'This Is Worse Than Swift'

I’ve been reading Questioning Minds: The Letters of Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport (Counterpoint, 2018) since receiving it as a birthday gift in October. Heroically edited by Edward M. Burns, it comes in two fat volumes with a slipcase, its 2,016 pages weighing almost eight pounds. It is one of two essential books published in 2018 that I have read, the other being Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories. On Monday, I brought the second volume with me to pass the time in the courthouse while awaiting jury selection. I wasn’t empaneled but had more than half a day to read, an unexpected luxury on a workday. Here is a rare convergence of three pairs of variously gifted men – Davenport and Kenner, Boswell and Johnson, Laurel and Hardy – from a letter Davenport wrote to Kenner on March 7, 1979:

“A Beckettian moment in Boswell:

LADY McCLEOD: Is no man naturally good?

JOHNSON: No, madam, no more than a wolf.

BOSWELL: Nor a woman, sir?

JOHNSON: No, Sir.

LADY McLEOD (in a low voice): This is worse than Swift.”

The exchange occurs in Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., on Sept. 14, 1773. In a Feb. 27 letter, Kenner told Davenport he spoke with a man who had known Stan Laurel (d. 1965), “who, he reports surprisingly, was 6’1’’ (Hardy was 6’3’’), and, not surprisingly, was the idea man of the two.” (Though it’s a mistake to underestimate Hardy’s subtlety and fat-man’s grace. No one played misguided overconfidence better.) After the Boswell exchange cited above, Davenport writes:

“In an ideal universe one would like to see [Laurel and Hardy] playing Johnson and Boswell. (Crossing from one Hebridee to another in a row-boat, they looked on in dismay as a wave leaped the gunwale and flicked Johnson’s spurs into the North Sea).”

   

Beckett had Laurel and Hardy in mind when writing his novel about another pair of hapless clowns, Mercier and Camier (1946). Keep them in mind while reading this scene:

“Even side by side, said Mercier, as now, arm to arm, hand in hand, legs in unison, we are fraught with more events than could fit in a fat tome, two fat tomes, your fat tome and my fat tome. Whence no doubt our blessed sense of nothing, nothing to be done, nothing to be said.”

In his “Addenda” to Watt (written in occupied France during World War II, published in 1953) Beckett includes this lightly encrypted encomium:

“I helped to lay out this darling place, said the old man.

“In that case, said Arthur, perhaps you can tell me the name of this extraordinary growth.

“That’s what we calls a hardy laurel, said the old man.

“Arthur went back into the house and wrote, in his journal: Took a turn in the garden. Thanked God for a small mercy. Made merry with the hardy laurel. Bestowed alms on an old man formerly employed by Knott family.”

We can see Laurel and Hardy in Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot, likewise in bowlers and baggy pants.  In Kenner’s words: “one of them marvelously incompetent, the other an ineffective man of the world devoted (some of the time) to his friend’s care” (A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, 1973). Kenner goes on:

“They journeyed, they undertook quests, they had adventures; their friendship, tested by bouts of exasperation, was never really vulnerable; they seemed not to become older, nor wiser; and in perpetual nervous agitation. Laurel’s nerves occasionally protesting like a baby’s, Hardy soliciting a philosophic calm he could never find leisure to settle into, they coped. Neither was especially competent, but Hardy made a big man’s show of competence. Laurel was defeated by the most trifling requirement.”

[ADDENDUM: Apropos of Shalamov, in the Wall Street Journal the impressive young novelist Joshua Cohen writes: “Does anyone read The Gulag Archipelago—in English, or even in Russian—for its feminism, pro-Semitism or literary style? In 2018, I preferred the Kolyma Stories of Varlam Shalamov, which was published in a new translation by Donald Rayfield. Kolyma is a cycle of fictionalized autobiographical stories about the eponymous gulag set among prisoners too cold to think but too proud not to; it reads like Solzhenitsyn’s opus rewritten—sharpened—by Isaac Babel. At one point, Shalamov lists the gulag’s three commandments, which I recommend obeying no matter what regime you labor under: ‘Don’t trust, don’t be afraid, don’t ask.’”]