`Relevant Obscenity and All'

A friend sent me a link to “Execution,” a piece of reportage Joseph Mitchell wrote for the New York World-Telegram in 1934. Four years later, Mitchell joined The New Yorker and quickly left his apprenticeship and entered his prime. “Execution” was collected in Mitchell’s first book, My Ears Are Bent (1938). By his later standards, the newspaper work is callow. Even “Execution” – splendidly paced, elegantly plain in style – betrays lapses of tone not imaginable by the time he was writing the pieces that make up The Bottom of the Harbor (1959). When he describes Robert Elliott as “the precise little executioner,” the sarcasm is adolescent and jarring. The story’s best effects are achieved through rigorous neutrality. The story leaves me wanting to learn more not about the punks who are executed but about their executioner. 

The pleasures of My Ears Are Bent are less writerly than historical or journalistic. Mitchell was blessed with acute outsider eyes and ears.  He was born and educated in North Carolina and came to New York City in 1929. As he says in the first chapter (“My Ears Are Bent”), he had never before “lived in a town with a population of more than 2,699.” New York became his permanent home and it never stopped being simultaneously exotic and domestic. Like his closest friend, A.J. Liebling, Mitchell was a gifted listener and loved good talk. In his first reference to the phrase that serves as the source of his title, Mitchell says “. . . I have been tortured by some of the fanciest ear-benders in the world.” Then he gives us a paragraph I often contemplated during my years as a newspaper reporter: 

“Do not get the idea, however, that I am outraged by ear-benders. The only people I do not care to listen to are society women, industrial leaders, distinguished authors, ministers, explorers, moving picture actors (except W.C. Fields and Stepin Fetchit), and any actress under the age of thirty-five. I believe the most interesting human beings, so far as talk is concerned, are anthropologists, farmers, prostitutes, psychiatrists, and an occasional bartender. The best talk is artless, the talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves, women in the sun grouped around baby carriages, talking about their weeks in the hospital or the way meat has gone up, or men in saloons, talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels.” 

My only dissent is with Mitchell’s inclusion of psychiatrists in his list of interesting people. That hasn’t been my experience. The unlikeliest people can be artful talkers, which is not the same as bullshit artists. For three years back in the nineteen-nineties I wrote a weekly newspaper column that was little more than talk. Sometimes I felt like the guy who puts a coin in a slot machine and waits for the bells to chime. Apart from looking and listening, it didn’t take a lot of effort, a fact Mitchell understood:

“I admire the imagery in vulgar conversation. I wish newspaper had courage enough to print conversation just as it issues forth, relevant obscenity and all.” 

I look forward to reading Thomas Kunkel’s new biography, Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker (Random House, 2015), though the mystery of Mitchell’s long publishing silence at the end of his life is of little interest. A writer’s only obligation is to write well. If he does that even once in his life, he earns our gratitude. Mitchell did it many times.

`That Warre Seemes Sweete to Such as Little Knowe'

R.L. Barth takes his epigraph to Battlefield Prayer (Scienter Press, 2003) from the seventy-first stanza of George Gascoigne’s “The Fruits of Warre, written upon this Theame, Dulce Bellum inexpertis” (1575):

“Wherfore my worde is still (I change it not)

That Warre seemes sweete to such as raunge it not.”

The unfamiliar word, raunge, is the ancestor of our “range.” The OED cites Gascoigne’s line in its entry. As a transitive verb it means “to traverse (a place or area) in all directions; to roam over or through.” We might say “to know” or “to have first-hand experience or knowledge of,” as Gascoigne (and Barth) had of war. Gascoigne (c. 1539-78) was an English soldier of fortune or, in modern terms, a mercenary. In 1571 he travelled to the Low Countries to serve under the Prince of Orange, William the Silent. Gascoigne was accused of treason and acquitted. The Privy Council dismissed him as “a notorious ruffian.” Yvor Winters is almost alone in his admiration for Gascoigne, calling him “one of the great masters of the short poem in the [sixteenth] century” (Forms of Discovery, 1967). “The Fruits of Warre” is a long poem made up of many short poems. Here is the thirty-fifth stanza, which echoes with the themes and even the words of the passage quoted by Barth:

“My promisse was, and I recorde it so,

To write in verse (God wot though lyttle worth)

That warre seemes sweete to such as little knowe

What commes thereby, what frutes it bringeth forth:

Who knowes none evil his mind no bad abhorth,

But such as once have fealt the skortching fire,

Will seldome (efte) to play with flame desire.”

“Efte” is an old adverb meaning “a second time, again; back.” In common parlance, the final line might be translated as “once bitten, twice shy.” Gascoigne’s understanding of war, at least in this poem, is unromantic and unadorned, in keeping with his plain style as lauded by Winters. A reader understands why Barth, a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, senses some affinity with the tough-minded Elizabethan. Here’s the title poem from Battlefield Prayer:

“The dead a-gibbering, and we who ken

Hear `Fuck it! Don’t mean nothin’.’ Yea. Amen.”

`Anything Thrown Into the Air'

My middle son is fourteen and in ninth grade at St. Andrew’s College, a boys’ boarding school in Ontario, Canada. On Sunday he sent me the draft of an eight-page paper written for his AP American history class: “America’s Natural Geopolitical Blessings.” He wanted me to proof it, and he included another attachment with this explanation: 

“On a slightly related note, I got bored so I started writing noir, hardboiled versions of kids’ stories that I may put on the web if they’re good. I'm working on one in which the stereotypical noir detective is trying to shut down a human-trafficking ring run by the Cat in the Hat.” 

Not my preferred niche-genre, but I made a few suggestions. He replied: “I find that when I'm bored I write a lot of random stuff, so I have a bunch of half-finished stories and analyses on my computer. Any advice for actually finishing them?” A tricky and unexpected question. I answered, in part: 

“Not advice, exactly. I find that if I really have something to say, and the subject is rich enough, I can return to a fragment or some otherwise unfinished piece and develop it further. If I’ve written something just as an impulse, to blow off steam, it probably won’t go anywhere. Let it rest, sort of marinade, and see if it tastes good later. Make sense?” 

MICHAEL: “Yeah, that makes sense. It’s just that I have so many ideas and I like writing, so that leaves me with a lot of unfinished stuff. Have you had this experience often?: when I read and edit other peoples writing the stylistic, content and punctuation errors make me cringe. A lot of stuff seems really obvious that my peers don’t pick up on.” 

PATRICK: “Get used to it. Most people are not writers. For them, writing is an odious task, sheer drudgery. And I can understand that, especially given the way composition is taught in public schools. I’ll let you in on a little secret: Sometimes I don’t fully understand a subject, or even know how I feel about it, until I’ve written about it. The very act of organizing and articulating thoughts actually gives me thoughts. If I were assigned to write, as I often am, about something I’m completely ignorant of – say, volleyball or Bayesian statistics – as I read about it, talk to people about it and start writing tentative thoughts, it starts coming together.” 

The exchange is verbatim, with one typo (mine) invisibly corrected. I’m gratified, of course. We pay a lot of lip service to reading and writing, but schools and most librarians and parents do their best to discourage both. Writers who can’t write and readers who don’t read outnumber the rest of us, and that gene pool is growing deeper. Seeing my exchange with Michael transcribed in dialogue form reminds me of the long-deferred project I recently undertook – reading the Imaginary Conversations published in five volumes by Walter Savage Landor between 1824 and 1829, with a sixth volume added later. Consider this sample from the lengthy conversation staged by Landor between Dr. Johnson and John Horne Tooke (1736-1812), the English politician and philologist: 

JOHNSON: “Coxcombs and blockheads always have been, and always will be, innovators; some in dress, some in polity, some in language.” 

TOOKE: “I wonder whether they invented the choice appellations you have just repeated.” 

JOHNSON: “No, sir! Indignant wise men invented them.” 

And so on. Johnson gets most of the good lines and Tooke gets the thankless job of playing his straight man, a sort of more pedantic Boswell. Not all the Imaginary Conversations are quite so lively, though a staged reading of some of the exchanges, if artfully selected, might prove interesting. I’m also reading Michael Oakeshott’s What Is History?: And Other Essays (Imprint Academic, 2004). While reading a marvelous piece titled “The Voice of Conversation in the Education of Mankind,” I realized that most of my most interesting conversations today – including the ongoing one with my son reported above – are conducted digitally, not while seated in the same room as my interlocutor. Oakeshott notes: 

“The nature of conversation is revealed in the observation that anything may be its subject, so long as it is treated conversationally. We speak of God and the high price of drink in a single quarter of an hour; of Spinoza and the weather. Anything thrown into the air will make a beginning.” 

And this: 

“I suppose all good conversation, in the end, comes round to the only two subjects worth talking about in any manner: love and death. But once a beginning has been made, the dialectic of conversation must be given its head; bit and bridle are out of place.” 

[I resolved to read more than just Landor’s poetry after reading the recently published Landor’s Cleanness: A Study of Walter Savage Landor (Oxford University Press, 2014) by Adam Roberts, who also recently published an annotated edition of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), which I also borrowed from the library after reading Alan Jacobs’review. I plan to start it soon. So many good books, old and new, are out there.]

`A Happy Accident of Literature'

“The quotidian quality of Montaigne’s essays, in fact, is their biggest appeal. They seem so drawn from life that they look effortless.” 

He is the most congenial of writers. The Frenchman is us, if only we were smarter, friendlier, more stoical, learned and articulate. His cognate in the Anglophone world is Dr. Johnson. Like the Englishman, he never pretends to be more than himself. The mature Montaigne is without pretensions, or at least his pretensions are roughly the size of our own. Danny Heitman, author of the quoted passage at the top, celebrates the inventor (and namer) of the least likely literary form, the essay. As Heitman writes: “Someone writing randomly about what he’s thinking for hundreds of pages sounds pretty dull, but Montaigne pulls it off.” 

I was amused by Heitman’s diplomatic reference to our own Ralph Waldo Emerson as “an often earnest New Englander with a Brahmin’s sense of propriety.” In “Reading Montaigne,” Joseph Epstein, of course, credits the Frenchman with the invention of the essay. In “The Personal Essay: A Form of Discovery” (A Literary Education and Other Essays, 2014), Epstein goes on to describe the personal essay as “a happy accident of literature” and Montaigne as its “first great practitioner.” Then he shifts his attention to Emerson, and things get amusing: 

“My own introduction to the personal essay—one, I suspect, shared by many in my generation—was by way of the bloated, vatic, never less than pompous Ralph Waldo Emerson and the sometimes rather precious Charles Lamb. Few things are more efficient at killing the taste for a certain kind of literature than being force-fed it in school at an early age. Although I have come to have a higher opinion of Lamb and an even lower one of Emerson, having to read them at an early age all but effectively killed the essay for me.” 

Amen. I still, on rare occasions, enjoy Emerson as a phrase-maker. His essays, which are largely incoherent as wholes, glitter with shiny bits. Emerson understands almost nothing of the world. He is a moral simpleton. But he insisted on thinking, and that always got him in trouble.

`The Art of the Word Made Me Yawn'

A reader asks if I know “Why the Classics,” written by Zbigniew Herbert in the nineteen-sixties, when his native Poland was hobbled by communism and few could imagine it would ever be otherwise. Here are the poem’s final stanzas in the translation by Alissa Valles (The Collected Poems 1956-1998, 2007): 

“if art for its subject
will have a broken jar
a small broken soul
with a great self-pity

“what will remain after us
will it be lovers' weeping
in a small dirty hotel
when wall-paper dawns” 

Herbert was a bookish poet, but his work seldom calls for annotations. Among modern poets he most admired T.S. Eliot (and Auden), but his lines are never so thick with allusions as the American’s. Rather, his work is suffused with Western civilization, with its poetry, history and philosophy. When he writes of the ancient world, as here, of Thucydides, one need not recall in detail the Peloponnesian War. In fact, some knowledge of World War II and the fate of Poland, in a vise worked by Hitler and Stalin, might be more useful. In a brief commentary on the poem, included in The Collected Prose 1948-1998 (2010), Herbert outlines the poem’s three-part structure in surprisingly explicit terms (reminding us that Herbert was never a specialist in mystification): 

“In the first part, it speaks of an event taken from the work of a classical author. It is, as it were, a note on my reading. In the second part I transfer the event to contemporary times to elicit a tension, a clash, to reveal an essential difference in attitude and behavior. Finally the conclusion contains a conclusion or moral, and also transposes the problem from the sphere of history to the sphere of art.” 

Self-explications tend to be insulting to readers or self-congratulatory. Herbert’s is crisp and sane. He’s not buying the era’s fashionable taste for glib absurdity. He is refreshingly hopeful, given his subject and the fate of his country: 

“I don’t mean to subject pessimism to easy ridicule if it is a response to evil in the world. However, I think that the black tone of contemporary literature has its source in the attitude its writers take to reality. And that is what I tried to attack in my poem.” 

He adds, winningly: “Writing as a stylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn.”

`To Try to Take the Measure of Our Loss'

James Matthew Wilson asks in “Some Notes for Ecclesiastes” (Some Permanent Things, 2014):

“How does one stir

A dull eye to the poignancy and gift

Of all the things that are but need not be?”

Like a rich kid’s Christmas morning, the world overflows with gratuitous bounty. It’s also a slaughterhouse. Negotiating those truths across a lifetime winnows optimists from pessimists, but a prudent path between them seems sanest. Wilson’s poem, written “In Memoriam Rae Lee Lester,” is a gloss on Koheleth, almost a rebuke. He understands that Ecclesiastes in the wrong hands turns quickly into cynical, smug, impotent, wet-blanket doomsaying (“flint-lipped quietists”). Along with Job, it’s probably the biblical book most favored by the faithless. But Wilson starts his poem practically, almost optimistically, with George Herbert, “The parson, lonely in his vicarage / At Bemerton,” wanting to stir his flock.   

The title of Dr. Johnson’s greatest poem, “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” traces it lineage to Ecclesiastes 1:2, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity,” a phrase distilling his central lifelong theme. In his Dictionary, Johnson defined vanity as “emptiness, arrogance, falsehood.” For vain he gives “fruitless, meanly proud, idle.” Asked for a synonym today, many would respond with “egotism,” “self-centeredness,” “pride.” Only the last avoids the modern clinical taint and retains the older, moral/spiritual sense. In Samuel Johnson: The Struggle (2008), Jeffrey Meyers writes of “Human Wishes”:

“Believing with George Herbert that `A verse may finde him who a sermon flies,’ Johnson uses the poem to preach from a deeply pessimistic text. His title implies that certainty and truth can be found, despite the temptations of the world, only by adhering to a spiritual path and following God's will . . . Instead of emphasizing the joy and consolation of Christian belief, and the hope of redemption it offers, Johnson distilled into the poem twenty years of bitterness, failure, and struggle for faith. His poem is not simply pessimistic, but strains against optimism, against the possibility that human life could actually get better.”

Wilson is not naïve. Neither is he hard-boiled. He seeks wisdom, not finality:

“We do not need a shaking from our comfort

In how the seasons feed us, how the new

Wars are just like the old ones. What we ask

Is wisdom wise enough never to dare

To try to take the measure of our loss.”

`At Last He Made Himself Heard'

Last weekend, a neighbor helped change one of the brake lights in my car. He’s handy and has the proper tools to remove a light assembly held in place by too much engineering. John is a Navy veteran of Vietnam who took part in the evacuation of Saigon, and several years ago he performed some clandestine work in Iraq. He rides a Harley and carries more scars than any man I’ve ever known. Just last year he had his gallbladder and a cancerous patch on his belly removed. He has broken most of the major bones in his body. If anyone has a right to be angry, it’s John. Needless to say, and contrary to pop psychology, he’s a smart, funny, sweet-natured guy, though I would never want to seriously cross him.

While John fussed with bolts and wires, I observed that he seemed a patient, methodical guy, someone who doesn’t assume the world is designed for his convenience and pleasure. He laughed at that and said he was hot-tempered when young, touchy and easily offended, but life had cooled him down. “I’m not that important anymore,” said John, who is married and has two sons, 12 and 13.

I was raised among angry people, and early on concluded that anger is the most addictive of emotions. People get hooked on the illusory rush of power that accompanies it. It’s the cocaine of inadequate people. Dr. Johnson puts it like this:

“He that finds his knowledge narrow, and his arguments weak, and by consequence his suffrage not much regarded, is sometimes in hope of gaining that attention by his clamours which he cannot otherwise obtain, and is pleased with remembering that at last he made himself heard, that he had the power to interrupt those whom he could not confute, and suspend the decision which he could not guide.”

This is from Johnson’s great essay on anger, The Rambler #11, published on this date, April 24, in 1750, and one senses he writes from first-hand experience. In brief, Johnson helps explain phenomena as diverse as Twitter, talk radio and murderous Muslims:

“From anger, in its full import, protracted into malevolence, and exerted in revenge, arise, indeed, many of the evils to which the life of man is exposed. By anger operating upon power are produced the subversion of cities, the desolation of countries, the massacre of nations, and all those dreadful and astonishing calamities which fill the histories of the world…”

`A Soul Remembering My Good Friends'

A Canadian graduate student in statistics who by all accounts was a brilliantly promising young woman died here last fall of cancer at the impossible age of twenty-six. I never knew Sarah Tooth, though we worked in the same building, but I was asked to write stories about her here and here. Last week a memorial bench for Sarah was placed in the engineering quadrangle. The first time I saw the bench, a female student was seated on it, reading a Penguin paperback edition of Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. A tree will be planted nearby in memory of Sarah, and a brass plaque was added to the bench on Wednesday. It gives the dates of Sarah’s birth and death, and these lines, spoken by Bolingbroke to Hotspur (Henry Percy) in Act II, Scene 3 of Richard II:

“I count myself in nothing else so happy

As in a soul remembering my good friends.”

Silently, we add Bolingbroke’s subsequent lines:

“And, as my fortune ripens with thy love,

It shall be still thy true love's recompense:

My heart this covenant makes, my hand thus seals it.”

Today is Shakespeare’s birthday, his 451^st, and it’s appropriate that even non-English majors (especially non-English majors) use his words to mark significant events in life and death. In Act IV, Scene 1, Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Richard himself -- a solipsist, a self-infatuated proto-poet -- lines all of us with justice will someday be able to speak:

“’Tis very true, my grief lies all within;

And these external manners of laments

Are merely shadows to the unseen grief

That swells with silence in the tortured soul;

There lies the substance.”

[ADDENDUM: I received an email from a friend of Sarah's, a doctoral student in philosophy at Rice University: "I tried to find selections reflecting on two things for a memorial at Rice: either (1) the notion of the importance of friends and an appreciation of them, or (2) the notion of accepting and appreciating (an adopted) home. Both were things that seemed to myself and other friends and her parents as at the center of Sarah's thoughts about her life in Houston and at Rice. Additionally, Sarah enjoyed Shakespeare quite a bit. We made a point of going to Shakespeare performances in Hermann Park and a few on campus at Rice, though we did have to miss the last round at Hermann Park in 2014 because she was away receiving treatment. I think she appreciated both the use of language and the writing itself, and also the uinversal human themes you can find in Shakespeare. All of that and Shakespeare's penchant for providing good concise statements of large sentiments made it seem like a natural place to look. I had to look -- it was not one I had previously memorized. You never see Shakepseare's history plays performed any more, so we never discussed Richard II at length, but I think she would have approved." 

`Aural Intelligence and Lexical Vigour'

The poet and classicist John Talbot, who teaches at Brigham Young University, sent me a copy of “Johnson’s Classical Mottoes,” an article he published in 2003 in the journal Essays in Criticism. By “mottoes” Talbot means the brief tags or epigraphs in Greek and Latin placed by Johnson at the top of his Rambler (1750-52) and Adventurer (1752-54) essays, often accompanied by English translations made by the lexicographer himself. Talbot’s reading of Johnson’s poems (they have been identified as such at least since 1940, when David Nichol Smith and Edward L. McAdam included them in The Collected  Poems of Samuel Johnson) is close and sensitive, like that of his former colleague at Boston University, Christopher Ricks. Here are some of Talbot’s choicer observations:

“The energy Johnson infuses into his translations derives in part from his determination that no form of the verb `to be’ should survive the transit from Latin to English unreinforced.”

“Johnson’s choice of words reveals other subtleties. On indication that these brief translations amount to more than mere cribs is their frequent recourse to words which connect the classical quotations to the phrasing of Johnson’s own major poems.”

“It is a kind of levelling: he naturalizes the Greek and Latin not only into English, but into Johnsonian, idiom.”

“`Verbs bristling in every line’ is [Walter Jackson] Bate’s characterisation of this feature of Johnson’s style, adding that Johnson’s mature prose style has a high proportion of verbs.”

“`Vain’ ranks near the top of Johnson’s most frequently used words, appearing seventy-six times in the poems alone.”

“All but five of the seventy-seven instances of `still’ throughout Johnson’s poems are in the adverbial sense.”

“…the words do not stand alone, but sound and resound off one another in the Johnsonian aural network…”

“This epigram and the best of the other mottoes and quotations from the Rambler and Adventurer deserve their place alongside Johnson’s more celebrated poems, whose aural intelligence and lexical vigour they so often share, and to which they so often allude.”

Talbot refers to “the magisterial severity” Johnson’s greatest poem, “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” For a further taste of Talbot try “Information Age” from his first collection, The Well-Tempered Tantrum (David Robert Books, 2004):

“From parroting that ours is the Information Age,

Some respite, please. Say that on crumbling piers

Fishermen wait; say the tossing wife pines

For footfall in the courtyard; report that the mountains

Are, and are, and are, underneath

Ice that was not, and is, and will not

Be. I can learn nothing from news.

Bring word of what I already know.

That breath is short. That daylight inches.

(These apples ripen to redness or paleness.)

That love comes shedding confetti from gnarled

Branches above; that canyons are deep

And from the deep canyons word sounds, resounds,

And will not alter and wants no age.”

As a former newspaper reporter, I find Talbot’s simple statement, “I can learn nothing from news,” a reliable mood-elevator. In his second collection, Rough Translations (David Robert Books, 2012), Talbot includes sixteen translations of Horace and one each of Virgil and Callimachus.

`The Past Is a Pledge for the Future'

When writing to or for dullards, a writer must work harder not to write dully. The witty whet our wit. We write up to them, not down. George Gordon writes in “Cowper’s Letters” (More Companionable Books, 1947): “The truth is, of course, that letter-writing is like conversation: a social thing. It takes two to make a good letter. The first article in the equipment of a letter-writer is not a turn for phrases, but a friend; and the first personal requisite is the generosity to value friendship. If these are available no obstacle need be apprehended; you have only to draw your chair in, dip your pen, and be honestly yourself.”

That William Cowper (1731-1800), a suicidally tormented man, should have written letters that are still readably charming, funny and moving after more than two centuries, defies the modern understanding of human personality. As poet and man, Cowper can’t be reduced to clinical categories for easy comprehension. Though depressed and reclusive, comfortable only among a small circle of friends and family, and then only in a rural setting, Cowper wrote letters that rival Keats’ as the finest in the language (that both poets suffered lends a plangent quality to everything they wrote, though that alone is not sufficient to explain their literary qualities). They carry philosophical and emotional freight lightly -- never a sermon or treatise, always a conversation. On Sept. 4, 1787, Cowper writes to his cousin, Lady Harriett Hesketh (1733-1807), whom he addresses as “My dearest coz.” The poet refers to his uncle, Hesketh’s father, who has been ill:

“But years will have their course and their effect; they are happiest, so far as this life is concerned, who, like him, escape those effects the longest, and who do not grow old before their time. Trouble and anguish do that for some, which only longevity does for others. A few months since I was older than your father is now [Cowper had suffered his fourth major breakdown between January and June 1787]; and though I have lately recovered, as Falstaff says, some smatch of my youth, I have but little confidence, in truth none, in so flattering a change, but expect, when I least expect it, to wither again. The past is a pledge for the future.”

The passage is a model of felicitous letter-writing. Cowper is witty, wise and trusting enough of his cousin to tactfully confide in her. He gives, but not too much, and without a hint of self-pity. He feels sufficiently free to cite Shakespeare, whom he misquotes, but in an interesting fashion. In Act I, Scene 2 of King Henry IV, Part Two, Falstaff actually says:

“Your lordship, though not

 clean past your youth, hath yet some smack of age in

 you, some relish of the saltness of time; and I must

 humbly beseech your lordship to have a reverent care

 of your health.

“Smatch” is misremembered, though Shakespeare uses it elsewhere. He gives it to Brutus in Julius Caesar:

“I prithee, Strato, stay thou by thy lord:

Thou art a fellow of a good respect;

Thy life hath had some smatch of honour in it:

Hold then my sword, and turn away thy face,

While I do run upon it. Wilt thou, Strato?”

For “smatch,” the OED gives “taste, smack, flavour.” Cowper uses the word correctly if not accurately. Gordon, in his essay on Cowper’s letters, confirms this:

“Most of his own letters were written out of mere affection, without his knowing when he began what he intended to say, or whether he had anything to say at all. They are totally unpremeditated, and flow from him like talk.”

`A Peep Show'

A Sterne-reading reader has stumbled on “raree-show,” a word William Hazlitt used in a passage I quoted in Sunday’s post. It’s a delicious word, seldom used today but perfectly suited to our world. I learned of “raree-show” more than forty years ago on first reading Tristram Shandy. The Widow Wadman, as usual, is putting the moves on the oblivious Uncle Toby. Something is irritating her eye and she asks Toby to look into it. The Widow is seated beside him and our narrator says: “Honest soul! Thou didst look into it with as much innocency of heart, as ever child look’d into a raree-shew-box; and ’twere as much a sin to have hurt thee.” Just so we get the joke, Sterne, the most smutty-minded of writers, has Tristram observe in the next paragraph: “—If a man will be peeping of his own accord into things of that nature—I’ve nothing to say to it--” 

In the OED, the first definition of raree-show is straightforward, dating from the seventeenth century: “a set of pictures or a puppet show exhibited in a portable box for public entertainment; a peep show.” That latter phrase has salacious modern connotations that Sterne may have been toying with. The dictionary gives nine citations between 1677 and 2003, including quotes from Tom Jones (1749) and Walter Scott’s Peveril of the Peak (1823). 

The second definition is even closer to Sterne’s sense: “an exhibition, show, or spectacle of any kind, esp. one regarded as lurid, vulgar, or populist.” We get this usage in a letter of Edward Fitzgerald’s published in 1889: “Do you see Dickens’ David Copperfield? Carlyle says he is a showman whom one gives a shilling to once a month to see his raree-show.” Unexpectedly, the word shows up in William Gaddis’ The Recognitions (1955): “He’ll show you... He'll put up a real maudlin raree-show for you.”

In the third sense, raree-show is1681—2003 “a mass noun: spectacular or lurid display,” as in an 1809 letter by Scott: “Those immense London Stages fit only for pantomime and raree show.” Among the compounds are “raree-show box” and “raree-show performance.” Here, the dictionary cites Sterne’s usage. Now the reader can understand the word’s contemporary relevance and usefulness. Among our counterparts to the raree-show, to entertainments that are “lurid, vulgar, or populist,” are video games, Star Wars and the Harry Potter phenomenon, tacky children's concoctions consumed by adults.

`The Bustle and Raree-Show of the World'

“‘Tis pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat,
To peep at such a world; to see the stir

Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd;

To hear the roar she sends through all her gates

At a safe distance, where the dying sound

Falls a soft murmur on the uninjured ear.” 

Among his other qualities, William Cowper is the poet of spectatorship, of diffidence expressed as a willingness to observe the world, not plunge into its swelter. Cowper was a high-strung man, affectionate and loyal as a friend but plagued by depression and thoughts of suicide. He hardly recognized civic affairs and remained blithely immune to politics. His passions were poetry and religion, not troublemaking. The passage above is from Book IV, “The Winter Evening,” of The Task (1785), lines 88-93. The phrase “loopholes of retreat” rang a distant bell, one somehow associated with William Hazlitt. A brief search turned up that essayist’s “On Living to One’s-Self” (1821), which I had quoted more than eight years ago:

“What I mean by living to oneself is living in the world, as in it, not of it: it is as if no-one knew there was such a person, and you wished no-one to know it: it is to be a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things, not an object of attention or curiosity in it: to take a thoughtful, anxious interest in what is passing in the world, but not to feel the slightest inclination to make or meddle with it. It is such a life as a pure spirit might be supposed to lead, and such an interest as it might take in the affairs of men: calm, contemplative, passive, distant, touched with pity for their sorrows, smiling at their follies without bitterness, sharing their affections, but not troubled by their passions, not seeking their notice, nor once dreamt of by them. He who lives wisely to himself and to his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of the retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray…”

Odd coming from Hazlitt, who seldom resisted sticking his nose into others’ business, and who spent his final years writing a four-volume apologia for Napoleon Bonaparte. The OED attributes the phrase’s origin to Cowper and says it “has been used by many later writers,” but doesn’t cite Hazlitt. The other citations are more variations on a theme. In 1853, the Christian Remembrancer includes this sentence: “The loop-holes through which we view the household manners of these times may be few and contracted.” Also cited is George Meredith’s The Egoist (1879): “Dim as the loophole was, Clara fixed her mind on it till it gathered light.”Further searching turned up “The Loophole of Retreat” as a chapter title in an 1861 novel I have not read, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs, an escaped slave who wrote under the pseudonym Linda Brent. The phrase is so attractive and useful, I continued looking and discovered Hazlitt liked it enough to recycle. In a chapter collected in Lectures on the English Poets, “On Swift, Young, Gray, Collins &c.,” he writes of Thomas Gray:

“He is not here on stilts or in buckram; but smiles in his easy chair, as he moralises through the loopholes of retreat, on the bustle and raree-show of the world, or on `those reverend bedlams, college, and schools!’ He had nothing to do but to read and to think, and to tell his friends what he read and thought.”

`Some Frail Memorial Still Erected Nigh'

In Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place (Granta, 2014), Philip Marsden visits Tregony, a village in Cornwall, and approaches two men in the churchyard of St. Rumon’s. One is digging a grave. The other is “busy leaning on his spade.” Marsden describes the latter as “an elderly man with a jowly face” who is “quite happy to interrupt his leaning for a little chat.” We know the type here in the U.S. He’s the sort of man who leans and loafs at his ease though he is not a goldbricker, exactly, but a man who budgets his time wisely and is comfortable delegating tasks. He would be genuinely affronted if you accused him of feather-bedding. In contemporary terminology he is a consultant. And he is eloquent:

“`Exciting place, a graveyard. Least I always think so. Always something going on.’ We looked around at the headstones and the empty paths and the shadowy places beneath the sycamore. He extended a finger to an age-skewed memorial beside us. `Best stones are they [sic] slate ones – like that. Nice curly writing. Stays hundreds of years on slate – not like the limestone. Weather gets to the limestone and it’s gone in no time, wiped away.’”

Some of us would concur. A visit to a graveyard is less morbid than a prompt for contemplation. There’s much to read, wildflowers in abundance and quiet. Often the company is excellent. Marsden has come to St. Rumon’s in search of John Whitaker (1735-1808), historian and hot-tempered clergyman. Marsden says of him: “He knew Dr Johnson. He was friends with Edward Gibbon (who showed him for comment the manuscript of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire). In 1771 he was elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.” Johnson scoffed at Whitaker’s two-volume History of Manchester. Marsden agrees but adds: “…in the couple of miles around his rectory, Whitaker discovered a fresh way of revealing the past: through old walls and rubbish piles, ruins, fields, oral history and toponymy.”

Thomas Gray wrote the primal text on English churchyards when Whitaker was still a boy. It remains among the most popular and rereadable poems in the language:

“Yet even these bones from insult to protect

Some frail memorial still erected nigh,

With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked,

Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

“Their name, their years, spelt by the unlettered muse,

The place of fame and elegy supply:

And many a holy text around she strews,

That teach the rustic moralist to die.”

Dr. Johnson had serious reservations about Gray’s poetry, but about the “Elegy” he was generous and grateful:

“In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours. The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo. The four stanzas beginning `Yet even these bones’ are to me original: I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him.”

`And in Fact Adonize'

No sound is so amusingly plaintive as a writer bewailing his inability to write, the grim labor of it all and the likely ingratitude of readers. On Thursday I found such a lament online and it cheered me for the rest of the day. You’d think the poor thing was slaughtering hogs or pumping out septic tanks. Naturally, I thought of Dr. Johnson’s common-sense retort: “A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it” (reported by Boswell in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, 1785). If “doggedly” sounds a little vague, here is more practical how-to advice from working writers: 

“Whenever I find myself growing vapourish [OED: “inclined to depression or low spirits”], I rouse myself, wash and put on a clean shirt brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoestrings neatly and in fact adonize as I were going out – then all clean and comfortable I sit down to write. This I find the greatest relief –” 

That would be John Keats in a letter to his brother and sister-in-law, George and Georgiana Keats, in September 1819. The poet was already coughing up blood from tuberculosis, and was dead seventeen months later at the age of twenty-five. Another writer who died from tuberculosis was Laurence Sterne. Even before he started writing Tristram Shandy, Sterne showed symptoms, as does the novel’s narrator. In fact, the book can be read as an account of a comic race against mortality so long as the title character keeps writing, he can continue evading death. Sterne published Tristram Shandy in nine volumes between 1759 and 1766, then A Sentimental Journey  Through France and Italy in 1786, and then died three weeks later. In Chapter 4, Section LXXII, Tristram, like Keats, also “adonizes”:    

“Now in ordinary cases, that is, when I am only stupid, and the thoughts rise heavily and pass gummous through my pen— 

“Or that I am got, I know not how, into a cold unmetaphorical vein of infamous writing, and cannot take a plumb-lift out of it for my soul; so must be obliged to go on writing like a Dutch commentator to the end of the chapter, unless something be done— 

“—I never stand conferring with pen and ink one moment; for if a pinch of snuff, or a stride or two across the room will not do the business for me—I take a razor at once; and having tried the edge of it upon the palm of my hand, without further ceremony, except that of first lathering my beard, I shave it off; taking care only if I do leave a hair, that it be not a grey one: this done, I change my shirt—put on a better coat—send for my last wig—put my topaz ring upon my finger; and in a word, dress myself from one end to the other of me, after my best fashion.” 

A man should always dress and groom well when performing work in which he takes pride, even if he’s dying.

`It Will Remain a Meadow, Wild'

“An essay is a walk, an excursion, not a business trip.”

The only itinerary the best essays heed is serendipity. Route and destination are plotted by the GPS of sensibility, not a thesis. Unplanned is not the same as aimless. The seasoned traveler trusts his feet and never hurries to get home and go to bed. Call it creative dawdling. Joseph Epstein titled his 1992 essay collection A Line Out for a Walk. In his “Note on the Title,” Epstein identifies his source as Paul Klee and says: “A subject is all the familiar essayist needs. Character, point of view, observation, past reading, these he has, or ought to have, in his kit.”

The quote at the top was written by Michael Hamburger (1924-2007), a German-born English poet I know as the translator of Paul Celan and a character in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. You’ll find it in “An Essay on the Essay,” collected in Testimonies: Selected Shorter Prose 1950-1987 (Carcanet, 1989). Here, Hamburger extends his walking metaphor:

“. . .this essay passes over a certain field—but with no intention of surveying it. This field will not be ploughed or cultivated. It will remain a meadow, wild. One walker is interested in wildflowers, another in the view, a third collects insects. Hunting butterflies is permitted—everything except the intentions of surveyors, farmers, speculators.”

And yet he describes the essay as “an outmoded genre,” but promptly seems to reverse himself by adding, parenthetically: “(`Form’ is what I almost wrote, but the essay is not a form, has no form; it is a game that creates its own rules.)” Only a confident essayist can casually, without apology, contradict himself and continue walking along. Consistency is an overrated virtue, after all (another essayist said something like that). The fun of essays (reading them, writing them) is their mingled sense of security and surprise. It’s never enough merely to drift like a rudderless boat. Johnson titled The Rambler well. Hamburger writes:

“The essay is not a form, but a style above all. Its individualism distinguishes it from pure, absolute or autonomous art. The point of an essay, like its justification and its style, always lies in the author’s personality and always leads back to it.”

And yet, style alone is insufficient if by style we mean poeticisms and attitudinizing. An essay can have its genesis in something as mundane as journalism, fiction, a blog post or a book review. “The spirit of essay-writing,” Hamburger says, “walks on irresistibly, even over the corpse of the essay, and is glimpsed now here, now there, in novels, stories, poems or articles, from time to time in the very parkland of philosophy, formidably walled and strictly guarded though it may seem, the parkland from which it escaped centuries ago to wander about in the wild meadow. . . somewhere or other the spirit of essay-writing is walking on; and no one knows where it will turn up. Perhaps in the essay again, one day?” Hamburger’s prognostication was at least half right. He was writing in 1964. The subsequent half-century would give us Guy Davenport, Joseph Epstein, Theodore Dalrymple, Cynthia Ozick, Oliver Sacks and a few others.

`More in Notions Than in Facts'

Jane Austen concludes a letter to her older sister Cassandra on Feb. 8-9, 1807:

“There, I flatter myself I have constructed you a Smartish Letter, considering my want of Materials. But like my dear Dr Johnson I beleive [sic] I have dealt more in Notions than Facts.—I hope your Cough is gone & that you are otherwise well.—And remain with Love, Yrs affectionately, J.A.”

Joseph Epstein reports that someone asked the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle if he ever read novels. Ryle is supposed to have replied, “Yes, all six.” That is, Austen’s, whose novels are those that most resemble poetry. Not because they are “poetic” – as in flowery or inflated with self-importance – but because they run like well-engineered machines of wit. Nothing loose, baggy or monstrous about them. In the passage quoted above, Austen refers to a letter Johnson wrote to Boswell on July 4, 1774. Included by Boswell in his Life, it begins:

“I wish you could have looked over my book before the printer, but it could not easily be. I suspect some mistakes; but as I deal, perhaps, more in notions than in facts, the matter is not great; and the second edition will be mended, if any such there be.”

The book in question is A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, an account of Boswell and Johnson’s eighty-three-day tour of Boswell’s native country in 1773. That the lexicographer makes a distinction in a proofreading context between “notions” and “facts” is surprising. Some writers are maniacally strict when it comes to the purity of their text.  This is the man, after all, who said, “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure” (ed. G.B. Hill, Johnsonian Miscellanies, 1897). Johnson uses “notions” the way we might use “understandings” or “impressions.” They are less rigorous than facts, just as off-the-cuff descriptions of events are less rigorous than equations.

The Idler #100 (March 15, 1760) is written in the voice of “Tim Warner,” who complains of his wife: “She smiles not by sensation but by practice. Her laughter is never excited but by a joke, and her notion of a joke is not very delicate. The repetition of a good joke does not weaken its effect; if she has laughed once, she will laugh again.”

“Miss Gentle,” in short, is precisely the opposite of Miss Austen, who never married, never repeated a joke, and wrote “all six.”

`To Enjoy Jazz and Cocktails and Night-Clubs'

I’ve never been much of a church-goer though I enjoy the rituals and the singing of hymns (“A serious house on serious earth it is”). I understand that a church service of any faith is not primarily an aesthetic event, which severely limits the experience of those not among the faithful, but I’ve consistently drifted off during the sermons, Catholic or Protestant. I can’t attest to whether most sermons are dull, but it seems like an opportunity squandered. The priest or minister has, in effect, a captive audience, and his subject -- God and man -- is of mortal interest to every congregant. But no cleric I’ve heard has rivalled Father Mapple. In fact, my appreciation of homiletics is largely literary. I love the prose of Donne and Andrewes (not to mention the King James Bible), which makes me a dilettante when it comes to religion.

I have found another literary exception to the sermonic rule of dullness. G.K. Chesterton published an essay in 1928 in the London Daily Telegraph under the title “A Sermon Against the Sin of Pride.” It was republished posthumously in The Common Man (Sheed and Ward, 1950) under a new and better title: “If I Had Only One Sermon to Preach.” Chesterton’s essential point is easily stated: “all evil began with some attempt at superiority,” about which he says: “No truth is now so unfamiliar as a truth, or so familiar as a fact.” Chesterton’s formulation is classically Chestertonian:

“Pride is a poison so very poisonous that it not only poisons the virtues; it even poisons the other vices.  This is what is felt by the poor men in the public tavern, when they tolerate the tippler or the tipster or even the thief, but feel something fiendishly wrong with the man who bears so close a resemblance to God Almighty.”

Who wouldn’t agree? The know-it-all, wise-guy, pundit, trivia freak, anal retentive, op-ed writer and self-anointed bet-settler are species universally despised. Of course, Chesterton has a sermon to preach, proposing an alternative to indulgence in Pride, and he gets around to it near the end of his essay (or lay sermon):

“. . . I should begin my sermon by telling people not to enjoy themselves.  I should tell them to enjoy dances and theatres and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; to enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if they can enjoy nothing better; to enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to this other alternative; but never to learn to enjoy themselves.  Human beings are happy so long as they retain the receptive power and the power of reaction in surprise and gratitude to something outside.”

In Chesterton’s essay you’ll find common sense, love of paradox, vivid prose and a memorable sermon: “Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making the truth the test.”

`He Learned from Lear'

The books a man reads in extremis are always of interest. Normalcy and abundance tend to breed complacency, and so we lower our standards and read undemanding and even admittedly trashy books. In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) was falsely arrested for treason, and three months later sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, the smallest of the Îles du Salut in French Guiana. He remained there for four and a half years. Dreyfus was the only inmate on the island. His only human company were the six guards who watched over him. Thanks in part to Emile Zola’s open letter, J'accuse!, and the dedication of his family, Dreyfus was returned to France in 1899 and, in 1906, exonerated of all charges and reinstated in the French army. 

Dreyfus’ wife, Lucie, was permitted to send him books. The author he wanted most was Shakespeare. In Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 1789-1945 (1991), Michael Burns writes: “Not the playwright dissected by Taine in his study of English literature (and stripped, according to Dreyfus, of all grandeur), but the humorous, passionate, sympathetic Shakespeare, the prisoner `never understood better than during this tragic epoch [that is, during his imprisonment], and who, like Dreyfus, may also have turned to Montaigne as a source of inspiration.” Burns reports Dreyfus enjoyed the comedies but found in King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and Richard III “poetic variations on the themes he had been attempting to describe in letters to his wife and family.” Burns writes: 

“…he learned from Lear—that most `heart-rending play’ that exposes all the `steps of human misery’—the `bitter irony of Shakespeare’s moral philosophy.’ For Dreyfus Lear was the definitive treatise on the `weakness of the human condition,’ a confirmation  of how `the wicked rarely profit from their  crimes, while the good are rarely rewarded for their Virtue.’ All of Shakespeare’s works become a compendium of allegories of all of Dreyfus’s dilemmas.” 

Burns’ book is excellent. A reader wrote to me on Sunday: 

“I think Lear Shakespeare’s finest play. I have always been fascinated with an exchange between Edgar and his father. Most people, anyone familiar with the play, recall Edgar’s words to his father when Gloucester says he will go no farther: `No farther, sir;  a man may rot even here.’ 

“Now, everybody knows Edgar’s famous response: `What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither: / Ripeness is all.’ 

“Few remember, however, Gloucester’s response: `And that’s true too.’”

`A Universal Human Tendency'

You can judge a man by the books he reads, the books he rereads, the passages in them he remembers and the ones he quotes to others. The man who judges Polonius a fount of wisdom and cites him in that spirit leaves us with an impression counter to the one he intends. At some indeterminate point, aesthetics and morality intersect, however fleetingly. This is not science; this is intuition tempered by good sense and humility in the face of reality. In reading King Lear again I came upon this passage from Act I, Scene 2, spoken by Edmund, the sociopathic son of the Earl of Gloucester: 

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!” 

Some years ago, the first book of Theodore Dalrymple’s I bought was Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Ivan R. Dee, 2001), a collection of pieces written for City Journal. He uses Edmund’s words as its epigraph. Dalrymple quotes a portion of the same passage in 2003 in another City Journal article, and in a 2007 article in the British Medical Journal. He returned to Edmund’s words in a speech he gave last year in Michigan, and glosses them like this: 

“This passage points, I think, to an eternal and universal temptation of mankind to blame those of his misfortunes that are the natural and predictable consequence of his own choices on forces or circumstances that are external to him and outside his control. Is there any one of us who has never resorted to excuses about his circumstances when he has done wrong or made a bad decision? It is a universal human tendency.” 

And it shows up again in Chapter 4 of Dalrymple’s most recent book, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality (Encounter Books, 2015). In this context he notes: “Instead of astrology, however, we believe in psychology, of whatever school—and call it progress.” It takes a deft writer to repeatedly quote an evil fictional character to good purpose.