`Childish Prattlement'

Under the seductive sway of Dr. Tamkin, Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day (1956) recalls scraps of poetry the way we often do in times of heightened emotion. There’s Shakespeare – “. . . love that well which thou must leave ere long” – and Keats – “. . . But now of all the world I love thee best” -- but most touching and thematically appropriate for Bellow’s feckless hero is this from Milton’s “Lycidas”: “Sunk though he be beneath the wat’ry floor.” Wilhelm is drowning in self-pity, naïveté and the world’s indifference. “Lycidas” probably remains the best-known elegy in the language, at least among readers of advancing age. One would expect Bellow to know the poem, but it’s no stretch to believe the bumbler Wilhelm could quote it. “Lycidas” colors our thoughts of death and mourning, as do Shakespeare and Tennyson.

Ten years ago I interviewed a computer scientist who was dying of cancer. Once handsome and quite the lady’s man, he was now a baggy suit on a rack of bones. He had been an undergraduate at Rice University, and on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination he was seated in an English literature class when news of the killing was announced. The professor had been lecturing on Milton, and, unlike other professors, did not cancel his class and, instead, read “Lycidas” aloud to his students. More than forty years later, the computer scientist – like Tommy Wilhelm, not a bookish man -- recited for me:       

“But O the heavy change, now thou art gone,

Now thou art gone and never must return!”

He had tears in his eyes as he spoke the words, and three months later he was dead. In his “Life of Milton,” Dr. Johnson famously wrote of “Lycidas”: “In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new.” It’s a rare misstep for Johnson. On this date, Oct. 31, in 1779, William Cowper had been reading the first volume of Johnson’s recently published Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, including the “Life of Milton.” In a letter to his friend the Rev. William Unwin, Cowper says he has enjoyed the book except for Johnson’s treatment of Milton, which he calls “unmerciful to the last degree.” Cowper takes Johnson’s condemnation of Milton as a personal attack:

“As a poet, he has treated him [Milton] with severity enough, and has plucked one or two of the most beautiful feathers out of his Muse’s wing, and trampled them under his great foot. He has passed sentence of condemnation upon `Lycidas,’ and has taken occasion, from that charming poem, to expose to ridicule (what is indeed ridiculous enough) the childish prattlement of pastoral compositions, as if `Lycidas’ was the prototype and pattern of them all.”

`The Shortcomings of a Tall Tree'

Advice is dangerous, whether heeded or ignored. Both parties set themselves up for hurt and resentment. I once ended an already tepid friendship by reading the draft of an opera libretto based on the life of Christopher Columbus. The author instructed me to be brutally honest, which should have been a clue as to his true sensitivities. I found the whole thing unintentionally funny, broadly reminiscent of Duck Soup. It seemed like a parody of a grand spectacle rather than a grand spectacle, which wasn’t what the author had in mind. I proofed the draft and submitted a detailed set of notes, and that was the last time I ever saw the author in person. We spoke once more by phone, very briefly and loudly. To my surprise, my conscience is mostly clear, after twenty-five years. My only regret is that my motive for taking on the job was flattery. I thought I was quite the smart fellow, and my friend was only being wise in recognizing my gifts (in fact, I did it gratis, which was his principal reason for asking me). I had no business being anywhere near a libretto.

Anton Chekhov was better at managing such things. In 1898, Alexi Peshkov, soon to be Maxim Gorky, sent Chekhov a selection of his stories and asked for his judgment. Chekhov opens with praise and encouragement:

“What do I think? You talent is not to be doubted, and it is a genuine major talent to boot. It manifested itself with extraordinary power, for instance, I love your story, `In the Steppe.’ I actually felt envious at not having written it myself. You are an artist and an intelligent man.”

Not bad. What young writer wouldn’t dance on the ceiling after reading such golden words? How honest was Chekhov being? Was he merely preparing young Gorky for the knockout punch? We’ll never know. Here it comes:        

“Shall I talk about your shortcomings now? That’s not quite so easy. Talking about a talent’s shortcomings is like talking about the shortcomings of a tall tree growing in the garden; the issue at hand is not the tree itself, but rather the tastes of the person looking at the tree. Isn’t that so? I’ll start by saying that, in my opinion, you lack restraint. You are like a spectator in the theater who expresses his delight with so little restraint that he prevents himself and others from listening.”

Gorky had a right to be both crushed and elated to be the object of such exquisitely surgical diplomacy. Seven years later, Gorky joined the Bolsheviks. In a footnote to the letter in Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973), translated by Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, the editors note that early in the twentieth century, Gorky was better known than Chekhov in the West, and later he became Stalin’s pet. Karlinsky writes:

“The same Gorky who as a young man declared freedom to be the highest value in human life, whose very name symbolized liberation to countless young Russians at the turn of the century, now lent the prestige of his name to consolidating Stalin’s regime and helped formulate the restrictive, oppressive and entirely artificial doctrine of Socialist Realism, which is still officially the only possible mode of expression any Soviet writer may use. For all this Stalin rewarded Gorky in a way that no other government ever rewarded a writer. He was deified.”

`Deaf to the Temptation of Fame'

Dr. Andrzej Szczeklik (1938-2012) was a Polish immunologist who gave the lie to C.P. Snow’s silly and annoyingly long-lived notion of “The Two Cultures.” The title of his second book to be translated into English, Kore: On Sickness, the Sick, and the Search for the Soul of Medicine (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Counterpoint, 2012), though fulsome, suggests the range of his interests. He possesses the digressive conversational gifts of a born essayist. One of the essays collected in Kore, “The Arcana of Art and the Rigors of Science,” begins with an anecdote lifted from The Master and Margarita, moves on to Heraclitus, then Brueghel and Auden, and settles, briefly, on the subject of sensitivity among doctors. Szczeklik contrasts a physician’s obligation to “put on a layer of armor every day” with the risk of sacrificing empathy. Doctors, he says, must “have a sensitive heart.”

Szczeklik then recalls an amusing, Solidarity-sanctioned act of defiance in Krakow against Gen. Jaruzelski in 1983. As a result of his participation in the demonstration (“we were just carried away by joy and elation”), Szczeklik was dismissed from his job as deputy vice-chancellor of the Medical Academy, forbidden to teach and put on trial for inciting a riot. He was convicted but avoided prison. The story is very funny and very Polish. I won’t recount the subsequent digressions-in-digressions, false bottoms and  shaggy-dog stories, except to say that Szczeklik eventually gets around to quoting Pascal (Pensées, trans. W.F. Trotter, 1931) on the subject of vanity:

“Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier, a soldier’s servant, a cook, a porter brags and wishes to have his admirers. Even philosophers wish for them. Those who write against it want to have the glory of having written well; and those who read it   desire the glory of having read it. I who write this have perhaps this desire, and perhaps those who will read it . . .”

Few passages in all of literature make the honest reader so instantaneously uncomfortable.  We feel found out, with no place to  hide. Szczeklik then quotes the first four lines of “The Old Masters” by Zbigniew Herbert, and says they “sound like an echo of Pascal.” The poem dates from the early nineteen-eighties, the heroic days of Solidarity, and was collected in Report from the Besieged City (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, 1985). It expresses Herbert’s sense of solidarity with the great artists of the past:

“The Old Masters

went without names

“their signature

was the white fingers of the Madonna

“or pink towers

di città sul mare

“also scenes from the life

della Beata Umiltà

“they dissolved

in sogno

crocefissione

“they found shelter

under the eyelids of angels

behind hills of clouds

in the thick grass of paradise

“they drowned without a trace

in golden firmaments

with no cry of fright

or call to be remembered

“the surfaces of their paintings

are smooth as a mirror

they aren’t mirrors for us

they are mirrors for the chosen

“I call on you Old Masters

in hard moments of doubt

“make the serpent’s scales of pride

fall from me

“let me be deaf

to the temptation of fame

“I call upon you Old Masters

“the Painter of the Rain of Manna

the Painter of Embroidered Trees

the Painter of the Visitation

the Painter of the Sacred Blood”

The final stanzas read like a prayer addressed to the patron saints of the arts, anonymous in the beauty and grace of their work. Herbert was born on this date, Oct. 29, in 1924, and died in 1998.

`These Studies Teem with Error'

My fondness for Marius Kociejowski was sealed when the poet identified his favorite writers as Samuel Johnson and Robert Louis Stevenson. About Johnson, Q.E.D., but Stevenson I pigeonholed as a writer of adventure stories for children, a judgment even I recognized as dubious. After all, when informed of his friend’s death, Henry James said “the loss of charm, of suspense, of `fun’ is unutterable.” On Thursday, the lobbying continued and Marius wrote: “One book of RLS’s that I’d like to press on you is Familiar Studies of Men and Books in which he is at his wittiest, although surprisingly intolerant of Villon.”

The first edition of Familiar Studies was published in 1882. My library has the American edition from 1896, two years after Stevenson’s death at age fifty-four. The copy is flamboyantly inscribed in the front by “Ethel Frances Rayner [sic?], National Park Seminary, Forest Glen, Maryland, Monday, December the sixth 1897.”  Two pages later, the book is signed by Frederick J. Hoffman (1909-1967), the literature professor whose personal library is part of the circulating collection at the Fondren Library. I’ve come across dozens of his books, which are always signed and marked as to place and date of acquisition. In this case: The University of Wisconsin, August 5, 1952. A book with owners dating back more than a century, and in remarkably good condition, feels seasoned, tested, proven. The pages are free of marginalia, and I find only one vertical line, marking a passage in “Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions”:

“To live is sometimes very difficult, but it is never meritorious in itself; and we must have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we should continue to exist upon this crowded earth.”

One hears Thoreau’s characteristic plaint in that sentence, though Stevenson had more reason to utter it than the American. Otherwise, I’ve read only “Preface: By Way of Criticism,” which confirms my respect for Stevenson’s mastery of tone, a gift rare among essayists and most other writers. Johnson had it, as did Hazlitt. This is from the preface:

“In truth, these are but the readings of a literary vagrant. One book led to another, one study to another. The first was published with trepidation. Since no bones were broken, the second was launched with greater confidence. So, by insensible degrees, a young man of our generation acquires, in his own eyes, a kind of roving judicial commission through the ages; and, having once escaped the perils of the Freemans and the Furnivalls, sets himself up to right the wrongs of universal history and criticism.”

Stevenson takes his books and authors seriously, but seldom himself. His descriptions of the tasks at hand are invariably self-deprecating: “literary vagrant” and “a kind of roving judicial commission.” This is appealing. Who wants to read a self-appointed commissar of books? How many critics or essayists possess the humility and confidence to write like this: “For my part, I have a small idea of the degree of accuracy possible to man, and I feel sure these studies teem with error. One and all were written with genuine interest in the subject; many, however, have been conceived and finished with imperfect knowledge; and all have lain, from beginning to end, under the disadvantages inherent in this style of writing.” That reads as though lifted from my daily breviary. 

`My Existence and Cheerful Countenance'

“Noble” is seldom used without a heavy dose of dismissive irony. The quality is rare and no longer valued. Among recent writers, the word might be fittingly applied to the work of Zbigniew Herbert and Geoffrey Hill, but the only American with a rightful claim to it is probably Anthony Hecht. All honor virtù without smirking, and possess great reserves of humor while embodying a certain Roman gravitas. In a 1996 interview I’ve just discovered, Hecht uses another adjective that, like “noble,” is overdue for retrofitting: gallant. My sense is that it survives as a sarcastic synonym for “chivalrous,” another linguistic and cultural fossil. As a noun it might refer to a man who daringly, and with many possible motives, holds the door for a woman. (See Hecht’s “Dilemma”: “Dark and amusing he is, this handsome gallant.”) The OED implies this when, in the word’s etymology section, it reports: “The early senses of the adjective in French are: `dashing, spirited, bold’ (obsolete in French, but the source of the prevailing sense in modern English).” Hecht uses gallant unexpectedly, in connection with the speaker in his great title poem in The Transparent Man (1990):

“Half of my imaginative model in that poem was Flannery O’Connor, whom I had known in Iowa and again in New York City after that. The speaker in `The Transparent Man’ dies of leukemia, not of lupus; and I went out of my way not to make this woman a southerner, a writer, or any of the things that Flannery so importantly was. But there was something about Flannery which was unbelievably gallant. It was that gallantry in her I admired and wanted to produce in my poem. It was the capacity to regard the imminence of your own death and feebleness with a kind of detachment which I thought was quite wonderful. This was what I was aiming for in that poem.”

The O’Connor connection never occurred to me. As in his Holocaust poems, Hecht in “The Transparent Man” chooses material inviting the sob-story treatment, and moves instinctively in the opposite direction. The dramatic monologue helps distance him from unearned emotion. The speaker never reduces herself to the disease that is killing her, and she understands the impact it has on others:

“Though they mean only good,

Families can become a sort of burden.

I’ve only got my father, and he won’t come,

Poor man, because it would be too much for him.

And for me, too, so it’s best the way it is.

He knows, you see, that I will predecease him,

Which is hard enough.  It would take a callous man

To come and stand around and watch me failing.”

In a Feb. 11, 1958 letter to her friend Maryat Lee (The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, 1979), O’Connor writes: “You didn’t know I had a DREAD DISEASE, didja? Well I got one. My father died of the same stuff at the age of 44 but the scientists hope to keep me here until I am 96. I owe my existence and cheerful countenance to the pituitary glands of thousands of pigs butchered daily in Chicago, Illinois at the Armour packing plant. If pigs wore garments I wouldn't be worthy to kiss the hems of them."

That’s gallantry, of a sort, though not to everyone’s taste. And so is this, later in the same letter: “I am bearing this with my usual magnificent fortitude.” 

`For a Writer to Be His Age'

“There are not many Doctor Johnsons to set forth upon their first romantic voyage at sixty-four.”

Two-thirds of a lifetime ago, there was not a place on earth I did not wish to visit. I dreamed of living in Ireland, Israel, Saskatchewan and even Chicago. I know now I was less a romantic voyager than a feckless soul in Ohio. Dreaming compensated for chronic inaction. I mistook gear-grinding for passionate intensity, to quote my then-favorite poet. I boasted I would never live to see thirty, and almost got my wish. The real adventure proved to be getting from one prosaic day to the next, and then learning the days weren’t really so prosaic, if not always poetic. The line at the top is from Chap. 2 of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Virginibus Puerisque (1881), “Crabbed Age and Youth.” Stevenson, who knew something of loss and regret, goes on: 

“Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud Hernani. There is some meaning in the old theory about wild oats; and a man who has not had his green-sickness and got done with it for good, is as little to be depended on as an unvaccinated infant.” 

No more flashing for me. My “romantic voyage” was postponed at the dock, not unlike Dr. Johnson’s. With Boswell he toured Scotland in 1773, and while on the Isle of Skye turned sixty-four, as I do today. I’ve grown into my age, and no longer feel twenty-one or even seventy-three. Auden told the Paris Review in 1972: “It’s frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, `What should I write at the age of sixty-four,’ but never, `What should I write in 1940?’” 

`The Infallible Instinct of the Artist'

“Pacing the streets of town he looked both ways,

For pleasure, and for fame; compiled with care

A chronicle of this divided gaze,

“Needing to view his own reflection there

To reassure him that he balanced well

Upon the tightrope stretching high and bare.”

The subject is James Boswell, the second and best of Dr. Johnson’s biographers, in a poem, “On the Publication of Boswell’s Journal” (A Word Carved on a Sill, 1956), by a later (1974) Johnson biographer, John Wain. Caches of Boswell’s papers were discovered in Ireland in the nineteen-twenties and -thirties. The first of twelve volumes drawn from this material, Boswell's London Journal, 1762–1763, was published by Yale University in 1950.

“And so however many times he fell

His candour caught him in his bouncy net,

And truthfulness became a magic spell.

“Attentive to the task his nature set,

He chose his prey by instinct, whore or sage;

It was not time to take decisions yet.”

Those unburdened with a complicated understanding of human nature will dismiss Boswell as little more than a diseased, whoring drunk. The London Journal and its “racy” contents proved an unexpected bestseller not for literary but salacious reasons. Scholars have documented Boswell’s sexual relations, between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine, with more than seventy women, at least sixty of whom were prostitutes. He was treated for gonorrhea at least nineteen times. Wain is shrewd about Boswell’s cunning: “He chose his prey by instinct, whore or sage.” The sage is Johnson, whom he idolized.

“So, timidly, he mustered, page by page

His bodyguard, and safe among the crowd

Bequeathed his problems to a later age.

“Till in the era of the mushroom cloud

They, having slumbered through the days of calm,

Jumped out and shouted to be read aloud,

“Flooding the wise with justified alarm.

Surely such frank admissions of defeat

From one so thickly smeared with wisdom’s balm

“Would make it harder still to be discreet:

For how could they still pose as their own masters

When forced to pore on each accusing sheet,

“And underline, in red, their own disasters?”

Thomas Macaulay famously scorned Boswell as “servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot,” and wrote, more damningly: “Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers, Boswell had absolutely none.” Macaulay was an early specimen of what Joseph Epstein has called a "virtucrat." He was blind to Boswell’s true virtues, though elsewhere in the review already quoted he almost sees the light: “That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world is strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has indicated no superior powers of mind, have left us valuable works.”

Wain accepts and thus understands Boswell. He isn’t eager to damn him, nor does he disingenuously ignore his faults. In 1966, Wain reviews Frederick A. Pottle’s James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740-1769 and lays out a mature, common sense portrait of the man and the artist:

“Boswell’s [Life of Johnson] has the excitement, the continuous play of life, of a first-rate novel. It is constructed around a tension of opposites. Boswell brings himself into the story as the anti-Johnsonian hero, the man with none of the Johnsonian qualities. He appears to have done this partly by instinct, and would perhaps have been puzzled if any contemporary reader of the book had pointed it out. But it was the infallible instinct of the artist. Macaulay’s caricature of Boswell as the fool who blundered into writing a great book is only a vulgarized picture of the mental processes of any artist.”

`The Ash of Which Oblivion Is Made'

To be reminded of our forgetability is always bracing, a splash of cold water on the spirit. We judge ourselves so precious and essential to the ongoing health and fitness of the universe, a dose of reality is welcome. The hunger for recognition, fame and its modern mutation, celebrity, is insatiable, and writers are especially susceptible to its blandishments. Borges in “To a Minor Poet of the Greek Anthology” (trans. W.S. Merwin, Selected Poems, 1999) puts it like this:

“Where now is the memory

of the days that were yours on earth, and wove

joy with sorrow, and made a universe that was your own?

“The river of years has lost them

from its numbered current; you are a word in an index.”

As all of us, if fortunate, will someday be. Borges reminds us Callimachus and Simonides of Ceos were once living, breathing, complaining, lusting bags of vanity, just like you and me. At least they, or a few of their fragmented words, are remembered. Borges’ “minor poet,” whoever he may be (or not be, if Borges is writing a ficcione), is “the ash of which oblivion is made.” Is he real? Even Mike Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti can’t “find a likely candidate.”

[Ian Jackson writes: “The flowing water and the nightingales suggest Heraclitus. I suspect that Borges was not thinking of the original elegy on Heraclitus by Callimachus in The Greek Anthology, but of William Johnson Cory's famous rendition or paraphrase, `They told me Heraclitus, they told me you were dead . . .’

“Borges was better read in English literature than in Greek, and Cory’s lines appear in one of his bibles, The Oxford Book of English Verse. It is true that Callimachus is not a minor poet for a classicist, but to the world at large, he is genuinely obscure."]

`Like a Page of the Iliad'

Last Thursday, Hungary dedicated busts of Zbigniew Herbert and Hannah Arendt in Budapest’s Széchenyi Square. The occasion was the sixtieth anniversary, on Oct. 23, of the Hungarian Revolution against Soviet domination. Daily News Hungary reports:

“U.S. Ambassador Colleen Bell told the inauguration ceremony that the writings and ideas of Arendt and Herbert are still the subject of discourse. She cited a letter written by Arendt about the 1956 revolution, in which she said `In any case, Hungary is the best thing that has happened for a long time.’ Commenting on Herbert, she said the Communist regime silenced him several times but he was still fighting against repression with his poems. They both used their knowledge to educate and inspire young people, Bell added.”

That’s a stretch, but we can’t expect a diplomat to be a close reader of poetry. Herbert’s first collection of poems, Chord of Light, was published in Poland in 1956, the year of the Hungarian revolt. Included is “Three Poems by Heart.” In the third section, as translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter, Herbert writes:

“the pigeons—

                  softly gray

“a Poet’s statue was in the park

children would roll their hoops

and colorful shouts

birds sat on the Poet’s hand

read his silence”

You probably think you know where the convergence of statue and pigeons is going, but Herbert leaves it unstated. Pigeons are roughly to public monuments as dogs are to fire plugs. Dictators love to see their image in public, preferably in outsized dimensions. Poets understand the experience can be unexpectedly humbling. Herbert’s poem continues:

“pigeons fell lightly

         like shot down air

“now the lips of the Poet

form an empty horizon

birds children and wives cannot live

in the city’s funereal shells

in cold eiderdowns of ashes”

A much-touted “thaw” was proclaimed in 1956, following Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Party Congress, but those remained bleak years in Poland, Hungary and the rest of the Soviet bloc. Anything resembling freedom was many years away. Herbert concludes his poem:

“the city stands over water

smooth as the memory of a mirror

it reflects in the water from the bottom

and flies to a high star

where a distant fire is burning

like a page of the Iliad”

`Imitate Him If You Dare'

The posthumous fate of writers’ bodies – think of Ben Jonson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne – deserves a mordant chronicler worthy of their literary gifts. For now we can follow their earthly remains with the assistance of various biographers. Consider Jonathan Swift. More decisively than any writer he reveled in the filth and corruption of the human body, even as his own decayed. In Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (Yale University Press, 2013), Leo Damrosch describes Swift’s final dementia as “a second infancy.” The biographer quotes a “bricklayer-poet from Drogheda”: “Reason buried in the body’s grave.” After much suffering, he died on Oct. 19, 1745. No one foresaw it more vividly than the poet in “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift”:

“Behold the fatal day arrive!

`How is the Dean?’—`He’s just alive.’

Now the departing prayer is read;

`He hardly breathes.’—`The Dean is dead.’”

On this date, Oct. 22, Swift’s body was laid to rest in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Ten feet away was the body of his beloved “Stella,” Esther Johnson, who had died in 1728. Only after a century, Damrosch reports, were their remains mingled, at last, in a single coffin. Soon after internment, a brass plaque was installed to mark Swift’s resting place, but Stella’s wasn’t added until early in the twentieth century. “After that,” the biographer reports, “in an ongoing tragicomedy, the plaques migrated from place to place in the cathedral, according to whether each successive dean felt that they belonged together or ought to be kept apart.” The Irish tragicomedy, however, is only just warming up:

“There was a bizarre coda to come. In 1835, the river Poddle, which flows to this day in a tunnel beneath the streets of Dublin, overflowed into the cathedral. Repairs, which Swift himself had urged a century before, had to be made. His coffin was opened, and in accordance with the fad for phrenology [Walt Whitman was an enthusiast], his skull and Stella’s made the rounds of Dublin learned societies. The episode [worthy of the inhabitants of Laputa] was described by a distinguished physician, Sir William Wilde: `The University where Swift had so often toiled again beheld him, but in another phase.’ The phrenologists concluded absurdly that the organs of wit, causality, and comparison were undeveloped, and also that `the portion of the occipital bone assigned to the animal propensities, philoprogenitiveness and amativeness, appeared excessive.’ Perhaps Vanessa would have been able to confirm the truth of that.”

Here is another, less bizarre coda. In his will Swift had left instructions for his own self-composed epitaph. Here is the Latin original, which Damrosch advises we read “not as a prose statement but as a series of telling phrases”:

“Hic depositum est Corpus

IONATHAN SWIFT S.T.D.

Hujus Ecclesiæ Cathedralis

Decani,

Ubi sæva Indignatio

Ulterius

Cor lacerare nequit,

Abi Viator

Et imitare, si poteris,

Strenuum pro virili

Libertatis Vindicatorem.

Obiit 19º Die Mensis Octobris

A.D. 1745 Anno Ætatis 78º”

Here is Damrosch’s translation (“S.T.D.” means not “sexually transmitted disease” but “Sacrae Theologiae Doctor”):

“Here is deposited the body

of Jonathan Swift, S.T.D.,

of this Cathedral church,

the Dean

where savage indignation

can no longer

lacerate his Heart.

Go, traveler,

and imitate, if you can,

a valiant champion

of manly freedom.

He died on the 19th Day of the Month of October,

A.D. 1745, in the 78th Year of his Age.”

And here, better-known than Swift’s original, is Yeats’ adaptation, “Swift’s Epitaph” (The Winding Stair and Other Poems, 1933):

“Swift has sailed into his rest;

Savage indignation there

Cannot lacerate his Breast.

Imitate him if you dare,

World-Besotted Traveler; he

Served human liberty.”

`A Person Stumbling Toward Some Goal'

The pleasure of reading the Irish essayist Robert Lynd (1879-1949) should not be mistaken for soft-headed nostalgia. His virtues are vital and we can learn from his example. As a writer, he was a professional amateur, in the etymological sense. Of necessity, Lynd was prolific. From 1913 to 1945 he published a weekly essay in the New Statesman. He was an expert on nothing, seems to have read everything and could write amusingly about anything, which makes him the working definition of an essayist. An Irish history website says of Lynd: “Like Samuel Johnson, who was his favourite writer, he had always something to say, whatever the subject.” The same site adds: “He became noted for his quiet, friendly and reflective style, earning his living, as one critic put it, `by supplying what might be called a point of rest in the newspapers to which he contributed.’” How our anemic newspapers could use a feuilletonist like Lynd today. Take this from the title essay in The Pleasures of Ignorance (Grant Richards Ltd., 1921):

“. . . there is, perhaps, a special pleasure in re-learning the names of many of the flowers every spring. It is like re-reading a book that one has almost forgotten. Montaigne tells us that he had so bad a memory that he could always read an old book as though he had never read it before. I have myself a capricious and leaking memory. I can read Hamlet itself and The Pickwick Papers as though they were the work of new authors and had come wet from the press, so much of them fades between one reading and another. There are occasions on which a memory of this kind is an affliction, especially if one has a passion for accuracy. But this is only when life has an object beyond entertainment.”

Seasoned readers will smile in agreement. Lynd’s manner has a charm, a confiding, conversational ease, absent from most contemporary essayists, though Joseph Epstein echoes the Lyndian mode. Today, an essayist is likelier to be transgressive rather than merely companionable or amusing. Lynd occasionally tips into the whimsical, but we can forgive so industrious a man. In “Cats” he writes: “A cat is obedient only when it is hungry or when it takes the fancy. It may be a parasite, but it is never a servant. The dog does your bidding, but you do the cat’s.” This is true, of course, but a thousand other writers, many less gifted than Lynd, have said so.

Another of his essay collections, Old and New Masters (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), is strictly literary. It’s always interesting to read the judgments of a working journalist as he reviews new books that for us are embalmed as “classics.” He reads Henry James, Conrad, Chesterton, Kipling, Hardy and Constance Garnett’s translations from the Russian as they are first published. Here is Lynd in “Tchehov: The Perfect Storyteller,”describing a writer still new to the English-speaking world:

“He sees, for one thing, that no man is uninteresting when he is seen as a person stumbling toward some goal, just as no man is uninteresting when his hat is blown off and he has to scuttle after it down the street. There is bound to be a break in the meanest life.”

Lynd nicely echoes Chesterton’s “On Running After One’s Hat.” Both men choose a faintly ridiculous image their readers would recognize because both write for Dr. Johnson’s now-mythical “common reader.” Here is Lynd again on Chekhov:

“He portrays his characters instead of labelling them; but the portrait itself is the judgment. His humour makes him tolerant, but, though he describes moral and material ugliness with tolerance, he never leaves us in any doubt as to their being ugly. His attitude to a large part of life might be described as one of good-natured disgust.”  

`As Mild and Unemphatic as a Schwa'

Consider these lines from George Herbert’s “The Forerunners”: “Lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane, / Honey of roses, wither wilt thou fly?” And this from Robert Herrick’s “Upon Julia’s Voice”: “Melting melodious words to lutes of amber.” Each pleases the mouth and ear. Each is a pleasure to say aloud and to hear, and pleasure is among the chief reasons we read. Herrick could have written “She sings real good,” and no one would have listened. Citing these lines by Herbert and Herrick, Anthony Hecht writes: “When I consult my own ear, I can claim that certain lines have come, over the years, to be cherished largely for the quality of their music.” The observation comes from the chapter titled “Poetry and Music” in On the Laws of the Poetic Arts (Princeton University Press, 1995), a book that started life at the National Gallery of Art as the Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts for 1992. Hecht begins this section with a dash of witty common sense:

“It must surely have been someone French who remarked that the most beautiful words in the English language are `cellar door.’ What, one is disposed to wonder, would be the choice of a Swede or an Indonesian? Each language has its own music; or, more properly, its own varieties of music, for at one time or another the following more or less incommensurate poets have all been held up as model practitioners of the musical component in poetry.”

Hecht assembles an unlikely and incompatible parade of nominees: Swinburne, Poe, Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Keats, Spender, Milton and Tennyson. This suggests that what we mean by “musical” in poetry is an amorphous notion. Likewise, one reader might swoon to Swinburne’s lines while another falls asleep. Easier to identity without training or critical rigor is the unmusical, the flat, flaccid, toneless and grindingly conversational that dominates poetry today; in short, prose. Hecht makes a useful distinction:

“Poetry as an art seems regularly to oscillate between song (with all the devices we associate with musical forms and formalities) and speech as it as it is commonly spoken by ordinary people. The problem presented by these alternatives ought to be evident; song and the artifices of formality lead in the direction of the artificial, the insincere, the passionless and servile mimicry of established formulas. But speech as a goal leads to chat, to formless rant and ungovernable prolixity.”

Critics have caricatured Hecht as a robotic formalist. The charge is laughable and baseless. He never proceeded as though form = poetic quality. In the passage just quoted Hecht acknowledges the risks implicit in empty formalism, but implies that writing good poems without form is possible but extraordinarily difficult. Hecht never published a poem, even when young, without some redeeming gesture of wit or musicality. By the time he reached poetic maturity, in the nineteen-sixties and -seventies, he was an American master, a peer of Dickinson, Robinson, Eliot and Frost. Listen to the music and thought in these lines, a time-lapse view of evolution, from what I judge Hecht’s finest poem, “Green: An Epistle” (Millions of Strange Shadows, 1977):

    

“Whole eras, seemingly without event,

Now scud the glassy pool processionally

Until one day, misty, uncalendared,

As mild and unemphatic as a schwa,

Vascular tissue, conduit filaments

Learn how to feed the outposts of that small

Emerald principate. Now there are roots,

The filmy gills of toadstools, crested fern,

Quillworts, and foxtail mosses, and at last

Snapweed, loment, trillium, grass, herb Robert.”

Hecht was born in 1923 and died on this date, Oct. 20, in 2004.

`A Weight on the Heart'

Last week I met a painter in New Hampshire who had set up his easel beside a river, though his back faced the water and he was painting the row of maples that paralleled the nearby road. It was mid-morning on a clear autumn day. The yellow leaves, when I looked at them more carefully, were not merely yellow but white and green and almost silver as they shimmered in the breeze. “I’m painting light, really,” he said. His canvas was small, about the size and shape of a license plate, and he worked in oils. The trunk of the closest maple was on the right side of the canvas. The middle was a muted patchwork of yellow, white, green and pale yellow-gray simulating silver but not at all metallic. In isolation this central part of the painting looked like an abstraction or the birth of a galaxy.

I asked him to name some of the painters he most enjoyed, and he mentioned Willard Metcalf, who painted Early October, and John Singer Sargent. I asked if he liked Fairfield Porter, one of my favorite painters, and he said, “Oh, yes. You know him?” He seemed surprised. “Painting light is the most difficult thing,” he said, “but it is also the most beautiful.” He spoke with great seriousness and precision, editing each word before he pronounced it. He never stopped painting but became more talkative. For years he had worked for a marketing firm, until he retired early and started painting fulltime. “I hate ugliness. It exists, but I hate art that celebrates it.” He gave me his business card. On it is a detail from a larger painting showing a branch heavy with red apples against a blue sky, like the one that morning. I thanked him for his time, and he thanked me and said, “There’s really no need to emphasize the ugly, is there?”

Several days later, in a motel room in Boston, I was reading Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side (University of California Press, 1977), a lousy title for a sometimes interesting collection of essays. The author is Robert M. Adams, who has a sense of humor despite having been an academic. In “Ideas of Ugly” he writes:

“. . . ultimate ugly is in some way global and oppressive; it doesn’t simply repeat a single element, but has a quality of infinite variation without change that lays a weight on the heart. The novels of Theodore Dreiser, Marxist political rhetoric, the landscape of northern New Jersey, souvenir shops in airports—these have the special qualities of an ugly which is at once settled into itself, varied in its particulars, yet bound to go on and on interminably.”

`This Weighing of Delights'

“The disconcerting fact may first be pointed out that if you write badly about good writing, however profound may be your convictions or emphatic your expression of them, your style has a tiresome trick (as a wit once pointed out) of whispering: `Don't listen!’ in your readers’ ears.”

The “wit” Logan Pearsall Smith coyly alludes to in “Fine Writing” (1936) is probably Smith himself. I discovered him as a footnote to Henry James, which sounds like climbing the Alps to retrieve a pebble, except that dwelling exclusively at the higher elevations makes breathing difficult. Minor writers possess gifts their betters lack. Besides, I’m not convinced any writer who gives even solitary moments of pleasure can be dismissed merely as “minor.” For those moments his impact on at least one reader is major. Who would sacrifice Max Beerbohm or O. Henry for the sake of tight-assed critical rigor? Minor does not imply dullness, a quality possessed by many major writers. There’s nothing dull about Smith’s Trivia (1902) and More Trivia (1921). Admittedly, “fine writing” carries a hothouse stench in our utilitarian age. (What is the prose counterpart of “poetaster”?) For Smith, irony is the saving grace of fine writing, not purple prose:

“. . . I should be inclined to say that an ironic way of writing is the one to which Prose is peculiarly adapted. I could instance among the ancients the irony of Plato, of Tacitus, and Lucian, and among the moderns the irony of Hamlet and of Falstaff, of Pascal, of Burton, Sterne, and Fielding, of Voltaire, of Swift, and of Gibbon, who was perhaps a greater artist than he knew.”

Smith isn’t talking about today’s cheapened, reflexive sense of irony, the lingua franca of undergraduates and second-rate comedians. He might approve of a phrase coined by Joseph Epstein when describing the work of A.J. Liebling – “worldly-ironic.” Liebling is another writer pigeonholed as “minor,” largely because he worked as a journalist, for newspapers and The New Yorker. That is, the deadline was his Muse, and he didn’t have the luxury of waiting for inspiration or a hefty advance to strike. He wrote so he could pay the rent and go on eating, which he did to glorious excess. My favorite among his books is forever changing. Usually I say Normandy Revisited (1958) or The Earl of Louisiana (1961). At the moment it’s Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1962). Take this dose of artfully muted and celebrative irony from that volume:

“It is from this weighing of delights against their cost that the student eater (particularly if he is a student at the University of Paris) erects the scale of values that will serve him until he dies or has to reside in the Middle West for a long period.”

If I believed in reincarnation, I would want to come back as A.J. Liebling, who wrote beautifully and wittily (“fine writing”), and knew how to enjoy himself along the way. Smith and Liebling were born on this date, Oct. 18, in 1865 and 1904, respectively.

`My Schooldays Were Filled with Wonder'

“How can we stop education from killing the sense of wonder? I was lucky: my schooldays were filled with wonder.”

[Michael Oakeshott, Notebooks, 1922-86, Imprint Academic, 2014.]

`Write Little; Do It Well'

“Write little; do it well.

Your knowledge will be such,

At last, as to dispel

What moves you overmuch.”

[Yvor Winters, “To a Young Writer,” The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters, ed. R. L. Barth,  Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1999.]

`In Hope of Illumination'

“There are two sets of readings: the trusted great texts, studied with devotion in hope of illumination, and the accident reports and fever charts of our condition, studied with revulsion for prophylactic purposes. (They are very roughly as books to articles.) The trouble in educating our young on the latter is that they become fixed on curing evils rather than achieving good.” 

[Eva Brann, Open Secrets/Inward Prospects: Reflections on World and Soul, Paul Dry Books, 2004.] 

`The Proper Business of Youth'

“To learn is the proper business of youth; and whether we increase our knowledge by books or by conversation, we are equally indebted to foreign assistance.

“The greater part of students are not born with abilities to construct systems, or advance knowledge; nor can have any hope beyond that of becoming intelligent hearers in the schools of art, of being able to comprehend what others discover, and to remember what others teach. Even those to whom Providence has allotted greater strength of understanding, can expect only to improve a single science. In every other part of learning, they must be content to follow opinions, which they are not able to examine; and, even in that which they claim as peculiarly their own, can seldom add more than some small particle of knowledge, to the hereditary stock devolved to them from ancient times, the collective labour of a thousand intellects.” 

[Samuel Johnson, The Rambler #121; May 14, 1751.]

`Correctness Has Its Own Elegance'

“I was not myself regarded as a tough teacher, but I prefer to think that I never fell below the line of the serious in what I taught or in what I asked of my students. What I tried to convey about the writers on whom I gave courses was, alongside the aesthetic pleasures they provided, their use as guides, however incomplete, to understanding life. Reading Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Willa Cather, and other writers I taught was important business—possibly, in the end, though I never said it straight out, more important than getting into Harvard Law School or Stanford Business School. When I taught courses on prose style, I stressed that correctness has its own elegance, and that, in the use of language, unlike in horseshoes, close isn’t good enough; precision was the minimal requirement, and it was everything.”

[Joseph Epstein, “The Death of the Liberal Arts,” A Literary Education, Axios, 2014.]

`Captivated by Admiration, Even Adoration'

“Those students seem to me most admirable who are captivated by admiration, even adoration—who know what it is to lack and long, quail and emulate—to feel the exultation of being the lesser, bound by love to a greater, the pride of recognizing superiority, the generosity of pure delight in it. You have to be young; with maturity comes a more distant, more mordant view of even of the finest of fellow humans. Yet, if moments of being simply overcome by some magnificence or other have ceased altogether, you’re not so much old as wizened.

“Our students often know more than they know how to say. Life passes, and it’s the other way around.”

[Eva Brann, Doublethink/Doubletalk: Naturalizing Second Thoughts and Twofold Speech, Paul Dry Books, 2016.]  

`For Too Many the Stopping Place'

Today we fly to Boston for a week of interviews at private schools in New England. I’m a product of public schools, and have no complaints about the education I received (despite Base Five in third grade). But for decades public education has been systematically diluted into a second-rate hybrid of babysitting and social engineering. Children are catered to and patronized but seldom educated. Learning is no longer the point, and parents have a fulltime job undoing what the schools do so efficiently. When I was my youngest son’s age, thirteen, dumb kids were the biggest obstacle to learning, making the process needlessly protracted and unpleasant. Today, dumb teachers and administrators are the biggest obstacle, with dumb kids as their natural sidekicks. Public school teaching is often a default career for the feckless.

Time and internet availability will remain uncertain until next Sunday. In advance I am posting each day this week education-themed passages from writers I admire. In Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (1991), Jacques Barzun writes:

“All children can learn and do learn. By the time they first go to school they have learned an enormous amount, including a foreign language, since no language is native to the womb. So if they stop learning when in school, it must be because the desire to learn is killed by protracted non-achievement and non-teaching . . .

“For the normal and healthy, it is the very character of the school that seems to stop learning, and this at a point of no great difficulty: simple reading, writing, and arithmetic. The fifth grade is for many too many the stopping place.”

`Our Lives Are Judged'

A defining quality of our time is the hatred of beauty. Art has been turned into its opposite. The reasons are many, mostly boiling down to egoistic nihilism, what Roger Scruton has called “a habit of desecration in which life is not celebrated by art but targeted by it.” Beauty frightens and offends the nihilist. It's a reproach to his sense of unbounded self-importance. Beauty cannot be ignored, so it must be vandalized.

 Zbigniew Herbert survived Nazis and Communists, oppressively unbeautiful and anti-beautiful regimes. In the nineteen-sixties, on one of his trips outside Poland, Herbert visited the Heraklion Archaeological Museum in Crete and experienced “a surprise of the unpleasant kind such as I had never had in any museum or in the presence of any work of art.” He was stunned by beauty. In the title essay of Labyrinth on the Sea (trans. Alissa Valles, The Collected Prose 1948-1998, 2010), he goes on:

“I was not then a youth thirsting for originality, which as we know is easiest to achieve if you are an iconoclast, if you scorn recognized works and don’t respect either authorities or tradition. This stance has always been alien to me—even odious, if I leave aside the short phase between my fourth and fifth year that psychologists describe as the phase of negativism. I always wanted to love, to adore, to fall to my knees and bow down before greatness, even if it overwhelms and terrifies, for what kind of greatness would it be that didn’t overwhelm and terrify.”

An iconoclast is a breaker of icons, a character Herbert rightly diagnoses as childish, not to mention petulant and self-dramatizing. Rather than gazing with wonder and gratitude at great works of arts, some grow angry and contemptuous, too proud and intimidated “to love, to adore.”  The hatred of beauty suggests a great poverty of spirit. Beauty is humbling. For some of us it is one of life's consolations. Scruton writes:

“The current habit of desecrating beauty suggests that people are as aware as they ever were of the presence of sacred things. Desecration is a kind of defense against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims. In the presence of sacred things, our lives are judged, and to escape that judgment, we destroy the thing that seems to accuse us.”

`Words That Are As Plain As This'

Kenneth Baker in The Faber Book of Conservatism (1993) includes, along with passages from such prose worthies as Swift, Burke, Newman, Oakeshott and Enoch Powell, a surprisingly substantial selection of good poems. Here you’ll find Dryden, Pope, Tennyson, Kipling, Yeats and Larkin. As a caution or clarification, Baker also gives us “The Past” (Not Waving But Drowning, 1957) by Steve Smith:  

“People who are always praising the past

And especially the times of faith as best

Ought to go and live in the Middle Ages

And be burnt at the stake as witches and sages.”

Perhaps as an implicit gloss on Smith’s poem, Baker’s next entry is a passage from Roger Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), including this: “Naturally, nostalgia for the past is more reasonable than nostalgia for the future; nevertheless it is, like every form of sentimentality, a way of `standing back’, a refusal to engage in the practice of rational life.” After Scruton comes another healthy dose of realism, C.H. Sisson’s “The Commonplace” (Exactions, 1980):

“A commonplace is good for nothing now

Yet that is how the world goes, all the same:

Nothing is what you had when you set out,

And nothing you will have when you go home.”

Sisson makes another appearance in Baker’s anthology: “For Canon Brown, Who Likes Contemporary Speech.” I don’t find this poem in Carcanet’s Collected Poems (1998), and don’t remember having read it before. At twenty-two lines, it’s too long to quote in full. Sisson is Swiftian in his rage. Here are his closing lines:

“While you defile the parish pump

Some of us like our water clean

And like to use words we can mean.

And so did Cranmer, who had to cook

For standing by his common book.

Write me a Book of Common Prayer

That is not made up of hot air

With words that are as plain as this

And, oh boy! That will take the piss

Out of those who wrote Series 3

And (I confess) out of me.”

The ruckus described occurred in England thirty-seven years ago, the same year Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. Here is Baker’s gloss for American readers:

“In the winter of 1979 the debates over the use of the Cranmer liturgy as opposed to the modern English version Series 3 came to a head. A pro-Cranmer petition was signed by 600 well-known people and a Canon Brown from Devizes wrote to the Guardian, saying that such matters should be left to the Church. This so incensed the poet C.H. Sisson that he wrote this poem and travelled to Devizes to pin it, like a latter-day Luther, to the door of Canon Brown’s church. Alas, the organist found it first and took it down. But it should not be lost to posterity.”

This may be the first and only publication of Sisson’s poem.