`Giving Elegance to Trifles'

“The purpose for which letters are written when no intelligence is communicated or business transacted, is to preserve in the minds of the absent either love or esteem; to excite love we must impart pleasure, and to raise esteem we must discover abilities.”

When did I last receive a letter? I mean “letter” in the conventional, almost extinct sense of a sheet of paper, handwritten or typed, with a message composed in complete sentences, folded, sealed in an envelope, stamped, addressed and mailed – a significant investment of time, energy and thoughtfulness our literate forebears took for granted. The closest surviving descendant of this non-machine-generated ideal is the birthday card, a second-best, ghost-written surrogate. This would have appalled Samuel Johnson, author of the passage above in The Rambler #152, published on this date, Aug. 31, in 1751. Johnson continues:

“Pleasure will generally be given as abilities are displayed by scenes of imagery, points of conceit, unexpected sallies, and artful compliments. Trifles always require exuberance of ornament; the building which has no strength can be valued only for the grace of its decorations. The pebble must be polished with care, which hopes to be valued as a diamond; and words ought surely to be laboured, when they are intended to stand for things.”

There was, in other words, an art to letter writing, prescribed in part by an unwritten code of manners (“Dear,” “Sincerely,” “P.S.”), a mingling of formality and affection, and a willingness to select the correct words and polish them. Cousin to such a letter is the flow of familiar conversation. Or the rare, well-written, thoughtful email, such as I received Friday from Helen Pinkerton. She writes, in part:

“In your blog for August 11 on Louise Bogan I like the way that you show your gift not only finding exceptional passages of criticism in older writers but adding your own perceptions about the passages in question. I admire and enjoy your way of writing what is really the equivalent of a very short literary essay. You, yourself, are pretty strong on `much in little.’” 

That such a compliment is delivered in careful, measured prose, not in today’s more overheated, formulaic fashion – the verbal equivalent of the vulgar “High five!” – lends it an earned quality. Helen respects language and other people. It’s no coincidence that she noticed a typo I had missed in the same post. Johnson says in the same Rambler essay:

“As much of life must be passed in affairs considerable only by their frequent occurrence, and much of the pleasure which our condition allows, must be produced by giving elegance to trifles, it is necessary to learn how to become little without becoming mean, to maintain the necessary intercourse of civility, and fill up the vacuities of actions by agreeable appearances. It had, therefore, been of advantage, if such of our writers as have excelled in the art of decorating insignificance, had supplied us with a few sallies of innocent gaiety, effusions of honest tenderness, or exclamations of unimportant hurry.”

`Blorting and Blorting Through the Hours'

Perhaps the least Larkin-esque word ever used by Larkin in a poem: blort. It looks like a typo for blurt or a cartoon sound effect. The OED doesn’t recognize it. Its closest possible cognate in that dictionary is blore, a verb meaning “to cry, cry out, weep; of animals, to bleat, bray, bellow.” In “Faith Healing” (The Whitsun Weddings, 1964), Larkin writes of the women seeking the touch of the faith healer: “…and such joy arrives / Their thick tongues blort.” In that context, I’ve always assumed it meant to make an unintelligible animal sound rather than to be humanly articulate. It carries a hint of sexuality and perhaps is meant to suggest glossolalia or speaking in tongues. In a letter to Anthony Thwaite written in 1960, Larkin says: 

“…blort is intended: it is I think a variation of blore which is a dialect word meaning to bellow (like an animal). I am rather alarmed not to find blort in the dictionary, but D.H. Lawrence uses it somewhere, and I certainly don’t mean blurt, which has a quite different meaning to my mind.”  

Five years later in a letter to Judie Johnson, Larkin says of the word: “It means a thick heifer-like bellowing. I don’t know where I found it—one of Lawrence’s dialect poems I believe.” The editor of The Complete Poems (2012), Archie Burnett, does our homework and locates the word in a laughably ridiculous poem by Lawrence, “Tortoise Shout”: “I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible.” 

Thirty years ago, another reporter and I at an Indiana newspaper played a mildly subversive game. We challenged each other to work obscure, preferably sexually suggestive words into our copy. He covered city government and my beat was courts, so our use of exotic lingo was conspicuous even to narcoleptic copy editors. The rules were simple: Use only real words and use them correctly. I recall only one of them: fream. The OED gives “to roar, rage, growl: spec. of a boar,” with a hint of the sound said animal makes while in rut. The pun on “bore” was irresistible. I used “freamed” as a synonym for the ubiquitous “said” when quoting a judge renowned for the flatulence of his pronouncements from the bench. An editor caught it, asked me if it was a typo for “creamed,” and deleted it. There’s a metaphysical realm reserved for words that exist only briefly and amusingly, and then are gone.

`The Depth of Unchecked Evil'

Thanks to Cynthia Haven we have Helen Pinkerton’s thoughts on Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. Helen’s reactions to the novel recall my own: 

“I finished it recently and found it possibly the greatest novel I have ever read. He creates a world – actually, two worlds, the Russian and the German – of believable human characters, who try to live worthy lives under a totalitarian government that is structured to destroy their humanity by bringing out the worst in each of them. Chapter after chapter unfolds individual dramas, wherein moral choices are made that are lived with and often died by.” 

Earlier this month Helen wrote in an email: 

“I have been reading the novel through in the last few months. I am very near the end, where Victor Schtrum is about to find out what will happen to him for his `mistakes.’ Grossman’s portraits of human and inhuman persons living in a totalitarian state are extraordinarily authentic and moving. I have to say that it is one of the finest novels I have ever read. I read War and Peace when I was in my teens, so I don’t remember it very well. But my impression is that Grossman’s novel is more important to me, because the events that are his subject took place in my life-time and his insights into the moral dilemmas and tragic choices of Russians, Germans, Tartars, Ukrainians, and the one Italian priest help me to understand the importance of knowing what happened to the human soul in those terrible years in order to understand the depth of unchecked evil in our contemporary and future society, world-wide.”

`Filled With Very Little'

“We may suspect that the author wrote them for himself, and didn’t know that he was tracing for others the image of a solitary and lucid man, conscious of the singular mystery of each moment.” 

Back to aphorisms. This is Borges writing of the Italian-born Argentine aphorist Antonio Porchia (1886-1968). Private writing of a literary nature made public is rare, especially in recent centuries. Writers are forever preening and customarily write to be read. Most could not and would not write without the assurance of readers. We sometimes sense Pascal is writing in a personal vacuum, and Robert Walser, but even Kafka has his eye on the future. Porchia is an odd case. He published a single book, Voces, starting with a private edition in 1943, which he tinkered with for the rest of his life. Think of it as a terse Leaves of Grass. Ultimately, Porchia published some six-hundred aphorisms and nothing else. He is routinely called a poet but writes brief bits of prose. A selection in French came out in 1949. W.S. Merwin published the first English version of Voices in 1969, with Copper Canyon Press putting out an updated edition in 2003. Porchia is one of literature’s solitaries, a modest autodidact of the word. In his 1969 note, Merwin says of Porchia, “the aphorisms themselves are not, in his view, compositions of his own so much as emanations which he has heard and set down.” 

There is a sense not of misanthropy in Porchia but monastic austerity, minus a deity. Merwin tells us Porchia’s father had been a priest in Italy, but abandoned his calling. His recurrent themes are solitude and suffering, but without self-pity. His thinking is stark and modest, qualities reflected in his choice of forms. Each aphorism is a small illumination. He has no dogma to preach and follows no system of thought. In this, he is like another European transplanted to Argentina, Witold Gombrowicz. Sometimes, Porchia has a Chestertonian taste for paradox: “A large heart can be filled with very little.” He channels Kafka: “When one does not love the impossible, one does not love anything.” And Heraclitus: “Everything that changes, where it changes, leaves behind it an abyss.” 

One of the effects of reading a body of aphorisms is to further condense one’s thoughts and words. Novels and histories start to seem ungainly, like corpulent children. But one also becomes aware of the risks in thinking and writing aphoristically, the temptation to slip into portentousness, like pundits, street preachers and other crackpots. Bad aphorisms are too pleased with themselves, like comics who laugh at their own jokes. One also starts seeing aphorisms everywhere, even where they don’t exist. Rereading Auden on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, 2001), I found this in the lecture on Richard II: “Richard has few feelings, but he enjoys those situations that should produce feelings.” Porchia writes: “A child shows his toy, a man hides his.”

`It's a Very Solitary Instrument'

If this blog has accomplished anything worthwhile in eight and a half years, it is to keep alive the names and works of good writers half-lost to oblivion. There’s no fairness to literary reputation. Mediocrities thrive, worthies fade. The only true act of criticism is to read a writer attentively and share your pleasure or displeasure with another, whether in a high-toned journal or over breakfast. Chief among the writers I’ve championed for the most selfish of reasons, undiluted enjoyment, are two American poets, L.E. Sissman (1928-1976) and Herbert Morris (1928-2001). At a website called Spoken Web I found a recording of a reading Sissman gave at Sir George Williams University in Montreal in 1972, seven years after he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and four years before his death. The sound of his voice was new to me, deeper and somehow more richly American than I had imagined. A Detroit native, Sissman speaks with Midwestern flatness mitigated by a hint of Harvard. His voice is strong, betraying no cancer or its treatment. He talks like a polite and almost pedantic wiseguy, interrupting and revising himself frequently, a quality we find in his poems. 

Of the first poem he reads, “Mouth Organ Tunes, The American Lost-and-Found,” Sissman says he tried to capture “the terminal flatness and grain-ness of American life, United States life, and the attempts to alleviate this barrenness by all sorts of temporizing accommodations, going to Howard Johnson’s on a Sunday, or having a kinky party in New York to show off one’s new paintings or celebrating the death of a genuine antique American and New Englander and looking at the house that he lived in and so on.” 

In the poem and in Sissman’s comments, I detect no Ginsbergian snottiness about middle-class Americans. No contempt or condescension. The first section of the poem is titled “In a Ho-Jo’s by the River,” and Sissman is celebrating a familiar fixture of the American road. The only other writer I recall who singles out Howard Johnson’s is Stanley Elkin in the first phrase of the first sentence in The Franchiser (1976): “Past the orange roof and turquoise tower…” Sissman continues: 

“Anyway the tune is called, the poem is called `Mouth Organ Tunes,” and I use the mouth organ as an instrument here to suggest the, well the mouth organ is something that can be played in a band, but is better not, it’s a very solitary instrument and to me it always conveys the loneliness of an individual against insurmountable odds.” 

Not to mention cowboys around the campfire, bluesmen and Larry Adler – an all-American instrument. The other poems Sissman reads, all found in Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman (1978), are “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” “The Birdman of Cambridge, Mass.,” “A College Room, Lowell R-34, 1945,” “East Congress and McDougal Streets, Detroit, May 25,” “The Museum of Comparative Zoology,” “A  Deathplace,” “Getting On: Grave Expectations,” “The Mid-Forties: On Meeting No One in New York,” “A Comedy in Ruins” and “Cockaigne: A Dream.” 

About “East Congress and McDougal Streets, Detroit, May 25,” Sissman tells the audience it was about a “shattering experience” he had in 1964 when he returned to his old neighborhood in Detroit and found “how puny it was and how destroyed it was by the passage of time.” The poem recalls Donald Justice’s disciplined excursions into nostalgia. In it he writes: “This was Jerusalem, our vivid valley. / In our dead neighborhood / Now nothing more can come to good.” Here is the poem’s final line: “My thirst for the past is easy to appease.” 

Introducing “A Deathplace,” Sissman says: “Let me get onto a poem that is now again a little bit more serious, although not ultimately so I hope. It's about being very sick at the hospital and knowing one is in good hands.” The poem, the only one Sissman reads explicitly acknowledging the cancer that was killing him, has one of his grim, memorable, witty openings: 

“Very few people know where they will die,

But I do: in a brick-faced hospital,

Divided, not unlike Caesarean Gaul,

Into three parts.” 

And here are the final four lines: 

“Then one fine day when all the smart flags flap,

A booted man in black with a peaked cap

Will call for me and troll me down the hall

And slot me into his black car. That’s all.”

`Irrespective of the Reader's Convictions'

“Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser or more intelligent than his readers. For this reason the aphorist who adopts a folksy style with `democratic’ diction and grammar is a cowardly and insufferable hypocrite.” 

The writer of carefully hedged aphorisms, qualified to fit every contingency, is no aphorist at all. “Wiser or more intelligent” isn’t quite right. It’s more accurate to say an aphorist weds ruthlessness to cant-free concision, gifts few writers possess in tandem (Swift did, supremely). Aphorisms are as tight and difficult to write as sestinas. They can be cold, merciless and unforgiving, and thus are ideal for delivering carefully aimed jabs of truth and puncturing pretensions. Can one imagine a politically correct aphorism? There’s nothing of self-regarding virtue in the form. An aphorist assumes truth trumps compassion and tact. Elsewhere in his foreword to The Viking Book of Aphorisms (1962), W.H. Auden says an aphorism must “convince every reader that it is either universally true or true of every member of the class to which it refers, irrespective of the reader’s convictions.” 

For inclusion in their anthology, Auden and his co-editor, Louis Kronenberger, rely heavily on the long-reliable – La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, Lichtenberg, Kraus, Pascal, Chesterton, Santayana and, of course, Dr. Johnson. They quote Johnson, via Boswell -- “In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath” -- and in nine words he acknowledges human mendacity even in death, and forgives it. 

Aphorisms can show up anywhere. They need not be written and discretely identified as aphorisms, maxims, epigrams, apothegms or aperçus. A reader can happen upon them in poems (as in Pope) and prose (as in Proust), where their serendipitous discovery contributes to the wallop they pack. Some writers are aphoristic with some regularity. It’s a quality, like a sense of humor, I associate with mental health. Take Stevie Smith’s “God and the Devil” from A Good Time Was Had by All (1937): 

“God and the Devil

Were talking one day

Ages and ages of years ago.

God said: Suppose

Things were fashioned this way,

Well then, so and so.

The Devil said: No,

Prove it if you can.

So God created Man

And that is how it all began.

It has continued now for many a year

And sometimes it seems more than we can bear.

But why should bowels yearn and cheeks grow pale?

We’re here to point a moral and adorn a tale.” 

If the final, aphoristic line sounds familiar, your memory is good. Smith borrows it from Dr. Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” and revises it for her own purposes: 

“His Fall was destin'd to a barren Strand,

A petty Fortress, and a dubious Hand;

He left the Name, at which the World grew pale,

To point a Moral, or adorn a Tale.” 

Smith must have been exceedingly fond of the line. She used it a year earlier in her first novel, Novel on Yellow Paper: 

“For this book is the talking voice that runs on, and the thoughts come, the way I said, and the people come too, and come and go, to illustrate the thoughts, to point the moral, to adorn the tale.”

`The Golden Age Continues, Even Now'

For some of us, connections with eminent forebears – real, physical connections, not sentimental swoonings -- are matters of some gravity. I’ve documented my pedigree and A.J. Liebling’s elsewhere, and now I’ve thought of another forming a pleasingly closed loop: I shook hands with Steven Millhauser, who shook hands with Lionel Trilling, who shook hands with Whitaker Chambers, who shook hands with Louis Zukofsky, who shook hands with Guy Davenport, who shook hands with me (many sub-loops could be traced, leading us to Auden, Barzun and Bellow, among others). I’m tempted to start another beginning with my introduction to Ralph Ellison but that’s enough phantom associations for now. I came across a more substantial, albeit broken, linkage while reading Walter Martin’s translation of Baudelaire’s Complete Poems (Routledge, 2002). In his “Afterthoughts,” Martin writes: 

“My credentials are as follows: Once I shook the hand of Basil Bunting, who dined with William Butler Yeats, who shared rooms with Arthur Symons, who spent twenty years translating Baudelaire and was a friend of Paul Verlaine, whose series of three articles on the book [Les Fleurs du Mal] had appeared in 1865. Two years later Baudelaire was dead, having refused, for reasons known only to himself, to meet Verlaine or Mallarmé or any of the young poets of his day who aspired to become him.” 

This notion of kinship, of writers as a sort of family to whom we owe a debt of gratitude, seems especially important to Martin. He traces two lines of descent from Baudelaire – Verlaine/Rimbaud,   Mallarmé/Valéry – and offers a lengthy list of writers who share his “complex patrimony.” Among them: Corbière, Proust, Eliot, Auden, Larkin, Montale and Winters. They passed along Baudelaire’s influence, Martin says, “so that in a sense, attenuated as it may be, exhausted as it is, the golden age continues, even now.” Martin’s fellow feeling extends to his acknowledgements page, where he expresses gratitude to, among others, Edgar Bowers, Dick Davis, Dana Gioia, Donald Justice, Helen (Pinkerton) Trimpi and Janet Lewis. Explaining his theory of translation, which includes replicating Baudelaire’s forms, meters and rhymes, Martin quotes bluesman Furry Lewis: “If it ain’t rhymed up, it don’t sound good to me or nobody else.” 

Martin sounds like an interesting fellow. The brief biographical note in the book says he was born in Texas, read French at Stanford and taught English in Nepal. He formerly owned Chimaera, a bookshop in Palo Alto, and was working on a translation of Théophile Gautier’s Émaux et Camées. Martin’s lineage and thankfulness prompts me to add an afterthought of my own: I’ve shaken hands with two men who shook hands with A.J. Liebling – Tony Hiss and James Salter.

`At Their Dapatical Banquets'

One of the joys of reading late Auden is the pleasure he takes in rare words used correctly. Like his friend Dr. Oliver Sacks, he loved trolling the Oxford English Dictionary for good catches. In his translation of Horace’s Odes (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014) David R. Slavitt acknowledges (and presumably shares) Auden’s predilection. Here is his version of the final stanza of I.14: 

“And will your heirs mourn, or will they revel,

Breaking out the wines you have locked away

To guzzle and spill on the floor

At their dapatical banquets?” 

My spell-check doesn’t recognize dapatical, though frayed memory and context figured it out. In his gloss, Slavitt says it is “exactly the right word to convey the idea of `the pontiff’s banquets,’ which was the way Romans referred to extravagance.” He goes on: 

“Auden uses the word in About the House; it comes from the Greek dapaien and means `to spend lavishly.’ It was Auden’s habit to use such low-frequency words to get them into the OED as a source—his idea of immortality. Without this note, I’m sure a number of readers would have had to look it up. My hope is that with the definition here, they will remember it. It’s a lovely word.” 

Agreed. And it gets lovelier if you follow the linguistic trail. The OED gives us the late Latin dapāticus, “sumptuous,” and uses the same English word to define, plus “costly.”

The most recent citation dates from 1721, and all three are from earlier reference. But no Auden. The unnamed poem Slavitt refers to in About the House (1965) is “To-Night at Seven-Thirty,” the tenth poem in a twelve-part sequence titled “Thanksgiving for a Habitat.” Auden dedicates the poem to the food writer M.F.K. Fisher, for whom he wrote an introduction to The Art of Eating (1963). In it he makes a rather dapatical claim: "I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.” 

“I see a table

at which the youngest and the oldest present
keep the eyes grateful
for what Nature’s bounty and grace of Spirit can create:
for the ear’s content
one raconteur, one gnostic with amazing shop,
both in a talkative mood but knowing when to stop,
and one wide-traveled worldling to interject now and then
a sardonic comment, men
and women who enjoy the cloop of corks, appreciate
dapatical fare, yet can see in swallowing
a sign act of reverence,
in speech a work of re-presenting
the true olamic silence.” 

More low-frequency words: cloop and olamic, and elsewhere in the poem: flosculent, cenacle, semble, curmurr, maltalents. Language, like life, is a dapatical feast. [For Auden’s essay on Fisher, “The Kitchen of Life,” see Forewords and Afterwords (1973).]23—1721

`The First Passion and the Last'

The dullest people I’ve known, from infants to ancients, are the incurious, those indifferent to the wealth of interesting things that surround them. We’re born in wonder, free of charge, and we have everything to learn, with brains engineered to that end. A parent’s principal job, after security and sustenance, is imbuing a child with curiosity. The world is ours to reject or enjoy. Those who reject it or take it for granted, waiting for something better to come along, are fated for unhappiness. Over-sophistication proves as fatal to curiosity as its opposite.

The most unapologetically curious person I have ever known (in the flesh, I mean; no one could be more curious than Montaigne) was Guy Davenport, who once spent fifteen minutes in my company contemplating the color of Franz Kafka’s eyes (blue). In his essay “The Scholar as Critic” (Every Force Evolves a Form, 1987), Davenport writes: “Scholarship begins as a critical act of loving eyes: curiosity is passion.” He spoke of Samuel Johnson, with Plutarch and Montaigne, as one of his most influential teachers. On this date, Aug. 24, in 1751, Johnson published The Rambler #150. Enjoy the stately advance of Johnson’s prose and thought:

“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last; and perhaps always predominates in proportion to the strength of the contemplative faculties. He who easily comprehends all that is before him, and soon exhausts any single subject, is always eager for new inquiries; and, in proportion as the intellectual eye takes in a wider prospect, it must be gratified with variety by more rapid flights, and bolder excursions; nor perhaps can there be proposed to those who have been accustomed to the pleasures of thought, a more powerful incitement to any undertaking, than the hope of filling their fancy with new images, of clearing their doubts, and enlightening their reason.”

It’s of some relevance to this writer that Davenport chose as the epigraph to Every Force Evolves a Form a passage from The Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, in which Boswell quotes Johnson. It is among the guiding precepts of Anecdotal Evidence:

 "I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get."

`He Was, in Fact, My Hero'

Seasoned readers develop secret crushes on writers who, if not exactly obscure or minor, and for whom appreciation will win you no place in the literary popularity contest, are little known and less admired. Think of Hubert Butler, Aleksander Wat and Aldo Buzzi. None was a genius. All make life more interesting. Such is Simon Leys, né Pierre Ryckmans, the Belgian sinologist and literary essayist who died Aug. 11 at age seventy-eight. Like many others I encountered him first in 1977 when Chinese Shadows was published in English translation. Many in the West were still denying or tacitly approving of Mao's Cultural Revolution. In nuanced prose rooted in a learned love of Chinese culture, Leys documented its systematic destruction. Other books developing the theme followed: The Chairman’s New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution, Broken Images: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics, The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics. I never studied Chinese history closely but made an exception for Leys’ books. 

Last year brought good news. New York Review Books published The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays and the plump paperback took its place on what L.E. Sissman called the Constant Rereader’s Bookshelf. He returns to China, of course, as Hazlitt inevitably returns to painting and Lamb to the prose masters of the seventeenth century, but also to literary matters – Waugh, Orwell, Chesterton, Balzac and Nabokov, among others. Leys’ prose is measured and pithy, with an aphorist’s pointed concision. Here he is on, of all people, his fellow Belgian Georges Simenon: “An artist can take full responsibility only for those of his works that are mediocre or aborted—in these, alas! he can recognize himself entirely—whereas his masterpieces ought always to cause him surprise.” 

Theodore Dalrymple, himself a crush growing into something more substantial for this reader, has written a fine tribute to Leys: “He combined in his person qualities that are rarely so closely associated or inextricably linked: vast erudition and scholarship, exquisite taste, complete intellectual honesty, coruscating wit and brilliant literary gifts. 

“I admired Simon Leys more than any other contemporary writer. He was, in fact, my hero, in so far as I have ever had one.”

`A Life of Small Disappointments'

A proven reporter’s dodge for loosening up recalcitrant interviewees – get them talking about family or work. If the former, be careful. You can blunder into tender domestic woes – divorce, illness, wayward children, death. Work is safer. If the subject likes his job and is good at it, or thinks he is, he’ll brag. If he hates it, he’s apt to indulge his hunger for grievance. Either way, he’s talking. Even when a misery, work is central and time-intensive, so how peculiar it is that writers today devote so little attention to it, or treat it only as wallpaper. One of the joys of Roth’s American Pastoral is learning about the glove-making trade. L.E. Sissman, an advertising executive, wrote about that business, and Larkin gave us "Toads." Add to the list the late Dennis O’Driscoll’s “The Bottom Line,” a veritable mock-epic of fifty eleven-line stanzas, published in a limited edition in 1994 by the Dedalus Press of Dublin and collected in Quality Time (Anvil Press, 1997). 

Most of the poem is narrated by a nameless business man, not the CEO but a mid-level executive. There’s mention of “sales” but the product is never named, prompting recollections of Lambert Strether’s “little nameless object.” It’s useful to know that O’Driscoll, who died on Christmas Eve 2012, joined the Office of the Revenue Commissioners in Dublin at age sixteen, specializing in “death duties, stamp duties, and customs,” and remained there for almost forty years.  In his memoir-essay “Sing for the Taxman,” O’Driscoll says, “I have always regarded myself as a civil servant rather than a `poet’ or `artist’ – words I would find embarrassing and presumptuous to ascribe to myself.” “The Bottom Line” is not a protest poem, telling truth to corporate power. The narrator is realistic about the compromises he has made, appreciative of the rewards, complaining only mildly about the job’s inevitable headaches. O’Driscoll avoids the vying clichés – “organization man” apologist and anti-corporate “activist.” The tone here, in the fifth stanza, should not be mistaken for arch satire: 

“I am a trustworthy, well-adjusted citizen

at this stage, capable of a commanding

pungency in business talk, good grasp

of office jargon, the skill to rest

phones on my shoulders as I keep tabs,

the ability to clinch a deal convincingly…” 

O’Driscoll knows the turf, the lingo and folkways of the working world. He is the Larkin of the office, minus the looming sense of desolation – almost Larkin Lite. In the 2009 essay “Working Bard” (The Outnumbered Poet: Critical and Autobiographical Essays, 2013) he writes: “Philip Larkin’s mutterings about work, as a `toad’ squatting on his life, did not blind him to the jewel in the amphibian’s head; waxing lyrical, he conceded that his choice of librarianship as a career was, in retrospect, an `inspired’ one.” From O’Driscoll’s sixth stanza: 

“A life of small disappointments, hardly

meriting asperity or rage, a fax

sent to the wrong number, an engagement

missed, a client presentation failing

to persuade: nothing you can’t sweat off

at gym or squash.” 

The concluding lines of that stanza recall Larkin’s “Aubade”: 

“But, in the dark filling

of the night, doubts gather with the rain

which, spreading as predicted from the west,

now leaves its mark on fuscous window panes;

and you wait for apprehensions to dissolve

in the first glimmer of curtain light.” 

There’s no melodrama or Hollywood mayhem in “The Bottom Line.” It’s true to our experience, not revenge fantasy, written by a mature adult for and about his peers. O’Driscoll closes his poem, and the narrator’s day, thoughtfully, peace of mind wrinkled faintly with apprehension: 

“Halogen lights tested, alarm clock set,

I burrow into the high-tog, duckdown quilt;

the number-crunching radio-clock squanders

digital numbers like there was no tomorrow.

Who will remember my achievements when

age censors me from headed notepaper?

Sometimes, if I try to pray, it is with

dead colleagues that I find myself communing…

At the end of the day, for my successors too,

what will cost sleep are market forces, vagaries

of share price, p/e ratio, the bottom line.”

`His Steady, Baleful, Solitary Gleam'

The old authors did it better, writing about the grimmest of subjects, the death of children, without mush or emotional posturing. There’s a calm deliberation about Jonson remembering his "best piece of poetry" and Herrick his “pretty bud.” Among contemporaries, Peter De Vries managed the impossible in The Blood of the Lamb. For a poet elided from fashionable literary consideration, exiled as a “light versifier,” the subject of the second poem in X.J. Kennedy’s first collection, Nude Descending a Staircase (1961), seems unpromisingly mirthless: “On a Child Who Lived One Minute”: 

“Into a world where children shriek like suns

Sundered from other suns on their arrival,

She stared, and saw the waiting shape of evil,

But couldn't take its meaning in at once,

So fresh her understanding, and so fragile. 

“Her first breath drew a fragrance from the air

And put it back. However hard her agile

Heart danced, however full the surgeon’s satchel

Of healing stuff, a blackness tiptoed in her

And snuffed the only candle of her castle. 

“Oh, let us do away with elegiac

Drivel! Who can restore a thing so brittle,

So new in any jingle? Still I marvel

That, making light of mountainloads of logic,

So much could stay a moment in so little." 

It’s voguish to say poems are about the making of poems, but the good ones normally engage something out there in the big bad world beyond the classroom. They have substance. Kennedy, I would suggest, is writing about a dead newborn, the poem we are reading and the promise of poetry itself in proper hands, and does so without compromising them. How refreshing his injunction to “do away with elegiac / Drivel!” “Jingle” is suitably patronizing and the final line is perfect. In a similar multum in parvo spirit, Yvor Winters wrote “Much in Little.” 

I muster these responses to Kennedy’s poem to remind us of what Auden wrote in 1937 in “Letter to Lord Byron”: “Light verse, poor girl, is under a sad weather. / She’s treated as démodé altogether.” Light verse is left to the hobbyists and misfit autodidacts, the terminally clever and earnestly comic, and this is a shame. In a 1986 tribute, Kennedy writes of the recently dead Philip Larkin that he “achieved a poetry from which even people who distrust poetry, most people can take comfort and delight.” Of how many living poets can we say the same? Of how many Pulitzer Prize winners, especially in recent years? Philip Levine? Sharon Olds? You’re kidding. Kennedy plays with the permeable membrane separating light verse and the rest of poetry. His blurring of boundaries adds to the fun and to the reader’s engagement with the poems: Is this funny? Am I supposed to laugh? Or is this serious? Is funny the same as trivial? Is serious the same as important? In 1978, when reviewing Kingsley Amis’ The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse, Kennedy said poetry “generally speaks with the deep voice of feeling” while light verse “tends to twitter and chirp.” He adds: 

“As in the elderly man’s damnation of the entire human race, a piece of light verse may profess strong feelings. Yet all the while it is affirming them, its jingly form and its verbal playfulness set up an ironic betrayal of that affirmation.” 

Into which camp does “Terse Elegy for J.V. Cunningham” (Dark Horses, 1992) stray?: 

“Now Cunningham, who rhymed by fits and starts,

So loath to gush, most sensitive of hearts—

Else why so hard-forged a protective crust?—

Is brought down to the unresponding dust.

Though with a slash a Pomp’s gut he could slit,

On his own flesh he worked his weaponed wit

And penned with patient skill and lore immense,

Prodigious mind, keen ear, rare common sense,

Only those words he could crush down no more

Like matter pressured to a dwarf star’s core.

May one day eyes unborn wake to esteem

His steady, baleful, solitary gleam.

Poets may come whose work more quickly strikes

Love, and yet—ah, who'll live to see his likes?” 

X.J. Kennedy was born on this date, Aug. 21, in 1929, in Dover, N.J. Happy eighty-fifth birthday, Mr. Kennedy.

`Nothing is Negative; Nothing is Commonplace'

“The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook; he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he did not intend to see; he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. His is the roving eye.” 

While trying to maintain a light touch and resist the urge to nag, I encourage my kids to look closely at things, to study and appreciate surfaces but not to be seduced by them. Be skeptical but not arrogant and dismissive. Look for patterns and connections. Ask questions but don’t assume you'll get satisfactory answers or even understand them. Don’t rush to self-congratulation. Looking at things is never passive but neither should it be indiscriminately all-consuming like a goat. 

“[The writer] must (like the child who cannot keep silent) share, make known, communicate what he has seen, or knows. The urgency of what is real to him demands that it should be realized by other people.” 

So, talk about it. Conversation is embryonic text, even in a child. I worked with a reporter who was a raconteur of oral narrative. Returning from an assignment, he would recount his adventures and have the desk in stitches. Then he sat at the keyboard and choked. A facile talker, he was a hobbled writer. He left journalism and became a lawyer. For some of us, an experience isn’t quite resolved until we’ve put it into words. 

“Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he a contemplative purely, he would not write.” 

Name one great Zen Buddhist novelist. 

“Unsuspected meaning in everything shines out; yet, we have the familiar re-sheathed in mystery. Nothing is negative; nothing is commonplace. For is it not that the roving eye, in its course, has been tracing for us the linaments of a fresh reality? Something has been beheld for the first time.” 

Among the chronically bored, those who are not merely depressed are, by choice, selectively blind. 

The quoted passages are drawn from “The Roving Eye” by Elizabeth Bowen, published in the New York Times Book Review in 1959 and collected in Afterthought: Pieces about Writing (Longmans, 1962). In her foreword she writes: “For the writer, writing is eventful; one might say it is in itself eventfulness.”

`A General Philosophy of Books'

“He had a general philosophy of books—all the classification that mattered was good books and bad books…” 

Do people still read the novels of R.K. Narayan (1906-2001)? I discovered him belatedly, in the nineteen-eighties, thanks to one of his champions, Graham Greene, and read my way through most of the dozens of stories and novels he sets in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. The plots are never world-historical and Narayan studiously avoids politics. His seemingly artless fiction, recounted in plain prose, makes for unlikely thesis-fodder. In aggregate, his works form an alternate world that cunningly resembles our own. His people are teachers, merchants, beggars, doctors, laborers, taxidermists and mail carriers. The passage quoted at the top refers to Raman, the title character in The Painter of Signs (1976), which I’ve just reread. He’s a college graduate who paints commercial signs for a living, not a surrogate for the cliché of the struggling artist. His room is bare except for a mat and bed roll, and his books: 

“His cupboard overflowed with the books he cherished since his college days—Plato to Pickwick Papers, some of them in double-column editions, with paper turning grey, yellow, and brown and etching that transported him.” 

Raman befriends a second-hand book dealer in the town market, paints a sign for him and is paid in books. The antiquarian is “a pessimist reveling in pessimism,” “gloating over his frustrations,” and endlessly fascinated by the behavior of bookworms – not the human sort like Raman but the generic category of beetles, booklice, roaches and moths that consume paper. The book dealer says: 

“`Book-worms possess a sense of design,’ he would explain. `Some books are tunneled end to end, some they give up with the preface, in some they create a perfect wizardry of design but confined to the end-papers, never an inch beyond. A real masterpiece must be read only in an ancient edition and you could easily recognize it by the fact that the book-worm has already gone through it end to end and left its testimonial in its own code.’” 

Insect as book critic – a representative sample of Narayan’s dry humor. Only then do we learn Raman’s admirably simple critical theory: 

“For browsing in the afternoon Raman hardly cared what book he chose; it might be Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or Kural—that tenth-century Tamil classic. He had a general philosophy of books—all the classification that mattered was good books and bad books, and the antiquarian could be depended upon not to nurture bad books. Raman’s practice was to put his hand into the cupboard and take out the first book that his finger touched.” 

That’s a practice that works only if one has good taste and sound judgment, and keeps only good books in one’s cupboard.

`The Still-Existing Part of Life'

In her introduction to The Norton Book of Friendship (1991), Eudora Welty explains why readers find insight and charm in personal letters and, by implication, such extra-literary works of literature as diaries, marginalia and commonplace books: 

“All letters, old and new, are the still-existing part of a life.  To come upon a personal truth of a human being however little known, and now gone forever, is in some way to admit him to our friendship. What we've been told need not be momentous, but it can be as good as receiving the darting glance from some very bright eye, still mischievous and mischief-making, arriving from fifty or a hundred years ago.” 

It’s the human spark. We slip complacently into the conceit that literature is a mausoleum, not evidence of life on the page. Letters remind us that every text started as a throb in someone’s consciousness – a whim, a gripe, a connection. It’s heretical in some quarters, but I would gladly sacrifice Keats’ poems if that were the only way I could hold on to his letters. The same is true for William Cowper and even Flannery O’Connor, whose letters I turn to more often than her fiction. It’s more complicated with the other great letter-writer in English, Charles Lamb, whose letters and essays merge on the page and in memory, often one a rehearsal for the other. 

In the case of Marianne Moore, her letters are often dry and formal affairs, without the elegance, wit and half-concealed revelations of her best poems. Only rarely does she flash in her correspondence. Edward McKnight Kauffer was an artist and designer who befriended both Moore and Welty. He seems to have been chronically depressed, feeling unappreciated for his art while well-paid for his advertising work. He died in 1954 of alcoholism at age sixty-four. Two years earlier, Moore gave him a pep talk in a letter, and it’s a magnificent gesture of compassion and a fine piece of writing:

 
“To speak is to blunder but I venture, for I know the bewilderment one experiences in being misapprehended. We must face it, as you said. When we do well – that is to say, you – in designs of yours which are standard – the Ethyl horse-power, the Gilbey’s port, the Devon downs, the girl in the helmet with the star and effect of velvet darkness, the tall hat on the Victorian table, the door with the keyhole made dramatic, -- there is a flash of splendour apart from the pretext; and when a thing snares the imagination, it is because of a secret excitement which contributes something private – an incontrovertible to admire afresh at each sight, like the bloom and tones of a grape or the glitter of Orion as one emerges into the dark from the ordinariness of lamplight.” 

It seems not to have worked on Kauffer but I feel better just reading it, for its form and sentiment. As William Maxwell says at the close of a letter he wrote to Welty in 1954 (What There is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, 2011): “Well it’s wonderful to be alive. Wonderful to be a writer. Wonderful to grow roses. Wonderful to care. Isn’t it?” 

[In 2012, Ronald Sharp, co-editor with Welty of The Norton Book of Friendship, published in The Georgia Review a remembrance of working with her on the anthology. He points out that they included “Ithaka” (Da Vinci’s Bicycle, 1979) by their mutual friend, Guy Davenport. The story, Sharp says, “was one of the initial suggestions Eudora had when I first talked to her on the phone that day. (She loved telling the story about how she and Guy had gone off to the movies together to see the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine when she was giving a reading at the University of Kentucky. They both loved it.)”]

`An Incomparable Way of Living Life'

Because of the attention it pays to the details of work and place, and its human sympathy (“Men’s ordinary lives / measured out on a scale alien / to that on which its life was measured”), one of the best poems in Joshua Mehigan’s Accepting the Disaster (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) is “The Cement Plant.” Now we learn Mehigan is describing a real place a few miles from where I lived for almost four years. I moved from Schenectady to Selkirk, N.Y., in the summer of 1988, and rented a house on Old Ravena Road. That same summer, Mehigan took a job as a laborer at the cement plant in Ravena where his father worked for thirty-five years as a welder. There’s another unintended resonance. Whenever I saw the cement plant with its smokestack and silos I remembered the Municipal Electric Light Plant in Cleveland, always known as Muny Light, where my father, also a welder, worked for thirty years.

What’s important here is that none of this autobiographical subtext is necessary for appreciating Mehigan’s poem. It adds a new layer of connections for me but “The Cement Plant” remains autonomous, requiring no personal scaffolding. Mehigan’s poem is the opposite of confessional. The novelist Howard Jacobson writes in his most recent column for The Independent:

“To lose oneself in making art – all questions of quality apart – is an incomparable way of living life. Never mind self-expression. The truly wonderful thing about being a painter, a writer or a musician is escaping self. You light the touch paper, step back, and watch the pages or the canvas explode.”

`I Wish I Could Write Prose Like That'

Once I interviewed a biographer of Jean Stafford, the novelist, story writer and author of that peculiar volume A Mother in History: Three Incredible Days with Lee Harvey Oswald's Mother (1966). Together, we reviewed Stafford’s work and her knack for accumulating misery. While drunk, Stafford’s first husband, the poet Robert Lowell, crashed his father’s Packard into a brick wall, breaking Stafford’s nose and fracturing her skull. Later, he punched her in the face and broke her nose a second time. Her second marriage likewise ended in divorce. In 1959, she married A.J. Liebling, the great New Yorker reporter. Though he died four years later, their marriage, by the standards of high-strung, alcoholic writers, was a good one. They adored each other and Stafford never remarried, but now back to the biographer. 

Liebling has for thirty-five years been one of my role-models as a writer. I had also read most of Stafford’s novels, stories and non-fiction, and admired them, but the biographer, already irked that another writer was about to publish his life of Stafford, got the idea that I was exaggerating the importance of Liebling at the expense of Stafford. More than irked, she accused me of “sexism” and was close to throwing me out of her house. I left, the story ran in the newspaper a few days later, and like clockwork she called my editor, complaining of my attitude and prose style. I was already busy on another story. 

The poet Howard Moss was poetry editor of The New Yorker from 1948 until his death in 1987, and a friend to both Liebling and, even more closely, Stafford, who died in 1979. In Minor Monuments: Selected Essays (1986), he collects anecdotes of Stafford under the title “Jean: Some Fragments.” In one, she has a dream in which the home of her Scottish forebears, Arran Island, was historically connected to the Greek island of Samothrace. Stafford and Libeling visited Samothrace and she obsessively researched its history, but was unable to complete the writing project she devoted to it. She let Moss read forty pages of the work, and he says it contained “some of the most extraordinary prose I had ever read.” She never published it. Moss writes: 

“Although Joe Liebling did everything to encourage Jean to write, she was intimidated by his swiftness, versatility, and excellence as a reporter….One day, Joe and I were riding up together in the elevator at The New Yorker. I told Joe I’d read the Samothrace piece and how good I thought it was. `I know,’ he said, `I wish you’d tell her.’ `I have,’ I said. And added, `I wish I could write prose like that….’ Joe, about to get off at his floor, turned to me and said, `I wish I could….’

`A Pretty Calculated, Sustained, and Slow Process'

The best French novel of the twentieth century not written by Marcel Proust is Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), a rare example of irresistibly readable near-plotlessness. The old, sick emperor (from 117 to 138) writes a novel-length letter to his adopted grandson and future emperor, the teenage Marcus Aurelius (in office from 161 to 180). That’s it. What keeps us reading is Yourcenar’s unfolding of Hadrian’s sensibility from the inside, a mingling of Roman intelligence, sensitivity and frequent good sense. His morals are not ours but we listen to Hadrian the way we listen to any older person who has paid attention and learned something from life. 

I thought of Yourcenar’s novel again while reading and looking at Richard Estes’ Realism (Yale University Press, 2014) by Patterson Sims, a book devoted to the American photorealist painter born in 1932. Estes is best known for his obsessively detailed urban scenes, storefronts in particular. Sims tells us Estes has painted only eight formal portraits, including one in 1985 of Yourcenar, a neighbor of his in Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island, Maine. A resident of the U.S. since the thirties, she became an American citizen in 1947, and in 1981 became the first woman elected to L’Académie française. Required as part of her induction, the portrait was commissioned by Yourcenar. The writer stands, dignified and almost regal, in her work place, across the cluttered desk from her electric typewriter. She casts multiple shadows. (Here is a photo of Yourcenar at her desk.) 

Estes’ paintings, like old photographs, invite study and contemplation. There’s nothing satirical or campy about the way he treats his subjects, like Supreme Hardware (1974) and Grand Luncheonette (1969). He honors and celebrates the human world, including the stuff snorted at by snobs. His paintings are gestures of gratitude for the bounty around us, even the tacky parts. In his essay, Sims says the “cardinal verities” of what Estes does as an artist are “prosaic, workmanlike, and unobtrusively intelligent,” and then he quotes Estes: 

“I think the popular concept of the artist is a person who has this great passion and enthusiasm and super emotion. He just throws himself into this great masterpiece and collapses from exhaustion when it’s finished. It’s really not that way at all. Usually it's a pretty calculated, sustained, and slow process by which you develop something. The effect can be one of spontaneity, but that’s part of the artistry. An actor can do a play on Broadway for three years. Every night he’s expressing the same emotion in exactly the same way. He has developed a technique to convey those feelings so that he can get the ideas across. Or a musician may not want to play that damn music at all, but he has a booking and has to do it. I think the real test is to plan something and be able to carry it out to the very end. Not that you’re always enthusiastic; it's just that you have to get this thing out. It's not done with one's emotions; it’s done with the head.” 

I admire Estes’ unromantic understanding that art is hard work, not happy thoughts and “passion” (an annoyingly overworked word of late). An artist is a tradesman who practices a skill. Boswell reports Johnson saying in Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides: “A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.” Emphasis on the adverb.

[ADDENDUM: From a reader whose late wife was a performing musician: "Richard Estes's thoughts on artistic production in today's Anecdotal Evidence reminded me of her. It always annoyed her when people would say - this happened frequently after recitals and other performances - that it must be wonderful to be so talented. It wasn't talent, she would tell me; she didn't just sit down and play. It took a lot of hard work, years of study and practice, to play as well as she did."]