`Something Not to Be Understood'

David Ferry uses this passage from The Diary of Samuel Ward as the epigraph to his 1983 collection Strangers: A Book of Poems: “Think thou how that this is not our home in this world, in which we are strangers, one not knowing another’s speech and language.” Ward (1572-1643) taught at the University of Cambridge, served as chaplain to James I and was a delegate from the Church of England to the Synod of Dort. He was among the scholars who translated the King James Bible, which alludes more than 120 times to strangers – usually those from other cultures and religions – often with the admonition to make them welcome. Surely the best-known reference is in Exodus 2:22: “And she bore him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.” 

I read Ward’s the diary in the volume cited by Ferry, Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, edited by Marshall M. Kruppen (American Society of Church History, 1933). Here is the complete entry for May 13, 1595, retaining the original spelling: 

“My little pity of the boy who was whipt in the hall. My desire of preferment over much. My adulterous dream. Think thow how that this is not our home in this world, in which we are straungers, one not knowing anotheres speech and language. Think how bad a thing it is to goo to bed without prayer, and remember to call on God at goyng to our prayers in the Chappell.” 

Ward’s diary takes the form not of a daily tally of events but of a systematic moral inventory, a scrupulous accounting of sinfulness in thought and deed. As is the Puritan practice, many entries contain references to “prid[e].” Ward seems afflicted with what we might diagnose as an “eating disorder.” He liked to eat and refers to his “liberall dyet.” On Sept 15, 1595, he notes: 

“My crapula [ed. note: “surfeit”] in eating peares in a morning and other things which might have diminished my health. As also my to much gluttony at dinner tyme. My unfitness to do any thing after dinner. My anger in disputing with Sir Huchinson. Also my not giving of my last thought to God.” 

Ward seems to use “strangers” in a specific religious sense – our state of homelessness in this life. Ferry’s interest in strangers is more metaphorical and connected to our condition of “not knowing another’s speech and language.” The phrase suggests the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. In verse 7, God says, “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.” Throughout Strangers, Ferry refers to the inadequacy of speech and writing, our failure to connect through language. In “The Waiting” he writes: “He speaks in a secret tongue understood by no other.” In “Out at Lanesville”: 

“The voices of some people out in a boat somewhere

Are carried in over the water with surprising

Force and clarity, though saying I don’t know what.” 

“Graveyard” begins with “A writing I can’t read myself” and concludes: “ a manuscript / Written in a language only the dead speak.” The book’s final poem, “Rereading Old Writing,” contains the marvelous line “writing / Is a way of being happy,” but concludes: 

“Writing a formula on a blackboard.

Something not to be understood.”

`Spirited, Cornucopian, and Virtuosic'

“His poetry was for inspiration, company, a story, and to pass the time as he marched along.” 

The person being described was not a poet in the conventional sense but the war hero and prose craftsman Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011). The describer is Artemis Cooper in her biography Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure (John Murray, 2012). She’s referring to Fermor’s fabled memory for the written word. In 1933, at age eighteen and with Hitler already poised to ravage Europe, Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Later he devoted two masterpieces to his youthful travels, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986). Fermor’s reputation remains unjustly small. He numbers among the last century’s great writers, and Ben Downing captures the charm of his books as well as anyone. A few years ago he discovered A Time of Gifts:  

“I began reading straightaway, but after a few pages stopped and rubbed my eyes in disbelief. It couldn’t be this good. The narrative was captivating, the erudition vast, the comedy by turns light and uproarious, and the prose strikingly individual—at once exquisite and offhand, sweeping yet intimate, with a cadence all its own. Perhaps even more startling was the thickness of detail, and the way in which imagination infallibly brought these million specificities to life. In the book’s three hundred or so pages, scarcely a paragraph was less than spirited, cornucopian, and virtuosic.”

 

Fermor travelled light when traversing Europe, often sleeping outdoors and in barns and stables, but he carried much useful luggage internally. His best-known feat of literary memory occurred a decade later when Major Fermor was part of the commando team on German-occupied Crete that kidnapped General Heinrich Kreipe. The commandos accompanied the German officer over Mount Ida, the birthplace of Zeus. From memory, Kreipe recited the first line of Horace’s Ode 1.9, Ad Thaliarchus: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte (“See how Soracte stands white with snow on high”). Fermor, who had translated the poem in 1930, recited the remainder of it in Latin from memory. Cooper reports the German general and the young English major “realized they had more in common than they had thought,” and calls the event an “extraordinary moment of recognition.” In an Appendix, Cooper includes Fermor’s schoolboy translation. Describing the portable library he carried across Europe in 1933-34, Cooper writes: 

“The list of poetry he had committed to memory in A Time of Gifts covers almost three pages, and he does not include songs, which are too numerous to mention. He knew all the schoolboy favourites…” 

She lists, in part, T.W. Rolleston’s translation from the Irish of “The Dead at Clonmacnois,” Macaulay’s “Horatius,” Charles Wolfe’s “The Burial of Sir JohnMoore,” and  “long passages from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, most of the choruses from Henry V, and many of Shakespeare’s sonnets; most of Keats’s Odes, stretches of Spenser and Marlowe, `the usual pieces’ of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge, lots of Rossetti for whom he had a passion, and Kipling.” After listing more poems in five languages, Cooper adds: 

"Among poetry lovers of his generation such command would not have been thought so unusual, except that it contained so little modern poetry. He was certainly familiar with Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and the poets of the First World War, and Yeats and T.S. Eliot were not unknown; but their preoccupations were not his, for Paddy had no need of poetry that tried to make sense of the twentieth century.” 

For Fermor and literate people of his generation (and ours), poetry was their iPod, source of comfort and consolation, entertainment and learning, a living link with the past, what Kenneth Burke called “equipment for living.”

`A Song Can Move You to Tears'

Even without thinking about the coming season I found myself humming “Early Autumn,” composed in 1949 by Ralph Burns and Woody Herman, with lyrics by Johnny Mercer. Herman’s band, the Second Herd, the so-called Four Brothers Band, had a hit with it that year that helped make Stan Getz a star, and Jo Stafford and Ella Fitzgerald also covered it. The phrase “Early Autumn” serves as the title of poems by Edward Dowden and Don Marquis, a story by Langston Hughes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Louis Bromfield, a poetry collection by Geoffrey O’Brien and a mystery by Robert B. Parker. It’s a wistfully evocative pairing of trochees (think how different “Early Fall” would sound), suggesting life’s evanescence, and so forth – familiar ground for Mercer, who also wrote the fall-themed English lyrics to “Autumn Leaves.” Here are the words to “Early Autumn” as transcribed in Reading Lyrics (eds. Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball, 2000): 

“When an early Autumn walks the land

And chills the breeze

And touches with her hand

The Summer trees,

Perhaps you'll understand

What memories I own.

 There's a dance pavilion in the rain

All shuttered down,

A winding country lane all russet brown,

A frosty window pane shows me a town grown lonely.

That spring of ours that started

So April-hearted

Seemed made for just a boy and girl.

I never dreamed, did you,

Any Fall would come in view so early, early.

Darling, if you care,

Please, let me know,

I'll meet you anywhere,

I miss you so.

Let's never have to share

another early Autumn.” 

Three of the four seasons are named, capitalized into allegory, but the song, as is customary for the great “American Songbook” lyricists, is one individual speaking directly to another (not to a generation or the whole damned world). This lends the words a charged sense of intimacy. The “dance pavilion in the rain” reminds me of something in Cheever. The song’s one false note is “a town grown lonely” – too explicit and tritely forced – but Mercer recovers nicely with his subsequent rhyme -- “started” / “April-hearted” – and with the sad beseeching of “so early, early.” The conclusion is unpromising but not hopeless. Gene Lees writes in Portrait of Johnny: The Life of John Herndon Mercer (Pantheon Books, 2004): 

“The song is unique among literary forms, and by far the most exacting. It has the function of retarding emotional time, so that the listener can experience the feelings it is attempting to convey with an intensity comparable to the effect of watching the wings of a hummingbird in slow-motion cinematography. This is one reason a song can move you to tears.”

`I See Another Human Being Clearly'

In one of those pleasing convergences that arrive unbidden, David Yezzi has given an interview to the Albany Times-Union, the newspaper where I worked as a reporter for more than eight years. I’ve always thought the first-person lyric, the contemporary poet’s default mode, is sadly limiting and provincial. Poets long ago conceded storytelling, and with it vast regions of human experience, to prose fiction and drama. Yezzi and a few others, following the example of the late Anthony Hecht, have reanimated the dramatic monologue, an elastic form that permits poets to deploy other voices in their work. In his most recent collection, Birds of the Air, Yezzi includes four such longer poems, calling them “dramatic monologues spoken by someone (not me, or not exactly me) speaking to a specific listener.” He says: “I'm interested in creating characters and situations. I guess if I had to label it, I'd call it dramatic. Some of the poems seem like little plays to me.” 

One of Yezzi’s monologues (elsewhere, he describes it as a “duologue” for two voices), “Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” is spoken, in part, by a young actor in a doomed American production of Macbeth in Germany. Near the end, the speaker dabbles in literary criticism of a distinctly personal sort. Referring to Roman Polanski’s gory 1971 film of Macbeth, the speaker says: 

“It’s got great stuff. But mostly that’s because

Kenneth Tynan told him what was what.

Banquo’s children shall be kings, we know.

We also know that Malcolm’s on the throne.

So, here’s the thing.

Macbeth has got no kids, or none we know of.

But Lady’s given suck, that’s how she puts it,

so what is that? What happened to her kid?

(I know, I’m getting literal.) Behind the credits,

A figure in a cloak  -- who must be Banquo’s son –

Goes to see the witches. It never ends.

One thane betrays another, blood for blood,

Blood against blood. And so on and on.

Sometimes it’s hard to know how it began,

how what they wanted was the thing they wanted.

`What’s to be done?’” 

The poem’s remaining ten lines, delivered without an easeful transition, describe a visit by the actors to an unnamed German concentration camp. As in life, the poem is a weave of such narrative threads, including a failed love affair. In naturalistic language – high and low, stammering, eloquent and filled with holes – Yezzi’s artifice simulates the way we talk and act. He’s interested in his kind; that is, fallible, mysterious human beings. The day I read Yezzi’s interview in my old newspaper, I also read a thoughtful essay by Anthony Esolen in the Intercollegiate Review. Esolen reminds us of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead (2004) and her most recent book, the essay collection When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), and of the vulgarization of higher education. He writes: 

“Whenever we meet a human being, then, we meet that extraordinary creature who can think of time past and time to come, and times that never were. We meet one whose next thought rarely has to do with food or the act of sex but with shaking a bough of wet leaves to see the drops spatter and splash, or with a jest to cap the jest of a friend as they sit on a shady porch, or with one who walks down to the quiet graveyard to place a vase of flowers at her mother’s headstone, to stand awhile there, and say a prayer, and think of her while the cardinals whistle their love calls from the trees.” 

In poetry, Yezzi honors these “extraordinary creatures,” walking mysteries, and gives them a voice. In Robinson’s title essay, she writes: “It may be mere historical conditioning, but when I see a man or woman alone, he or she looks mysterious to me, which is only to say that for a moment I see another human being clearly.” 

[See Yezzi’s new poem, “Argument from Design,” in the September issue of Smithsonian.]

`Blazing with There-ness'

Sometimes, though not often enough for one so gifted, Thoreau gets it just right, as in this passage from his journal on this date, Aug. 27, in 1853: 

“Topping corn now reveals the yellowing pumpkins. Dangle-berries very large in shady copses now; seem to love wet weather; have lost their bloom. Aster undulatus. The decurrent gnaphalium has not long shown yellow. Perhaps I made it blossom a little too early. September is at hand; the first month (after the summer heat) with a burr to it, month of early frosts; but December will be tenfold rougher. January relents for a season at the time of its thaw, and hence that liquid r in its name.” 

“Dangle-berry” is the folk name for Gaylussacia, a genus of flowering plants in the family Ericaceae. The following Latin name refers to the wavy-leaved aster. Its appearance heralds autumn in late summer, and in the Northeast you can see it still blooming as the snow falls. “Decurrent” is a botanical term for leaves extending downward along the stem. Gnaphalium is a genus of flowers in the daisy family. In Concord, it would have been known as the dwarf huckleberry. More than a botanical update, a report from the field as the seasonal cusp approaches, the passage suggests Thoreau is revving up for a playful romp with the seasons, one rooted in the folk adage that the names of the cold months, September through April, contain the letter “R.” This dovetails nicely with the sound we make in English to suggest cold: burrrrrrr. Thoreau’s ear is sensitive and clever, and he notes the “liquid r” coinciding with the customary January thaw. This is Thoreau at his finest: the sharp-eyed naturalist and riffer on words and ideas. No bitching, no politicking, no cranky self-righteousness – just a prose master at work, one of our best. 

In the latest entry in the “One Thousand Words” series at Front Porch Republic, Will Hoyt writes: “Thoreau can try your patience.” Can, and will. He can be insufferable with his complaining about his fellow Americas. For a man who prized and dramatized his status as an outsider, Thoreau often sounds like one of our own bloviating-class elitists, a pretender to democratic ideals. Hoyt gives a thoughtfully balanced assessment: “…Thoreau’s pedantry and Yankee practicality and best instincts are each of them in the service of a most wondrous end, which is to report how heaven works, via a detailing of its cogs and gears and nuts and bolts.” That’s the naturalist in Thoreau, the man who surveyed for a living, manufactured pencils and moved through the fields and woods like a walking field guide. As a writer, Thoreau is impossible to swallow whole. Reading him is always like panning for gold, separating nuggets from dross. He wrote terrible verse but his prose must be read with the vigilance we customarily give to poetry. Hoyt writes: 

“Thoreau is our one, absolutely indispensable American man of letters. [Not so. Where are Henry James and Nabokov, among others?] He faces east! I don’t mean he looks toward India. Rather, I mean he’s a watchman for morning—which is to say, for the human person and things blazing with there-ness.”

`Stuffed with Skulls'

We squandered an hour of our lives Sunday afternoon testing and buying a king-size bed, an appliance larger than Huck Finn’s raft. The salesman, Steve, whose fellow salesman and manager are also named Steve, lavished on the purchase of a bed the solemnity others might associate with the purchase of a coffin.  (At my age, any significant purchase is accompanied by the thought: “Well, this may be the last one of these I ever buy.”)  “This is not a decision you take lightly,” Steve said. “Think of how much of your life you will actually spend in this bed.” The convergence of a bed and thoughts of the Big Sleep sparked memories of a passage in Evelyn Waugh’s first and best travel book, Labels: A Mediterranean Journal, published in 1930. Waugh spends his first night in Paris in the Crillon, which is comfortable but too expensive. Next day, he moves to a cheaper place: 

“My next hotel was remarkably less comfortable. It was exactly facing into the Metro, where it runs very noisily above ground, and the bed was, I think, stuffed with skulls.”

`The Sum Assess of the World's Woes'

Dr. Eoin O’Brien is a professor of molecular pharmacology at the Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research at University College Dublin. He is also author of The Beckett Country, a heavy volume easily mistaken for a coffee-table book, published in 1986 to celebrate Samuel Beckett’s eightieth birthday. O’Brien befriended Beckett in the nineteen-seventies and devoted a decade to documenting the distinctively Irish landscape present in much of Beckett’s work. With photos and text, O’Brien roots Beckett in a recognizable geography. “I explored the terrain of Beckett’s writing,” he says. For instance, in Chapter 2, “The Dublin Mountains,” O’Brien writes, “The skies over the Dublin mountains, vivid and majestic in their restlessness, often threatening, are characteristic of the Molloy country, and quotes a passage from Molloy: 

“Yes, the great cloud was raveling, discovering here and there a pale and dying sky, and the sun, already down, was manifest in the livid tongues of fire darting toward the zenith, falling and darting again, ever more pale and languid, and doomed no sooner lit to be extinguished. This phenomenon, if I remember rightly was characteristic of my region.” 

O’Brien’s book delicately recalibrated my reading of Beckett’s books. Landscapes that once seemed abstract, strictly artistic creations, took on a more vivid reality, which in turn complimented the reality of Beckett’s characters. The novels in particular, especially the great trilogy, as well as the middle-period short fiction, took on an almost documentary quality. The comic suffering of humanity seemed newly vindicated. O’Brien’s method is never reductive. He writes: 

“That Dublin is a powerful influence, the point of commencement, in fact, of much of Beckett’s writing, is I think quite evident, but that influence itself would be insufficient to explain the genius of Beckett’s talent. After all, many fine Irish writers have this common background but have failed to achieve in their writing this `something’ that elevates Beckett’s work to an unusual pinnacle in art.” 

Last year, O’Brien published The Weight of Compassion and Other Essays (The Lilliput Press, Dublin), a collection evenly divided between O’Brien’s twin interests, literature and medicine. In the title essay he states, in a passage that refutes the slanderous commonplace that Beckett is a fashionable nihilist: 

“There are many facets to Samuel Beckett's writing -- humor, despair, love, poignancy, suffering -- but for me there is one dominant characteristic -- compassion, compassion for the human condition of existence.” 

As evidence, O’Brien marshals the plangent fourth “Addenda” from Watt (a footnote in the novel warns: “The following precious and illuminating material should be carefully studied. Only fatigue and disgust prevented its incorporation.”): 

“who may tell the tale

of the old man?

weigh absence in a scale?

mete want with a span?

the sum assess

of the world's woes?

nothingness

in words enclose?” 

Written in occupied France, where Beckett served in the Resistance, the fragment (like the novel, composed in English before his switch to French) is a pithy restatement of the themes that would occupy his postwar work. O’Brien uses the same fragment as his “Envoi” to The Beckett Country. In “The Weight of Compassion,” O’Brien says: 

“That Beckett should have postulated so demanding an avocatory vision was astounding; that he had the courage and discipline to fulfill it in every detail is testimony to the magnificence of his achievement.”

`I Can't Get Out'

The Oxford English Dictionary’s “Online Word of the Day” on Thursday was unexpected and strange – serinette, meaning “a small barrel organ originally designed for teaching cage birds to sing.” I never knew such things existed or that there was ever much call for song instruction for birds. The word derives from the French serin, “canary,” and entered English, naturally, in the eighteenth century. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, in its entry for “bird instruments,” says “songs, dances and airs d'oiseau (simple bird-like melodies)” were composed for the serinette, and reports, charmingly: “Although contemporary illustrations show them in use with caged birds, it seems unlikely that these instruments would have succeeded in their goal.” 

I thought of the unhappy starling in Chapter 41, “The Passport,” of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). Yorick has been discussing the Bastille (“the terror is in the word”) with Eugenius, when: 

“I was interrupted in the heyday of this soliloquy, with a voice which I took to be of a child, which complained `it could not get out.’—I look’d up and down the passage, and seeing neither man, woman, or child, I went out without further attention. 

“In my return back through the passage, I heard the same words repeated twice over; and looking up, I saw it was a starling hung in a little cage.—`I can’t get out—I can’t get out,’ said the starling.” 

Yorick is unable to open the cage and free the bird, inspiring a paean liberté (and, presumably, égalité and fraternité): “Mechanical as the notes were, yet so true in tune to nature were they chanted, that in one moment they overthrew all my systematic reasonings upon the Bastille; and I heavily walk’d up-stairs, unsaying every word I had said in going down them.” 

Yorick’s starling narrative continues in Chapters 42 and 43. Sterne includes in the text of Sentimental Journey a picture of “this poor starling as the crest to my [coat of] arms.” Tim Parnell in his notes to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel (2003) writes: 

“…the arms and crest pictured had been used by Sterne’s great-grandfather Richard Sterne (d. 1683), archbishop of York, on his episcopal seal. Although the family may not have had a legal right to them, Sterne himself used a seal impressed with the arms. The Sternes appear to have adopted the starling crest on the basis of a punning association between starn (Yorkshire dialect for starling) and the family name.” 

Mention of the serinette reminds me, too, of The Goldfinch, painted by Carel Fabritius in 1654, the year he died in Delft when a powder magazine exploded. The painting served as the cover art for Selected Poems (1974) by Osip Mandelstam, as translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin. In Carel Fabritius: 1622-1654 (Royal Cabinet of Paintings, Mauritshuis, 2004) a catalog and brief biography, Frederick J. Duparc identifies the species – Carduelis carduelis – and gives a history of the painting and bird: 

“The bird on a chain in front of its feeding-box, seen against a whitewashed wall, is a goldfinch…. recognizable by the red in its face and the bright yellow stripe on its black wing. The goldfinch was a popular pet already in Roman times: Pliny described its ability to learn difficult tricks. The bird’s name in Dutch -- puttertje, which is derived from putten, meaning to draw water from a well – was used as early as the sixteenth century. It refers to the bird’s dexterity in being able to draw its own drinking water (if taught to do so) by hauling up a thimble-sized bucket on a chain from a bowl or glass of water. Goldfinches can also open their own feeding boxes.”

`Laconic Matter-of-Factness'

“The sticky self that clings
Adhesions on the wings.
To love and adventure,
To go on the grand tour
A man must be free
From self-necessity.”

A reader in Minnesota has sent me a copy of No Earthly Estate: The Religious Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh (The Columba Press, Dublin, 2002), written by his cousin in Ireland, Father Tom Stack. He describes the book as an “appreciation of [Kavanagh’s] religiously inflected poems.” It opens with a forty-page essay by Stack followed by sixty poems, further commentary and notes. As a reader, I’ve pigeonholed Kavanagh (1904-1967) as a peasant poet, a studied primitive, a Liam O’Flaherty in verse and a butt to Flann O’Brien’s jokes. In his introduction, Stack asserts that 138 of Kavanagh’s 253 published poems “include explicitly religious themes, images or allusions.” The poet, Stack makes clear, is no pious proselytizer: 

“His is not confessional writing. His personal dialogue with God and the sacred entices us to share it with him, precisely because it issues always from his fresh and unusual approach. He clearly communicates a definite and personal version of Christian truths but always re-formed in the poet’s unique expression. It is neither false, forced nor sentimental. It is invariably simple in its depth, devoid of advocacy, always honest, sparing in style and sometimes daring in its laconic matter-of-factness.” 

I see that final quality most as I reread the poems. If Americans know anything about Kavanagh it is probably through his contentious friendship with Flann O’Brien or the song “On Raglan Road” (here performed by Van Morrison and The Chieftains). I sense he gets typecast as a professional Irishman, the sort of sentimental stage “Paddy” mocked with glee by O’Brien. Reading Stack’s essay/anthology does what good revisionist literary criticism and history always do – challenge the lazy assumptions. The passage above is from “The Self-Slaved,” mind-forg'd manacles a restatement of “mind-forg’d manacles.” The poem, against all modern wisdom, poses the self as an impediment to fulfillment, spiritual and otherwise: 

“…a life with a shapely form

With gaiety and charm

And capable of receiving

With grace the grace of living

And wild moments too
Self when freed from you.” 

I also see on rereading Kavanagh his comic impulse, less savage than O’Brien’s, more celebrative and life-enhancing. In “Prelude” he writes, echoing Joyce: 

“Bring out a book as soon as you can

To let them see you’re a living man,

Whose comic spirit is untamed

Though sadness for a little claimed

The precedence; and tentative

You pulled your punch and wondered if

Old cunning Silence might not be

A better bet than poetry.” 

In a fashion that sounds very Irish to me, Father Stack writes of Kavanagh: “He helps us to see that the grossly human and the grandly sublime are repugnantly and wonderfully mixed within us.”

`Keep It in a Soft Continuingness'

Fifteen years ago, on a sunny spring day in Schenectady, N.Y., I spent the afternoon in a jazz club with Marian McPartland, who chatted while she oversaw the tuning of the club’s new grand piano. In conversation as in piano-tuning, her standards were severe and exacting, and she wasn’t shy about correcting work she judged inadequate. McPartland would be performing that evening on the new Steinway, and it had to be perfect. I asked some lame questions and they, too, needed work. When I told her I had especially enjoyed the “Piano Jazz” interview she had done with Joe Bushkin, a pianist of little interest to me otherwise, she said: “Not every artist is interesting and not every interesting person is an artist.” McPartland was at once charming, tart and a little imperious. I found her, as Whitney Balliett had in his profile “The Key of D is Daffodil Yellow” (Alec Wilder and His Friends, 1974), “impeccably got up.” Her hair, makeup and clothes were perfect. She had recently turned eighty and did not want to discuss her age – a coy vanity that, combined with the formality of her appearance, I found endearing. My wife and I had just gotten engaged to be married and I brought a promotional photograph of McPartland for her to sign. She wrote: “To Sylvia. Best of luck. Marian McPartland.” 

In 1987, Oxford University Press published All in Good Time, a collection of profiles and essays, some of which started as liner notes, that McPartland had written between 1960 and 1983. Retitled Marian McPartland's Jazz World, the book was republished in 2003 by the University of Illinois Press, with a new postscript added by the author to each piece. One of the best is “Bill Evans, Genius,” in which she writes of Evans’ appearance on her radio show shortly before his death: “How could I know that within a year Bill would have died from the effects of his lifelong heroin addiction? Seeing him there that afternoon, so completely together, full of jokes and good humor, one could never guess that he had returned to his old habit.” Evans died at age fifty-one on Sept. 15, 1980. McPartland died on Tuesday at age ninety-five. Three days earlier the poet John Hollander had died at age eighty-three. In “By Heart,” the first poem in Picture Window (2003), Hollander writes: 

“We grasp the world by ear, by heart, by head,

And keep it in a soft continuingness

That we first learned to get by soul, or something.” 

[See Terry Teachout and Steve Cerra on McPartland and her music. Cerra reprints the Balliett profile.]

`As Many Idle Fellows Have Assayed'

To a friend who complains of depression: 

“Whosoever he is therefore that is overrunne with solitarinesse, or carried away with pleasing melancholy and vaine conceits, and for want of imployment knows not how to spend his time, or crucified with worldly care, I can prescribe him no better remedy than this of study, to compose himselfe to the learning of some art or science. Provided alwaies that his malady proceede not from overmuch study, for in such cases he addes fuell to the fire, and nothing can be more pernitious.” 

We’ll Americanize the prescription to make it easier to swallow. Think of The Anatomy of Melancholy as a medicine show and Burton as the pitch man hawking remedies. By the time we’ve reached “Exercise Rectified of Body and Mind” (Partition II, Section 2, Member IV), we’ve come to know the barker and to trust him, or at least to be charmed without taking him for a grifter. If he’s a con man he’s good enough to have conned himself. He writes, self-revealingly: “I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy.” You are a bookish person with a casual flair for the written word. Burton’s words, if not his “science,” are seductive and soothing. 

“Study is onely prescribed to those that are otherwise idle, troubled in minde, or carried headlong with vaine thoughts and imaginations, to distract their cogitations (although variety of study, or some serious subject would doe the former no harme) and divert their continuall meditations another way.” 

In other words, when not crippling, melancholy can be a spur to industry and learning. You’ve expressed interest in reading Moby-Dick and Shakespeare from start to finish, and in boning up on your threadbare Latin. Burton is a substantial education under a single title. He recommends a close reading of scripture, “which is like an Apothecaries shop, wherein are all remedies for all infirmities of minde.” Get hold of the three-volume Clarendon Press edition (1990) of The Anatomy of Melancholy, with its accompanying three volumes of commentary. That should keep you busy for a couple of years. 

“He may apply his minde I say to Heraldry, Antiquity, invent Impresses, Emblems; make Epithalamiums, Epitaphs, Elegies, Epigrams, Palindroma, Anagrams, Chronograms, Acrosticks upon his friends names; or write a comment on Martianus Capella, Tertullian de pallio, the Nubian Geography, or upon AElia Laelia Crispis, as many idle fellows have assayed; and rather than do nothing, vary a verse a thousand waies with Putean, so torturing his wits, or as Rainnerus of Luneberge, 2,150 times in his Proteus poeticus, or Scaliger, Chrysolithus, Cleppisius, and others have in like sort done.” 

How long since you made an Epithalamium? A productive and relaxing day or two could be spent glossing that brief passage (“Wipe your glosses with what you know,” Joyce suggested.) and tracing Burton’s cascade of allusions. “AElia Laelia Crispis” alone is worth volumes. Burton cautions:  

“For, as he that plays for nothing will not heed his game; no more will voluntary employment so thoroughly affect a student, except he be very intent of himself, and take an extraordinary delight in the study, about which he is conversant. It should be of that nature his business, which volens nolens ["willy nilly"] he must necessarily undergo, and without great loss, mulct [OED: “A fine imposed for an offence.”], shame, or hindrance, he may not omit.”

`Farewell the Castle in the Air'

In the spring and summer of 1937, Louis MacNeice visited the Western Isles of Scotland, self-consciously following much of the route taken by Johnson and Boswell in 1773. The Irishman published his account of his travels in 1938 as I Crossed the Minch, a twentieth-century counterpoint to Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and Boswell’s A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). One is struck by the generous catholicity of MacNeice’s references and tastes. Along the way he alludes to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Donald Duck, the Powys brothers, cricket, Sunlight Soap, Charles Laughton’s role as Rembrandt and much Irish, Scottish and English history. He works in passages written as verse and inserts passages parodying the styles of Walter Pater, D.H. Lawrence, Hemingway (“He put his hands in his pockets and opened the door with his knee. He went out into the rain. The rain was raining.”) and Yeats. He writes: 

“After lunch I walked up to Arnabost and took the road to the left, leaving it at Grishipol (which means Pig Steading) to visit the house where Dr. Johnson stayed. The house is beautifully situated by the sea—of grey stone, with no roof, but the three broad chimneys remain. It is not a big house and is full of weeds and dung. In holes in the wall there are pigeons’ nests, which contained baby pigeons covered with yellow down. If it had been Shelley who stayed here, how people would gush about this place.” 

That made me laugh out loud. Shelley may be the most irritating poet in the language, at least before the birth of Sharon Olds, and it’s nice to see MacNeice take a shot at the narcissistic twit. In his Journey, Johnson writes of the house, on the island of Col[l]: 

“The house of Grissipol [sic] stands by a brook very clear and quick; which is, I suppose, one of the most copious streams in the island. This place was the scene of an action, much celebrated in the traditional history of Col, but which probably no two relaters will tell alike.”  

Of W.H. Auden, his friend and co-author of Letters from Iceland (1937), MacNeice writes: 

“Wystan Auden, as everyone should know, is a poet and English Eccentric. He would agree that nature in the nude is a bore. He likes the human element; his favorite landscape is the Black Country. He could not, however, object to my going North as it was he who persuaded me last summer to go to Ireland.” 

Auden was born in York but his family moved to Black Country (Harborne, Birmingham) when he was a year old. As a child, Auden was fascinated by the limestone landscape of the moors and the declining lead mines of the North. One of his brothers became a geologist and Auden laces his poems with geological, mining and industrial allusions. In “Letter to Lord Byron” he writes: “Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery, / That was, and still is, my ideal scenery.” Among Auden’s masterpieces is “In Praise of Limestone.” In Forewords and Afterwords he writes: 

“I spent a great many of my waking hours in the construction and elaboration of a private sacred world, the basic elements of which were a landscape, northern and limestone, and an industry, lead mining.” 

MacNeice shares Auden’s northern temperament. He is a melancholy poet with a gift for celebration (rather like Auden and Dr. Johnson – especially the latter). He is a genial man comfortable in solitude. His humor can be somber in the Irish fashion. In this passage from late in I Crossed the Minch, I admire the way MacNeice simulates one’s progression from callow to seasoned while retaining the sense of improvised Irish gusto: 

“When I was nineteen and twenty I was very excited if I walked up a road. Because, like a character in G.K. Chesterton, I expected some adventure round the corner. But now I realize that, contrary to adolescent expectations, adventures are not things which happen at random. The globe-trotter, the flaneur, the wandering dilettante of sensations, these are not the people who get adventures. An adventure must be important to the adventurer. You cannot collect them with scissors and a pot of paste. You must work for them. They must be related to your work and come to you in the course of it. Farewell the castle in the air which never saw hod or trowel.”

 

On Sept. 3, we’ll remember the fiftieth anniversary of MacNeice’s death nine days before his fifty-sixth birthday. Starting in 1941, MacNeice worked as a script writer and producer for the Features Department of the BBC. In August 1963, he accompanied sound engineers on an underground visit to a cave in Yorkshire. They were collecting audio for what became his final radio play, Persons from Porlock. He was caught in a storm on the moors, remained in his wet clothes and developed bronchitis which turned into viral pneumonia. MacNeice entered the hospital Aug. 27 and died a week later.

`Caught Between Quotation Marks'

My wife asked which of the books in my library is the most valuable and I had to ask if she meant financially, pure market value, or personally, in terms of sentiment, influence, reliance or love. If the former, I don’t know. I have some post-Nobel Beckett first editions, paperbacks and hard covers, mostly Grove Press. I have many signed copies, firsts and otherwise – William Gass, D.J. Enright, Steven Millhauser, Helen Pinkerton, Guy Davenport, among others. On my shelves are firsts by Saul Bellow, Evelyn Waugh, A.J. Liebling, Geoffrey Hill and Edgar Bowers. All are books I would keep and cherish if they were beat-up paperback reprints. I’ve owned many thousands of books and not one was acquired as an investment. I’m not philosophically opposed to books-as-nest-eggs. I just don’t think that way. A book thief would find slim pickings in my library, which is an extension of my sensibility not my financial portfolio. 

As to sentiment, the most valuable book is probably the one I’ve owned longest, since Sept. 25, 1960, according to my mother’s inscription at the front – The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments (Revised Standard Version). The binding is taped and the pages are soft as flesh. Even the underlinings are familiar, like old friends. Isaiah 24:8: “He who flees at the sound of the terror shall fall into the pit; and he who climbs out of the pit shall be caught in the snare.” In uncertain memory, the passage is linked to an early reading of Kafka. 

Influence? Almost certainly The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981), signed by Guy Davenport when I visited him at his home in Lexington, Ky., on June 18, 1990. The cover is browning and torn. The Australian poet Stephen Edgar says: “You're caught between / Quotation marks, your heart's beat an allusion.” 

Reliance? Hardest of all to name.  Either of the books already cited would qualify. So would my Ulysses with more than forty years of annotations. And the Johnson edition of Dickinson’s Complete Poems, about forty years old. And a brown, brittle Harvest paperback of Four Quartets, acquired from the book store in my junior high school shortly after Eliot’s death in January 1965. Now we’re back to sentiment. 

Love? Who can say? I own three editions of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Lately the one I’ve used most often is the three-volume boxed set from The Heritage Press (1963), a gift from my brother. I can’t seem to escape sentiment.

[ADDENDUM: In an excellent piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books devoted to Melville’s transformative reading of Milton (and much else), William Giraldi writes: “Melville remains one of the best American examples of how every important writer is foremost an indefatigable reader of golden books, someone who kneels at the altar of literature not only for wisdom, sustenance, and emotional enlargement, but with the crucial intent of filching fire from the gods.”]

`What You're After Is to Turn 'em All'

An idle ramble, an at-home adventure, little more. Kipling writes in “Sestina of the Tramp-Royal”: “It's like a book, I think, this bloomin’, world.” Book-as-world or book-as-life is an old trope among Jews and Christians. Did it exist before Gutenberg? For inveterate readers, it seems like a hard-wired metaphor. Will it fade away as books and literacy fade? The speaker in Kipling’s letter-perfect sestina fancies himself a happy (or “’appy”) wanderer, one of those who “go observin’ matters till they die.” Not a wastrel or bum, but more an itinerant philosopher, an attentive nomad, and a neat rebuttal to the caricature of Kipling as jack-booted imperialist. His vision here is tolerant, forgiving and multicultural in the best sense: “The different ways that different things are done.” Kipling and his speaker admire competence, industriousness and valor. The speaker recalls a bohemian, Penelope-less Odysseus, another wanderer, one whose Ithaka is everywhere. Kipling wrote the poem in 1896, shortly before he left Vermont and returned to England. Here’s the entire next-to-last stanza:vin’ matters till they die.

“It's like a book, I think, this bloomin' world,
Which you can read and care for just so long,
But presently you feel that you will die
Unless you get the page you're readin' done,
An' turn another -- likely not so good;
But what you're after is to turn 'em all.”

The final two lines sound the poem’s darkest note. Even a determined reader, told that the remainder of the book in his hands is “likely not so good,” is tempted to chuck it. When young, I plowed through, never permitting myself the moral laxity of being defeated by a bad book. Today, I sometimes choose not to “turn ’em all.”

`Ordeal Succeeding Ordeal'

Forty years ago in Cleveland a friend and aspiring poet (one with whom I made a Hart Crane-inspired pub crawl of the city) was reading the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella with devotion. Kinsella was born in Dublin in 1928, and now is eighty-five years old. My friend was reading and imitating his most recent collections, Nightwalker (1968) and Notes From the Land of the Dead (1972). I read over his shoulder, so to speak, but Kinsella left me cold. His poems are often fragmentary and highly compressed, like misbegotten aphorisms or traces of language on shards of pottery or papyrus. The mythic material feels undigested and portentous. Meaning is forced to do the work of sound in such lines: “The Hag. Squatting on the water, / her muzzle staring up at nothing.”

My friend gave up writing poetry years ago, so far as I know. Last I heard, he and his wife were making woodcrafts in northernmost Maine, where they homesteaded in 1977. Partly out of a wish to rekindle fond memories, I’ve tried to read Kinsella’s Collected Poems 1956-1994 (Oxford University Press, 1996). To say I’m disappointed is not quite correct because my expectations were minimal and exploratory. I’ve discovered a few pleasant fragments. In “Phoenix Park” from Nightwalker, a poem about leaving, I find this in the third section: 

“Love, it is certain, continues till we fail,

Whenever (with your forgiveness) that may be

--At any time, now, totally, ordeal

Succeeding ordeal till we find some death, 

“Hoarding bitterness, or refusing the cup;

Then the vivifying eye clouds, and the thin

Mathematic tissues loosen, and the cup

Thickens, and order dull and dies in love’s death
And melts away in a hungerless no dream.” 

That phrase – “ordeal / Succeeding ordeal till we find some death” – is memorable, and reminded me of another writer, also Irish.  In 1985, Kinsella published a brief book-length poem, a pamphlet in his Peppercanister series (thirteen pages in the Collected Poems), Her Vertical Smile. It concludes with two three-line stanzas titled “Coda.” Here is the second, referring to an orchestra conductor: 

“I lift my

baton and my

trousers fall.” 

This confirms the earlier echo: Beckett, the final scene in Waiting for Godot: 

VLADIMIR: Pull on your trousers.

ESTRAGON: What?

VLADIMIR: Pull on your trousers.
ESTRAGON: You want me to pull off my trousers?
VLADIMIR: Pull ON your trousers.

ESTRAGON: (realizing his trousers are down). True.

He pulls up his trousers.

VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?

ESTRAGON: Yes, let's go.

They do not move.      

[Go here and advance to 2:48, then go back and watch the whole thing.]

`Anything to Do with That Old Blusterer'

On April 6, 1775, James Boswell, true to his customary mode of operation as a budding biographer, baited his friend Samuel Johnson, then sixty-six years old, hoping to prod the old bear into eloquence. As usual, it worked. Boswell raises the question of whether English judges in India “might with propriety engage in trade.” Johnson argues that they can, and moves on to question when a judge is a judge, or when a member of any profession acts in that role. “A Judge may be a farmer, but he is not to geld his own pigs,” he says. “No, Sir, there is no profession to which a man gives a very great proportion of his time.” Warming to the subject, Johnson, already author of the Dictionary, the Rambler, Adventurer and Idler essays, “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” Rasselas, and his great critical monument to Shakespeare, among other works, turns to his own trade, writing, and says: 

“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.” 

Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon put that passage at the head of their introduction to Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge University Press, 2013, obscenely priced at $90), a detailed accounting of the 750 books in the Irishman’s library at the time of his death in 1989. Beckett had already given away many books to friends and scholars. In the section devoted to Johnson in the chapter “Literature in English,” Van Hulle and Nixon write: 

“It comes perhaps as no surprise to find that the largest number of books in Beckett’s library is dedicated to the work of Samuel Johnson. Throughout his life, Beckett read Johnson intensely, at times even obsessively, especially in the years 1937-40 when he filled three notebooks with material that was to enable the theatre piece Human Wishes.” 

Beckett was introduced to Johnson as a student at Trinity College Dublin. By the end of his life, more than a dozen books by and about Johnson remained in his personal library. Van Hulle and Nixon tell us Beckett was “fascinated” with Johnson’s famous letter on patronage to Lord Chesterfield, quoted it throughout his life and went so far as to translate it into German. He owned the first volume of the Yale edition of Johnson’s work, Diaries, Prayers, Annals (1958). In 1959 he writes to his friend Barbara Bray: “I accept with gratitude the Yale Johnson if it’s not too expensive, I find it hard to resist anything to do with that old blusterer, especially his last years.” The following year he read Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh’s edition of Johnson on Shakespeare, and later still Walter Jackson Bate’s great biography of Johnson (1977). 

Thus far I’ve only skimmed Samuel Beckett’s Library, reading the sections most immediately of interest. The authors report finding Saul Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man (1944), and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), among Beckett’s books. Unexpectedly, they quote a 1953 letter in which Beckett calls The Catcher in the Rye the “best thing I’ve read for years,” and another from 1972 in which he calls Slaughterhouse-Five “a remarkable book.” As the epigraph to Samuel Beckett’s Library, Van Hulle and Nixon append a sentence from a letter Beckett wrote to his friend Thomas MacGreevy on March 25, 1936: “I have been reading wildly all over the place.”