. [Story recounted in For Us, What Music?: The Life and Poetry of Donald Justice, by Jerry Harp] 

No one reads Crabbe today. Or Cowper or Collins (William, that is, not Billy). The loss is ours. If it helps, think of him as Sherwood Anderson in verse – frequent conventional phrasing, drabness of sentiment, little formal invention. Then he sketches a life in miniature, a moment two centuries old, as when the “youth of slender frame,” like the “Before” picture in the old Charles Atlas ads, wants to join the bruisers in the fields, as in The Village: a Poem (1783): 

“His cheerless spouse the coming danger sees,

And mutual murmurs urge the slow disease.”   

A man with the eye to capture and identify seventy species of beetles can see the vanities and small sins of men. Crabbe was born on this date, December 24, in 1754, and died Feb. 3, 1832.

`Their Laded Branches Bow'

“Those cleeves whose craggy sides are clad
With trees of sundry suits,
Which make continual summer glad,
Even bending with their fruits. 

“Some ripening, ready some to fall,

Some blossom’d, some to bloom,
Like gorgeous hangings on the wall
Of some reach princely room.”

“Pomegranates, lemons, citrons so

Their laded branches bow,
Their leaves in number that outgo
Nor roomth will them allow.”

This celebration of pomology is from “Description of Elysium,” the opening section of Michael Drayton’s The Muses’ Elysium (1630). How pleased the Elizabethans must have been to hold a lemon or orange, to smell and taste them and make the Northern winter “continual summer glad” for a moment. They remind me of the Christmas story my maternal grandmother, born in upstate New York in 1888, told us. Each sibling in December was given an orange, a precious gift from far away, and a lesson in living. Some ate the fruit quickly and knew the despair of satiety. Others savored the color and scent, savored it like gold, but risked the fruit rotting. Which sort are you? 

From a nursery I bought a potted lemon tree and a potted lime on Saturday, and smuggled them into the garden shed without my wife noticing. The pots are plastic. Today I’ll transplant them into terra cotta and prune the brown leaves. The lime has one fruit on it, the lemon a pinkish blossom. “Some blossom’d, some to bloom." Drayton was born one year before Shakespeare and died on this date, Dec. 23, in 1631, fifteen years after the playwright.

`Something Is Here That Was Not Here Before'

A friend resolved to stop drinking one Christmas while eating dinner in a Howard Johnson’s, alone. “Canned corn and processed turkey,” he said. “That’s no way to spend the holiday.” He sobered up, returned to his wife and kids and, so far as I know, gave up the bottle and never spent another holiday alone. He told the story in the Irish manner, grimly amused by the memory of his misery. But it was more than a good story. That Christmas back in the nineteen-seventies represented a desolation he hoped never to revisit. It was the bottom, at least in the human realm. In Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life (2007), Scott Donaldson writes: 

“On Christmas day [1934], which he spent alone in his room at 328 East Forty-Second Street, he sent a note to [his friend Craven Langstroth] Betts in California. `This is a Christmas word to let you know that I am here alone with a compound of cold and collywobbles. I hoped to be at Westport with the Frasers, but couldn’t quite make it. I’m better than I was but still not so good.’” 

“Collywobbles” is splendid folk poetry, as Robinson surely understood. The Oxford English Dictionary calls it a “fantastic formation on colic and wobble,” and defines it as “a disordered state of the stomach characterized by rumbling in the intestines; diarrhœa with stomach-ache; hence gen. indisposition, ‘butterflies in the stomach’, a state of nervous fear.”  A joke, yes, but in brief it suggests a hard drinker’s physical and emotional state, and Robinson was no stranger to alcohol and the solitude it virtually ensures. He had been treated for depression by the poet-psychiatrist Merrill Moore and, at age sixty-five, was celebrating his last Christmas. He would be dead less than four months later. 

In 1928, Robinson had published Sonnets, 1889-1927. Among its eighty-nine poems is the last sonnet he ever wrote, “A Christmas Sonnet,” subtitled “For One in Doubt”: 

“While you that in your sorrow disavow

Service and hope, see love and brotherhood

Far off as ever, it will do no good

For you to wear his thorns upon your brow

For doubt of him. And should you question how

To serve him best, he might say, if he could,

`Whether or not the cross was made of wood

Whereon you nailed me, is no matter now.’ 

“Though other saviors have in older lore

A Legend, and for older gods have died—

Though death may wear the crown it always wore

And ignorance be still the sword of pride—

Something is here that was not here before,

And strangely has not yet been crucified.” 

Donaldson says the poem “arrives at a hard-won affirmation,” but I don’t find it convincing. By the early nineteen-twenties, Robinson had written his best poems, all of them short rhymed lyrics, and for the rest of his life he turned out book-length poems, almost novels in verse, and most were not very interesting. “A Christmas Sonnet” is a late lyric with a tacked-on ending. The last line is disappointing after the promise of “Something is here that was not here before.” Robinson was born on this date, Dec. 22, in 1869, and died April 6, 1935.

`In His Ruminative Moods'

“I reread Macbeth, a favourite. I saw somewhere the other day the statement that all young men thought themselves Hamlet, all old men Lear. What rubbish. I never thought myself in the least like Hamlet (tho’ I love the play), nor do I now look on myself as Lear. I do, however, find much fellow feeling with Macbeth, anyway in his ruminative moods.”

Minority opinions, I suppose, but appealingly shrewd. Hamlet is an abominable swine, self-serving, self-dramatizing, priggish, arrogant, arrested in adolescence, the very model of an over-educated narcissist. What’s remarkable is that I knew this the first time I read the play, when still too young to be arrested in adolescence (though, on first reading, I took Stephen Dedalus to be the hero of Ulysses, and Leopold Bloom a drudge). Lear, too, is mired in self. Only with Cordelia’s death does he slip involuntarily into humanity. And yet, if limited to a single book on that bookless island of the damned, I would bring King Lear. I’m convinced Shakespeare reserved his best lines, ruminative and otherwise, for Macbeth.

The writer quoted above is Anthony Powell in the third volume of his journals, covering 1990-1992. At age eighty-five, the author of A Dance to the Music of Time is systematically rereading Shakespeare’s plays, a regimen he has followed unsystematically all his life. The plays and their characters are old friends, and the passages devoted to them flow seamlessly into passages devoted to gossip and the character analysis of real people. Powell the octogenarian is still happily addicted to the lives of others, at his best when writing not about himself but his fellows. Following his illness in late 1990, he writes on April 3, 1991:

“Much relieved to find I can read Shakespeare in bed again, something I found myself too exhausted to do hitherto after turning in, since my indispositions. I was surprised how much I missed this, tho’ it may sound affected.” 

The project is more than bookish nostalgia. Powell and his books are suffused with Shakespeare.  The four volumes of his memoirs, collectively call To Keep the Ball Rolling, published between 1976 and 1982, take their titles from the plays, as does his first post-Dance novel, O, How the Wheel Becomes It! (1983). In an example selected almost at random, Nicholas Jenkins in The Military Philosophers (1968, the ninth novel in the twelve-novel Dance sequence) observes: 

“Our billet was a VIP one, a requisitioned hotel presided over by a brisk little cock-sparrow of a captain, who evidently knew his job. `We had the hell of a party here the other night,’ he said. `A crowd of senior officers as drunk as monkeys, brigadiers rooting the palms out of the pots.’ 

“His words conjured up the scene in Antony and Cleopatra, when arm-in-arm the generals dance on Pompey's galley, a sequence of the play that makes it scarcely possible to disbelieve that Shakespeare himself served for at least a period of his life in the army.” 

By this time in his life, Powell knows his mind and cares little for critical orthodoxies. Much Ado about Nothing he calls “a most unfavourite play of mine, in fact the only Shakespeare play I really dislike.” But for Measure for Measure, “a play I never greatly like,” he discovers a newfound fondness, comparing it favorably to The Tempest: 

“I am struck by how the Duke resembles Prospero, especially in certain rather disagreeable aspects, for instance telling Isabella her brother actually has been executed, when it would have been just as good to say question still hung in the balance. Prospero is usually taken to be The Bard’s self-portrait to some extent, so that not for the first time one feels Shakespeare had a slightly sadistic side. Of course an Elizabethan audience may have demanded that sort of situation. Always good on brothel personnel, here Pompey the pimp is funny, as, when being interrogated: `...Now, sir, come on. What was done to Elbow’s wife, once more? Pompey:  `Once, sir? There was nothing done to her once.’ Shall reread The Tempest next to check on Duke/Prospero similarity.” 

Four months later, in April 1991, he rereads The Tempest, drops the Measure for Measure comparison and notes of my favorite scene in the play: 

“Reread The Tempest, which I enjoyed more than usual. What were Miranda’s reactions when she first saw a woman, grasped that she had competitors? Did she still think how beauteous was mankind? Did they leave Caliban on the island, more or less in command, or was he taken back and shown at fairs?” 

An attractive, slender volume, one I would happily buy, could be assembled from Powell’s late, pithy assessments of the plays. Powell was born on this date, Dec. 21, in 1905, and died March 28, 2000, at age ninety-four.

`And For Each Small, Individual Life'

“Somewhere over the hill and far away in a Moscow that had become unreal to us, the blood-stained graven idol of our century had breathed his last. That was an event of overwhelming importance for millions whose suffering had not yet reached its term, for those nearest and dearest to them, and for each small, individual life. 

“I must confess that I was sobbing not for the monumental historical tragedy alone, but most of all for myself. What this man had done to me, to my children, to my mother…” 

The unnamed idol is Joseph Stalin, dead on March 5, 1953. His non-mourner is Yevgenia Solomonovna Ginzburg, a one-time Communist Party official and survivor of the Gulag. Ginzburg was arrested in February 1937 on charges of counter-revolutionary activity. In August she received a ten-year sentence and was transported to a labor camp in Kolyma, in northeastern Russia. Released from the Gulag in February 1949, she was forced to remain in exile for another five years in Magadan, a camp near Kolyma visited in 1944 by then-Vice President Henry Wallace (one of Lenin's "useful idiots"), who likened it to the Tennessee Valley Authority. Ginzburg was arrested again in October 1949 and returned to Kolyma. She worked secretly on her memoirs and was released from the Gulag in June 1955. 

The English translation of Journey into the Whirlwind was published in 1967, and Within the Whirlwind in 1981. Her memoirs were not published in the Soviet Union until 1989. In Russian, the volumes are titled Krutoi marshrut I and Krutoi marshrut II, meaning Harsh Route or Steep Route. She was the mother of novelist Vasilii Aksyonov, who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1980. During her eighteen years in the Gulag, her older son Alyosha died of starvation during the siege of Leningrad. The passage quoted above is from the end of Chapter 14 of Within the Whirlwind. The next chapter begins like this: 

“Both up to and after March 5, in the harrowing days of the funeral rites of the Great and Wise One, Bach ruled supreme on the air. Music occupied an unprecedented, colossal place in the radio broadcasts of that brief period. Majestic musical phrases, slow and luminous, rolled forth from all the loudspeakers in our building, drowning out the clatter of children’s feet in the corridor and the hysterical sobbing of the women.” 

A remarkable coincidence: In My Century, another former Communist and prisoner of Stalin, the Polish poet Aleksander Wat, recounts hearing the St. Matthew Passion on the radio during a twenty-minute, supervised walk he’s permitted on the roof of the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. It’s Easter Sunday 1941: 

“If the human voice, manmade instruments, and the human soul can create, even once in all of history, such harmony, beauty, truth, and power in such unity of inspiration—if this exists, then how ephemeral, what a nonentity, all the might of the empire must be, that might that a beautiful Polish carol says `quakes in fear.’ It’s a commonplace line, but I’m an old man and I stopped being afraid of the commonplace a long time ago—what the critics call a commonplace. That wasn’t a thought I had while listening to Bach because I simply wasn’t a `thinking being’ at that moment. I was listening. But that thought did come to me as the last chords were fading. With desperate nostalgia I tried to summon them back from memory, but to no avail. The only sound was the wind howling over the roof of Lubyanka.”

Ginzburg was born on this date, Dec. 20, in 1904, and died May 25, 1977.

`Ever Three Parts Coward'

The first citation, from 1814, is so obscure and awkwardly written as to be almost unreadable: “There lay the steed; here lay the man;/Gude friends that day did twin [part]:/They leuch [laughed] na a' to the feast that cam/Whan the het bluid-bath was done.” The source is Robert Jamieson (c. 1780-1844), a Scottish antiquary, friend of Walter Scott and co-editor of Illustrations of Northern Antiquities. The first use of bloodbath (“bluid-bath”) in English, as identified by the Oxford English Dictionary, is a translation from the Danish. Why did the word appear so late in our bloody history? Why don’t we find it two centuries earlier in those blood-drenched plays Titus Andronicus and Macbeth? Shakespeare uses “blood” thirteen times in the former and twenty in the latter, as when Macbeth says: 

“I am in blood

Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o’er:

Strange things I have in head, that will to hand;

Which must be acted ere they may be scann’d.”

 

History is nothing if not bloody. Ours is a bloody-minded species. The OED’s second citation, by another Scot, Thomas Carlyle, appeared in 1832: “England has escaped the blood-bath of a French Revolution.” The dictionary gives four subsequent citations dated between 1919 and 2005. All are drawn from the popular press. It’s a tabloid word, vulgarly sensational, likelier to be used by a journalist than a legitimate historian. In a Simpson’s episode, Homer buys a revolver from the Bloodbath & Beyond Gun Shop. But the word’s referent is a daily occurrence somewhere, hardly a moral anomaly. Consider the OED’s first definition: “A battle or fight at which much blood is spilt; a wholesale slaughter, a massacre.” In brief, the twentieth century. 

Each morning the OED emails its “Word of the Day” feature to subscribers. On Tuesday, the choice was “bloodbath,” and some readers objected. They found the choice “insensitive,” “in poor taste” and “tasteless and gross,” among other expressions of ersatz sensitivity. The dictionary issued an apology and removed “bloodbath” as a “Word of the Day.” The editors explained that their daily words are chosen by committee months in advance and posted automatically. Nonetheless, they added: 

“The timing of today's word is a coincidence of the worst kind, and we apologize for any distress or upset caused by what might appear to be a highly insensitive choice.” 

For the next “Word of the Day” I nominate “craven,” defined by the OED as “That owns himself beaten or afraid of his opponent; cowardly, weak-hearted, abjectly pusillanimous.” Hamlet uses it: 

“Now, whether it be

Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple

Of thinking too precisely on th' event,--

A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom

And ever three parts coward.”

`I Believe Some of Them Can Read'

After driving the boys to their schools I pulled up in front of our neighborhood library to return some books through the night-chute. It was early and I was under-caffeinated. I tripped on the steps, dropped the volumes and looked up to see a charcoal-gray roof rat (Rattus rattus alexandrinus), a creature built like a compact squirrel, standing upright in front of me. He cocked his head, rubbed his forepaws together in imitation of Fagin, and glared. He looked offended. Despite my approach and the clatter of fallen books, he stood his ground. 

I like rats. Rather, I admire them, as I admire almost anyone who is resourceful and endures. I don’t share the revulsion most feel in their presence. I once killed a rat with a shovel, flattening him in our backyard, and I shot several with a pellet gun, but I was young and filled with bloodlust. Last summer I interviewed a neuroengineer who dissects rat brains, cutting them into thin slices like prosciutto di Parma. He spoke lovingly, with unfeigned respect, of the rat and the beautiful symmetry of its hippocampus. Thanks to the rat and his sliced-up brain we may someday eliminate Parkinson’s disease. The neuroengineer’s tone of admiration reminded me of the exterminator Joseph Mitchell quotes in “The Rats on the Waterfront,” collected in The Bottom of the Harbor (1960):    

“Rats are almost as fecund as germs. In New York, under fair conditions, they bear from three to five times a years, in litters of from five to twenty-two. They live to be three or four years old, although now and then one may live somewhat longer; a rat at four is older than a man at ninety. `Rats that survive to the age of four are the wisest and the most cynical beasts on earth,’ one exterminator says. `A trap means nothing to them, no matter how skillfully set. They just kick it around until it snaps; then they eat the bait. And they can detect poisoned bait a yard off. I believe some of them can read.’” 

Evidently, Dr. Johnson shared our interest in rats. Boswell reports a 1776 conversation regarding Bishop Thomas Percy, a friend to both men best remembered for assembling the ballad collection Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Boswell writes:

“I told him, that I heard Dr. Percy was writing the history of the wolf in Great-Britain. Johnson. “The wolf, Sir! why the wolf? Why does he not write of the bear, which we had formerly? Nay, it is said we had the beaver. Or why does he not write of the grey rat, the Hanover rat [better known as the brown rat, sewer rat, Norwegian rat, Rattus norvegicus], as it is called, because it is said to have come into this country about the time that the family of Hanover came? I should like to see The History of the Grey Rat, by Thomas Percy, D.D., Chaplain in Ordinary to His Majesty,’ (laughing immoderately). Boswell. `I am afraid a court chaplain could not decently write of the grey rat.’ Johnson. “Sir, he need not give it the name of the Hanover rat.” Thus could he indulge a luxuriant sportive imagination, when talking of a friend whom he loved and esteemed.” 

The Hanover rats of eighteen-century England were the likely ancestors of the rats whose brains my neuroengineering friend was thin-slicing in his lab. My roof rat, too, was an import, possibly from North Africa or anywhere on the Mediterranean, probably sometime in the last five-hundred years. As I watched, he walked away slowly, past the book-chute, under a railing and down the alley where he disappeared.

`Without the Help of Scaffolding'

Winter, and with it the longest night and shortest day of the year, arrives on Friday, even in Houston. Rain fell most of the day on Sunday, a welcome respite from ongoing drought, though hardly encouraging of Yuletide cheer. One’s notion of Christmas and winter forms early, compounded of scenes from boyhood and books, Santa and Dickens. Nothing quite lives up to this primal Christmas collage, though we spend the rest of our lives trying to replicate it. Emotionally, I remain a Northerner, even in Texas. I get flashes of the Platonic winter, the one I never experienced in reality, only in the purity of imagination. I recognize it in William Cowper’s The Task, Book IV: “The Winter Evening”: 

“Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,

Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful ev'ning in.” 

I see it too in this passage from a letter Charles Lamb wrote his friend Robert Lloyd on this date, Dec. 17, in 1799: 

“The presents will be most acceptable whenever they come, both for thy sake and for the liquor, which is a beverage I most admire. Wine makes me hot, and brandy makes me drunk, but porter warms without intoxication; and elevates, yet not too much above the point of tranquility. But I hope Robert will come himself before the tap is out. He may be assured that his good honest company is the most valuable present, after all, he can make us. These cold nights crave something beside Porter—good English mirth and heart’s ease. Rob must contrive to pass some of his Christmas with us, or at least drink in the century with a welcome.” 

Here are two English writers, neither a stranger to suffering, both occasional guests in asylums, and both make us cozy with thoughts of winter and Christmas. Each emphasized the essential ingredients – friends, family, the intimacy of loved ones. Lamb writes later in the same letter: 

“I am not fond of presents all on one side, and Rob knows that I have little to present him, except the assurances of an undiminished and undiminishable friendship. Rob will take as a hint what his friend does not mean as an affront. I hope our friendship will stand firm, without the help of scaffolding.”

`I Know What I Have to Expect'

A handy measure of my disaffection with what passes for literary culture in the United States is “Twelve Months of Reading,” a year-end poll of the books fifty Americans read in 2012. The Wall Street Journal asked politicians, actors and authors to list the recently published volumes they enjoyed. The most winning response is Joseph Epstein’s: “On the perhaps shaky assumption that I shall live forever, I am never in a hurry to read the current year's books, no matter what the year.” My thinking goes something like this: With millennia of good books already published, some of which I haven’t yet read, why take a chance on a book with the single dubious distinction of newness? I’ve read almost none of the books mentioned by the poll’s participants, and don’t in the slightest feel deprived. 

Most of the best books I read this year I was reading for at least the second time. Among them: Tristram Shandy, Max Beerbohm’s And Even Now, the essays and letters of Johnson and Lamb, the stories of Bellow and Cheever, among others. Judging from most of the books mentioned in the Wall Street Journal poll, I made the right decisions. Little sounds interesting, though I do want to read Oliver Sacks’ Hallucinations and   Artemis Cooper’s Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure.  I don’t need to know anything more about Lyndon Johnson. What books published in 2012 did I read and enjoy? In no particular order: 

Olives, A.E. Stallings.

What Happened to Sophie Wilder, Christopher Beha.

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956, Anne Applebaum.

Bewilderment, David Ferry.

When I Was a Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson.

 The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, Roger Kimball.

John Keats: A New Life, Nicholas Roe. 

And best of all, Essays in Biography by Joseph Epstein, an admirer of William Hazlitt, who writes in “On Reading Old Books”: 

“When I take up a work that I have read before (the oftener the better) I know what I have to expect. The satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. When the entertainment is altogether new, I sit down to it as I should to a strange dish, -- turn and pick out a bit here and there, and am in doubt what to think of the composition.”

`Leaves Must Be Green in Spring'

Like Shakespeare, the American Civil War is a vast, indulgent mirror in which we can see almost anything we want to see. Trolling the library shelves on Friday I found, among the thousands of volumes devoted to the subject, Sons of Garibaldi in Blue and Gray: Italians in the American Civil War (2007) by Frank W. Alduino and Food and Recipes of the Civil War (1997) by George Erdosh. Don’t mistake my tone. I’m celebrating the bounty. I’ll probably never read these books, but I’m heartened whenever writers ride their pet hobbyhorses and do it with learning and style. One volume I borrowed and have already started reading carries the unlikely title Flora and Fauna of the Civil War: An Environmental Reference Guide (Louisiana State University Press, 2010). 

The author, Kelby Ouchlev, is a naturalist living in Louisiana, “on the edge of the D’Arbonne Swamp in a cypress house surrounded by white oaks and black hickories.” Ouchlev has scoured letters, diaries and journals by soldiers on both sides and assembled references to thirty-one categories of plants and twenty-three of animals, all wild – no cotton or horses. He refers to his book as “a blend of traditional and natural history.” The reader gleans a sense of a time when Americans were more self-sufficient and comfortable living closer to the land. For them, wild plants and animals are a natural source of food, medicine, clothing, building materials and, in the case of lice, ticks and mosquitoes, aggravation and disease. Private Theodore F. Upson of the 100^th Indiana Infantry Volunteers, stationed near Atlanta on Aug. 13, 1864, writes: 

“Our boys are living on fruit diet mostly now. The blackberries are so thick in the abondoned [sic] fields that one can pick a ten quart pail full in a few minutes. The boys make puddings, pies and evry [sic] thing they can think of.” 

In contrast, Private Amos E. Stearns, 25^th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, as a prisoner of war in Florence, S.C., composes a poem on Jan. 16, 1865: 

“A Confederate prison is the place—

Where hunting for lice is no disgrace.” 

The persistence of humor in the midst of suffering is impressive. Corporal Edmond D. Patterson, 9^th Alabama Infantry, writes from Fredericksburg, Va., on Nov. 23, 1862: 

“Mr. Carroll says that he can’t stay long, that these horrible lice will eat him up. He says that they are so thick that he is afraid to go to sleep, for fear that in an unguarded moment he might snore, and these vermin would think it was the dinner gong and eat him up.” 

It’s a book to wander in, pausing periodically to savor the surroundings. One comes to admire the stoicism, humor and resourcefulness of men on both sides. Ouchlev quotes from a letter Lt. Sidney Carter of the 14^th South Carolina Volunteers writes to his wife on April 23, 1863: 

“I must tell you of a groundhog that I saw last Sunday dug from his hole and given to me. I ate his meat and on Monday, I dressed his skin to make shoe strings. I will enclose you a pair and a pair for Father.” 

Ouchlev cites a few civilians as well. Here is Sarah Wadley, daughter of the supervisor of the Confederate railroads, writing near Trenton, La., on Dec. 31, 1861: 

“We had a very pleasant Christmas; the day after Christmas day, Miss Mary and I fixed up a little pine tree as a Christmas tree, we had no costly gifts, but a few sugar plums in lace bags, and some home made Cornucopias with two or three wax candles made the tree very attractive to the children.”` 

As the epigraph to his section on flora, Ouchlev includes a stanza from Herman Melville’s “Malvern Hill”: 

“We elms of Malvern Hill

Remember every thing;

But sap the twig will fill:

Wag the world how it will,

Leaves must be green in Spring.”`