`Abrupt, Articulate, Flashing Figures'

“Most important, Powell invariably gave the impression of being wholly confident about his ideas; one could almost see them start bright and bold from his mind and then, more often than not, twist away before reaching his fingers.”

It reads like a premature obituary. Bud Powell (b. 1924) had another two years to live, but Whitney Balliett is too tactful and too respectful of earlier accomplishments to say it bluntly: Something inside the pianist had died. Powell had returned to the United States in August 1964 after living in France since 1959. Among jazz critics and listeners, Powell’s health problems and multiple hospitalizations were common knowledge. Tuberculosis, mental illness and alcoholism had ravaged the pianist once present at the creation of bop, and who had played with Parker, Gillespie and Kenny Clarke. Sonny Rollins calls him “the great professor of the music.” Here is Powell performing “Get Happy” in Paris in 1959. On his return to the U.S., Powell was booked for a homecoming engagement at Birdland. His biographer, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., writes in The Amazing Bud Powell (University of California Press, 2013):

“How the engagement went depended on whom you asked and which night they saw him. Greeted by a seventeen-minute standing ovation when he first took the stage, the night of August 25 was filled with promise. But when he didn’t show up for the gig one night in October and went missing for two days, it became clear that returning to New York was perhaps not the best idea for his health. Powell was fired from the gig, and things get worse.”

Balliett attended one of the Birdland shows. His review is a sort of valedictory, and the critic works hard to detect signs of the old genius:

“He has gained weight, which adds to his impassive Oriental look, and between numbers and during his accompanists’ solos he sat large and still, eyes hooded, slowly twiddling his thumbs. It was a stony inertia, and his playing reflected it. The old mastery was there, but it was caught in an eerie slow-motion. The long, barbed melodic lines hung together, but they flowed somewhere below the beat, like the delayed-action timing in a dream. Occasionally he caught up and held tight, only to fall below again, with a flurry of missed notes. Entire passages went by in a monotone, but they were relieved by abrupt, articulate, flashing figures.”   

Powell is a pianist I respect more than enjoy, unlike, say, Tatum, Garner and Evans. His early recordings can be breathtaking. His life was a long misery. He was a gifted composer, and his best known song is probably “Un Poco Loco.”  Powell died on this date, July 31, in 1966. He was forty-one.

[See Balliett’s frequent mentions of Powell throughout Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000 (2000).]

`That Astonishment That Seizes Each of Us'

The poem starts with a walk without destination, the sort that best stimulates contemplation. (The walkers we see in the park resemble spastic infantry on a forced march.) The place, unstated, is Montreal. It’s twilight in February, still bright. The walker longs for May and observes the mannequins who “smile and wave” in shop windows. His “onerous day at the office” is over. Now, unfettered, what's next? Not Happy Hour but Quintus Horatius Flaccus – Horace. The 2,000^th anniversary of the Roman poet’s death (in 2008) approaches, and scholars will hold solemn symposia. The walker has other plans:

“I’ll hail you from the wings, reread your poems

when May returns, in the garden

under the Great Bear you must have so admired

--Stella, quas nostril septum soliti vocari trione—

with that astonishment that seizes each of us

beneath the starry sky, familiar and dark.”

Our poet footnotes the Latin: “The stars that generally go by the name of Septentriones, and less frequently, Septemtriones, i.e. the Little Bear [or Big Dipper]; vocitare, a frequentative of vocare, is sometimes used. The sentence is taken from Cicero’s Treatises on the Nature of the Gods.” Stars, distant and cold, glimmering with light emitted two-hundred years ago, join the Roman and Canadian poets. The walker recalls that lilacs bloom in May and he will turn forty-five: “Fugerit, invida, aetas. What have I done / With this time frittered away?” The lament of the middle-aged. The Latin, “jealous time will have (already) fled,” is from Horace’s Ode I.11. “. . . I don’t know who I’ll be / when this better time comes, if it ever does.” Reading Horace for our walker is a comfort and a reproach:

“One carries oneself along like some bag

one drags about, stuffed with god knows what,

a bag one doesn’t dare look inside, but leaves

behind on a subway bench. I paraphrase

in these approximate lines, dazzling sapphics

whose perfection drives me to despair:

Otium diuos rogat . . . I’d never dare

imitate this ode in which each word

fits more firmly than a stone set it

an indestructible monument.

But spoken verse, the low style, the

barely metred conversation of the Epistles—I can dream,

perhaps, of approaching these a little.”

The Latin phrase translates as “he asks the gods for ease, or leisure,” the first words of Ode II.16. The walk is nearly over and the walker has arrived at no grand conclusions. “I don’t know for whom I write, or why.” Who does? Those who claim to write for others, with their interests in mind, are deluded with pride. Those who understand the "why" are lying. The poem’s final words are “Otium diuos rogo.” Rogo means “I ask.” C.H. Sisson freely translated Horace’s Epistle II.3, “Ars Poetica,” in 1974. He writes, in part:

“The man who can actually tell when a verse is lifeless

Will know when it doesn’t sound right; he will point to stragglers,

And equally put his pen through elaboration;

He will even force you to give up your favourite obscurities,

Tell you what isn’t clear and what has got to be changed,

Like Dr. Johnson himself. There will be no nonsense

About it not being worth causing trouble for trifles.

Trifles like that amount in the end to disaster,

Derisory writing and meaning misunderstood.”

[The poem outlined above is “A Winter Stroll Pondering the Poetry of Horace” from Montreal Before Spring (trans. Donald McGrath, Biblioasis, 2015) by Robert Melançon.]

[Mike Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti tells me that the line from Cicero as quoted in the book is actually "Stellae, quas nostri septum soliti vocari trione," but more correctly it ought to be "Stellae, quas nostri septem soliti vocitare trione."]

`Passions, Death, Storms, Etc.'

“. . . the `poetic’ is all too often cover for lack of imagination and yet, the word `poetic’ still has to stand for something, still has to make good somehow on its mandate, as Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare did make good on it in their day. And why do we keep going back to them, after we’ve read the various menus at hand, experienced a few yummy verses, had our exotic drinks, having parked ourselves on trendy terraces?”

Because Homer & Co. are “yummy” but never less than nutritious and sustaining -- comfort food that does more than comfort. In a long, digressive, Keatsian letter to me, Norm Sibum does what poets have always done – complain about other poets and their abettors. It’s bleak out there. Poetry shrivels from the incompetence, failure of will and stunted literacy of poets and readers alike. Norm continues:

“Why Leopardi? Who, I suspect, would rather have written the Odyssey than Zibaldone, but that the spirit for such a venture had gone out of the world. I don’t think the poet works ex nihilo.”

All true, though Leopardi gave us, along with his blog-like Zibaldone, the Canti.  I am reading The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen (Harvard University Press, 2016) by Aileen M. Kelly, and find this:

“He had a deep attachment to the poetry of Leopardi, whom he describes as an `apologist of death . . . who represents the world as a league of the wicked waging war against a few virtuous madmen.’ He recalls defending him against Mazzini, who was incapable of comprehending `these poisonous reflections, these shattering doubts.’”

Leopardi writes in his Zibaldone: “Passions, deaths, storms, etc., give us great pleasure in spite of their ugliness for the simple reason that they are well imitated, and if what Parini says in his Oration on poetry is true, this is because man hates nothing more than he does boredom, and therefore he enjoys seeing something new, however ugly.”

`To Be Anything You Like Except Kind'

People have always feigned kindness, especially in unkind ages. It’s useful to be seen committing kind acts and repeating kind sentiments. Our fellows are gratified and so are we. To be congratulated on our kindness releases a warm tide of self-congratulation within: I really am a good person. Everybody says so. It must be true.

I’m reading Chinese Shadows for the first time since shortly after it was published in 1977. The author is the Belgian-born Pierre Ryckmans (1935-2014), who wrote under the name Simon Leys. He was a sinologist, novelist, art historian, translator and essayist who settled in Australia. One of the essential books published in recent years is Leys’ The Hall of Uselessness (2013), a collection of essays. Leys had lived and taught in China, knew the culture and language, and witnessed some of the ravages of Mao’s Cultural Revolution first-hand. Chinese Shadows and Leys’ other books on China were violently condemned by Mao’s Western apologists. In Chap. 2, “Follow the Guide,” Leys addresses the “deeper scars” left on the Chinese who survived the Cultural Revolution:

“. . . I cannot but wonder if the history of the last twenty years has not borne fruit, twenty years of systematic incitation to `class hatred’ and the denunciation of basic human impulses, such as compassion for suffering, whoever is the victim (this is now condemned as the expression of a bourgeois humanism that denies the class struggle), has not brought about the general and willed lowering of the traditional virtues that give harmony to Chinese life.”

All of which sounds eerily familiar. Leys notes that Mao didn’t invent class hatred and violence. He had a handy model in the Soviet Union of Lenin, Stalin and their successors. He was just more ambitious. I didn’t remember this, but Leys then quotes from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope (trans. Max Hayward, 1970):

“There were once many kind people, and even unkind ones pretended to be good because that was the thing to do. Such pretense was the source of hypocrisy and dishonesty so much exposed in the realist literature at the end of the last century. The unexpected result of this kind of critical writing was that kind people disappeared. Kindness is not, after all, an inborn quality—it has to be cultivated, and this only happens when it is in demand. For our generation, kindness was an old-fashioned, vanished quality, and its exponents were as extinct as the mammoth. Everything we have seen in our times—the dispossession of the kulaks, class warfare, the constant ‘unmasking’ of the people, the search for an ulterior motive behind every action—all this has taught us to be anything you like except kind.”

Kindness, in other words, is not a virtue, not the unforced impulse that makes human relations sufferable. It is, as Ambrose Bierce defines it in The Devil’s Dictionary, “a brief preface to ten volumes of exaction.”

`A Faint-Hearted Formula for Happiness'

In the library I found a copy of Parnassus, Vol. 24, No. 1, from 1999. As with any randomly chosen literary journal, it contains much rubbish, trendy and unreadable, but also good work – a review and poems by Eric Ormsby, an essay on epigrams by David Barber and one on William McGonagall by Thomas Disch. Also, a prose piece by Zbigniew Herbert, “Securitas,” translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter, who call it a “fable.” It was collected in The King of the Ants: Mythological Essays (Ecco Press, 1990). Herbert dances along a narrow line. Readers who fear the horrors of the “prose poem” can relax. His prose, in translation, is free of fog and filigree. “Poetic” effects are banished. “Securitas” is no cheap allegory awaiting decryption. Herbert keeps things light and drily comic, more Mozart than Mahler. The nearest cognates are the parables in Kafka’s notebooks. The Carpenters call Herbert’s form “a twentieth-century philosophical parable.”  

In “Securitas,” the Romans “at the beginning of the Empire” conceive a new deity, and soon all the predictable human squabbling, theological and otherwise, takes over. One thinks of Poland and the years of Nazi and Communist rule, the competing demands of security and personal liberty, and the way totalitarian regimes assert the primacy of one over the other. Meanings ripple outward from the central image. Here, Herbert looks at Schadenfreude, that universal human quality:

“The victims of Securitas--more precisely, the half-eaten victims--avoided speaking about her. Why should they? The few who had the courage to make their revelations public met with disbelief and a sense of distaste. The conviction is very strong that the misfortune of another reduces, in a way empties, the reservoir of bad fate--that another's bad luck protects us and increases our chances of survival. This salutary illusion always wins over the simple logic of facts. It will be this way forever.”

Securitas, Herbert tells us, “avoided pomp, ostentation, even publicity. She was severe, and content to have faceless executors.” History concurs. Herbert weighs what to call them, and settles on “attendants,” a word in English that hints at servility without announcing it:

“The Attendants wait in vain for their Proust. Great art is slow in paying them due justice or crowning their labors. These were countless. Rapt attention, speeding up or slowing down of the pace, sudden turns and pirouettes in a metropolitan ballet, floors, corridors, straining of memory, patient standing at street corners, empty hours in a cafe with a newspaper read many times over, fitting proofs of guilt together from overheard whispers, bits and snatches of conversation, papers, even from the flies on the ceiling. But these were not reflected, with a hundredfold echo, in any long roman fleuve, figurative painting, or opera.”

The smooth deployment of irony is bracing, like smelling salts. Herbert gives it to us straight: “Securitas puts us face to face with the cruel alternative: either security or freedom. TERTIUM NON DATUR.” The Latin, literally, means “third is not given”; figuratively, “there is no third option” or “there is no alternative.” For the powers that be, as Herbert knew them, it’s a binary choice. One is reminded of those aging former Soviet citizens who, in the early years of glasnost, yearned for the golden days of Stalin.

This Thursday marks eighteen years since Herbert’s death in Warsaw at the age of seventy-three. Like Montale and Cavafy, he remains one the twentieth-century’s partisans for civilization who celebrate our ever-threatened inheritance. He closes his fable bluntly: “Security, what is security? A faint-hearted formula for happiness. Life without struggle.”

`Symmetry and Balance in Sentences'

“The Fletcher Henderson Story: A Study in Frustration, which contains sixty-four numbers recorded between 1923 and 1938, is somewhat like reissuing Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary. Both Henderson’s band and Johnson’s work were seminal affairs, both were training schools, both were widely copied, both had serious faults, and both, despite their considerable period appeal, are outdated.”

Well, yes, but Johnson’s Dictionary retains an attractive readability that exceeds “period appeal.” Whitney Balliett, reviewing the Henderson reissue for The New Yorker in 1961, is right on both counts – Henderson and Johnson – but right in a way that is of little consequence. “Outdated” is a vaporous criticism, and implies that “up-to-the-minute” is always a term of praise (the opposite, I suspect, may be true). I still listen to Henderson – “King Porter Stomp” – and still read Johnson because both are reliable sources of pleasure. 

Most often I consult dictionaries for etymologies and occasionally for definitions, and that means the Oxford English Dictionary, which in turn usually means the digital version. The hard copy is cumbersome but reassuring, and I would never discard it. I say “consult,” but most of the time I spend in dictionaries is motivated by something less utilitarian -- a faith in serendipity. You can start an hours-long ramble by looking up a single word. Consider, in the OED, “Johnsonian”:

“Of, belonging to, or characteristic of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709–84), a celebrated English man of letters and lexicographer; applied esp. to a style of English abounding in words derived or made up from Latin, such as that of Dr. Johnson.”

A conventional enough definition, accurate though shading into disapproval. Other potential synonyms for Johnsonian I might propose: noble, tortured, learned, compassionate, opinionated, argumentative, hard-working, idleness-prone, guilt-wracked, devout, neurotic. In short, thoroughly contradictory and thus, human. The OED gives secondary definitions -- “a student or admirer of Dr. Johnson” – and offers Johnsonism, Johnsonianism and Johnsonise (the last, from Boswell: “I have Johnsonised the land; and I trust they will not only talk but think Johnson.”) Best of all, as is usually the case, are the citations. My favorite, one I quoted here more than eight years ago, is from Ruskin’s Praeterita:  “Johnsonian symmetry and balance in sentences.”

`Neither Sweet Nor Simple'

Again, Chekhov is in Nice, in September 1897, taking a room in La Pension Russe on the Rue Gounod:

“Its attraction, apart from cheapness, was its Russian owner (a Mme Vera Krugloleva). The Russian cook was a former serf who had stayed in France thirty years ago when her owners returned to Russia, and now occasionally made the borshch or shchi her guests pined for. She lent the pension mystery: she was married to a negro sailor and had a mulatto daughter, Sonia, who was seen at night as she plied her trade on Nice’s streets.”

Chekhov had an uncanny gift for inhabiting a Chekhovian world, whether in Russia, the French Riviera or Badenweiler, where tuberculosis would kill him in seven years. Our world too is Chekhovian when we read his stories. That is, he reminds us that life is remarkably sad and amusing, usually without a lesson attached, and always interesting in its excitement and tedium, if we pay sufficient attention. Whatever happened to the negro sailor and Sonia? Chekhov might have written their subsequent fate. Even non sequiturs make sense. His final words were: “It’s been such a long time since I had champagne.” His body was shipped home from Germany to Russia in a crate labeled “oysters.” Because of an error in the train schedule, his brother Aleksandr missed the funeral, as he had missed their father’s. More than four thousand mourners accompanied Chekhov’s body on a four-mile procession across Moscow to the cemetery.

The quoted passage above is from Anton Chekhov: A Life (Henry Holt and Co., 1997) by Donald Rayfield, who says of his subject: “Chekhov’s life was short, but neither sweet nor simple.”

`I Am Alive and Well'

In the era before antibiotics, the city of Nice on the French Riviera was to Europe as New Mexico was to North America – an open-air sanitarium for patients seeking a cure for tuberculosis. Maupassant took note of the “lungers” in Sur l’eau (1888; translated as Afloat), set along the Mediterranean coast. Chekhov left Melikhovo for Nice in September 1897, and spent eight months there at the urging of his doctors. On Oct. 4 he wrote to his mother from Nice, sounding very much like a dutiful son (he was thirty-seven):

“I am alive and well and lack for nothing; I eat and sleep a lot. It’s warm here, and when

I go out of doors I don’t need an overcoat. I’m staying in a Russian pension, by which I mean a hotel run by a Russian lady. . . . There are orange and Seville orange trees in the garden, as well as palm trees and oleanders as tall as our linden trees. The oleanders are all in bloom. The dogs wear muzzles, and there are all kinds of breeds. A day or two ago I saw a long-haired dachshund, an elongated beast a bit like a hairy caterpillar. The cooks all wear hats; domestic carriages are pulled by donkeys, which are quite small, about the size of our Kazachok [one of Chekhov’s ponies at Melikhovo]. It’s very cheap to have laundry done here, and they do it very well.” [trans. Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips, Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters, 2004]

Even in a letter to his mother, Chekhov is Chekhovian. In his notes to Letters of Anton Chekhov (trans. Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, 1973), Karlinksy tells us Chekhov settled in the Pension Russe, a boarding house for visiting Russians on Rue Gounod, and that Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, author of The Golovlyov Family (1876), had once lived there. He paid eleven francs a day for a spacious room with a southern exposure. Karlinsky says: “It was owned by a Russian lady and was especially celebrated for its elegant Russian-style cuisine (a typical dinner was: borscht, poisson glace, squab, veal, salad greens, ice cream and fruit).” In the letter to his mother translated by Bartlett and Philips, Chekhov says: “We have a Russian cook, Evgenia; her cooking is like a French chef’s (she has been living in Nice for thirty years) but every so often we have borscht or fried mushrooms.”

Chekhov kept busy in Nice. He wrote “In the Cart,” “Home," “Ionych,’ and three masterpieces: “The Man in a Shell,” “Gooseberries” and “About Love.” He renewed his commitment to Alfred Dreyfus and support for Emile Zola, and found time to improve his French. Chekhov argued with his friend and editor Alexi Suvorin, a notorious anti-Semite and anti-Dreyfusard. On Jan. 4, 1898 he wrote:

“The Dreyfus case has gotten up steam and is on its way, but it’s still not going full power yet. Zola is a noble soul, and I (I belong to the syndicate and have already received a hundred francs from the Jews) am delighted by his outburst. France is a wonderful country and has wonderful writers.”

Here is Karlinsky’s footnote to the second sentence: “A sarcastic reference to the repeated assertions of New Times [Suvorin’s newspaper] that anyone offering proof of the innocence of Dreyfus was in the pay of an international Jewish syndicate.”    

`Read and Write Without a Shadowed Care'

I’ve become the old guy who would sit on the park bench in the afternoon sun, feeding the pigeons and squirrels, except I have to work and don’t have time for idleness. Nor do I understand the notion of retirement. Golf? You’re kidding. I’m happiest when working, even if only pulling weeds or writing about faculty retirements. I’m fortunate: I enjoy my own company (a rare gift among humans) and enjoy what David Solway in Installations (Signal Editions, 2015) calls “The Art of Thinking”:

“. . . never disappointing the admiring gaze

and the confident patience

of the one who waits and watches.”

Solway’s poems often begin in observation and contemplation. He is not a notably meditative poet – probably too easily riled -- but certainly is more spectator than actor, which is only right for a poet. He uses lines from Book III of Keats’ Endymion as the epigraph to his own poem of the same name: “But the crown / Of all my life was utmost quietude: More did I love to lie in cavern rude.” Solway’s “Endymion” sent me back to Keats’, where I found this a few lines later:

“I would watch all night to see unfold   

Heaven’s gates, and Aethon snort his morning gold  

Wide o’er the swelling streams: and constantly          

At brim of day-tide, on some grassy lea,

My nets would be spread out, and I at rest.”

Aethon snorts because the Greek aithôn can mean “burning” or “shining,” but as an epithet it usually is applied to horses. Solway’s poem is a drawn-out double entendre, and not his best work. Better is a poem addressed to another Canadian poet, “A Letter to Robert Melançon on His Retirement.” Solway pays homage to Melançon’s Le Paradis des apparences (2004), translated into English by Judith Cowan as For as Far as the Eye Can See (Biblioasis, 2013). Melançon taught at the University of Montreal for thirty-five years and retired in 2007. In the poem’s final lines, Solway writes:

“And then, when time can spare you for the task,

you’ll pledge your lines beside the wooden shrine

of our Lady of Abundance, and find

you need not trade the freedom of your days

for all Arabia’s wealth or all the tomes

of Pergamum and Alexandria,

once self-sufficient on your Dunham farm,

once in your element of pastoral

where you may school the clamour of the age

and quell the dictates of eternity,

to plough and seed and reap without a hitch

and read and write without a shadowed care.”

`A Summer Afternoon’s Supreme Iambic'

Reading outdoors in Houston this time of year invites melanoma, heat stroke and, of late, the Zika virus. According to the semi-mythological heat-index, the temperature at noon Thursday was 110° F. Even skinny people in repose were sweating. A woman I know was waiting for the campus shuttle bus, in the sparse shade of a live oak. Normally proper and demure, she whispered, “Even my underwear’s dripping,” which was far more than I wanted to know. But I was returning to my office from the library and found a bench in the shade of a building, and decided to defer the afternoon’s work for a few minutes. I’d felt an urge to read L.E. Sissman again. He was a favorite of mine and of my late friend D.G. Myers, who, like Sissman, died of cancer, though I haven’t been able to read his poems since David’s death almost two years ago. In Sissman’s first collection, Dying: An Introduction (1968), I read “Dear George Orwell, 1950-1965 [Sissman was well aware that Orwell died in 1950],” including these lines:

  

“But always in the chinks

Of my time (or the bank’s),

I read your books again.

In Schrafft’s or on the run

To my demanding clients,

I read you in the silence

Of the spell you spun.

My dearest Englishman,

My stubborn unmet friend.”

That’s how we read certain writers, just as we seek the company of certain friends for reasons we may not understand. Few human capacities are more important than friendship, with its mingling of intimacy and trust, reliance and autonomy, and I know from experience that writers frequently grow into unmet friends. Reading Sissman again felt like the impulse to renew a friendship that had grown a little stale from disuse. As Johnson told Boswell: “A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.” Another book I had with me was Robert Melançon’s For as Far as the Eye Can See (trans. Judith Cowan, Biblioasis, 2013), one of my favorite recent poetry collections. Here is 120 from that collection:

“The reader who’s lifted his eyes from his book

perceives the sky above as the true ocean,

the immense expanse of blue enclosing

“the whole earth, at whose end we might tumble

out of everything, should we ever find that end.

An enormous white cloud appears as

“the crest of foam on a wave; it breaks and

streams in tatters while a pair of gulls fly through

the hollow space where blue ebbs and flows.

“Before picking up the thread of the sentence

Where he left off, this reader will have scanned

A summer afternoon’s supreme iambic.”

Melançon identifies that magical moment when, after being lost in a book, consciousness returns to our immediate surroundings and everything looks a little different, at once familiar and strange. The power of a book to induce self-forgetting ought to frighten us.

`The Languor of the Heart and the Pang of Thought'

Wednesday’s post included a fleeting mention of Yevgeny Abramovich Baratynsky (1800-1844), a Russian poet praised and befriended by Pushkin and admired by Mandelstam, Zabolotsky, Shalamov and Brodsky. Wednesday morning, Norm Sibum wrote to me: “Say, in your travels, did you ever come across a Russian poet named Baratynski? Just wondering. He’s supposed to have been the Russian Leopardi and roughly contemporary to him.” When I wrote back, I assumed Norm was joking but I was wrong. He hadn’t yet read the post, and replied: “Christ, more synchronicity at work: I hadn't heard of Baratynski until last night.” Nor had I, but it appears to be a good time to discover a poet who remained a complete blank to us until two days ago.

Last year, Arc Publications brought out a slender edition of Baratynsky’s Half-light and Other Poems, translated by Peter France, and this year Ugly Duck Presse published the 584-page A Science Not For for the Earth: Selected Poems and Letters, translated by Rawley Grau. France in his introduction confirms Baratynsky’s kinship with Leopardi, saying: “. . . there is much in the clear-sighted, bleak vision of man and society in the Canti that reminds one of the poet of Half-light: the historical pessimism, the noia (something like Baudelaire’s spleen), the awareness of human fragility and ephemerality, but also the idealism and the vital honesty and magnanimity.”

Superficially, based on a single reading of France’s versions, Baratynsky seems like a stiffer, more formal and classically minded poet than Leopardi. The Russian’s world is muted and melancholy, less profoundly bleak than Leopardi’s. An English-language cognate might be Keats (“glut thy sorrow on a morning rose”). Here is France’s version of an untitled 1828 poem:

“My talent is pitiful, my voice not loud,

but I am living; somewhere in the world

someone looks kindly on my life; far off

a distant fellow-man will read my words

and find my being; and, who knows, my soul

will raise an echo in his soul, and I

who found a friend in my own time,

will find a reader in posterity.”

That’s the best any writer can hope for. The most fruitful writer/reader connections tend to be occult, after all, defying ready explanation. Why do some writers – often a wildly divergent assortment – elicit a tingling sense of kinship? Leopardi certainly does that for me. Go here to see Peter France’s coupling of Baratynsky’s “Autumn” and Pushkin’s poem of the same name. For a reader of English, the echo of Keats is inevitable. In his preface France writes:

“Pushkin is irresistibly attractive, Baratynsky is probably more of an acquired taste. When I first started to read him, he wasn’t exactly my type of poet -- too bleak, too aloof. Yet I began to feel (the translator's abiding illusion?) that I could find my way into his vision, his voice. I'm not sure now why I was originally drawn to translate his poems. Perhaps at first it was partly the challenge of the new.”

Encountering a new poet from another time and place can be disorienting. Am I getting Baratynsky or France, or some indeterminate mingling of both? How much am I missing? What remains of the original? What France gives me I like. There’s a clarity and occasional plain-spokenness about Baratynsky’s lines that’s attractive. I can’t say how “major” Baratynsky is. I’m too removed from the original. I’ll defer to Nabokov’s assessment in the commentary to his four-volume translation of Eugene Onegin (1964):

“If in the taxonomy of talent there exists a cline between minor and major poetry, [Baratynsky] presents such an intermediate unit of classification. His elegies are keyed to the precise point where the languor of the heart and the pang of thought meet in a would-be burst of music; but a remote door seems to shut quietly, the poem ceases to vibrate (although its words may still linger) at the very instant that we are about to surrender to it. He had deep and difficult things to say, but never quite said them.”

`One Wave in an Ocean of Millions'

Do young people still fall bookishly in love with Rossiya-Matushka, Mother Russia, and stay up too late reading Pushkin, Gogol and Tolstoy? Are they still smitten with Natasha Rostov or Prince Andrei? Saul Bellow wrote of his youth in Chicago with Isaac Rosenfeld: “We were so Russian, as adolescents, and perhaps we were practicing to be writers.” A writer I couldn’t read today on a bet, Dostoevsky, was my first crush, at age twelve. It had something to do with pervasive melancholy, an incipient spiritual light, the melodrama of everyday living and probably hormones. The Russians seemed to feel more than the people in my neighborhood. The affliction may be genetic. My middle son, who just turned sixteen, is teaching himself Russian, and War and Peace is calling to him. His closest friends at boarding school, his boxing partners, hail from Россия-Матушка.

I’m enjoying The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015), edited by Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. Chandler has already translated Pushkin and Leskov for us, and one of the last century’s great novels, Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, but he reminds us in his introduction: “Almost all Russians see Pushkin, rather than Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, as their greatest writer. Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak and Tsvetaeva are loved at least as passionately as Bulgakov, Nabokov, Platonov, Sholokhov and Zoshchenko.” I hadn’t known that Varlam Shalamov, author of The Kolyma Tales (trans. John Glad, 1980), described by Chandler as “a masterpiece of Russian prose and the greatest of all works of literature about the Gulag,” was a poet before he wrote his stories. Here is “Baratynsky,” written in 1949 and named for Pushkin’s contemporary Yevgeny Abramovich Baratynsky:

“Three Robinson Crusoes

in an abandoned shack,

we found a real find –

a single, battered book.

“We three were friends

and we quickly agreed

to share out this treasure

as Solomon decreed.

“The foreword for cigarette-paper:

one friend was delighted

with a gift so unlikely

he feared he was dreaming.

“The second made playing cards

from the notes at the back.

May his play bring him pleasure,

every page bring him luck.

“As for my own cut –

those precious jottings,

the dreams of a poet

now long forgotten –

“it was all that I wanted.

How wisely we’d judged.

What a joy to set foot in

a forgotten hut.”

In a note, Chandler writes: “This poem records a real incident. Shalamov describes how playing cards were made from paper, saliva, urine, a little chewed bread and a tiny piece of crayon.” The final section of the anthology is inspired: “Four Poems by Non-Russians.” Most interesting and most pertinent to our literary love of Mother Russia is “Learning the Letter Щ” by Nancy Mattson, a Canadian-born poet who lives in London. Щ is the Cyrillic letter usually transliterated shcha. The sound resembles the English sh, but is prolonged: “It is basically a long, palatalized version of English’s `sh’ as in `ship.’” Mattson’s poem is a wash of Щ’s. See the final stanzas:

“I remember the shooshch

of my grandmother’s tongue and teeth

sucking her tea through a sugar cube

telling her stories in Finnish

“Hush now, it’s the one about her sister

in Soviet Russia, how she barely survived

on watery cabbage soup:   ЩИ

but was finally crushed     lost      she

“disappeared

the sound is a soft shchi

one wave in an ocean of millions

that receded but never returned”

`A Well-Stocked Head and a Better-Stocked Library'

“The ideal which grew up in the Renaissance and has not yet died away, that of the many-sided humane thinker with a well-stocked head and a better-stocked library, the ideal personified in Montaigne, Ronsard, Johnson, Gray, Goethe, Voltaire, Milton, Tennyson, and many more—that ideal was, in modern times, first and most stimulatingly embodied in Petrarch.”

Francesco Petrarca – Petrarch -- died on this date, July 19, in 1374, in Arquà, near Padua, one day before his seventieth birthday. It’s risky to judge the men and women of the past by the blinkered standards of the present. Our assurance of our rightness is self-serving and arrogant, nothing more. Given all of that, Petrarch still seems curiously modern, almost one of us. Gilbert Highet’s characterization of the poet in The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (1957) articulates our notion of an educated person: “a well-stocked head and a better-stocked library.”

Petrarch wrote prolifically in Latin and Italian. Among the most amusing and modern-seeming of his Latin works is Invectives (trans. David Marsh, I Tatti Renaissance Library, Harvard University Press, 2003). “Invectives Against a Physician” was prompted by the illness of Pope Clement VI in 1351-52. The pope was being treated by a committee of physicians. Petrarch wrote to Clement suggesting he rely on a single, experienced doctor, which provoked one of the committee members to attack Petrarch. In his lengthy tirade, the poet says, “Your own wasted pallor comes from the chamber-pots you study every day,” but he’s just warming up:

“Against your weapons, laughter and silence and contempt would have sufficed. There was no need for words. But I could not be silent. Otherwise you might have held a celebration in some sewer–which to you would be like a Capitol–among the banging of bed-pans and the farting of the sick--for such would be your trumpets, such your cheering army—to celebrate the ruin of the Muses and the destruction of sacred studies.”

Another essay in Invectives, “On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others,” reads like a prescient preview of Montaigne, who wasn’t born until 1533. Petrarch can be as unexpectedly personal and free with his “I” as the Frenchman: “When I was in good health, I almost never let a day pass in idleness. I read, wrote, or pondered some learned question. I listened to others as they read, or questioned them when they were silent. I sought out not only learned men, but learned cities as well, so that I would return more learned and more virtuous.”    

Despite the amnesia pandemic, Petrarch is still with us. Section 55 of The Triumph of Love (1998) is Geoffrey Hill’s response to the final poem in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, a hymn to the Blessed Virgin, “Vergine bella, che di sol vestita.” Hill begins: “Vergine bella – it is here that I require / a canzone of some substance. There are sound / precedents for this, of a plain eloquence / which would be perfect.” The poem concludes:

“Vergine bella, as you

are well aware, I here follow

Petrarch, who was your follower,

a sinner devoted to your service.”

About the poet’s death, Morris Bishop (Nabokov’s closest friend at Cornell) recounts a possibly apocryphal anecdote in Petrarch and His World (1963):

“According to an old story he was found, pen in hand, collapsed over his Life of Caesar. The story, of which the first extant record is dated fourteen years after his death, is now regarded as unreliable, being all too apt. It is at least possible, and fitting with all we know of his state of body and mind. I cannot willingly surrender the conviction that death found Petrarch reading and writing, praying and weeping. Nor the conviction that death gave him a kindly greeting, and that Petrarch responded with a welcome; for, as he said, what we commonly call death is in truth only the end of death.”

The story leaves us admiring Petrarch and his biographer.

`Their Temporary Heads of Yellow Crepe'

Sometimes, despite proverbial wisdom, you can judge a book by its cover. Take Compass & Clock (Swallow Press / Ohio University Press, 2016) by David Sanders. On the cover is Sunrise by Jeff Kallet, an arrangement of quadrilaterals -- some straight-edged, some ragged – a circle (which presumably accounts for the title) and a half-circle. What makes the grouping of shapes so pleasing are the colors – denim blue, pumpkin orange, black, newly poured concrete gray, moss green and a circle of red. Some artists have a gift for colors, contrasting them, bouncing one off another, creating symmetries and asymmetries that please the inner eye. In Kallet’s palette, yellow is most vivid, a deep yellow like egg yolks, aspen leaves in the fall, taxis and sulfur. The poets of such yellows are Klee, Matisse and Mondrian. Across a lifetime, each of us assembles a private library of associations with various colors. For me, yellow is soothing and suggestive of life itself – what green is for many. Alexander Theroux in The Primary Colors: Three Essays (1994) sees things differently. Of yellow he writes:

“It is the color of early bruises, unpopular cats, potato wart, old paper, chloroflavedo in plants, forbidding skies, dead leaves, xanthoderma, purulent conjunctivitis, dental plaque, gimp lace, foul curtains, infection and pus (`yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog's eye,’ sings John Lennon in `I Am the Walrus’), speed bumps, callused feet, and ugly deposits of nicotine on fingers and teeth.”

Yellow shows up sparsely in Sanders’ poems, which should not surprise us given that he lives in Central Ohio, a muted landscape of color. In Texas, his work might be spattered with yellow. He notes forsythia and a school bus without mentioning their color. He likens piano keys to “chipped and yellowed teeth.” In “Unattended Consequences,” the speakers and a neighbor visit an abandoned settlement in the woods, where all that remains are the flowers planted by the long-gone inhabitants. The neighbor says:

“`Timbermen—who knows when or why—

tried to settle here, built some houses,

then disappeared. Left just the daffodils. . . .’”

And the speaker comments: “Such curiosities should be passed on / to kin, not just the guy across the street,” and adds:

“In all fairness, though, he chanced to tell me

just because the daffodils were up—

their temporary heads of yellow crepe

both maverick marks and mockery of survival—

the afternoon we saw them in the woods.”

“Mockery of survival,” yes, but survival nevertheless. That’s yellow, despite the hint of cowardice.

`He Drives His Peg Into the Cliff'

“The artist who can get down on paper something not himself—some scheme of values of which he takes—so that the record will not waver with time or assume grotesque perspectives as viewpoints alter and framing interests vanish, has achieved the only possible basis for artistic truth and the only possible basis for literary endurance.”

                   

By these standards, our age will be recalled, if at all, as one of literary history’s near-vacuums. The Age of Hill ended two weeks ago, and the resulting vacancy rings in our ears. The best writers never proselytize but their words embody “some scheme of values” – not Truth, necessarily, but tentative, reality-tested truths.

“Homer so registered values and was the educator of Greece [and all of Western civilization]. It is the hardest and rarest of jobs. This or that novel which we in haste mistake for a mirror of the age—The Forsyte Saga, for instance—usually turns out to be a reflection in moving water. Language alters, connotations slither, the writer leans on what his audience understands, and that understanding does not endure.”

 The quoted passages come from “Remember that I Have Remembered,” Hugh Kenner’s review of the 1950 reissue of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, collected in Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature (McDowell, Obolensky, 1958). Later in the same essay Kenner writes: “The point at which a writer defines something, whether one moral term--`wise passiveness’—or an entire civilization—Cummings’ Eimi—is the point at which he drives his peg into the cliff.”

`I Would See This Light Again'

“The town of Nice is altogether indefensible, and therefore without fortifications.”

Tobias Smollett is the embodiment of the cantankerous, ever griping traveler, which is not such a bad thing. I’ve always suspected the narrator of Travels through France and Italy (1766) is a persona created because Smollett knew that complaining is funnier than a positive attitude. Sterne caricatured Smollett as “Smelfungus” in A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), and while I love Sterne’s novel, it’s not as funny as Smollett’s travel book.

After the death of their fifteen-year-old daughter in April 1763, Smollett and his wife left England in June, and did not return for two years. The novelist spent more time in Nice than any other place in France or Italy. Like his novel Humphrey Clinker (1771), Travels is epistolary in form. Twenty-six of the forty-one letters that make up the book are sent from Nice. While he is famously anti-Gallic, Smollett is never blind to the charms of France. Here he is in Letter XIII, soon after his arrival:

“When I stand upon the rampart, and look round me, I can scarce help thinking myself inchanted [sic]. The small extent of country which I see, is all cultivated like a garden. Indeed, the plain presents nothing but gardens, full of green trees, loaded with oranges, lemons, citrons, and bergamots, which make a delightful appearance. If you examine them more nearly, you will find plantations of green pease ready to gather; all sorts of sallading, and pot-herbs, in perfection; and plats of roses, carnations, ranunculas, anemonies, and daffodils, blowing in full glory, with such beauty, vigour, and perfume, as no flower in England ever exhibited.”

Another celebrator of Nice was Henri Matisse, who lived and worked there from 1917 until his death in 1954. The city is home to the Musée Matisse. One of the first paintings he made in Nice was a self-portrait, The Violinist at the Window, followed by The Bay of Nice. Matisse was a Northerner, born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, 120 miles northeast of Paris, and he reveled in the Mediterranean sunlight. In Matisse in Nice: 1917-1954 (Thames and Hudson, 1996), Xavier Girard, former curator of the Musée Matisse, quotes Matisse in conversation with Louis Aragon:

“Nice, why Nice? Shall I tell you? In my art I have attempted to create a crystalline environment for the mind. This necessary limpidity I have found in several places around the world; in New York, in the South Pacific, and in Nice. If I had painted in the North, as I did thirty years ago, my painting would have been different.”

Girard quotes the painter as describing the sunlight in Nice as “soft and delicate, in spite of its brilliance,” and saying “When I realized that every morning I would see this light again, I couldn’t believe how lucky I was.”

`Things of an Intolerable Intimacy'

A musician on modern warfare:

“My ear, accustomed to differentiate sounds of all kinds, had some time ago, while we still advanced, noted a remarkable discrepancy in the peculiar whine produced by the different shells in their rapid flight through the air as they passed over our heads, some sounding shrill, with a rising tendency, and the others rather dull, with a falling cadence.”

The Austrian-born violinist Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962) in his memoir Four Weeks in the Trenches: The War Story of a Violinist (1915) takes a scientific interest in analyzing the sounds of an artillery barrage. I knew from my reading that seasoned soldiers could differentiate various guns by their sounds, and I remember my father describing the distinctive sound of a German “eighty-eight.” One detects an almost aesthetic component in Kreisler’s account. By the summer of 1914, he was already an international musical star. My friend Amy Biancolli writes in Fritz Kreisler: Love’s Sorrow, Love’s Joy (Amadeus Press, 1998):

“. . . Kreisler was at the top of his profession and, it seemed, the civilized world. Wherever he toured, he packed houses; however he played, he earned raves. Nowhere was he more popular than in the United States, where his musical panache, combined with a movie-idol charisma, made him one of the most universally recognized celebrities on the concert circuit.”

By Aug. 1, 1914, Kreisler and his wife had left Switzerland and returned to Vienna. The violinist was an army reservist, and he rejoined his regiment at Graz. They were ordered to Lemberg, and by Aug. 10 were fighting Russian troops at the front. Amy quotes “Kreisler, Wounded, Tells of War,” a story published on Nov. 29, 1914, in the New York Times: “. . . when you hear the first shell burst, it is a terrible thing; the whining in the air, the deafening crash, and the death it spreads around it. That is what you think of your first shell. But you think less of the second and third, and after that they pass out of your mind.”

In Four Weeks, Kreisler claims his musician’s ears enabled him to pinpoint the position of enemy guns: “Every shell describes in its course a parabolic line, with the first half of the curve ascending and the second one descending. Apparently in the first half of its curve, that is, its course while ascending, the shell produced a dull whine accompanied by a falling cadence, which changes to a rising shrill as soon as the acme has been reached and the curve points downward again.”

On Sept. 6, Kreisler’s unit was attacked by Russian Cossacks, and he was knocked down by a horse. When another mounted Cossack struck him in the hip with a sword, Kreisler shot him with his revolver. He was shuttled among field hospitals and returned to Vienna on Sept. 10. Kreisler was discharged from the Austrian army due to permanent disability in October. His military service had lasted less than three months. When he toured the United States in November, Kreisler was hailed as a war hero, as well as a virtuoso. The U.S. wouldn’t enter the war for more than two years.

Kreisler quickly wrote his war memoir and it was published by Houghton Mifflin in the spring of 1915. Amy notes that “the violinist’s celebrity seemed to overshadow his musicianship,” and she compares his fame to a rock star’s.  About the memoir she writes:

“Read today, Four Weeks remains an energetic and astonishingly literate war story filled with advancing Russians and the agonizing cries of wounded men. Whether all of it is true (and there is reason to doubt that it is, considering Kreisler’s predilection for creative storytelling) is, in this regard, a moot point, since the book was widely accepted as fact and its effect on the public was obvious and real.”

There’s little sense of horror in Kreisler’s memoir. In his telling, the war is a brief, inconvenient interruption in a life otherwise filled with musical triumphs. His war story shares little with the better-known English accounts by Blunden, Graves, Sassoon and Ford Madox Ford. In No More Parades (1925), the second novel in his Great War tetralogy Parade’s End, Ford’s description of a German shelling on the Western Front is utterly different in tone from Kreisler’s:

“An enormous crashing sound said things of an intolerable intimacy to each of those men, and to all of them as a body. After its mortal vomiting all the other sounds appeared a rushing silence, painful to ears in which the blood audibly coursed.”

In July 1916, Ford was blown into the air by a high-explosive German shell. For three weeks the novelist lost his memory, even forgetting his own name, and suffered shellshock. In his poem “Remembering Ford Madox Ford and Parade’s End,” Howard Nemerov writes:

“. . . yet we, who did the next

Big one entailed upon us at Versailles,

Read you and believe your word. They were,

As we are, a sorry lot; you made them good.”

`He and the Hundred Best Authors'

“I say `the great literature’ not because of its aura of cultural strenuousness, but simply because, in the past, there is only great literature. Only the great stands the racket of time and survives from generation to generation; the rest dies for lack of staying power.”

My most humiliating act as a reader would be to list the contemporary writers I read, enjoyed and even admired when I was young (one shameful example: Donald Barthleme). In my defense, I should note that I entered literature without context. I knew no one who read seriously and could advise me intelligently. I had no understanding of literary history. Reading in my house was strictly utilitarian (newspapers, textbooks, restaurant menus). “Literature” was defined by others, and I had never met any of them. My adolescence coincided with a much ballyhooed boom in American writing, and I consumed it indiscriminately, vacuum cleaner-style. I was naïve and trusted critics stupid and acute. With time and a well-tended critical sense, one naturally jettisons dubious enthusiasms and embraces new and better ones, while holding on to the best of what one’s callow self read without comprehension.

The passage at the top is from V.S. Pritchett’s preface to In My Good Books (Chatto & Windus, 1942), his first collection of reviews. Its twenty-five essays were published in the New Statesman and Nation, and all were written during the grim early years of World War II, which, Pritchett observes, “brings its medical date-stamp heavily down upon every contemporary book.” All that remains are the “topical” and the “classics,” and Pritchett chose to write about the latter:   

“We turn to literature not only for respite, relaxation or escape from the boredom of reality and the gnaw of suffering, but to get away from uncertainty. And certainty is in the past. There, so it seems to us, things have been settled. There we can see a whole picture. For to see something whole becomes a necessity to people like ourselves whose world has fallen to pieces. Perhaps, we think, the certainty of the past will help our minds to substantiate a faith in the kind of certainty we hope for in the future.”

Not that the past and its literature represent nostalgia for a golden age. On the contrary, Pritchett says: “The past is not serene. It is turbulent, upside down and unfinished.”

He notes that during the Blitz, printers, publishers, bookshops, libraries, readers – civilization itself – were in jeopardy. The same threat festers today, from within and without. A bookless Dark Age is no longer a misanthrope’s bitter vision. Pritchett writes:

“The wise reader is one who prepares himself for the awful moment, a kind of Judgment Day, when only he and the hundred best authors are left in the world and have somehow to shake down together; when he will, so to speak, be stranded in the highest society.”

Pritchett reminds us that literature is part of our education for life, one of the most pleasurable ways we learn how to behave and how to live with ourselves and others. In his brief monograph The English Novel (1930), Ford Madox Ford tells us “the novel supplies that cloud of human instances without which the soul feels unsafe in its adventures.” For readers and writers like Ford and Pritchett, books and life are interleaved. In The Spanish Temper (1954), Pritchett describes a visit to Almería, a city in Andalusia, on the Mediterranean coast. Rather than resorting to economics or politics to make sense of the scene, he turns to a Russian writer of stories:

“The mind drifts to Chekhov in Almería. We are in one of his bright but fading Black Sea towns. One feels the shut-in provincial life ruled by habit and dominated by one or two families. I passed a `school’: twenty little children packed round a dining-room table in a tiny front room, with the master—rather like Chekhov to look at—jammed against the door. A charming sight; but these were privileged children. They actually had a school to go to.”