`The Glory of the World'

Witty writers plant parenthetical prose-bombs, calibrated for maximum damage. Mediocre writers turn a parenthesis into a junk drawer. Here’s a recent example of the former: “(My patients who were bored by existence and therefore in search of themselves used to ask me how one became interested in something, a question to which I did not know the answer.)” The detonation takes care of whiners, self-seekers and the fashionably bored, while inflicting minimal collateral damage. Only a confident writer keeps his goods so unspectacularly under wraps. Today’s booby-trapper is Theodore Dalrymple, who begins his essay when he receives a catalog from an antiquarian book dealer, and concludes by diagnosing the pandemic of our age: “The greatest cause of boredom in the modern world is entertainment.” The theme will be familiar to long-time readers of Dalrymple:

“...the world is so infinite in its variety that our brief time on it cannot, or at least should not be able, to exhaust our interest. I used to tell my patients that it was vastly more important, from the point of view of reaching contentment, that they should lose themselves than that they should find themselves; and that, in losing they would find themselves and most of their problems would disappear, at least for the time they remained lost. If they made finding themselves the precondition of losing themselves, they were, in effect, lost.” 

From the mouth of another writer, this would sound like New Age mumbo-jumbo, but Dalrymple is the least mystical, most common-sensical of writers. When someone, whether child or adult, complains he is bored and blames anyone or anything other than himself, I stop listening. The world is crowded with boring people, situations and ideas, and my job as a grownup is to ignore or transcend them. While a prisoner of the communists in Lubyanka, held in solitary confinement, Aleksander Wat painstakingly recounted the plots of novels he had read, often many years earlier. Muddled inattention, exacerbated by a purposeful pursuit of distraction, seems to be the cause and sustaining impetus for a chronic case of boredom. When John Berryman announces, “Life, friends, is boring,” he writes not as a poet but as an alcoholic. Boredom is a symptom of his disease. 

Until I began rereading Revolutionary Road this week, I had forgotten that Richard Yates borrows the epigraph for his novel from Keats: “Alas! When passion is both meek and wild!” I had never bothered looking up the source, which turns out to be one of Keats’ lesser efforts, “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil.” Keats borrows his kitschy melodrama from Boccaccio. In Yates’s novel, Frank and April Wheeler borrow theirs from Hemingway, Hollywood and other second-hand founts of Romanticism. They too are “meek and wild,” fatally so. Nor had I noticed Keats’ play on the conventional pairing of “meek and mild.” Respecting a book means following clues left by its author, upholding the contract agreed upon by reader and writer. Dalrymple writes:

 

“It is my regret that I shall not live long enough to explore everything in [the book dealer’s catalog], let alone everything else beside, but it is the glory of the world that its interest is without end. As for my patients who were bored and who created convoluted difficulties for themselves to disguise that fact, I came to the conclusion that the world seemed dull and slow moving to them by comparison with videos, films, shows, and television. The greatest cause of boredom in the modern world is entertainment."

`I Write Books to Find Out About Things'

In 1969, Peter De Vries delivered the Hopwood Lecture, “Exploring Inner Space,” at the University of Michigan, and later included it in Without a Stitch in Time (1972). Even the title is a joke. Readers of his novels will recognize the familiar word play, the blurring of serious and comic, the devotion to details of middle-class American life, and his gleeful puncturing of pomposity, including his own. In the third paragraph, De Vries refers to Robert Frost and C.P. Snow “in the same breath, which will have to suffice us as a token unity.” His subject is characterization, in fiction and in life. How does it feel to be human? His answer, of course, is to tell a story, which may or may not be fiction, or some inscrutable mingling of both, like his novels. True to the year of its making, the story explores that phenomenon once taken seriously, the Generation Gap, with passing asides devoted to hippies, the moon landing and Timothy Leary. The lecture reminds me of a comic novel published in 1970, Thomas Berger’s Vital Parts, the third of four installments in the Rinehart cycle. De Vries writes: 

“To say that literature illuminates life is platitudinous enough, and I haven't come nine hundred miles to sock that apocalypse to you; but it may be instructive to suggest how the sheer practice of fiction as such can sometimes help the practitioner understand what he is writing about, that is to say living with, and to conduct the experiment by recalling an incident that recently befell me--or rather, to focus the point down to where I want it, a character I ran foul of, and he me, and whom I misjudged completely at first and did not comprehend until I had spent some time trying to put him down on paper, though he may have had my number from the beginning on a somewhat more primitive level.” 

De Vries’ experience will be familiar to many writers of fiction or other forms, and to some of their readers. Composition goads understanding. Writing is a focusing of attention, a sort of continuing education. I found the sentiment echoed by Rebecca West in her Paris Review interview, which I recently reread: “I write books to find out about things.” And Guy Davenport, in his introductory note to The Hunter Gracchus: And Other Papers on Literature and Art (1996), fills in the reader’s side of the equation: “I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.” Read the lecture to the end and learn a new reading of a familiar Emily Dickinson poem by the author of The Blood of the Lamb.

`This Is a Time to Begin Your Life'

Youth is pure momentum, mindlessly so. You move forward because that’s what you’ve always done. Think of it as a variation on Newton’s First Law of Motion: Life proceeds until an external force is applied to it. That might be death, injury, illness, a creeping loss of will or something less discernable, a quiet self-sabotage, but no one remains forever immune to inertia. As Bertie Wooster says of an acquaintance: “He's lost his pep. He’s got no dash.” Mercifully, as some of us get winded, tired and sore, we muster the dash to carry on. The mind grows acute even as the body flags. George Herbert phrased it rousingly in “The Flower”: 

“And now in age I bud again,

 After so many deaths I live and write;

 I once more smell the dew and rain,

 And relish versing: O my onely light,

 It cannot be

 That I am he

 On whom thy tempests fell all night.” 

In her 1989 volume, Tributes (“I relate / My debts and give back what I’ve taken, grace”), published when she was sixty-three, Elizabeth Jennings repays a poetic and spiritual debt in “For George Herbert”:  “When I’ve been low I’ve felt your deference / To all that dogs mankind / And all that also gives him happiness. / It is within your words.” In an earlier poem, “Accepted” (Growing Points, 1975), Jennings echoes Herbert’s “now in age I bud again”: 

“You are no longer young,

Nor are you very old.

There are homes where those belong.

You know you do not fit

When you observe the cold

Stares of those who sit 

“In bath-chairs or the park

(A stick, then, at their side)

Or find yourself in the dark

And see the lovers who,

In love and in their stride,

Don't even notice you. 

“This is a time to begin

Your life. It could be new.

The sheer not fitting in

With the old who envy you

And the young who want to win,

Not knowing false from true, 

“Means you have liberty

Denied to their extremes.

At last now you can be

What the old cannot recall

And the young long for in dreams,

Yet still include them all.” 

My new motto: “This is a time to begin / Your life.”

`Thinking to Keep It There Alive'

If this Polish/Irish mongrel, whelped in the United States, were to design a coat of arms, it would include the image of a crow passant on the dexter side, the side of greatest honor. The crow embodies the virtues I value most – intelligence, resourcefulness, courage and dignity. I thought of this last week in Austin when I saw two flattened, bloody crows and a blood-spattered chunk of masonry in a downtown alley. Some write off crows as vermin, as worthy of extermination as mosquitoes. I remembered an anecdote shared by Guy Davenport in his essay “Finding” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981): “Sir Walter Scott, out hunting and with some good lines suddenly in his head, brought down a crow, whittled a pen from a feather, and wrote the poem on his jacket in crow’s blood.” I wasn’t looking for one but that gives me yet another reason not to read Scott. 

In his journal on this date, March 28, in 1856, Thoreau recounts the story of another abused crow, one with a marginally happier fate: 

“Sam Barrett tells me that a boy caught a crow in his neighborhood the other day in a trap set for mink. Its leg was broken. He brought it home under his arm, and laid it down in a shop, thinking to keep it there alive. It looked up sidewise, as it lay seemingly helpless on the floor, but, the door being open, all at once, to their surprise, it lifted itself on its wings and flitted out and away without the least trouble. Many crows have been caught in mink-traps the past winter, they have been compelled to visit the few openings in brooks, etc., so much for food.”

`A Stern and Gloomy One Certainly'

Rare is the reader or critic who can savage a writer, carefully cataloging his failures, while coolly valuing his accomplishments. One such is Yvor Winters. He lauds “Church Monuments” as among the great poems in the language while dismissing much of the rest of George Herbert’s work as “cloying and almost infantile pietism.” For many of us, admiration is likelier to devolve into uncritical fandom, and criticism into whole-hog banishment. A critic who resembles Winters, at least in her laser-guided specificity, is the forgotten poet Anna Seward (1747-1809), known as the “Swan of Lichfield,” who writes of Dr. Johnson two weeks after his death:   

“It is right that mankind should form a just, rather than a partial and dazzled estimate of exalted genius. Such exclusive and hyperbolic praise is now poured on the public ear, concerning an illustrious, but a very mixed character, as seems likely to produce ideas of a judgment which could not err, and of a virtue which could not flatter.” 

In the same memorial, Seward says “the faults of his disposition have disgraced much of his fine writings,” but describes “The Vanity of Human Wishes” as “a much finer satire than the best of Pope’s.” I don’t make a case for Seward as a major critic. Rather, I admire her acuity and nimbleness of thought, and hope to learn something from it. Of all Johnson’s works, Seward most valued his poetry. In a 1787 letter to William Hayley (Letters of Anna Seward: Written Between the Years 1784-1807, 1811) she praises Johnson’s “nervous and harmonious versification…a quick and vigorous imagination, elevated sentiments, striking imagery and splendid language,” and adds: 

“Of the author who possessed those great essentials, it is surely not too much to say that he might, had he chose it, have been perpetually a poet—a stern and gloomy one certainly; but yet a poet, a sublime poet, however the want of tender sensibilities might have closed all the pathetic avenues against his muse.” 

And yet Seward detested Johnson’s masterpiece, Lives of the Poets (1779-81), sounding remarkably like recent advocates of kinder, gentler book reviewing. In a 1789 letter to the Rev. Thomas Whalley, a minor poet, she accuses Johnson of “malice” in writing his “Life of Milton,” refers to his “contempt for the sweet, the matchless Lycidas,” and claims he is “perpetually stimulated by rival-hating envy.” In another seeming reversal, in a 1795 letter to William Seward (no relation) she praises Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), saying he “elevated the style of prose composition much above the water-gruel mark. His splendid example demonstrates, that efflorescence and strength of language united, are necessary to form the perfection of writing in prose as well as in verse.” 

In 1796, Seward wrote a letter to the Dewar Club, a literary society once frequented by Johnson. She denied being the author of an epitaph about Johnson published in several newspapers, but goes on to bitchily eviscerate him: 

“I have had frequent opportunities of conversing with that wonderful man. Seldom did I listen to him without admiring the great powers of his mind, and feeling concern and pain at the malignance of his disposition. He would sometimes be just to the virtues and literary fame of others, if they had not been praised in the conversation before his opinion was asked:--If they had been previously praised, never.”

`Form Has Gained Its End'

Wesley Trimpi, poet and scholar, died in Stanford Hospital on March 6 at the age of eighty-five. I learned of his death from his former wife, Helen Pinkerton, who wrote to me on Tuesday: “We met in a writing class of Yvor Winters in 1946, when he was a freshman. He published some pretty good poems, but chose, instead, to become a great scholar of Classical, Medieval and Renaissance literary criticism.” The fruit of Trimpi’s scholarship was published as Ben Jonson’s Poems: A Study of the Plain Style (Stanford University Press, 1962) and Muses of One Mind: The Literary Analysis of Experience and Its Continuity (Princeton University Press, 1983). The Jonson book (dedicated to J.V. Cunningham, “a master of the plain style”) I read a long time ago. Muses I struggled to finish, at the suggestion of Helen and with the encouragement of David Myers, almost two years ago. The struggle was the result of my threadbare education not Trimpi’s thinking and prose, which are admirably clean and orderly. Here is one of Trimpi’s “pretty good poems,” first published in Poetry in 1948 and collected in The Glass of Perseus (Alan Swallow, 1953). I choose “Adirondacks: Late Summer 1948” because it describes a place where I’ve spent a lot of time and miss very much: 

“The spruce are dense above the lake.

A thick, gray driftwood, sharp and bent,

Margins the shore with heavy lines.

The overhanging aspens shake

Their dry deciduous sentiment

Into the cool, reflected pines. 

“There is a limit here of tree

And water: form has gained its end,

Lost in continual reflection.

Through shades the glossy visions flee

And in a darker calm distend

Downward in shadowy perfection. 

“Across the lake at evening, wild

And distant, like unhallowed ghosts,

The loons converse. Rotten and dank,

The logs jut rudely: split and piled

They slant into the dusk like posts

Unearthed and cast against the bank.” 

The call of the loon is the most bereft sound I know in nature. I remember waking to it in the morning fog when camped on the shore of Pyramid Lake. It sounded like a lost, disconsolate soul. My condolences go to Helen and her family.

`A Special Way of Being Afraid'

I’ve never read a word written by T.F. Powys, author of the allegorical novel Mr. Weston’s Good Wine (1928) and scion of the prolific Powys clan, though his death in 1953 moved Philip Larkin to a typically Larkinesque contemplation. In a Nov. 11 letter to Patsy Avis Strang, recipient of the first love letters Larkin ever wrote, the poet says: 

“I expect you noticed Theodore Powys had died. I felt greatly distressed – did I say so before? However much you talk yourself into regarding death as merciful oblivion, the moment of death, I can’t help thinking, must be a little choppy, a fribbling as the currents of life fray against the currents of death, & it must leave plenty of time to realize what’s happening to you. `Between the stirrup & the ground, Him terror sought, him terror found.’ I went a long walk on Sunday in his memory, as it was the kind of day he liked -- `The colour of a poor man’s coat.’” 

The final quoted line I’m unable to identify but “Between the stirrup…” is Larkin’s grimly purposeful misquotation of two lines from “Epitaph for a Man Killed by Falling” by William Camden (1551-1623): “Betwixt the stirrup and the ground, / Mercy I ask’d; mercy I found.” In other words, between the time a Christian begins to fall from his horse and when he crashes dead on the ground, he is given sufficient opportunity to repent, ask for mercy and receive absolution. Call the couplet an expression of folk optimism. Boswell reports Dr. Johnson quoting Camden’s lines to him in 1783, one year before Johnson’s death. The old man says: “Sir, we are not to judge determinately of the state in which a man leaves this life. He may in a moment have repented effectually, and it is possible may have been accepted of God.” Graham Greene has the unschooled sociopath Pinkie Brown recite the lines in Brighton Rock (1938). 

Larkin, of course, would have none of this. The moment of dying is “a little choppy, a fribbling [OED on fribble: `to falter, stammer’],” he jokes. It represents the ultimate experience of horror, without consolation. What’s noteworthy is that the poet, at the age of thirty-one, uses the recent death of a writer, one for whom he seems to feel no profound enthusiasm, to meditate on the subject of dying without hope. And in a letter to a woman upon whom he has romantic designs – surely an unconventional strategy of seduction. More than twenty years later, in 1977, Larkin returned to the theme in a very different setting. “Aubade” is one of the great poems of the last century, including these lines: 

“This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.” 

Reading “Aubade” again for the thousandth time, I thought of the final lines Kingsley Amis writes in his portrait of Larkin in Memoirs (1991): 

“My sorrow at his death and my abiding sense of loss is tinged with regret. He was my best friend and I never saw enough of him or knew him as well as I wanted to. If I had, I might have been able to tell him, among other things, that he was a wonderful poet whose work would last. But as it is I have to fall back on hoping he knew I thought so.”

`I Left the Matter Uncertain'

“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” 

Is it Dr. Johnson’s best-known quip? The kicker, of course, is “wonderfully.” Johnson was a satirist, among other things. Had the adverb been “intensely,” would we remember the line and would Boswell have bothered quoting it? Instead, Johnson sounds like Swift. In Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet (Yale University Press, 2013), Frederic Raphael writes to Joseph Epstein about “everyone’s favourite Englishman”: 

“Johnson was ugly and self-made and, I suppose, must have been enchanting in person, even though he doesn’t look as though he washed a lot. Many of his obiter dicta are worth bumping into, although that stuff about knowing that one is to be hanged in a fortnight’s time `concentrates a man’s mind’ has that tincture of callousness which approximates to the nastiest kind of camp (the attachment `concentration’ loiters adjacent to this obligatory Sontag reference).” 

I’ll leave the unpacking of the bookish word play to the reader, except to report that earlier in the volume, Epstein devotes more than two pages to Sontag, starting with: “If Susan Sontag only looked like Cynthia Ozick (plain, matronly, white hair, large round spectacles), American intellectual life would be a good bit healthier.” No argument there, though I don’t hear the hint of callousness Raphael detects in Johnson’s wisecrack. Harshly amusing, yes, but not uncaring. Chief among the qualities of so gruff a man was compassion. Consider the context. William Dodd was an Anglican priest born in 1729, who lived extravagantly and was known as the “Macaroni Parson.” In February 1777, he forged a £4,200 bond in the name of a former student. On June 27, he was hanged at Tyburn. 

Johnson had ghost-written a sermon for Dodd, “The Convict's Address to His Unhappy Brethren,” and one of Johnson’s friends, William Seward, questioned the sermon’s true authorship. Even after Dodd was hanged, Johnson wished to publicly preserve the ruse. Boswell reports: 

“Johnson disapproved of Dr. Dodd's leaving the world persuaded that [the sermon] was of his own writing. `But, Sir, (said I,) you contributed to the deception; for when Mr. Seward expressed a doubt to you that it was not Dodd's own, because it had a great deal more force of mind in it than any thing known to be his, you answered, --`Why should you think so? Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ JOHNSON. Sir, as Dodd got it from me to pass as his own, while that could do him any good, there was an IMPLIED PROMISE that I should not own it. To own it, therefore, would have been telling a lie, with the addition of breach of promise, which was worse than simply telling a lie to make it be believed it was Dodd's. Besides, Sir, I did not DIRECTLY tell a lie: I left the matter uncertain. Perhaps I thought that Seward would not believe it the less to be mine for what I said; but I would not put it in his power to say I had owned it.'” 

The reasoning is attenuated, and Johnson in effect is lauding his own work, but one admires his rectitude. Less a “tincture of callousness” than a benignly ingenious exercise in sophistry.

`Don't Arsk Why!'

For 50 cents at our branch library I picked up a paperback of John Lennon’s Collected Works – that is, the Signet compendium edition of In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works (1965). Almost half a century ago I bought the same book. On the cover is a drawing of Lennon holding a fountain pen like a guitar. He stands on a podium on which is written: “Was $5 in hardcover. Now 95¢. Don’t arsk why! Buy!” Presumably this represents Liverpudlian dialect. The price for so slender a volume in the mid-sixties is steep (35 or 50 cents would have been likelier for a non-Beatles title). Lennon’s books are nonsense of the sub-Edward Lear variety, and critics seemed impressed that a rock and roller could compose a complete sentence. The more deluded among them likened the books to Finnegans Wake. The rudimentary drawings recall Thurber’s and those Quentin Blake fashioned for some of Roald Dahl’s books. Promotional copy on the back cover says: “From America to Australia, from teen to Queen, everybody’s acclaiming the pop-heartiest of them all, the madcap of the longhair set, John Lennon.” I bought the book for my youngest son, age 11, a virulent Beatles fan. 

In The Rambler #106, published on this date, March 23, in 1751, Dr. Johnson meditates on the “fictions of opinion” and the delusory ambitions of authors. When not merely ridiculous, anticipations of literary immortality are comically heartbreaking. In one grand, ceaselessly deferred sentence, Johnson asks: 

“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a publick library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditation, and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue, and preserved only to increase the pomp of learning, without considering how many hours have been wasted in vain endeavours, how often imagination has anticipated the praises of futurity, how many statues have risen to the eye of vanity, how many ideal converts have elevated zeal, how often wit has exulted in the eternal infamy of his antagonists, and dogmatism has delighted in the gradual advances of his authority, the immutability of his decrees, and the perpetuity of his power?”

`A Sort of Dessert Special'

I began following the work of the late Richard G. Stern in “real time” about a third of the way into his career, in the mid-seventies, a few years before he published my favorite among his novels, Natural Shocks (1978). As much as any fiction writer can be, Stern seemed like an omni-competent polymath who knew everyone and read everything. His work was seldom less than intelligent and entertaining, and he knew a lot about human beings (once a prerequisite for novelists). In 2006, when already in his late seventies, Stern started blogging for the New Republic, and continued doing so until 2009.  I launched Anecdotal Evidence in February 2006, and for a few years enjoyed practicing the same trade as Stern. I admired him for trying something new at a time in his life when many writers retire or conclude they have nothing left to say (or continue saying the same old nothing). In 2010, the University of Michigan Press published Still on Call, his sixth collection of what he called “orderly miscellanies. The book’s middle section, “Posting,” included a selection of his blog posts. Of them he writes: 

“…my blogging eye was never far off the actualities which engendered them. Blogs are getting increased attention, read by campaign workers and reporters, cited in newspapers and by TV commentators. That one collects them now is, I hope, a way of aligning them with the short pieces which writers since, say, the seventeenth-century character writers or essayists considered forms of mental play. They are closer, say, to diary entries than to the intricate and touching `try-outs’ of a Montaigne, but the hope is that some will be enjoyed despite their ever-increasing distance from the news events which prompted them.” 

The first thing to admire is Stern’s gracefully conversational translation of the French infinitive essayer, usually rendered “to try” or “attempt.” He refers to the form pioneered by Montaigne  as a “try-out.” This suggests a dress rehearsal, prototype or experiment. The outcome isn’t known in advance. You start with a hypothesis and test it. The best essays and blog posts should not be confused with science. They may suggest truths, but they don’t mathematically define Truth. Given all of that, I’ve always favored blog posts (and tried accordingly to write them) closer to essays than a diary. Diaries, like recitations of our dreams, are rather dreary affairs, useful as therapy but too tiresome for public consumption. 

Stern’s posts have their longueurs. Like many writers, he’s excessively interested in politics and devotes too much time to tennis. But then you come upon a sentence like this: “I like to compare what’s happening on Tuesday, June 18th, with what I’ve been reading or what I remember from the past.” That’s a mental tic I can get behind. Stern’s is the sort of mind that’s moves seamlessly from Lewis “Scooter” Libby to a story by Borges. His final post, dated Feb. 3, 2009, is dedicated to John Updike, who had died a week earlier. He’s not an unqualified admirer and says, rightly, only three or four of Updike’s fifty-some books “hold a reader from line one to the finish in such a way that he is shaken to the point of tears.” Stern suggests Rabbit at Rest. I would counter with the early story collections, and none of the novels. Then Stern cinches the true nature of Updike’s gift: 

“Seldom has sheer intelligence been coupled with great narrative or dramatic gift. Shakespeare is the acme of such fusion; Tolstoy, Proust and Joyce are the closest novelists have gotten to it. Updike’s novels may not have it, but his remarkable literary criticism does. It is as masterful as it is in part because Updike can summarize and even energize other people’s narratives in such a way that they don’t merely illustrate the critical points he’s making about their work but add a narrative dimension to the criticism, a sort of dessert special.” 

Stern’s praise for a fellow novelist, a “competitor,”is a deeply touching lesson in generosity: 

“I don’t believe any country has ever had a writer who brought depth of understanding, often beautiful and uproarious understanding, to so much. What a national, what an international resource this man was.” 

So too, Richard G. Stern (1928-2013).

`The Moment When Most People Are Quiet'

After a morning tramp up Mount Bonnell in Austin, we noticed a park surrounded by walls built of smooth river stones, one of those creations that straddle folk art and functionality. Mayfield Park is easy to miss on Old Bull Creek Road. I was reading the plaque next to a lush Texas persimmon, certifying it as Austin’s 2009 “Small Tree of the Year,” when we noticed a large, off-white bird lying in a patch of brown grass. I briefly mistook it for a pheasant, until we saw a peacock in full regalia, the male of the species, shamelessly parading down the walk. The first bird was the drabber female, the peahen. Soon, we saw them on the roof of the guest house and walking along the top of the stone wall. Mating season and its attendant rituals were in evidence. 

When a male spreads his plumage to interest a female, he also quivers the smaller fan of brown feathers beneath the more conspicuous iridescent quills. This produces a sound like wind in dry leaves. Their call is from the soundtrack of a Tarzan movie. With its flower-like crest and shimmering blue and blue-green feathers, they’re decked out for Mardi Gras. Like butterflies, they are gratuitously beautiful. They are profligate with their beauty, almost vulgar. Their beauty exceeds necessity (please spare me your dull evolutionary explanations), and could not be designed by humans. Flannery O’Connor, of course, raised peacock at her home, Andalusia, in Millidgeville, Ga. Read her wonderful essay “Living with a Peacock,” first published in Holiday magazine in 1961, and revised and retitled “The King of the Birds” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969). Here’s a sample that won’t surprise anyone familiar with O’Connor’s fiction:

“When the peacock has presented his back, the spectator will usually begin to walk around him to get a front view; but the peacock will continue to turn so that no front view is possible. The thing to do then is to stand still and wait until it pleases him to turn. When it suits him, the peacock will face you. Then you will see in a green-bronze arch around him a galaxy of gazing haloed suns. This is the moment when most people are silent.”

`To the Earnest Eye'

Judged against what’s to come in another month, it’s the drab season at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center near Austin. The fields are almost monochromatic, which attunes an attentive visitor to gradations of gray and brown, even mauve and yellow if you look closely. I wasn’t as I approached the visitor’s center. A man with a camera mounted on a monopod was peering at a patch of nimblewill growing on a ledge near the roofline of the building. I asked what he was shooting and he pointed – the head of a screech owl gazing Kilroy-fashion over the edge. For six years straight, the retired engineer from Texas Instruments has photographed the owl on her nest. Like most seasoned birders and photographers, he’s taught himself to see diminutive changes in the physical world across time. As I looked, the owl suddenly looked conspicuous. How did I miss her? 

The only conspicuously blooming flower at the nature center was golden groundsel. My middle son was curious about the word’s etymology. The root is Old English and dates from the early eighth century. Its history is complicated and uncertain. Among its possible meaning are “pus-absorber” (the flower is commonly used in poltices for reducing abscesses) and “ground-swallower.” The word morphs delightfully across the centuries – gundaesuelgiae, grunswel, groundie-swallow, grundy-swallow, groundis walle, and so on. The OED’s most recent citation is 1893. In “July” (“the month of Summer’s prime”) from “The Shepherd’s Calendar” sequence, John Clare writes of the seeming lethargy of mid-summer: 

“Hawkweed and groundsel’s fanning downs

Unruffled keep their seedy crowns;

And in the oven-heated air,

Not one light thing is floating there,

Save that to the earnest eye,

The restless heat seems twittering by.” 

Richard Mabey finds much to admire in groundsel. In Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants (2011), he writes: “Groundsel can go through an entire life cycle from seed to flower to seed in just six weeks. 

`Nothing But Leather and Prunella'

“Worth makes the man; the rest is nothing but leather and prunella.” 

Roger Sale writes with admiration short of hagiography in “Johnson in Darkness,” a chapter in Literary Inheritance (University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), his examination of writers (Dr. Johnson, Wordsworth, Henry James) and their relations with writers of the immediately preceding generation. Johnson’s shadow, in Sale’s view, is Alexander Pope. The sentence quoted above is Sales, from Pope, by way of Johnson. These lines are from An Essay on Man (1734): 

“You'll find, if once the monarch acts the monk,

Or, cobbler-like, the parson will be drunk,

Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow.

The rest is all but leather or prunella.” 

The last word, despite its sound, is not a confection made from dried plums. Here’s the operative definition in the OED: “A strong silk or worsted fabric formerly used for the gowns of graduates, members of the clergy, and barristers, and later for the uppers of shoes.” The dictionary cites Pope’s usage. In his Dictionary (1755), Johnson also cites the lines, but in his entry for fellow, under this definition: “8. A word of contempt; the foolish mortal; the mean wretch; the sorry rascal.” Sale judges Johnson’s Dictionary his supreme creation, and is less than enthusiastic about the periodical essays and Rasselas. In the entry for fellow, Johnson is “at his best,” Sale says. This is unexpected and useful. He writes: 

“Pope is fending off precisely those tones Johnson, not really attending to Pope’s passage, asks us to include. It is as though Pope, for Johnson, is not worth the attention he accords Sidney, Shakespeare, or Dryden.” 

Sale goes on the strongly praise Johnson’s late poem, “On the Death of Mr. Robert Levet,” lauding his use of the tetrameter quatrain over his earlier reliance on the heroic couplet. Of the poem he says: “It is appropriate to end with it here as a way of honoring Johnson, his best book a dictionary, his strongest appearance in someone else’s book about him, his poems a few scattered things, his best prose work an homage to a friend whose life and work had come to nothing [The Life of Savage].” 

Sale continues: “…Johnson knew Levet as his fellow, obscurely wise because there was no wisdom in what he said, coarsely kind so that only those most in need of his kindness could recognize it for what it was. Worth makes the man; the rest is nothing but leather and prunella.” 

Sale is the sort of critic who helps us see a great writer as if for the first time. We weigh his judgments and ours, and read Johnson anew.

`According As the Fly Stings'

Four months ago, on Nov. 24, we celebrated the three-hundredth  birthday of Laurence Sterne, whose best-known creation was not born until Vol. IV of the novel bearing his name and not breeched until Vol. VI. On this date, March 18, in 1768, Sterne died at age fifty-five. Tristram Shandy is a death-haunted novel. Sterne knew he was dying of consumption as he wrote it, and the novel’s eponymous narrator often seems to be running a race with his own mortality. So long as the words are flowing, he’s ahead. 

It’s a critical truism that Samuel Beckett, another Irishman forever brooding on death while laughing at it, is the spawn of Sterne. It’s easy to see kinship but documentation is scarce. In an Aug. 4, 1938, letter to his friend Thomas McGreevy, Beckett says he has “read nothing for months” but Vigny’s Journal, which bored him, and Tristram Shandy, which “irritated [him] in spite of its qualities.” (The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940.) The qualities in question remain unspecified, though surely they include grim and bawdy comedy, linguistic exuberance and an abiding and more-than-scholarly interest in death. In Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon report that Beckett owned a copy of Tristram Shandy from The Works of Laurence Sterne (1910) and another of Sentimental Journey from the Complete Works published in 1780. The former was given to Beckett by his friend A.J. Leventhal. The only marginalia are pencil marks at the end of Chapter 7 and the beginning of Chapter 8 in Vol. I – the famous discussion of hobby-horses: 

“...if you come to that, Sir, have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself,—have they not had their Hobby-Horses;—their running horses,—their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets,—their maggots and their butterflies?—and so long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,—pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?” 

In my private mythology of literature, which corresponds only tangentially with the texts in question, Sterne’s hobby-horse has always been first cousin to Swift’s Houyhnhnms. And wasn’t it another Irishman who said Sterne and Swift should have exchanged names? Sterne resumes in Chapter 8: 

“—De gustibus non est disputandum;—that is, there is no disputing against Hobby-Horses; and for my part, I seldom do; nor could I with any sort of grace, had I been an enemy to them at the bottom; for happening, at certain intervals and changes of the moon, to be both fiddler and painter, according as the fly stings.” 

The cracked logic, anarchic reasoning, stuttering articulation – very Sternean, very Beckettian, very Irish.

`Alone and Great'

Clive James takes the title and first line of “Grief Has Its Time” (Nefertiti in the Flak Tower: Collected Verse 2008-2011, 2013) from a passage in Boswell’s Life of Johnson. The date is June 2, 1781. Johnson is 72, three years away from his death. The friends visit Welwyn, Hertfordshire, the home of the late poet and cleric Edward Young (1681-1765), author of The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, commonly known as Night Thoughts, a volume illustrated by William Blake in 1797 and much prized by Edward Blunden during the Great War (see his Undertones of War, 1928). The house was now occupied by the late poet’s son, Frederick Young, described by Boswell as “a plain, civil, country gentleman.” Here is Boswell’s account: 

“We sat some time in the summer-house, on the outside wall of which was inscribed, `Ambulantis in horto audiebant vocem Dei;’ [Genesis 3:8: “They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden.”] and in reference to a brook by which it is situated, `Vivendi recte qui prorogate horam, &c.’ [Horace, Epistle I.ii.40: “He who puts off the hour of right-living is like the bumpkin waiting for the river to run out…”:  I said to Mr. Young, that I had been told his father was cheerful. ‘Sir, (said he,) he was too well-bred a man not to be cheerful in company; but he was gloomy when alone. He never was cheerful after my mother's death, and he had met with many disappointments.’ Dr. Johnson observed to me afterwards, ‘That this was no favourable account of Dr. Young; for it is not becoming in a man to have so little acquiescence in the ways of Providence, as to be gloomy because he has not obtained as much preferment as he expected; nor to continue gloomy for the loss of his wife. Grief has its time.’ The last part of this censure was theoretically made. Practically, we know that grief for the loss of a wife may be continued very long, in proportion as affection has been sincere. No man knew this better than Dr. Johnson.” 

Johnson is harsh, though he had the tact not to censure Young fils to his face. Like Boswell, we sympathize with Johnson, whose wife, Hetty, had died in 1752. He never stopped grieving. In his “Life of Young,” Johnson writes of deaths that may have inspired “Night Thoughts”:  

“That domestic grief is, in the first instance, to be thanked for these ornaments to our language it is impossible to deny. Nor would it be common hardiness to contend that worldly discontent had no hand in these joint productions of poetry and piety. Yet am I by no means sure that, at any rate, we should not have had something of the same colour from Young's pencil, notwithstanding the liveliness of his satires. In so long a life causes for discontent and occasions for grief must have occurred. It is not clear to me that his Muse was not sitting upon the watch for the first which happened.” 

After quoting “Grief has its time,” James says Johnson was “well aware / It was himself he spoke for.” James extends his sympathy: “Others must /  Be granted full rights to a long despair / Fueled by the ruination of their trust / In a fair world.” This represents a wise maturity we encounter in Johnson and a few other writers and thinkers but seldom in our lives. James recounts meeting an elderly woman at a book-signing. She asks him to dedicate the book to her and her sweetheart killed in World War II. 

“Utmost concision, even in a rage;

Guarding the helpless from experiment;

Stalwart against the follies of the age;

The depth of subtlety made eloquent –” 

“These were the qualities of Johnson’s mind

Even the King felt bound to venerate…” 

At this point, James recalls the serendipitous meeting on Feb. 10, 1767, in the King’s Library, of Johnson, the great lexicographer, and King George III. Boswell tells us the King asked Johnson for his assessment of the comparative worth of the libraries at Oxford and Cambridge, the writings of Warburton, Lyttleton and Hill, and the general state of letters in England. The King urged Johnson to “continue his labours” at writing. Johnson replied that “he had pretty well told the world what he knew” and he thought “he had already done his part as a writer.” The King is gracious: “I should have thought so too….if you had not written so well.” James concludes his poem like this: 

“These were the qualities of Johnson’s mind

Even the King felt bound to venerate,

Who entered through the library wall to find

The rumpled, mumbling sage, alone and great.”

`A Humus for New Literature'

On this date, March 16, in 1852, Thoreau tells us in his journal that he spent the day in the Cambridge Library, and that Walden Pond had not yet melted around the edges. This is characteristic of Thoreau, a leveling of devotions, books and nature, literature and life – one of his most attractive qualities. He was not afraid to carry a book in the woods or a turtle shell in the library. He writes: “The Library a wilderness of books” – a compliment, not a complaint. He’s in the library to research the previous three hundred years of Canadian history, and finds little to please him. He observes “how one [book] had been built upon another, each author consulting and referring to his predecessors. You could read most of them without changing your leg on the steps.” 

Learning what not to read, which volumes constitute a waste of time, how to sift data from noise, is a prerequisite for readers, writers and researchers. Every reader ought to be a critic. Nabokov lauded “creative readers,” not writers. Thoreau continues: 

“It is necessary to find out exactly what books to read on a given subject. Though there may be a thousand books written upon it, it is only important to read three or four; they will contain all that is essential, and a few pages will show which they are. Books which are books are all that you want, and there are but half a dozen in any thousand.” 

A wonderful, easily misunderstood phrase -- “Books which are books” – the corollary of what Charles Lamb calls “books which are no books—biblia a-biblia.” The monsoon of printed matter leaves a drought in its wake. I’ve explored libraries with crowded shelves where I can find nothing to read. Thoreau picks up his earlier suggestion of “a wilderness of books”:

“I saw that while we are clearing the forest in our westward progress, we are accumulating a forest of books in our rear, as wild and unexplored as any of nature’s primitive wildernesses. The volumes of the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries, which lie so near on the shelf, are rarely opened, are effectually forgotten and not implied by our literature and newspapers. When I looked into Purchas’s Pilgrims, it affected me like looking into an impassable swamp, ten feet deep with sphagnum, where the monarchs of the forest, covered with mosses and stretched along the ground, were making haste to become peat.” 

Old books, of course, are best. They have endured. One is always skeptical of novelty. Thoreau again echoes Lamb, not directly but in resonant affinity: “I can read any thing which I call a book. There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such.” A true book is like a sage, one who is dignified, humble and learned. Thoreau honors tradition: 

“Those old books suggested a certain fertility, an Ohio soil, as if they were making a humus for new literatures to spring in. I heard the bellowing of bullfrogs and the hum of mosquitoes reverberating through the thick embossed covers when I had closed the book. Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.”

`His Rucksack of Gift'

“I loved your stuff, and the way

it came from nowhere, where poetry

must come from, having no credentials.” 

I like the idea of poetry or any writing coming from nowhere and arriving without credentials – that is, unsanctioned, unofficial, non-aligned, representing only the writer, his self-chosen tradition and his gift. Writing has grown so partisan and identity-hobbled – most poems might as well come with an abstract, to save you the time of reading the whole thing – that we’re poleaxed when we meet an autonomous human being in print. The lines above are from a sequence of three sonnets titled “To Ed Sissman,” written by his friend John Updike on Sept. 20, 1977, eighteen months after L.E. Sissman’s death from cancer, and collected in Facing Nature (1985). Of late I’ve read some remarkably stupid things written about Sissman’s poems, including an old review in which the critic faults Sissman for not being Robert Creeley, a well-known writer of skinny stacks of anemic prose. This is from later in Updike’s poem: 

“You told me, lunching at Josèph’s,

foreseeing death, that it would be

a comfort to believe. My faith,

a kind of rabbit frozen in the headlights,

scrambled for cover in the roadside brush

of gossip; your burning beams passed by.

`Receiving communications from beyond’: thus

You once described the fit of writing well.

The hints hang undeveloped, like

my mental note to send you Kierkegaard.

Forgive me, Ed; no preacher, I—

A lover of the dust, like you,

Who took ten years of life on trial

And lent pentameter another voice.” 

Of course, Updike is now dead more than five years, also of cancer. In “Patrick Kavanagh: An Annotated Exequy” (Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L. E. Sissman, 1978), a celebration of the Irish poet after his death in 1967, Sissman writes of the writer’s solitary integrity:

 

                                    “But he got

On with the serious business of what

An artist is to do with his rucksack

Of gift, the deadweight that deforms his back

And drives him on to prodigies of thought

And anguishes of execution, bought

At all costs of respectability

And all expense of nice society,

Until, alone, he faces homely him,

The only other tenant of his room,

And finds the world well lost.”