`To Dispel What Moves You Overmuch'

To talk shop with a young writer is to be reminded how peculiar a job we have chosen. By definition it calls for solitude, the more the better. And yet I learned to write in a disciplined fashion in a newsroom, a noisy, argumentative place haunted by editors. My office, in comparison, is a monkish sanctuary. We can’t be “Isolatoes,” as Melville called the crew of the Pequod, each “living on a separate continent of his own.” Our job calls for a merging of opposite impulses – solitude and company, relaxed openness and discipline, confidence and self-skepticism. The young writer I met with seems on her way to such a fruitful balance. She sweats every syllable and gets the job done. Her temperament is cool and assessing. She seems not overly impressed with herself but knows she’s good. I went her a copy of Yvor Winters’ “To a Young Writer,” which concludes:

“Write little; do it well.

Your knowledge will be such,

At last, as to dispel

What moves you overmuch.”

`Was She Really Beautiful?'

A sentence copied into a commonplace book and never pursued: “She smelled of damp cotton, axillary tufts, and nenuphars, like mad Ophelia.” I’m reminded of a park ranger who told me flowering cottonwoods smell like freshly ironed linen. It’s evocative but not helpful. Our naturalist/author is Vladimir Nabokov in Part One, Chapter 32 of Ada. Nine years ago, when David Myers and I were assembling “Best American Fiction, 1968–1998,” I lobbied hard for inclusion of Nabokov’s late masterpiece, while objecting to his efforts to include Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew and anything by Philip K. Dick. For once, I won an argument with David.

First, “axillary tufts,” a botanical term. Nabokov was a professional and hobbyist lepidopterist, but his learning in natural history was broad and deep, and he loved using words with precision. Here he refers to a feature found on the abaxial – that is, underside – of many tree leaves. Patches of fuzz sometimes grow where the veins intersect. Each patch is an axillary tuft. Axillary means of or relating to the armpit. Is Van saying Ada smells, in part, like a hairy armpit? There’s a technical name for the related fetish: maschalagnia.

A nenuphar, according to the OED, is “a water lily, esp. the white water lily, Nymphaea alba, or the yellow water lily, Nuphar luteum." In his annotations to Ada, Brian Boyd writes:

“Nenuphars or water lilies are not among the flowers Ophelia picks just before she drowns, but could be compared to the way her `clothes spread wide, / And mermaid-like they bore her up,' in Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death, one of Nabokov’s favorite passages in Hamlet.”

In Gertrude’s speech, Shakespeare mentions only “crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples.” His contemporary, Robert Burton, uses nenuphar in The Anatomy of Melancholy: “To refrigerate the face, by washing it often with rose, violet, nenuphar, lettice, louage waters and the like.” Here’s Nabokov’s context:

“Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture. The silly girl had heaped her hair under a rubber cap, and this gave an unfamiliar, vaguely clinical look to her neck, with its odd dark wisps and strags, as if she had obtained a nurse's job and would never dance again. Her faded, bluish-gray, one-piece swimsuit had a spot of grease and a hole above one hip—nibbled through, one might conjecture, by a tallow-starved larva—and seemed much too short for careless comfort. She smelled of damp cotton, axillary tufts, and nenuphars, like mad Ophelia. None of those minor matters would have annoyed Van, had she and he been alone together; but the presence of the all-male actor made everything obscene, drab and insupportable.”

I first read Ada in 1969, when it was published, and have read it again three times. The novel at first gave me the mingled sensations of delight and incomprehension, useful to novice readers. With time, the former overtook the latter, but I still hadn’t until now looked into nenuphars.   

`Reasonable, Scrupulous and Gently Astringent'

“He is not a writer for periods of great optimism or pessimism or violent agitation, but when the human spirit is convalescing from some orgy of emotion, Chekhov is the perfect companion and counsellor; he is reasonable, scrupulous and gently astringent.”

That’s as good a summation – think of it as a pitch to novice readers – as you’ll find outside reading Chekhov himself. And it doubles as a self-definition of the its author, the great Irish essayist Hubert Butler. “Materialism without Marx: A Study of Chekhov” dates from 1948 and you’ll find it in Independent Spirit: Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996). The most cosmopolitan of self-described provincials, Butler taught English in Leningrad in 1931 and translated Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (for his brother-in-law Tyrone Guthrie’s Old Vic production starring Charles Laughton). In Chekhov he saw a skeptical, principled, compassionate, nonaligned kindred spirit, immune to ideological fashion.

Butler reviews familiar ground, including Chekhov’s friendship with Alexy Suvorin, the publisher of the influential newspaper New Times who championed Chekhov’s work while attacking Dreyfus and his defender, Emile Zola. Suvorin was a reactionary and anti-Semite. Chekhov was an ardent Dreyfusard and, in the context of late-nineteenth-century Russia, a liberal. Butler rightly calls Suvorin, “outside his own family, the most important person in Chekhov’s life.” Chekhov, whose understanding of and compassion for conflicted human nature is unrivalled, maintained a seventeen-year friendship with Suvorin. Friends suspected Chekhov of harboring sympathy for Suvorin’s unsavory views. The friendship was strained by the Dreyfus Affair, but you fail to understand Chekhov and his values if you think he was merely a cynic literary opportunist. Butler lauds Sakhalin Island, based on Chekhov’s 11-week journey to the penal colony in Siberia. The book was only belatedly translated into English, as of 1948, Butler says, “because it is in conflict with the accepted Chekhov legend.” He writes:

“It is not wistful, resigned and full of subdued melancholy. It is blazing with certainty and indignation, and because of that, in spite of its tragic contents it is perhaps the most hopeful and optimistic of all his writings.”

Find the Oneworld Classics edition of Sakhalin Island, translated by Brian Reeve, which includes excellent notes and the book’s first chapter printed in the original Russian. With Henry Mayhew’s London Labor and the London Poor (1851), it’s the finest nineteenth-century work of journalism I have read. Butler describes Chekhov’s return from Sakhalin after eight months’ absence:

“He returned one December afternoon from his long journey, accompanied by two mongooses, a palm civet and a flat-faced, hairless Buryat priest, all of whom were to be accommodated in the tiny Chekhov flat in Moscow. The Buryat priest did not stay long, but the palm civet darted under a bookcase, from which it never again emerged except by night to forage for food and bite the legs of sleepers. The mongooses, on the other hand, led a sociable life, tearing off the wallpaper to look for bugs, making messes in visitors’ hats and turning their gloves inside out. Chekhov meanwhile wrote his book . . .” 

Chekhov was born on this date, Jan. 29, in 1860.

`Until My Visas Wither'

Tony Peyser has little of interest to say about L.E. Sissman, but it’s reassuring to know someone remembers the poet who died at age forty-eight. He’s the sort of poet, like Larkin and Wilbur, whose lines lend themselves to effortless memorization. It’s not just the musicality, though Sissman wrote poems you can sing. It’s his sense of familiarity with life as we live it. Sissman’s poems, like Larkin’s and Wilbur’s, inspire trust. Their bullshit quota approaches zero, rare in recent American poetry, yet Sissman is no blustering cynic. Cancer dogged him for the final decade of his life, the years during which he turned himself into one of American poetry’s great life-celebrators, without being fatuously self-congratulatory about it. Sissman’s poems, even the ones about death, are exuberant.

“Homage to Clotho: A Hospital Suite” was published posthumously in his collected poems, Hello, Darkness (1978). Sissman often wrote suites of poems, as his punning title suggests. One needn’t have cancer or know someone who does to appreciate the wit and craft. This was not poetry written by a victim, for victims. It was written by an adult, that endangered species, for adults. Clotho, for the Greeks, was the youngest of the Fates, who spun the threads of life for all mortals. Here’s the first movement:

“Nowhere is all around us, pressureless,

A vacuum waiting for rupture in

The tegument, a puncture in the skin,

To pass inside without a password and

Implode us into Erewhon. This room

Is dangerously unguarded: in one wall

An empty elevator clangs its doors,

Imperiously, for fodder; in the hall,

Bare stretchers gape for commerce; in the air

Outside, a trembling, empty brightness falls

In hunger on those whom it would devour

Like any sparrow hawk as darkness falls

And rises silently up the steel stairs

To the eleventh and last floor, where I

Reside on sufferance of authorities

Until my visas wither, and I die.”

I’m reminded of Larkin’s “Ambulances”: “the solving emptiness / That lies just under all we do.” My friend David Myers and I met in person only once, in March 2012, in a Mexican restaurant in Houston. Sissman was one of the writers who brought us together when David started A Commonplace Blog in 2008. He was already sick with the cancer that would kill him in September 2014. Over salsa and chips we fumbled through the opening of “A Deathplace”:

“Very few people know where they will die,

But I do: in a brick-faced hospital,

Divided, not unlike Caesarean Gaul,

Into three parts.”

`O Profit-Seeker, O Greedy Thief'

“The dead cannot return, and nothing is left us here but languishment and grief.”

Long life assures a long mourning. Deaths of family and friends accumulate. One even knows retroactive grief. We admire the eminent dead, form bonds of loyalty and affection with strangers gone long before our time, and their absence pains us. It’s not rational but what about life and death is? The author of the grim observation above is Dr. Johnson, writing on this date, Jan. 27, in 1759, in The Idler #41. By then, Johnson’s wife and parents were dead, as were friends, and his mourning never ceased. Futilely, he sought consolation in faith and friendship. In The Idler essay he taxonimizes death’s causes: “There are evils which happen out of the common course of nature, against which it is no reproach not to be provided.”

That would describe the death of Isaac Babel on this date in 1940. The cause was the NKVD’s trademark method of execution: a bullet to the back of the head, in the basement of the Lubyanka in Moscow. Think of the scene: the deafening explosion, the bare swinging bulb, the stink of blood and cordite, the slickened floor and walls – and a great writer was dead. Andrei Sinyavsky writes of Babel in A Voice from the Chorus (trans. Kyril Fitzlyon and Max Hayward, 1976):

“. . . his biography is that not of a living person, but of one seconded to life (his job of clerk in the Red Cavalry suited him admirably), who could fit into any surroundings or situation and look at it without prejudice. He was a spy in the service of literature who ferreted out wonders in everyday existence, a declasse secret agent who once rented a room in the house of a `finger man’ in order to write his Odessa Stories.”

Babel’s Red Cavalry is a death-haunted book set during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-21. “The Cemetery of Kozin” closes with these words:

“O death, O profit-seeker, O greedy thief, why have you not spared us, even once?”

`Progress in the Art of Reading'

“Read over again the ten best books that you have already read. The result of this experiment will test your taste, measure your advance, and fit you for progress in the art of reading.”

Let’s fudge “best” and substitute “most reliable,” “most companionable,” plain old “favorite.” What I mean are the books you long for when you’re out of town, books you can open on a whim and happily browse, in which you can start reading a sentence, close your eyes and finish it from memory. Here’s mine, hastily spewed, not premeditated:

James Boswell: Life of Johnson

Samuel Johnson: Lives of the English Poets

A.J. Liebling: Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris

Shakespeare: Plays

Zbigniew Herbert: Barbarian in the Garden

Vladimir Nabokov: Pale Fire

Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy

Whitney Balliett: American Musicians II

Anton Chekhov: Stories

Philip Larkin: Complete Poems

Whittaker Chambers: Witness

That’s eleven, I know, but really it’s even more than that because the Shakespeare I most often use comes in three volumes, as does the Boswell, and the Garnett translation of Chekhov’s Tales has thirteen. The point is not numbers but time-tested compatibility, the pleasing fit of reader to book.

The advice at the top is drawn from Henry Van Dyke’s “A Preface on Reading and Books,” which serves as an introduction to Counsel Upon the Reading of Books (1900). Andrew Rickard at his blog Graveyard Masonry quotes an excerpt. The volume consists of six essays delivered in 1898-99 at the American Society for the Extension of University Teaching in Philadelphia. I’ve skimmed the six and found them dry and academic in the old-fashioned sense. Van Dyke makes good, practical sense:

“Read plenty of books about people and things, but not too many books about books. Literature is not to be taken in emulsion. The only way to know a great author is to read his works for yourself. That will give you knowledge at first-hand.”

Consume the entrée before the sides. Ignore the critics. Consider the presumption of someone eager to tell you what and how to read. Trust your own damn instincts until it’s time to revise or jettison them. Here is Van Dyke’s wisest counsel: “Read the old books, — those that have stood the test of time. Read them slowly, carefully, thoroughly. They will help you to discriminate among the new ones.”

In this he echoes Hazlitt and Lamb. The Library of Today is small and provincial. The Library of the Past is vast and catholic. Hazlitt plays the reactionary when he memorably opens his essay like this: “I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire ever to read at all.” After two centuries, he’s still offending partisans of the new.

`It Was the Greatest Loss of My Life'

“People claim that Chekhov hated life, that he was a pessimist, a grumbler. Slander! The bleakest of his stories is harmonious. His world is elegant, perfect, charming in a feminine way. `Gusev’ is more perfect than anything Tolstoy ever wrote. Chekhov is the most mellifluous, the most musical of all writers.”

This sane judgment was written in 1907, three years after Chekhov’s death (and three before Tolstoy’s), by twenty-five-year-old Kornei Chukovsky (1882-1969), who went on to become a beloved writer of Russian poetry for children, a literary critic and the translator of Defoe, Whitman, Chesterton and Synge, among others. The source of the passage at the top is from a remarkable volume, Chukovsky’s Diary, 1901-1969 (trans. Michael Henry Heim, 2005), which begins during the reign of Nicholas II and ends with Brezhnev.

During his lifetime and ever since, Chekhov has been confidently misunderstood by critics and readers alike. He is gloomy, too light-weight, too conservative, a decadent, too liberal, too apolitical, a nihilist, a shameless bourgeois, and a realist or not a realist. Oh, and nothing happens in his stories. The only other major writer I can think of who is comparably misunderstood is Kipling.

“Gusev” is probably the first Chekhov story I read. As a kid I found it in a library copy of Randall Jarrell’s Book of Stories: An Anthology (1958). Jarrell adored Chekhov. He translated The Three Sisters. Peter Taylor remembered him as the tennis coach at Kenyon College, sitting with his players “about the soda shop reading Auden and Chekhov and Proust.” In a lecture he delivered at Harvard, Jarrell told his audience that “Proust and Chekhov, Hardy and Yeats and Rilke . . . demand to be shared.” Jarrell is remembered for his pans (and they are delicious) but his enthusiasms are unforgettable.

“Gusev” is claustrophobically sad, and yet exhilarating.  Chekhov gives us a clinically described death at sea:  “He slept for two days, and at midday on the third two sailors came down and carried him out.” Never has omniscient narration been so powerful and, in the final sentences, almost surreal. It’s as though Chekhov sees everything. The body is dumped overboard. Chekhov’s vision is audacious and unblinking:

“After that another dark body appeared. It was a shark. It swam under Gusev with dignity and no show of interest, as though it did not notice him, and sank down upon its back, then it turned belly upwards, basking in the warm, transparent water and languidly opened its jaws with two rows of teeth. The harbour pilots are delighted, they stop to see what will come next. After playing a little with the body the shark nonchalantly puts its jaws under it, cautiously touches it with its teeth, and the sailcloth is rent its full length from head to foot; one of the weights falls out and frightens the harbour pilots, and striking the shark on the ribs goes rapidly to the bottom.”

“Overhead at this time the clouds are massed together on the side where the sun is setting; one cloud like a triumphal arch, another like a lion, a third like a pair of scissors . . . . From behind the clouds a broad, green shaft of light pierces through and stretches to the middle of the sky; a little later another, violet-coloured, lies beside it; next that, one of gold, then one rose-coloured . . . The sky turns a soft lilac. Looking at this gorgeous, enchanted sky, at first the ocean scowls, but soon it, too, takes tender, joyous, passionate colours for which it is hard to find a name in human speech.”

It’s as though suddenly God takes over the story. Here is an entry from Chukovsky’s Diary, dated July 15, 1954:

"Today is the fiftieth anniversary of Chekhov’s death. Exactly fifty years ago, while I was living in London, I read the announcement of it in the Daily News and spent the whole night walking round and round the Bedford Square fence weeping—sobbing—like a madman. It was the greatest loss of my life . . . Fifty years have passed, yet my love for him—for his face, for his work—remains constant.”

`Asservation Is Today the Rage'

Three of the five newspapers I worked for are dead. The other two, owned by Gannett and Hearst, have survived only by no longer resembling newspapers. I stopped grieving a long time ago, though I’m amazed at the speed with which an essential piece of culture for centuries, a way of life for writers and readers alike, went moribund. I started work as a reporter just in time to learn how to write, before editors (and readers, and most reporters) stopped caring. In the seventies, symptoms of morbidity were already undeniable (not that I’m suggesting there was ever a Golden Age), but I sure had a lot of fun. I think of newspapers as my graduate school, just as Ishmael declared “a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” We were certainly kept as poor as grad students. One year we got canned hams as Christmas bonuses, and were grateful.

The only newspaper I continue to read with any regularity – in hard copy, I mean – is our folksy neighborhood weekly. It survives by pretending it’s 1962, complete with what we used to call “chicken-dinner” news. I mean no condescension. I read it faithfully every Thursday, even the ads. They publish a neighborhood police blotter. The Mencken-esque photo of the columnist on the editorial page shows him with a cigar in his mouth. They run a pet column called “Dear Tabby.” The writing can be clunky and leans toward earnestness, but is never slick or trendy. A recent front-page story documented the swarms of grackles, starlings and cowbirds that congregate at twilight at a nearby intersection and shit on cars.

In his introduction to The Dog’s Last Walk (Bloomsbury, 2017), Howard Jacobson composes an epitaph for defunct newspapers: “The shutting down of any serious newspaper is a small catastrophe.” He should know. For eighteen years, the novelist wrote a column for The Independent, the British newspaper that folded in 2016 after thirty years of publication. His latest book collects ninety-three of his columns, which are unlike anything I’ve read in an American newspaper – learned, bookish, clever, enormously funny and opinionated while remaining politically non-aligned. Jacobson calls them “feuilletonistic,” referring to a form that has never caught on in the U.S. His columns,  composed with “ambitions to be impartial and non-assertive,” are, he writes:

“. . . at once popular and literary, serious without solemnity. Perhaps intimate in tone, sometimes taking the form of fiction, eschewing dogma, at all times assuming a shared disinterestedness in matters intellectual and stylistic, and therefore a patient leisureliness – an absence of any hunger to have their own views confirmed – on the part of readers.”

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Sounds like the better blogs. I used to think blogs could supplant what some journalists used to do, but I was young and foolish. The demise of the Independent, Jacobson says, represents “one more proof that we no longer read in the expansive, altruistically curious manner we once did.” Jacobson is simply good company. He’s not out to change your mind and he never panders:

“Asseveration is today the rage: a passion to pronounce with certainty, to aver or declare if you’re the writer; an impatience with discourse of any other sort if you’re the reader. Irony, whose methodology is often slow and covert, finds little favour in those channels of conversation which the social media have made possible. The writer, literal-mindedly meaning what he says, stands and delivers, whereupon the respondent, literal-mindedly believing him, gives the thumbs up or thumbs down. If you happen to believe that most judgements worth making occupy a hazy, indeterminate space somewhere between `like’ or `dislike,’ and are in a perpetual state of being formed and reconsidered, you will find there are few symbols on the Internet you can make use of.”

The least interesting thing I can know about a writer or reader – about anyone, really – are his or her opinions. There’s a pandemic of strident didacticism out there. Jacobson’s columns are a nice quarantine away from all that, and I haven’t even read past his introduction.

`Never Mind My Dulness'

We’ve lost the gift for mock-self-disparagement. The point of the art form is to make a show of modesty, for form’s sake, but to do it so dazzlingly that your recipient forgets you don’t really mean it and applauds your wit. In his letters, Guy Davenport often referred to his writings as “scribbles,” which I’ve always taken as an allusion to the Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh’s “Another damned thick book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?” That way, Davenport remains fetchingly humble while likening himself to the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Here is another impressive example. On this date, Jan. 23, in 1824, Charles Lamb wrote a letter to his friend Bernard Barton, known as the “Quaker Poet” and renowned as a writer of hymns. Humor seems to have been lost on Barton. Lamb begins with a mock-apology for having written a “peevish letter” about being slow to answer letters, and tells his Friend he “seems to have taken [it] in too serious a light.” He had a cold, Lamb says, and couldn’t muster “the vigour of a Letter, much less an Essay.”  Then comes the apologetic artifice: “I will bridle my pen another time, and not teaze and puzzle you with my aridities.” Lamb is the wittiest of writers, a reputation he earned during his lifetime. “Aridities” is his “scribbles.” But he won’t let go of it:

“The more I think the more I am vexed at having puzzled you with that Letter, but I have been so out of Letter writing of late years, that it is a sore effort to sit down to it, & I felt in your debt, and sat down waywardly to pay you in bad money. Never mind my dulness, I am used to long intervals of it. The heavens seem brass to me--then again comes the

refreshing shower. `I have been merry once or twice ere now.’”

The Shakespeare tag is nice. Silence to Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 2, Act V, Scene 3. Lamb possessed an enviable gift for being simultaneously gracious, affectionate and collegial, and also amusing. What a joy it must have been to open one of his letters. Even Wordsworth, I suspect, must have indulged in the occasional discreet giggle. Here’s the close of the Barton letter:  

“Keep your good spirits up, dear BB--mine will return--They are at present in abeyance. But I am rather lethargic than miserable. I don’t know but a good horse whip would be more beneficial to me than Physic. My head, without aching, will teach yours to ache. It is well I am getting to the conclusion. I will send a better letter when I am a better man. Let me thank you for your kind concern for me (which I trust will have reason soon to be dissipated) & assure you that it gives me pleasure to hear from you.”

`To Give In to the Story at Hand'

The radio is no longer listenable. It’s sad to see a medium with so much promise squandered, surrendered to children and fanatics. As a teenager I loved listening with an ear plug late at night. The lights were out and everyone slept. That was the age of “underground radio.” That’s how I first heard Jimi Hendrix playing “Red House.” Even talk shows, like freak shows, seemed interesting. John Birchers, UFO nuts, JFK conspiracy theorists – but also a guy, late at night, from a city I no longer remember, talking at length about Sherwood Anderson. Of course, everything then was new. I hadn’t yet sorted out the gifts from the cranks. I haven’t listened to AM in half a century.

We have no radio in the house now, a change from the days when my mother turned on the kitchen set first thing in the morning and listened to Ed Fisher on WJW, and polkas on Sunday mornings. Radio was a comfort, a surrogate neighbor, an audio blog with a soundtrack. In the car, I now listen strictly to CDs. Most of my drives are brief – eleven miles to work, eleven back – but long enough for a couple of tracks, usually jazz, Jack Teagarden or Lester Young. Being in a car, shielded from wind and street noise, revives some of the late-night radio intimacy I knew as a kid. I’ve never liked music as background. I like to listen.

Verlyn Klinkenborg comes up with another option, one I’ve never tried. In More Scenes from the Rural Life (Princeton Architectural Press, 2013), he describes a cross-country drive he and his wife took from upstate New York to California. They listened to a recording of Middlemarch cover to cover, so too speak: “It so happens that America is as wide as Middlemarch is long, at seventy mph along the Southern route.” This makes sense. Eliot’s novel is as expansive and intimate as the country. Most of my drives are too short for so hefty a novel. Klinkenborg notes, correctly:

“A novel is really a temporal creation. It’s as much about the ways in which time passes in the story and in the reader’s awareness of the story as it is about anything else. If you sat in a room and read Middlemarch or listened to it being read, you’d become very aware of the time it took. But for us the novel became a spatial creation. It was as if we were driving along a pavement of Eliot’s sentences laid end to end across the country, the ink as black as asphalt.”

Klinkenborg had read Middlemarch several times before listening to the recording. I wonder how this changed his experience. Reading a book a second or third time is a qualitatively different experience from the first time – not that Middlemarch is driven by suspense. For my purposes, I won’t be listening to Daniel Deronda in the car anytime soon. But I might try something briefer – Chekhov’s stories, Liebling’s essays. Klinkenborg writes:

“The human mind has a natural propensity to give in to the story at hand.”   

[Go here to read the original newspaper version of Klinkenborg's story. The piece collected in More Scenes from the Rural Life is revised, expanded and improved.]

`Letting Them Laugh'

Most of today’s poetry is dreary, in-bred stuff. Don’t read it if you need a lift. Read this instead:

“The coast of Maine is painted brown and gray

So starlings, grackles, gulls and crows

Have safe but somber feathers to display.

A more forgiving land would not foreclose

Some lusher oranges, blues or indigos.

“A cardinal returns to perch alone,

Though it is weeks before a thaw.

His sudden scarlet jars like blood on bone,

And shows that evolution has a flaw

That spares some whimsy from the grip of law.”

That’s “March” from A.M. Juster’s The Secret Language of Women (University of Evansville Press, 2003). Not quite light verse, whatever that may mean, and, thankfully, not self-importantly solemn. If not whimsical, at least respecting whimsy as a subject. And set in E.A. Robinson’s backyard. Nor is it an anti-Darwin screed, but less than reverential when it comes to some Darwinists and their determinist bullying. I knew an ornithologist convinced birds, if not other species, possess an aesthetic sense and sing just for the joyous hell of it. He asked me to keep that to myself for now.

Saturday afternoon I spent an hour on the telephone with the poet and translator A.M. Juster, whose street-legal name is Mike Astrue. This was our first conversation, and we had no trouble coming up with things to talk about, including X.J. Kennedy, Fred Gwynne, Clement Moore and Patty Duke. Nothing stuffy, like Juster himself. If Maine in March isn’t ebullient enough, try “Ballade of Bad Sandwiches,” which comes with an epigraph from Warren Zevon: “Enjoy every sandwich.” Here’s the poem:

“I ask myself throughout my flight delay:

why can’t a Whopper have more sauce and cheese?

Those footlong subs grow shorter by the day.

There’s skimpy bacon in my BLT’s,

and this pastrami is so dry and gray

I cannot drown its dreary taste in beer.

I ask a food-court worker, “Tell me, please,

where are the sandwiches of yesteryear?”

“How long can mayonnaise or chicken stay

on sale before they give us some disease?

Who knows if food inspectors need to spray?

I balk at burgers as uncooked as these,

then panic that my tuna is passé;

egg salad leaves me nearly numb with fear

about E. coli’s harsh realities.

Where are the sandwiches of yesteryear?

“I am not asking that they be gourmet.

Who needs more quinoas and organic Bries?

Who wants croissants that quickly flake away—

or honey dressing sourced from free-range bees?

Bring ham and cheese with chips from Frito Lay!

The PBJ apocalypse is near,

and yet the FDA remains at ease.

Where are the sandwiches of yesteryear?

“We’ve lost our dietary liberties;

such times demand a lunchtime Paul Revere.

Now stand with me! Arise as one and say,

`WHERE ARE THE SANDWICHES OF YESTERYEAR?’”

When my brother and I were kids, our father subscribed to such magazines as Guns and Ammo and Field and Stream. We invented a magazine of our own: Guns and Sandwiches, with a special issue devoted to the Reuben. Here’s Mike in a 2015 interview:

“I think the purpose of all work is to try to make the world better for your efforts. With poetry that can mean turning people toward something spiritual, letting them laugh, helping them face their fears, or reminding them about joy.”

`To Hear the Prose When One Reads It Silently'

The two most chilling words a reader can hear: “poetry reading.” The ham on stage, his audience of sycophants. The ham droning or orating, head bowed in faux-modesty. He is so sensitive, so – visionary? Few read well and fewer write well. The poet substitutes himself for his words, which, come to think of it, may be an act of mercy. I’d rather be at home, reading poems on the page and cutting out the middleman. No tedium, no wishing I’d worn a watch.

In 2011, the late Helen Pinkerton sent me Yvor Winters Reading Poetry, the CD she and Wesley Trimpi produced for the Yvor Winters Centenary Symposium at Stanford University in 2000. Winters made the recordings in 1953 and 1958. He reads thirty-one of his own poems and others by Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and J.V. Cunningham – in short, the Winters Canon. To listen to the recording is to hear a grownup. Winters maintains a strong mid-tempo pace. His words are neither rushed nor labored. The enunciation is flawless. No cheap effects, over-emoting, goofy sounds, pandering to listeners. Winters sounds like a husband, father and thinker, worthy of trust. He is the messenger, not the message. Helen writes in her liner-notes: “As if in a musical performance, he riveted attention on the poem itself in its full, living reality – its audible being.”  After listening again to the CD, I reread Winters’ essay “The Audible Reading of Poetry” (The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises, 1957), and was impressed by the amount of space he devotes to prose:

“It is also important to learn to read prose aloud, and to hear the prose when one reads it silently. Melville, Gibbon, or Samuel Johnson about equally will be lost on us if we do not so hear it.”

Winters suggests we listen with both the “sensual ear” and the “mind’s ear.” Readers who don’t are “barbarians; literature is closed to them, in spite of the fact that they may think otherwise.” Winters’ examples of prose writers worth listening to are perfectly chosen. Here is the opening paragraph of the first sketch in Melville’s “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles.” Read it aloud. Hear the conversational, story-telling tone and the predominantly iambic beat:

“Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside city lot, imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and the vacant lot the sea, and you will have a fit idea of the general aspect of the Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles. A group rather of extinct volcanoes than of isles, looking much as the world at large might after a penal conflagration.”

As to Gibbon, he is difficult to quote briefly. Read aloud this excerpt from Vol. IV, Chap. 25 of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and enjoy the unlikely mingling of sonority and hilarity:

“A philosopher may deplore the eternal discord of the human race, but he will confess that the desire of spoil is a more rational provocation than the vanity of conquest. From the age of Constantine to that of the Plantagenets, this rapacious spirit continued to instigate the poor and hardy Caledonians: but the same people, whose generous humanity seems to inspire the songs of Ossian, was disgraced by a savage ignorance of the virtues of peace and of the laws of war. Their southern neighbours have felt, and perhaps exaggerated, the cruel depredations of the Scots and Picts: and a valiant tribe of Caledonia, the Attacotti, the enemies, and afterwards the soldiers, of Valentinian, are accused, by an eye-witness, of delighting in the taste of human flesh. When they hunted the woods for prey, it is said that they attacked the shepherd rather than his flock; and that they curiously selected the most delicate and brawny parts, both of males and females, which they prepared for their horrid repasts. If, in the neighbourhood of the commercial and literary town of Glasgow, a race of cannibals has really existed, we may contemplate, in the period of the Scottish history, the opposite extremes of savage and civilized life. Such reflections tend to enlarge the circle of our ideas: and to encourage the pleasing hope that New Zealand may produce, in some future age, the Hume of the Southern Hemisphere.”

Finally, Dr. Johnson in The Rambler #2:

“He that endeavours after fame by writing, solicits the regard of a multitude fluctuating in pleasures, or immersed in business, without time for intellectual amusements; he appeals to judges prepossessed by passions, or corrupted by prejudices, which preclude their approbation of any new performance. Some are too indolent to read any thing, till its reputation is established; others too envious to promote that fame which gives them pain by its increase. What is new is opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught; and what is known is rejected, because it is not sufficiently considered that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed. The learned are afraid to declare their opinion early, lest they should put their reputation in hazard; the ignorant always imagine themselves giving some proof of delicacy, when they refuse to be pleased: and he that finds his way to reputation through all these obstructions, must acknowledge that he is indebted to other causes besides his industry, his learning, or his wit.”

At its best (in the periodical essays and Lives of the English Poets), Johnson’s prose is a pounding sea. We stand on the shore, wondering at its power, hoping not to be swept away. Just listen to the roar.

`Chekhov Had Really Written in Yiddish'

Hyphen-mongering by readers and critics is a political, anti-literary act of laziness and myopia. We don’t read and enjoy a book because its author comes USDA-stamped “Irish-American” or “French-lesbian.” We read it and enjoy it because it’s good, to put it in the simplest terms. I’m restating what my late friend David Myers wrote more than a decade ago: “Literature is simply good writing—where `good’ has, by definition, no fixed definition.” That formulation makes some uneasy. I find it useful. We all have bookish prejudices, and I have no interest in defending or questioning mine. I’m almost immune to the charms of German literature. The only books I own written by an African writer are Confessions and The City of God. Science fiction, a species of children’s literature, leaves me cold and indifferent, and I’m too old to care. I won’t read a book because I’m told it’s good for me. Reading is not therapeutic and it’s not like eating kale. Literature is slippery and defies pre-fabricated marketing. By definition it surprises and sometimes offends. I like the spirit in which Irving Howe writes “Strangers,” an essay from 1977:

“I remember Isaac Rosenfeld, the most winning of all American Jewish writers, once explaining to me with comic solemnity that Chekhov had really written in Yiddish but Constance Garnett, trying to render him respectable, had falsified the record. Anyone with half an ear, said Rosenfeld, could catch the tunes of Yiddish sadness, absurdity, and humanism in Chekhov’s prose—and for a happy moment it almost seemed true.”

Chekhov was a Dreyfusard who championed Sholem Aleichem. As Howe notes in his essay, Jewish immigrants to America felt a solidarity with Chekhov and other non-Jewish Russian writers, though not with the “sensationalist and anti-Semite Dostoevsky.” Howe writes:

“These Russians formed a moral dike guarding the immigrant Jewish intelligentsia and then their children from the waves of American sensibility and myth. Like the Yiddish culture from which we had emerged, we were internationalist in our sentiment before we were part of any nation, living in the exalted atmospheres of European letters even as we might be afraid, at home, to wander a few streets away.”

As a non-Jewish, non-Russian American, I share a similar affinity for Gogol and Sinyavsky, David Bergelson and Isaac Bashevis Singer. They are “mine,” and I don’t need anyone telling me otherwise. In 1985, Clarence Brown edited The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, a selection ranging from Tolstoy and Chekhov to Voinovich and Sokolov. In his introduction he says provocatively and correctly: “I now look back on this banquet of words with much pleasure, which I hope nothing will prevent your sharing. These writers, after all continue in our time the tradition that has made Russian, along with English and classical Greek, one of the three supreme literatures of the world.” Nothing to argue about there, and I’m not Russian, English or Greek.

`Lest the Jails Overflow'

Self-destruction has its charms, especially if you’re not the one doing the destructing. Let me clarify. I’m not referring to alcoholism or drug addiction, subsumed under the clinical label “substance abuse,” which evokes a vision of someone flogging an ingot of molybdenum. Exhibit A is A.J. Liebling and his lifelong over-indulgence in food. Had it stopped there, we wouldn’t be wasting our time. Food is not an inherently interesting subject. The much-ballyhooed works of M.F.K. Fisher, for instance, are almost unreadable. Food – procuring, preparing, consuming -- invites a comic treatment, and that was Liebling’s abiding gift. He is the wittiest of writers, and his masterpiece is Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1962). It may be the book I have read most often as an adult.

I’ve returned to it after rereading Joseph Epstein’s “An Older Dude” in Once More Around the Block: Familiar Essays (1987). The occasion of Epstein’s essay is his fiftieth birthday (in 1987 – earlier this month he turned eighty-one). As you would expect, his tone is weighty but light. Epstein takes his subject but not himself seriously. He is amusing but not joking: “While I remain as youthful and beautiful as always, why, I cannot help ask, have so many of my contemporaries grown to look so old?” Then he gets to the heart of it: “It is not always easy to distinguish between the love of life and the fear of death.” Which move him to think of friends who are “slowly but rather systematically eliminating life’s little physical pleasures: cutting out tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, red meat, cholesterol-laden food, all sugar. Soon their meals will be reduced to three dandelions and a nice cup of boiled water.” Such anxiety-driven behavior, Epstein says, seems like “greed for life, as opposed to love of life.” Ascetics, especially self-advertising ascetics, make me nervous, too. Enter Liebling, via Epstein:

“When I think of the distinction between love of life and the greed for duration, I think of the writer A.J. Liebling. With the aid of his fork, Liebling had early joined the ranks of the obese, an army he was never to leave.”

Liebling possessed the grace of the guiltless. He seldom seriously agonized over what he was doing to himself. Years ago, Tony Hiss told me he remembered walking as a young reporter beside Liebling, and barely having enough room on the sidewalk. Yet he was happy to be taking the budding writer to lunch. Here is where Epstein rises to the occasion:

“Doubtless he would have lived longer [Liebling died at fifty-eight] had he lived more carefully. But had he lived more carefully – eaten less, drunk less – he would not have been A.J. Liebling . . . My own preference would be to live like Liebling and last until age ninety-seven. There is a contradiction here, I realize, but then, fortunately, the law of contradiction is not enforced, lest the jails overflow.”

`While Someone Else is Eating'

We read an old chestnut so often we can no longer read it. Take “Musee des Beaux Arts,” written by Auden in Brussels in 1938. I first encountered it as a teenager in an Oscar Williams anthology. The poem’s conversational plainness, the way Auden illustrates the bland ubiquity of human suffering – “how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along” -- make it instantly memorable. But familiarity breeds blindness. I have just noted the date of the poem’s composition: December 1938.

Hitler has Austria and the Sudetenland. A month earlier: Kristallnacht. In the Soviet Union, the Yezhovshchina rages on (and would soon claim Yezhov). As many as 1.75 million people have died in Stalin’s Great Terror (1936-38). Some 5,200 miles to the east of Brussels, a poet is dying. Osip Mandelstam was arrested a second time in May 1938, for “counter-revolutionary activities.” On Aug. 2 he was sentenced to five years in correction camps. Half-mad, starved and sick, he dies in a transit camp near Vladivostok on Dec. 27, 1938.

`Your Mind Knew the Intent'

The following is from an email the late Helen Pinkerton wrote to me in July 2011, shortly after I had returned to Houston. I was reading her 1987 volume Melville’s Confidence Men and American Politics in the 1850s:

“The Melville book took 10 years of my life, which I much enjoyed, traveling East to find the illustrations, and reading countless biographies of American politicians. Melville’s mind I found almost endlessly fascinating, and reading about the period made it even more so. Today, we think we have political problems. We should try dealing with an issue of the magnitude of slavery. Melville grew intellectually enormously in pondering the problem. He also grew into a philosophical pessimist about human nature and a political conservative, which the current PC Melvillians refuse to recognize.”

When she wrote this, Helen was eighty-five. Whenever she described working on a project, whether poetry or scholarship, she spoke of excitement, focus and pleasure, even when the job was difficult and protracted. Her mention of “PC Melvillians” still makes me laugh, as I’ve had run-ins with that crowd, who seem to think the whale – or was it Ahab? -- represents capitalism. If you read only one volume by Helen, make it A Journey of the Mind: Collected Poems of Helen Pinkerton 1945-2016 (Wiseblood Books, 2016). Here are the middle stanzas from “Coronach for Christopher Drummond.” Read them with Helen in mind:

“Whether Jonson’s grieving prayers,

Or Milton’s rich designs,

Or Melville’s rugged verse,

Or Winters’ densest lines,

“Your mind knew the intent,

Your voice wakened the sound—

The sleeping beauty pent

In chambers underground.”

Helen’s daughter, Erica Light, sent this announcement:

“A memorial gathering of Helen’s friends, caregivers and family will be held on Saturday, February 24, from 1:00 to 4:00pm, at the historic Holbrooke Hotel, 212 West Main Street, Grass Valley, California. All are welcome to join us in remembering Helen’s life and honoring her many contributions to the study of English literature, poetry, and of Civil War history.

“A variety of hors d’oeuvres and beverages will be shared, and Helen’s ‘well-lived’ life and her poetry will be celebrated.

“Please RSVP by Monday, February 5, by email as shown above, telephone at (530) 292-1365, or USPS at P.O. Box 2746, Grass Valley, CA  95945. Accommodations may be found at the Holbrooke Hotel, http://holbrooke.com, or at the nearby Gold Miners Inn, http://www.goldminersinn.com, or Grass Valley Courtyard Suites,  http://www.gvcourtyardsuites.com, both in walking distance of the Holbrooke.”

[ADDENDUM: Go here to read Helen's obituary.]

`This Is a Beautiful Day'

It always comes as a surprise to be reminded that George Keats, the poet’s younger brother, lived the last twenty-three years of his life in Louisville, Ky., operated a sawmill there, worked in property development and even served on city council. It’s like being reminded that Robert Frost, the Ur-New Englander, was born in San Francisco. George married Georgiana Wylie in May 1818 and the couple arrived in the U.S. in August. The poet was fond of his sister-in-law, and George and Georgiana were the recipients of his longest and most ebullient letters, often written over the course of several days. This week in 1820, a year before his death at age twenty-five, Keats addressed a ten-page letter to Georgiana, dated Jan. 13, 15, 17 and 28. George had returned to England in December 1819 after the death of his brother, Tom Keats. The couple had been staying in John James Audubon’s home in Henderson, Ky. Keats’ tone, as in this excerpt from Jan. 15, is gossipy and buoyant. George is still in England:  

“This is a beautiful day. I hope you will not quarrel with it if I call it an American one. The sun comes upon the snow and makes a prettier candy than we have on twelfth-night cakes. George is busy this morning in making copies of my verses. He is making one now of an `Ode to the Nightingale,’ which is like reading an account of the Black Hole at Calcutta on an iceberg.”

That is Keats the comedian. Here, two paragraphs later in the same letter, is Keats the moralist, echoing Swift:

“The more I know of men the more I know how to value entire liberality in any of them. Thank God, there are a great many who will sacrifice their worldly interest for a friend. I wish there were more who would sacrifice their passions. The worst of men are those whose self-interests are their passion; the next, those whose passions are their self-interest. Upon the whole I dislike mankind. Whatever people on the other side of the question may advance, they cannot deny that they are always surprised at hearing of a good action, and never of a bad one.”

On the cusp of his final, “posthumous” year, Keats shows he has done a lot of growing up, of necessity. Two days later, Keats enacts a comic tour-de-force that doubles as a taxonomy of human types. He writes to Georgiana of his friends James Rice Jr., John Hamilton Reynolds and Thomas Richards:   

“I know three witty people all distinct in their excellence — Rice, Reynolds, and Richards. Rice is the wisest, Reynolds the playfullest, Richards the out-o’-the-wayest. The first makes you laugh and think, the second makes you laugh and not think, the third puzzles your head. I admire the first, I enjoy the second, I stare at the third. The first is Claret, the second Ginger beer, the third Crême de Byrapymdrag. The first is inspired by Minerva, the second by Mercury, the third by Harlequin Epigram, Esq. The first is neat in his dress, the second slovenly, the third uncomfortable. The first speaks adagio, the second allegretto, the third both together. The first is Swiftean, the second Tom-Crib-ean [a reference to Thomas Moore’s Tom Crib’s Memorial to Congress, 1819], the third Shandean. And yet these three Eans are not three Eans but one Ean.”

Keats was many things, and certainly not what we were taught.