`Something Cheerful and Bright Green'

Yelena Shavrova (1874-1937) sends Chekhov a story she has written in which a character contracts syphilis. She asks his advice, and he suggests she lock the story in a trunk for a year, and only then reread it. “By that time things will seem clearer to you,” he says, prudently. “I am afraid to decide for you for fear of making a mistake.” Then he proceeds to demolish what sounds like an awful story: “The story is a little wishy-washy, it exudes tendentiousness, the details all run together like spilled oil, and the characters are barely sketched out.”

Most damningly, Chekhov tells Shavrova she has “failed to cope with the formal aspects.” He means her science is weak. She doesn’t understand the disease, how it manifests itself and how it can be treated (with mercury compounds, unreliably, in the late nineteenth century). Recall that Chekhov was a working physician:

“Degeneracy, general nervousness and flabbiness are not due to S [Chekhov’s discrete abbreviation for syphilis] alone, but to a combination of many factors: vodka, tobacco, the gluttony of the intellectual class, its appalling upbringing, its lack of physical labor, the conditions of urban life and so on and so forth. What is more, there are other diseases no less serious than S. Tuberculosis, for example.”

Chekhov was coughing blood as early as 1884, and the disease killed him in 1904, but the mention of TB here is fleeting, a hypothetical example. There’s no evidence Shavrova knew Chekhov had the disease, nor even certainty that he accepted the diagnosis at the time he was writing the letter, in 1895. His next sentence is personally revealing and suggestive of Chekhov’s aesthetic sense: “I also feel that it’s not the duty of the artist to lash out at people for being ill. Am I to blame for having migraines?” To this day, a belief in disease as moral punishment is latent in many of us.

Chekhov condemns the doctors in Shavrova’s story. They “behave abominably” and violate the Hippocratic Oath. “S isn’t a vice,” he writes, “it isn’t the product of ill will, but a disease, and the people who have it need warm, human care.” He reminds Shavrova of the risks one runs just being alive, and then states a sort of artistic credo deeply informed by his medical training and experience, and by his native sense of tact:

“For myself, I stand by the following rule: I write about sickness only when it forms part of the characters or adds color to them. I am afraid of frightening people with diseases. I can’t accept the idea of `our nervous age,’ because people have been nervous in all ages. Anyone who is afraid of being nervous should turn himself into a sturgeon or a smelt. A sturgeon can make a fool or a blackguard of himself once and only once by getting caught on a hook. After that he goes into soups and pies.”

Chekhov’s letter is remarkably various. It zig zags from topic to topic, tone to tone, without seeming chaotic. He is able to criticize Shavrova without humiliating her or making ad hominem comments. One would love to know her reaction and what she eventually did with the story. Did she revise it? Was it ever published? Would Russian censorship have permitted a story about syphilis to appear without excisions? Chekhov writes:

“I’d like to see you write about something cheerful and bright green, a picnic, for example. Leave it to us medics to write about cripples and black monks.  I’m soon going back to writing humorous stories, because my psychopathological repertory is exhausted.”

In the next year or so, Chekhov would write “Three Years,” “My Life” and "Peasants." He wrote his letter to Shavrova on this date, Feb. 28, in 1895.

[An online source of unknown reliability reports: “Elena Mikhaylovna Shavrova sent more than twenty of her stories to Chekhov who liked them, reviewed for her and edited. She failed to develop into a serious writer as he hoped she would, but their ten years’ correspondence (which started in 1889, when she was 15) resulted in more than 200 letters.”]

`There Is Really No Fear'

The most skeptical among us reserves a dim corner for magic, whether precognition, divination or faith in dumb luck. Most of us keep such things under wraps, to preserve our guise of rationality. In Return to Yesterday (1932), Ford Madox Ford demonstrates a form of bibliomancy aimed less at foretelling the future than reanimating the past. In a friend’s house in Greenwich Village, he removes a “dullish-backed book” from the shelf and reads these words, randomly chosen, at the bottom of a page:

“So you see, darling, there is really no fear, because, as long as I know you care for me and I care for you, nothing can touch me.”

Ford tells us he experiences a “singular emotion.” He is again eighteen (in 1891 or 1892), his age when he first read those words in Kipling’s story “Only a Subaltern.” He is seated on a train entering Rye Station, smoking shag tobacco in his pipe. He has just published the first of his more than eighty books, The Brown Owl, a fairy story. For it he was paid ten pounds. “I was going courting,” he says, and describes the memory, after forty years, as “my oldest literary recollection.” Ford was a fabled fabulist but one accepts that the story is true. He adds detail to the remembered scene: “The fascicle of Kipling stories had a blue-grey paper cover that shewed in black a fierce, whiskered and turbaned syce [a groom who cares for horses] of the Indian Army.” Ford again quotes a portion of Kipling’s line – “So you see, darling, there is really no fear” – and adds:

“I suppose they are words that we all write one day or another. Perhaps they are the best we ever write.”

Among readers today, Kipling, the greatest writer of short stories in the language, is even more out of fashion than Ford. He is not a writer we would assume Ford, the arch-Modernist, would treasure. Even if the anecdote is pure fabrication, Ford has chosen his text carefully. It suggests the sort of men and writers he and Kipling were. The passage closes with these words: 

“You have no idea how exciting it was in those days to be eighteen and to be meditating, writing for the first time there is really no fear. . ..”

`I Don't Generally Like Artists'

Last month I received an email from D. Blake Werts, a name that meant nothing to me. Werts lives in Albany, N.Y., where I lived for almost twenty years. He publishes a monthly zine titled COPY THIS! which, he says, “focuses on the Newave mini comics creators of the 80s and 90s.” As a newspaper features writer, one of my self-appointed mini-beats was subcultures, artistic and otherwise. I admire the phenomenon of people pursuing their interests on their own, usually without pay or funding but often with the support and encouragement of fellow subculturists. The “zine scene” of the seventies and eighties was a lively and largely harmless phenomenon of the immediate pre-internet era. Among its proponents was Mike Gunderloy, publisher of Fact Sheet Five, whom I met and interviewed in 1989.

Werts asked permission to republish a feature story I had written about an Albany artist, Jim Ryan. The story appeared in the Times Union on Sept. 16, 1990, and Werts supplied me with a link to “It’s no trick to find the real amid the surreal” (I didn’t write the headline). He was planning a tribute issue dedicated to Ryan, who died on Dec. 11, and wanted to include my story. I agreed, of course, but confessed to him that I couldn’t remember Ryan or the story I had written about him. Granted, that was almost twenty-seven years ago, and I have subsequently written millions of additional words. Still, it feels disrespectful. Fortunately, the story isn’t too embarrassing (I hate reading my old work), and I even like this paragraph:

  

“Despite his subversively surrealist tastes in art and politics, Ryan is a pretty conventional guy, in a short-haired, hard-working sort of way. He saves his subversion for his art: `I never, ever hung around with other artists. I don't generally like artists - their sloppy habits, their lack of respect for other peoples’ lives. I have no regard for artists who want to scrap all traditions.’”

Werts was true to his word, and the latest issue of COPY THIS! arrived in the mail on Friday. My story appears with others written by people who not only remember Ryan but knew him well and respected him and his work. The honor is mine. 

`The Great Dream of History'

Some writers turn their work into a long meditation on the past, the vagaries of history and the nature of man. A few of them are formal historians, like Gibbon, who characterized all of history as “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Others are poets or playwrights, like Homer or Shakespeare, and some are novelists, like Solzhenitsyn. Janet Lewis identifies this quality in the French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar:

“She is as much a historian as a novelist. Elsewhere (in Les Yeux Ouverts) she speaks of the great dream of history, that is to say, the world of all the living people of the past, so that when one loves life one loves the past. She even uses the word vivants, which includes more than people -- animals, plants, the moving air.”

I happened on “The Historical Imagination,” ostensibly a review by Lewis of Yourcenar’s essay collection The Dark Brain of Piranesi, published in the Summer 1995 issue of The Threepenny Review. Lewis, born in 1899, would die at the age of ninety-nine three years after the review was published. She was a poet and author of three novels based on Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence with an Introduction of the Theory of Presumptive Guilt by S. M. Phillips (1873): The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), The Trial of Soren Qvist (1947) and The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron (1959). Lewis published two other novels not part of the Circumstantial Evidence series – The Invasion: A Narrative of Events Concerning the Johnston Family of St. Mary’s (1932) and Against a Darkening Sky (1943) -- and a collection of stories, Good-bye, Son, and Other Stories (1946).

All of Lewis’ work is essential but The Wife of Martin Guerre is one of the last century’s great novels, and ranks, in fact, with Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (1954). Lewis devotes much of her review to the first essay in Yourcenar’s collection, “Faces of History in the Historia Augusta”:

“. . . she treats of the six historians of the last three hundred and fifty years of the Roman

 Empire, and shows them in their incompetence, their mediocrity; remote in time often from their subjects -- the twenty-eight emperors -- and yet revealing in that they give unconsciously, unintentionally, each his contemporary view of his historical subject. The effect is like a scene superimposed upon a scene, because out of her own research she can give us the more true background. Hadrian appears here, as seen by the gossip of the times, a portrait corrected and extended by her own knowledge. The passages spent on Hadrian are few, but the whole essay gives us the milieu of research and of the living scene -- the past -- from which the Memoirs of Hadrian emerged. And the images which appear as if by magic in this prose, the anecdotes that are in themselves whole stories.”

If you have access to JSTOR, read Lewis' review here. For those who do not, I’ll reproduce another passage at length. Lewis might be writing of her own approach to writing much of her fiction:

“In this essay the sense of research is great: something of a private investigator, something of an archeologist, invigorating with a sense of perpetual discovery. But beyond this there is always the widening scene, the real scene as she comes to know it from these and other sources, and there is always the sense of all time. The decadence of Rome, unobserved, inconceivable by those who lived in their little segments of it, is it not comparable to our own recent history?”

Yourcenar closes “Faces of History” with a plain and simple sentence: “The modern reader is at home in the Historia Augusta.” Lewis picks up the theme and concludes her review:

“She speaks also of the curious fate of martyrs. `Nothing is more quickly outmoded than a martyr.’ As the causes for which they died are resolved, the plausibility for their suffering disappears. Why, say my contemporaries, did Thomas More let himself perish over so small a difference with the King? How fortunate that Galileo recanted, since all the world can see that he was right! I remember, or rather, I cannot remember all the names of the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement; there are too many. And yet I remember well, almost with a sense of envy, a white woman [Viola Liuzzo?] from the North who was shot and killed as she rode in a demonstration somewhere in the South -- envy of a life well-given for a great and urgent cause. `Each martyr drives out his predecessor; the deviations for which they were sacrificed are not reconciled, but discarded.’ The final page of this essay [“Agrippa d’Aubigné and Les Tragiques”] becomes a passionate declaration of the importance of paying due attention to such tragic -- and noble -- events. And yet this is an essay on the literary quality of a great poem. Well, perhaps there is no difference.”

The title of the final poetry collection published during Lewis’ lifetime, put out by R.L. Barth, was The Dear Past and Other Poems 1919-1994 (1994).

`But I Still Don't Know Where I Should Send It'

I’ve learned that Donald Rayfield, author of the best Chekhov biography in English, and of Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him (2004), and translator of Gogol’s Dead Souls, is now preparing a new translation of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales. John Glad translated a selection of the 147 stories Shalamov wrote in samizdat between 1954 and 1973 as Kolyma Tales (1980) and Graphite (1981). In English we know him, as we know Solzhenitsyn, principally as a chronicler of the Gulag, where he spent fourteen years, but Shalamov is not a literal documentarian. He wrote fiction as artfully poised as Chekhov’s. In him, witness and artist maintain a rare balance. In his 1980 review of Kolyma Tales, Irving Howe writes:

“. . . the tension here between aesthetic and moral standards is good for our souls, if not our literary theories; let it remain, that tension, so that we will not rest too easily with mere opinion. But in the case of Varlam Shalamov it is also worth saying that one reason his work achieves high literary distinction is precisely the moral quality of his testimony. The act of representation yokes the two.”

From The Penguin Book of Russian Verse (2015), edited by Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, I learned that Shalamov was also a poet. Chandler writes in his introduction that Shalamov’s stories are “a masterpiece of Russian prose and the greatest of all works of literature about the Gulag.” Shalamov’s poems are little read, he says, perhaps because “we tend to pigeonhole writers; it is hard to imagine that the author of the bleak and sober Kolyma Tales could also have written poems of such ecstatic joy.” Here is Chandler’s version of “Purple Honey”:

“From a frost-chilled

line of poetry

my anguish will drop

like a ripe berry.

“Rosehip juice will dye

fine crystals of snow –

and a stranger will smile

on his lonely way.

“Blending dirty sweat

with the purity of a tear,

he will carefully collect

the tinted crystals.

“He sucks tart sweetness,

this purple honey,

and his dried mouth

twists in happiness.”

Shalamov often writes about the impulse to write and its futility:

“I went out into the clear air

and raised my eyes to the heavens

to understand our stars

and their January brilliance.

“I found the key to the riddle;

I grasped the hieroglyphs’ secret;

I carried into our own tongue

the work of the star-poet.

“I recorded all this on a stump,

on frozen bark,

since I had no paper with me

in that January dark.”

In one of the Kolyma Tales, “Sententious,” the narrator says: “Little flesh was left on my bones, just enough for bitterness – the last human emotion; it was closer to the bone.” Shalamov’s poems, too, are stripped-down and elemental, and in this, presumably, they resemble life in the camps. As Chandler says, there is joy and even gratitude in the poems, but the more typical note is baffled stoicism:   

“And so I keep going;

death remains close;

I carry my life

in a blue envelope.

“The letter’s been ready

ever since autumn:

just one little word –

it couldn’t be shorter.

“But I still don’t know

where I should send it;

if I had the address,

my life might have ended.”

Shalamov lived his final years in poverty. He was blind, deaf and suffered from Huntington’s disease, but continued composing poems until his final months, when visitors took his dictation. He died in 1982 at age seventy-four. “Somewhat like Paul Celan and Primo Levi,” Chandler writes, “Shalamov seems in the end to have been defeated by the destructive forces he withstood so bravely and for so long. His own life story may be the most tragic of all the Kolyma tales.”

[Chandler writes about Shalamov’s poetry here and here.]

`I Always Made an Awkward Bow'

John Keats, whose letters surpass in brilliance and sheer readability most of his poetry, at least in the judgment of some, wrote his final letter to his friend Charles Brown on Nov. 30, 1820. It begins:

“’Tis the most difficult thing in the world [for] me to write a letter. My stomach continues so bad, that I feel it worse on opening any book,--yet I am much better than I was in Quarantine. Then I am afraid to encounter the proing and conning of any thing interesting to me in England. I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.”

One month earlier, Keats had turned twenty-five. He arrived in Rome on Nov. 15, after spending ten days in quarantine on a ship in the Bay of Naples. The sentence beginning “I have an habitual feeling . . .” is the saddest in all of literature. Three sentences later – “There was my star predominant!” -- he rallies sufficiently to quote Shakespeare, his ever-present tutelary spirit: “a bawdy planet, that will strike / Where ’t is predominant.” (The Winter’s Tale, Act I, Scene 2). He declares his love for Brown – and for wordplay:

“I cannot answer any thing in your letter, which followed me from Naples to Rome, because I am afraid to look it over again. I am so weak (in mind) that I cannot bear the sight of any hand writing of a friend I love so much as I do you. Yet I ride the little horse, – and, at my worst, even in Quarantine, summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of my life.”

The clear-sightedness and absence of self-pity in the former medical student is inspiring: “Servern is very well, though he leads so dull a life with me. Remember me to all friends . . .” Try reading the letter, right through these final lines, without tearing up: “I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.” Keats’ loyal friend Joseph Severn, who accompanied the poet to Rome, described his final moments:

 

“The poor fellow bade me lift him up in bed—he breathed with great difficulty—and seemed to lose the power of coughing up the phlegm—and immense sweat came over him so that my breath felt cold to him—`dont breath on me—it comes like Ice’—he clasped my hand very fast as I held him in my arms—the mucus was boiling within him—it gurgled in his throat—this increased—but yet he seem’d without pain—his eyes look’d upon me with extrem[e] sensibility but without pain—at 11 he died in my arms.” 

Keats died on this date, Feb. 23, in 1821.

`I Wish Them Literature'

“Fifty years ago . . .”

That year I turned fourteen, as my youngest son did on Tuesday. I was reading indiscriminately in that uncharted no-man’s-land between boyhood and what passes for young American manhood. Tolkien and Kafka, Dickens and Bellow, Shakespeare and Roger Tory Peterson. I was an omnivore, without critical standards, without a reading “mentor,” Hoovering the literary landscape. If I started reading a book, I had to finish it – an obsessive tic I overcame many years later. I had only recently shed science fiction and Edgar Rice Burroughs. I was learning that a quality shared by all bad books, no matter how highly touted, is tedium. Good books give pleasure. Those are slippery concepts, I know, but dedicated readers learn what they mean and aren't interested in laying down the law for others. One of my all-time favorite books, Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, will bore the tears out of most readers, which is precisely what James Baldwin’s novels do to me.     

“. . . we opened books not just to learn about the content of a writer’s mind but to hear the right words in the right order telling us things we sensed to be true.”

Our author proposes three reasons why we read, which, when combined, come close to defining that elusive thing, the good book: 1.) The writer has something worthwhile and interesting to say. 2.) He deploys words artfully. (Hear the echo of Jonathan Swift: “Proper words in proper places make the true definition of style.”) 3.) He tells the truth. He’s not just not lying. His truth can be tested against our own experience.

“To read Donne, Herrick, Keats. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Fitzgerald, Proust, James, and Joyce was like hearing Miles or Louis on the horn or Art Tatum or Bill Evans on the keyboard.”

I would add Errol Garner.  Otherwise, the comparison is precise. I’m more articulate about books than music, but the feeling of exaltation and gratitude is nearly identical.

“By God, back then we listened when we read, and if on occasion our ears needed readjustment, we read the same words again and again until we heard what we were supposed to hear.”

Writers and readers collaborate. A new word, an old word newly deployed, a subtle brushstroke of irony, a seductive rhythm, an intriguing metaphor, an allusion recognized – literary libertines lives for such things. The passage quoted incrementally above is from page xii of Arthur Krystal’s This Thing We Call Literature (Oxford University Press, 2016). He closes his “Author’s Note” with these words: 

“So it comes down, as it must, to one reader reading, one person who understands that he or she, while alone, is still part of a select society, a gallery of like-minded readers who, though they may disagree about this or that book, know that literature matters in a way that life matters. Such readers, I believe, still exist. I wish them well. I wish them literature. And I wish them solitude.”

`What a Necrology of Notability!'

Last week, Andrew Rickard at Graveyard Masonry posted a passage from “Library of Old Authors,” an essay collected in James Russell Lowell’s My Study Windows (1871). The first sentence – “What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticised for us!” – echoes my own suspicion that critics are superfluous, and discerning readers are the legitimate arbiters of literary worth. My library’s copy of Lowell’s book is the twenty-third edition, published in 1886, which suggests his one-time popularity. “Library of Old Authors” is eighty-four pages long. Lowell’s style will remind readers of Charles Lamb. Detractors will find it fulsome or fusty. His pacing is leisurely and conversational, more like a storyteller’s than a stiff-necked academic’s. His sentences can be enormously (and comically) long. Lowell is an entertainer as well as a man of letters, and style is a means of charming, not dazzling, offending or boring the reader.

Lowell’s essay is ostensibly a review of Library of Old Authors, a series of reprints published by John Russell Smith of London between 1856 and 1864. Lowell is not uncritical, and he writes in a manner not seen since the triumph of Modernism a century ago:

“It is not easy to divine the rule which has governed Mr. Smith in making the selection for his series. A choice of old authors should be a florilegium [OED: “a collection of the flowers of literature, an anthology”], and not a botanist’s hortus siccus [“an arranged collection of dried plants; a herbarium”], to which grasses are as important as the single shy blossom of a summer. The old-maidenly genius of antiquarianism seems to have presided over the editing of the Library.”       

The Latin tags, elevated vocabulary and stringent whimsy are borrowed straight from Lamb. When Lowell writes, “We confess a bibliothecarian avarice that gives all books a value in our eye,” we recall “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” and Hazlitt’s “On Reading Old Books.” Lowell preaches respect for his old authors, and condemns the sloppiness of editing he finds in the series: “It is impossible that men who cannot construct an English sentence correctly, and who do not know the value of clearness in writing, should be able to disentangle the knots which slovenly printers have tied in the thread of an old author’s meaning.” Lowell gives a remarkably close and learned reading of many texts, with emphasis on scholarly incompetence, and reaches new heights of invective. Of writers whose work is “mainly bibliographic” (that is, not literary) – a distinction all but evaporated today -- Lowell writes:

“As literature, they are oppressive; as items of literary history they find their place in that vast list which records not only those named for promotion, but also the killed, wounded, and missing in the Battle of the Books. There are hearts touched with something of the same vague pathos that dims the eye in some deserted graveyard. The brief span of our earthly immortalities is brought home to us as nowhere else. What a necrology of notability!”

In a fractionally more hopeful mood Lowell writes, “There is scarcely any rubbish-heap of literature out of which something precious may not be raked by the diligent explorer,” which has always been one of the working assumptions here at Anecdotal Evidence.

Lowell is amusingly merciless with one of the editors in the series, William Carew Hazlitt, grandson of the great essayist:

“We are profoundly grateful for the omission of a glossary. It would have been a nursery and seminary of blunder. To expose pretentious charlatanry is sometimes the unpleasant duty of a reviewer. It is a duty we never seek, and should not have assumed in this case but for the impertinence with which Mr. Hazlitt has treated dead and living scholars, the latchets of whose shoes he is not worthy to unloose, and to express their gratitude to whom is, or ought to be, a pleasure to all honest lovers of their mother-tongue.”

`Find Them As Strange As You Do'

My oldest son finished the Austin Marathon with a sore right foot. His time was superb until mile-18, when he felt a pain that alternately burned and stabbed. Around mile-21 he contemplated quitting but persevered. He walked and ran, and for the home stretch tore out of sheer Kurp cussedness to the finish line. A doctor diagnosed a stress fracture, and swore him off running for at least  two weeks, which has Josh steaming, of course. I couldn’t be prouder.

Austin update: the hipster-to-civilian ratio in our capital has peaked at 30-to-1. Visible tattoo density is higher still. I borrowed from my daughter-in-law her beat-up hardback copy of the posthumously published Meyer Berger’s New York (Random House, 1960). The volume collects samples of his column, “About New York,” published in The New York Times between 1953 and 1959. Berger was a great American writer who never stopped being a great reporter. Apropos of Austin, Berger writes in his preface “Our Town: Open Letter to a Visitor”: 

“If you wander into Greenwich Village and come across men and women who affect Bohemian dress and Bohemian manner, don’t go away with the impression that they alone represent New York. The visitor from Flatbush and from Hunt’s Point in the Bronx find them as strange as you do.”  

`Things One Must Not Leave Undone'

Today we are in Austin to watch my oldest son run his first marathon. Few settings could be more alien but I’m curious to see how Josh will run 26 miles, 385 yards. He’s twenty-nine, and started running only a year ago, but is gifted with an ironclad work ethic. If he does something, he does it. No skimping, no half-measures, no distractions. I wish I had been like that at twenty-nine. The run in Austin reminds me of a poem by Guy Davenport -- “At Marathon” (Thasos and Ohio: Poems and Translations 1950-1980, 1986) -- just as Josh reminds me of Pheidippides, who ran from Marathon to Athens to announce the victory over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C.:

“Marianne Moore saluted the battlefield.

Her frail hand at the brim of her hat

round as a platter, she stood at attention

in her best Brooklyn Navy Yard manner,

or as years before she and Jim Thorpe

raised the school flag at Carlisle.

Here in long scarlet cloaks the ranks

advanced with ashlared shields, singing

to the thrashed drums and squealing fife

the pitiless hymn of Apollo the Wolf,

spears forward, horsetails streaming

from the masked helmets with unearthly eyes.

The swordline next and the javelineers,

More red cloaks, Ares wild in their blades.

The javelins whistled up like partridges

flushed in a brake and fell like sleet.

The Persians bored in, an auger of hornets.

The Greeks flowed around their thrust

as fire eats a stick. Wise to the ruse,

the Persians pulled back to the sea

and made hard in their ships for Athens,

which, the Greek army there on the plain,

lay naked to their will, tomorrow’s victory.

But the Greeks were there on the morrow

to cut them back. They had run all the way

from Marathon, twenty miles, in bronze.

Two thousand, four hundred and fifty-five

years ago. There are things one must not

leave undone, such as coming from Brooklyn

in one’s old age to salute the army

at Marathon. What are years?”

Moore visited Greece in 1962 with her Bryn Mawr classmates Frances and Norvelle Browne. She stopped at Marathon. Davenport would admire the reverence of such a gesture. He refers in his final line to Moore’s poem “What Are Years?” in which she says “how pure a thing is joy. / This is mortality, / this is eternity.”

`A Genteelish Toothpick Case'

In 1782, William Cowper published his first book, cumbersomely titled Poems by William Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esq. In a letter to his stalwart friend, the Rev. William Unwin, written on April Fool’s Day, Cowper thanks him for publicizing the publication: “I could not have found a better trumpeter.” When not insane, Cowper was the most wittily gracious of men. He never says “thank you” when a more baroque expression of gratitude is handy. Two sentences later, and extending the musical metaphor, Cowper writes:

“Methinks I see you with the long tube at your mouth, proclaiming to your numerous connections my poetical merits and at proper intervals levelling it at Olney, and pouring into my ear the welcome sound of their approbation. I need not encourage you to proceed, your breath will never fail in such a cause; and thus encouraged, I myself perhaps may proceed also, and when the versifying fit returns produce another volume.”

Cowper was a fragile soul. His sense of self-worth was brittle at best. Writers tend to be children when it comes to wanting attention and approval. Cowper thanks Unwin for recognizing this need. He goes on to feign indifference to Edward Thurlow of the Inner Temple, who had become Lord Chancellor in 1778. Thurlow has said nothing about Cowper’s book. He feels unjustly snubbed, calling it a “mortification” -- but pretends otherwise. Cowper writes:

 

“. . . Mr. Newton tells me that my book is likely to run, spread, and prosper; that the grave cannot help smiling, and the gay are struck with the truth of it; and that it is likely to find its way into [King George III’s] hands . . . Now, if the King should fall in love with my muse, and with you for her sake, such an event would make us ample amends for the Chancellor's indifference, and you might be the first divine that ever reached a mitre, from the shoulders of a poet.”

Cowper launches into the obligatory writer’s rant, leavened with humor, against reviewers: “[They] are such fiery Socinians that they have less charity for a man of my avowed principles than a Portuguese for a Jew.” Spend a few hours unwrapping those metaphors. Cowper’s on a roll. He suggests to Unwin that each of them write a book and have the other review it (which, of course, is how book reviewing has always worked). More shenanigans follow, and a garden update, but my favorite part of Cowper’s letter is the coda, the post scriptum not preceded by a P.S.:

“If your short stay in town will afford you an opportunity, I should be glad if you would buy me a genteelish toothpick case. I shall not think half a guinea too much for it; only it must be one that will not easily break. If second-hand, perhaps it may be the better.”

Cowper was a man of modest needs, but with a taste for accessorizing. Elsewhere, he asked for a stock-buckle, a new hat (“not a round slouch, which I abhor, but a smart well-cocked fashionable affair”) and a cuckoo clock (a penchant he shared with Wordsworth).  

`The Horrible Sanity of the Institution'

Where would I have been without libraries? Scarcely literate. I never had a lot of money as a kid. My parents lived through the Great Depression and were tight. I learned early not to be a spendthrift (or miser). To this day I know a twinge in my gut when I shell out cash for a book. Online purchases make the pain abstract, so I remind myself to be strong. The other day, after much internal debate, I ordered the fat (624 pages) critical edition of Basil Bunting’s Poems recently published by Faber & Faber. While I was on the web site, mouse in hand, I almost ordered C.H. Sisson’s translation of the Divine Comedy, which I read last year – thanks to the library – and Dana Gioia’s 99 Poems, another library loan, but I was strong, at least until book-hunger strikes again.

Later this month we’ll observe the centenary of Anthony Burgess, a writer who stirs in me mixed reactions. I met him once, in April 1971, at Bowling Green State University. I was an eighteen-year-old freshman and Burgess, at fifty-five, was approaching the zenith of his fame. Less than a year later Stanley Kubrick would release A Clockwork Orange, his botched adaptation of Burgess’ 1962 novel. He read from his upcoming novel, M/F, and I was star-struck. I still admire Burgess’ industriousness, his learning and linguistic verve. I read Earthly Powers (1980) several years ago and enjoyed it. I’ve read little that he published after that, but he was an old-fashioned bookman, a solid nut-and-bolts professional. In person he was charming in an Irish sort of way, a gifted talker and literary raconteur. In Urgent Copy: Literary Studies (1968), Burgess collects the essay “What’s All This Fuss about Libraries?” He doesn’t like them. They are “monstrously unnecessary.” He writes:

“I’ve never been able to think of a library as a thing to be used, nibbled or eaten piecemeal. A library encloses, and any one of its items seeks to possess the brain that approaches it: the things are alive and malevolent.”

I have never felt this way. There’s nowhere I’m happier or more at home than in a library; more, even, than in a bookstore. I still feel that little-boy tingle of greed and incipient satiation as I walk through the front door. Libraries suggest Borgesian universality. Thanks to Dewey or the Library of Congress, I can act on any bookish whim, find any volume I want, even if it means filling out an interlibrary loan request. The internet, invented by Borges, makes book location and acquisition even more effortless. But Burgess partially redeems himself:

“I prefer my library at home—and I mean a library, not just bookshelves in the sitting-room. I've bought these books, or, if they’re review copies, neglected to sell them: they can be ravished, defaced, spent pagemeal in the privy, arranged in disorder, lost and found again, used. But there ought not to be too many of them: that way, the shelves mount to the ceiling, library steps have to be imported, a simple classification system begs to be given a trial. Soon you start filling gaps, hungering after completeness, throwing out tattered paperbacks, judging things you once loved unworthy. That way madness lies, or rather the horrible sanity of the institution.”

`No Matter How Few Seemed to Notice'

Whether barbershop anecdote or a story by Chekhov, the brief narrative is best suited to the lives of loners, “isolatoes” (Melville’s word), drifters and others never quite at home. In theory, one could tell a good story about a Congressman (come to think of it, Ward Just did), but the lives of the obscure and forgotten, and those on the margin (not necessarily in the social-justice sense), seem best adapted to short, tightly focused accounts. A novel would stretch and pad and thus dilute the essentials. Novels are social; stories, personal. Frank O’Connor in his study of the short story, The Lonely Voice (1963), says short stories, unlike novels, are characterized by “an intense awareness of human loneliness.” Or at least aloneness.

Before he wrote poetry, Edwin Arlington Robinson tried his hand at prose fiction, and even chose a title for a possible collection of these pieces: Scattered Lives. (That might have served Joyce instead of Dubliners or Sherwood Anderson instead of Winesburg, Ohio.) They were never published and only fragments survive. Robinson turned to poetry without giving up narrative, and 1896 self-published his first book, The Torrent and the Night Before.  In “Calverly’s” (The Town Down the River, 1910), Robinson recycles the title of his abandoned fiction collection: 

“No fame delays oblivion

For them, but something yet survives:

A record written fair, could we

But read the book of scattered lives.”

The title refers to a tavern in New York City, and Robinson memorializes his drinking companions who have died. Throughout his verse, he strives to preserve the memory of those for whom “no fame delays oblivion.” Robinson is one of the great storytellers in our literature. Everyone knows the stories of “Richard Cory” and “Miniver Cheevy.” “Mr. Flood’s Party” (Collected Poems, 1920) was famous in its day but less so now. Eben Flood has walked into town to buy a jug. He’s an old man who lives alone. He pauses in the dark, places the jug on the ground, “With trembling care, knowing that most things break,” and talks to himself. Flood addresses Flood:       

“`Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this

In a long time; and many a change has come

To both of us, I fear, since last it was

We had a drop together. Welcome home!’”

Critics have dragged in the Rubáiyát (“A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou”) and La Chanson de Roland to explicate a poem about a drunk falling off the wagon. We’re witnessing what’s known in recovery parlance as a “slip,” and potentially a fatal one, given Flood’s advanced age. The self-addressed monologue is histrionic and typical of alcoholics, who like to dramatize their psychodramas. Flood sings, as many of us have, when primed with whiskey. Who are we to condemn a superannuated drunk who lives alone for taking a drink?

“He raised again the jug regretfully

And shook his head, and was again alone.

There was not much that was ahead of him,

And there was nothing in the town below—

Where strangers would have shut the many doors

That many friends had opened long ago.”

What might Robinson have made of his story if he had told it in prose? Verse was the preferable option. Scott Donaldson writes in the introduction to his Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life (2007):

“Usually he took for his subjects those who had failed in life and love. He wrote about the derelict and downtrodden, the old and bereft. Who wanted to read about successful aldermen, anyway? Those who led `scattered lives’ interested him, not least because for a long time he thought of himself as one of them. Recognition came late to Robinson. He spent two decades struggling  to get his poems published, surviving on the edge of poverty. Drink and depression dogged his days, yet he was sustained by a persistent belief in his calling—that he had been put on the earth to write poems. It was the only thing he could do, and he meant to do it, no matter how few seemed to notice.”

`It Pains a Man When ’t Is Kept Close'

I wish I had known Sir John Suckling’s poem, sometimes called “Love’s Offence”, when I was young and too easily infatuated. It might have served as prophylaxis for the more delicate sentiments:

“If when Don Cupids dart

Doth wound a heart,

    we hide our grief

    and shun relief;

The smart increaseth on that score;

For wounds unsearcht but ranckle more.”

On this day after St. Valentine’s Day, obligatory card and candy consumed, it’s good to take a refresher course in the booby traps of love. It’s not all nectar and ambrosia. Suckling suggests we suck it up – a wounded heart, that is – and put a lid on it. No Swain, no gain, as the boys say down at the gym. The Cavalier poet goes on:

“Then if we whine, look pale,

And tell our tale,

    men are in pain

    for us again;

So, neither speaking doth become

The Lovers state, nor being dumb.

Suckling discourages both “sharing,” as moderns would call it, and also shutting up. So what’s a lover to do?

“When this I do descry,

Then thus think I,

    love is the fart

    of every heart:

It pains a man when ’t is kept close,

And others doth offend, when ’t is let loose.”

In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson cited that final stanza in his entry for fart, which he defined rather delicately as “wind from behind.” J. Geils articulated Suckling’s insight for contemporary sensibilities.

`What You Hear Is a New Voice'

Without peeking online, read the following stanza and make an educated guess as to its author:

“My childhood’s home I see again,

And sadden with the view;

And still, as memory crowds my brain,

There’s pleasure in it too.”

The speaker is a forthright realist but no stranger to nostalgia. He’s old enough to have a past and to weigh its bitterness and charms. The meter recalls a ballad, which primes us for a story, not a lyrical revelation. Our author knows something and wants to share it. Already he has told us sadness precedes and perhaps follows pleasure, which is how we have come to understand Abraham Lincoln, the melancholy president and poet. That he is a masterful writer of prose is old news. In “Lincoln, the Literary Genius” (later retitled “Lincoln the Writer”), originally published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1959 for the sesquicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, Jacques Barzun reminds us:

“The qualities of Lincoln's literary art--precision, vernacular ease, rhythmical virtuosity, and elegance—may at a century’s remove seem alien to our tastes. Certainly we vehemently promote their opposites: our sensibility cherishes the indistinct. Yet if we consider one continuing strain in our tradition, we cannot without perverseness question the relevance to the present generation of Lincoln’s literary art. His example, plainly, helped to break the monopoly of the dealers in literary plush.”

“My Childhood Home I See Again” is hardly plush-free, but its verses, if more conventional than Lincoln’s prose, are moving and revealing of the man. The editors of the Collected Works (nine volumes, Rutgers University Press, 1953-1955) date the completion of the poem to Feb. 25, 1846. Two years earlier, Lincoln had campaigned in southwestern Indiana for the Whig presidential candidate Henry Clay. Lincoln hadn’t visited his childhood home, where his mother and sister were buried, in fifteen years. One day before finishing the poem, Lincoln sent a copy of his favorite poem, William Knox’s “Mortality,” to Andrew Johnston, a Quincy, Ill., attorney. At Lincoln’s request, in May 1847, Johnston anonymously published several of Lincoln’s poems, including the first two cantos of “My Childhood Home I See Again,” in the Quincy Whig.

In a letter to Johnston, Lincoln described southern Indiana “as unpoetical as any spot on the earth; but still seeing it and its objects and inhabitants aroused feelings in me which were certainly poetry; though whether my expression of those feelings is poetry is quite another question.” Lincoln devotes the second part of his poem to a pure “murder ballad” story. He was present when a childhood friend, Matthew Gentry, tried to murder his parents. He was judged insane and confined to an institution. Lincoln tells Johnston that when he visited his childhood home in 1844, Gentry “was still lingering in this wretched condition.” Lincoln, whose favorite poets were Shakespeare, Pope, Burns and Byron, crafts a self-revealing melodrama:

“And when at length, tho’ drear and long,

Time smoothed thy fiercer woes,

How plaintively thy mournful song

Upon the still night rose.

“I’ve heard it oft, as if I dreamed,

Far distant, sweet, and lone--

The funeral dirge, it ever seemed

Of reason dead and gone.”

Like Dr. Johnson, Lincoln lived in fear of madness. The book to read on this subject is Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness (2005). Lincoln never completed his poems. He wrote two additional stanzas, perhaps the start of a third canto, and then abandoned it:

“And now away to seek some scene

Less painful than the last—

With less of horror mingled in

The present and the past.

“The very spot where grew the bread

That formed my bones, I see.

How strange, old field, on thee to tread,

And feel I’m part of thee!”

The final stanza reads like a thrown-together, obligatory wrap-up. It’s a shame but Lincoln had more pressing matters. Barzun suggests we read Lincoln as though he were a new writer unfamiliar to us: 

“Pretend that you know none of the persons and incidents, nothing of the way the story embedded in these pages comes out. Your aim is to see a life unfold and to descry the character of the man in his own words, written, most of them, not to be published, but to be privately read and felt. If you are at all sensitive to words and to the breath that blows through them, you will soon be aware that what you hear is a new voice.”  

`Mouldering in the Archive'

Another blogger wrote a little guiltily to confess she could never “get” the work of Ivan Turgenev. I eased her mind a bit by admitting that the Russian had always left me chilled if not cold. When I was young and easily swayed by fashion and reputation, I assumed the failing was mine. Henry James called him “adorable.” Sherwood Anderson claimed A Sportsman’s Notebook as a decisive influence on Winesburg, Ohio, and Nabokov savored the purple patches he found in the same book, though his final judgment in On RussianLiterature (1980) was more dismissive:

“Incidentally, Turgenev, as most writers of his time, is far too explicit, leaving nothing to the reader's intuition; suggesting and then ponderously explaining what the suggestion was. The labored epilogues of his novels and long short stories are painfully artificial, the author doing his best to satisfy fully the reader's curiosity regarding the respective destinies of the characters in a manner that can hardly be called artistic.”

That confirms my experience as a reader. Over-explicitness is always annoying in a writer. It implies a condescending lack of trust in the reader’s abilities, an assumption that the reader is too dim to fend for himself. I’ve just found an unexpected source who backs me up on this. Here is Chekhov in Yalta on this date, Feb. 13, in 1902, writing to his wife, Olga Knipper-Chekhova:

“I’ve been reading Turgenev. Only one eighth or one tenth of what he wrote will survive; in twenty-five to thirty-five years’ time all the rest will be mouldering in the archive.”

[See Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters, trans. Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips, Penguin, 2004.]  

`He Had No Experimental Sympathies'

While walking the dog some unseasonal lines jangled in my head:

“And what is so rare as a day in June?

Then, if ever, come perfect days;

Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,

And over it softly her warm ear lays.”

I remember when students were expected to memorize poetry, often many lines of it, and to declaim them in front of the class. I was ham enough in seventh grade to turn James Russell Lowell’s chestnut into an Americanized “The Charge of the Light Brigade,”complete with noble gestures. To this day I have never read all of "The Vision of Sir Launfal," but a dozen lines of it stick in my head more indelibly than most of my computer passwords. The difference, of course, is rhythm. Lowell’s verse is steady as a metronome.

Back home, I read more Lowell online. Sorry to say, I own no volumes of his verse, nor of Whittier’s, nor Bryant’s, nor Longfellow’s – all of whom reside with Lowell in my portable library. I also happened on the tribute to Lowell published in 1892, the year after the poet’s death, by Henry James. All of us should so fortunate as to be eulogized by James:

“His America was a country worth hearing about, a magnificent conception, an admirably consistent and lovable object of allegiance. If the sign that, in Europe, one knew him best by was his intense national consciousness, one felt that this consciousness could not sit lightly on a man in whom it was the strongest form of piety. Fortunately for him, and for his friends, he was one of the most whimsical, one of the wittiest, of human beings, so that he could play with his patriotism and make it various. All the same, one felt in it, in talk, the depth of passion that hums through much of his finest verse—-almost the only passion that, to my sense, his poetry contains, the accent of chivalry, of the lover, the knight ready to do battle for his mistress.”

Who can imagine a poet today being celebrated for his essential Americanness? Or one notable for his ability to “play with his patriotism and make it various”? Such sentiments would embarrass the sophisticates among us. James’ encomium for Lowell is minor by anyone’s judgment, but moving and linguistically generous. He spared nothing coming to the job. We can think of Henry James as a machine for manufacturing metaphors, but that limits him, for he was simultaneously many other sorts of machine, and all the while human. What he says of Lowell may be said rightly of James: “He had no experimental sympathies, and no part of him was traitor to the rest.”

`I Am the Ode!'

Some writers we adopt as members of the family. We coddle them and pay attention to their every word like doting parents. We seek out the obscure and minor works, even juvenilia. If their native tongue is not English, we read and weigh rival translations. We pay them respect and honor as we would a sibling or child. Such a pair is Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (1891-1938), the doomed Russian poet, and his wife Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam (1899-1980), one of the last century’s great memoirists. I would read anything by or about them I could find.

Two Literary Giants: Bulgakov, Mandelstam (1993) is part of the New Russian Writing series published by Glas (as in glasnost, “openness”) in Moscow. I’ve read much of Bulgakov and never found him interesting, but the Mandelstam material redeems this thrown-together little book, more like a family scrapbook than a Festschrift. The editor, Natasha Perova, reproduces photographs of Osip’s parents, Emily and Flora, his younger brothers, Aleksandr and Evgeny, and of the poet, his wife and their friends.

Much of what we know about Mandelstam is drawn from Hope Against Hope (1970), Mozart and Salieri: An Essay on Osip Mandelstam and the Poetic Process (1973) and Hope Abandoned (1974), the memoirs written by his wife, so it’s good to finally have excerpts from pre-Nadezhda remembrances (trans. James Escomb) left by his brother Evgeny (1898-1979), a doctor. We learn that Mandelstam, when young, loved Wagner’s music, and that the family moved at least seventeen times before the February Revolution. The brothers found visits to the synagogue “unpleasant, even distressing.” We read Evgeny’s anecdotes gratefully but sadly, knowing the poet’s fate:

“We used to play charades while on holiday. I remember once Osip and I thought up and played a charade on the name `Mandelstam.’ The first part was a sweetcake made from almonds [in German, Mandel], in the second was a tree trunk [in German, Stamme], and the whole was the two Mandelstam brothers, hand in hand. We often had musical evenings at the guest-house, playing new compositions, and reading poetry, though Osip always refused to read his own work.”

Mandelstam was a student at the famous Tenishev School in St. Petersburg from 1900 to 1907. Another writer, Vladimir Nabokov, enrolled in 1911, and both studied with Vladimir Gippius, the school’s Russian literature instructor and head master. Evgeny writes:

“Literature, of course, was the most important to him. His studies quickly took him beyond the boundaries of the curriculum. This was already evident in his third-form report. In essence this was a testimonial not to his mastery of the school curriculum, but to his formation as an individual. His teacher wrote: `He has made great strides in the past year. Exceptional progress can be observed in his independence of thought and ability to express himself on paper.’”

Perova includes a selection of anecdotes written by Nadezhda Volpin (1900-1998), a poet and translator from French and English, who had a son with another doomed poet, Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin (1895-1925). Here’s one:

“Once, after a long interval, Osip and Nadezhda came to see me. My little boy, who was two at the time, was lying on his cot. The poet leaned down over him:

“`Do you know who I am?’

“`Yes.’

“`You’re lying. What’s my name?’

“`You’re Uncle O.!’

“Mandelstam burst into a joyful laugh.

“`True! True! That’s O for Ode. That’s my hallmark. I am the Ode!’”