'Walking One More Patrol'

“It became the Chinese New Year never forgotten by any Vietnamese or American who was there. The question ‘Where were you at Tet?’ could refer only to January 30, 1968, and the weeks that followed.”

Among the Americans arriving in Vietnam in the weeks that followed, a time known as the Tet Offensive, was a young Marine and future poet, R.L. Barth. His brother recently found two poems Bob wrote in the late 1970’s “which I had not only lost but had completely disremembered having written.” He has published them in Thirteen Months (Epigrammist Press, 2019) a pamphlet that includes, in addition, five epigrams devoted to the war. The title refers to the length of Bob’s tour in Vietnam. The first of the salvaged poems, “Letter from a Staging Area,” is subtitled “arriving in-country, February 1968,” and includes these lines:

“But there I was:

Asleep one minute, stumbling to war the next.

Suspended in impacted time,

I waited, hearing all too sharply

The thump and crash, the pings as smaller pieces

Of shrapnel hit tin bulkheads. What was it like?

Like suddenly the true Platonic forms

Shredded the shadows?”

Here is the other recovered poem, “A Letter from the World,” subtitled “March 1969”:

“You’ll never come in from your last patrol.

Down to six spades—your short-time calendar—

You count long rations left, each fighting hole,

Certain you know exactly where you are

“When your reflections snap from dwindling days

To clean clothes, women, loafing, and cold beer.

And yet that reverie indulged betrays

The horrors you contain; and once back here,

“As you’ll discover, you must sleep at night,

Walking one more patrol; relearn, in bed,

Paddies, jungle, fear, till with the first light

You’re oily with the rancor of the dead.”

On the front of the chapbook Bob has written:

"Patrick,

here’s a small group of poems I put

together to ‘celebrate,’ or at least

to acknowledge, the 50^th anniversary

of my departure from the RVN

Bob

14 iii, ’19”  

[The lines quoted at the top are from Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (2018) by Max Hastings.]

'Lost in a Rotation of Petty Cares'

On this date, March 30, in 1751, Dr. Johnson wrote in The Rambler #108:

“Many of our hours are lost in a rotation of petty cares, in a constant recurrence of the same employments; many of our provisions for ease or happiness are always exhausted by the present day; and a great part of our existence serves no other purpose than that of enabling us to enjoy the rest.”

Something in that opening phrase tickled a muted memory: “petty cares.” Most of our cares are petty, a fact we realize only retrospectively. Lives are squandered on fretting. I traced the echo of Johnson’s phrase to an email my friend David Myers sent me on May 9, 2013, a little more than sixteen months before his death from cancer:

“I’ve been thinking how much of life is absorbed with `small cares’ that seem overwhelmingly important at the time--or at least disabling--which are forgotten in the sequel: the headaches, stomach aches, the traffic jams, the appointments which are late. Do these take up the majority of our time? They almost never make it into literature, and in fact literature seems an unstinting propaganda on behalf of the dramatic occurrences of human life. I may try to write about the `small cares,’ but I'm not sure yet what I want to say.”

You just said it, David.

'At Least for the Inquisitive or Reflective Mind'

“Nothing written is utterly without value, without something to teach, whatever its intentions.”

Reluctantly, masochistically, I agree. When a book is bad, our instinct is to conclude its badness is irredeemable. It would be Pollyanna foolishness to go looking for something to salvage. Theodore Dalrymple, however, suggests that even worthless books, the most unrepentant pulp, regardless of authorial intentions, can supply us with good negative lessons:

   

“[T]he more books we read, the clearer it becomes that there is no book, however bad or merely mediocre it may be, that has nothing to say to us, for every book tells us something. Thus reading a book may be a relative waste of time, for we might be doing something better or more useful than reading it, such as reading a better book. But it is never a waste of time in the absolute sense, at least for the inquisitive or reflective mind.”

As theory, this holds up. Dalrymple volunteers to test it experimentally. At random, he selects a paperback romance novel, reads it, and draws moral and historical conclusions beyond my capacity and probably the novelist’s to reaach. I was reminded of the Cleveland bookstore where I worked in 1975. A large section of the second floor was devoted to Harlequin Romances and related items. Readers, invariably female, kept lengthy lists of the books they had already read to avoid buying the same one twice. They wrote down not titles or even authors, for these were unmemorably generic, but the serial numbers assigned to each volume.

But I also remembered a more personal reading experience. In 1977 I decided to read Gertrude Stein’s immensely long and repetitious The Making of Americans (1925). I was young and impressionable and wanted to be old and wise, so I read the damned thing. It is, of course, unreadable. That was Stein’s intention and the intention of many subsequent avant-gardists. The whole point of such work is to be puritanically obscure and boring, so only the enlightened ones, a literary priesthood, can appreciate their rare beauties. Stein is to fiction what Andy Warhol is to movies and Clark Coolidge is to poetry. If, as Dalrymple claims, “every book tells us something,” what did The Making of Americans tell me? I’ve read nothing by Stein in the subsequent forty-two years.

'Delivering the Goods'

At last, I will meet the man who wrote the immortal “Fried Beauty” and, in a poem titled “Ballade of the Yale Younger Poets of Yesteryear,” asked the burning questions: “Where’s Younger Carolyn Forché? / And where is Lindley Williams Hubbell?” For decades, R.S.“Sam” Gwynn has been proving that solidly built poems rooted in wit, learning and close social observation can be unambiguously funny. He has also been writing some of the best poetry criticism around.

At 2 p.m. on April 6, Gwynn and three other poets will be reading at the Oak Forest Neighborhood Library, which is roughly half a mile from my house. The series is organized by Public Poetry and the Houston Public Library. Gwynn lives in Beaumont, Texas, where he began teaching at Lamar University in 1976. There’s nothing folksy or “regional” about Gwynn’s body of work. He’s seldom merely funny. He’s a moralist and his range of tones is impressive. Take “Release” (No Word of Farewell: Selected Poems 1970-2000, Story Line Press, 2001):

  

“Slow for the sake of flowers as they turn

Toward sunlight, graceful as a line of sail

Coming into the wind. Slow for the mill-

Wheel's heft and plummet, for the chug and churn

Of water as it gathers, for the frail

Half-life of spraylets as they toss and spill.

For all that lags and eases, all that shows

The winding-downward and diminished scale

Of days declining to a twilit chill,

Breathe quietly, release into repose:

Be still.”

In the Spring 2011 issue of The Hudson Review, Gwynn closes his review of four recent poetry collections, “Personae Gratae,” with this observation: “Wisdom in poetry is, I think, largely a matter of a poet’s knowing his surroundings and getting all that he can out of them. It is most palatable when the poet doesn’t remind you how wise he or she is before delivering the goods.”

'Many Instances of His Active Benevolence'

Dr. Johnson preached the virtue of charity. More importantly, he practiced it. He was no Mrs. Jellyby, that pioneering virtue-signaler. Nor was he saintly. He knew from self-study that human motives can be complicated and contradictory. Boswell reports him saying: “No, Sir; to act from pure benevolence is not possible for finite beings. Human benevolence is mingled with vanity, interest, or some other motive.” He invited needy, eccentric or otherwise maladjusted people into his home, and often they stayed for years. Think of Frank Barber, Anna Williams and Robert Levet. As Joseph Epstein writes of Johnson in his review of Leo Damrosch’s The Club: “He was, more important to note, a genuinely good Christian, a man who took in desolate people off the streets and brought them home to live with him for extended stays at his lodgings at Bolt Court.” In a letter he wrote after the death of Williams, who was blind and notably difficult for much of her life, Johnson applies Epstein’s word “desolate” to himself:

“Her curiosity was universal, her knowledge was very extensive, and she sustained forty years of misery with steady fortitude. Thirty years and more she has been my companion, and her death has left me very desolate.”

On this date, March 27, in 1775, Boswell relates a story revealing Johnson’s inveterate sense of kindness: “Mr. [William] Strahan [Johnson’s printer] had taken a poor boy from the country as an apprentice, upon Johnson’s recommendation. Johnson having enquired after him, said, ‘Mr. Strahan, let me have five guineas on account, and I’ll give this boy one. Nay if a man recommends a boy, and does nothing for him, it is sad work. Call him down.’”

Boswell tells us Johnson “talked alike to all people,” meaning he didn’t patronize or talk down to others, even children. He meets the boy, who is working in the print shop for Strahan, and gives him a guinea and vintage Johnsonian advice:   

“‘Well, my boy, how do you go on?’—‘Pretty well, Sir; but they are afraid I an’t [sic] strong enough for some parts of the business.’ JOHNSON. ‘Why, I shall be sorry for it; for when you consider with how little mental power and corporeal labour a printer can get a guinea a week, it is a very desirable occupation for you. Do you hear — take all the pains you can; and if this does not do, we must think of some other way of life for you. There’s a guinea.’”

Boswell is impressed and amused by his friend’s beneficence:  

“Here was one of the many, many instances of his active benevolence. At the same time, the slow and sonorous solemnity with which, while he bent himself down, he addressed a little thick short-legged boy, contrasted with the boy’s aukwardness [sic] and awe, could not but excite some ludicrous emotions.”

'A Mode of Defense and Consolation'

We learned the sound of comedy, the accent and delivery, from the variety shows of the 1960’s. Most of the funniest comics were Jewish. Like Groucho Marx, they could make so-so lines amusing with some version of the greenhorn accent. They were wise guys, tricky, hip and raffish. Think of Myron Cohen, Ben Blue (né Benjamin Bernstein), Jack E. Leonard (né Leonard Lebitsky) and Jackie Mason (né Yacov Moshe Maz). We had Jack Benny, Zero Mostel, Don Rickles, Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar, Woody Allen, Alan King, Shecky Greene and Robert Klein, not to mention the writers: Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Stanley Elkin, Bruce Jay Friedman. On LP we had Lenny Bruce. We grew up with a flattering (and sadly inaccurate) stereotype: all Jews are funny. One of the rare funny non-Jews was Jonathan Winters.

Last year, in a review of Jeremy Dauber’s Jewish Comedy: A Serious History, Joseph Epstein noted that “the heart of being Jewish, in the minds of a preponderant number of American Jews [and non-Jews], is comedy. How did this minority people produce so much humor, so many jokey jakeys?” And doing it for so long. I’ve been reading The First Book of Jewish Jokes: The Collection of L. M. Büschenthal (Indiana University Press, 2018). The book is edited by Elliott Oring and translated by Michaela Lang, and includes a collection of “witty notions from Jews” published in 1812 by Lippmann Moses Büschenthal, an Alsace-born enlightened rabbi and former newspaper editor. There’s also a translation of an 1810 collection of “anecdotes, pranks, and notions of the Children of Israel,” published under the pseudonym “Judas Ascher,” and a lengthy introduction by Oring about the origins of Jewish jokes and what it is that makes them “Jewish.” He is carefully pedantic about the latter question:

“In general, what has been assumed is exactly that which remains to be proved: that the Jewish joke is something distinctive in the jokelore of Europe; that it is an outgrowth of an ancient tradition of Jewish humor in the Talmud, the rabbinic literature, and even the Bible; that it first crystallizes in the villages of eastern Europe; and that it is a mode of defense and consolation. All of these assumptions might prove true but all remain to be convincingly demonstrated. To date, the Jewish joke as a concept has been largely celebratory rather than scholarly.”

I should hope so. Oring is a scholar, not a comedian. He keeps things pretty dry and his task is daunting. The exegesis of humor kills it. Think of it as a variation on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. As soon as you perform vivisection on a joke, whatever humor it once possessed is dead. Even writing down jokes, reducing them to mere words, dooms them – the reason why helpless laughter sparked by the written word is so rare. Jokes need voice. Here’s one collected by Büschenthal that has the ring of Jewishness about it, a logic-twisting defiance, though it was recorded more than two centuries ago:

“’You Jews are all damned,’ said a Christian to a Jew. ‘Why?’ asked the Jew. ‘Because you crucified our Lord.’ ‘Tell you what,’ said the Jew, ‘When you find ours, crucify him too.’”

And this:

“A baby with six fingers on his right hand was born to a Jew. The father, as well as the mother and the rest of the relatives, was very brokenhearted.

“An acquaintance visited the family, and when the mother complained about her bad luck, their Jewish friend responded, ‘Hey, what’s there to fear? I congratulate you. Your son is a born piano player.’”

Leave it to Epstein, who, when contemplating the future of Jewish humor, throws in an allusion to that great comedian Immanuel Kant, who wasn’t Jewish: “My own view is that Jewish humor will continue as long as the reigning note behind Jewish jokes continues to be the belief, everywhere confirmed, that out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing entirely straight can be made, that human nature in all its nuttiness does not change, and that the greatest fool of all—he could be mayor of Chelm, that legendary Jewish town of fools—is he who thinks it can.”

'Cheering as the Summer Weather'

My article,“`Cheering as the Summer Weather’: On the Primal Appeal of Light Verse,” has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

'Reluctance or Unwillingness to Be Compelled'

A productive day: two new words. The first, tangana. I was listening to Louis Armstrong’s recordings from 1929, including W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.” Four years earlier, Armstrong had played cornet on Bessie Smith’s version of the song. The later performance is credited to Louis Armstrong & His Orchestra. What did Philip Larkin have to say about it? In a March 1968 review collected in All What Jazz (1985), he calls it “the hottest record ever made,” and goes on:

“Starting in media res, with eight bars of the lolloping tangana release, it soon resolves into a genial up-tempo polyphony, with [J.C.] Higginbotham, [Red] Allen and Charlie Holmes observable behind the trumpet lead.”

The OED, which tells us the word’s origin is unknown, isn’t terribly helpful with its definition either: “a type of rhythm used in jazz music.” The second of three citations is more helpful and suggests Larkin may have encountered the word in Barry Ulanov’s A History of Jazz in America (1952): “In 1914 Handy published his ‘St. Louis Blues’ with its provocative Tangana rhythm, which is a kind of habanera or tango beat consisting of a dotted quarter, an eighth-note, and two quarter-notes.” Larkin’s modifier is interesting too. The OED defines lolloping as “to lounge or sprawl; to go with a lounging gait.” We already know how to loll.

The second word is renitency, which I found in the first paragraph of Book III, Chap. XXXIV of Tristram Shandy: “It is a singular blessing, that nature has form’d the mind of man with the same happy backwardness and renitency against conviction, which is observed in old dogs—‘of not learning new tricks.’”

The OED cites Sterne’s usage. It means: “resistance; reluctance or unwillingness to be compelled or persuaded; uncooperativeness.” We might say contrariness or bullheadedness. Bonus points to anyone who composes an intelligible sentence using both words.

'Adds Something to This Fragment of Life'

Never lose the capacity to be surprised. The hip and ultra-sophisticated happily suffer from this malady, one that leaves life and art deflated. Giacomo Leopardi was no cheerleader and one wouldn’t normally read him looking for a pep talk, but here he writes in his Zibaldone (eds. Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino, 2013) on Feb. 1, 1829:

“It can be said of reading a piece of true contemporary poetry, in verse or in prose (but verse gives a more effective impression), and perhaps more aptly (even in such prosaic times as these), what Sterne said about a smile; that it adds ‘a thread to the brief fabric of our life.’ It refreshes us, so to speak; and it increases our vitality. But pieces of this sort are extremely rare today.”

Still true, 190 years later. Just when I was concluding that poetry, like movies and popular music, was dead, I was refreshed by reading Aaron Poochigian’s “The Living Will” in the March issue of The New Criterion. You can’t go looking for such experiences because surprise is essential to their charm. I felt better after reading Poochigian’s poem. The way he uses language, without being cloyingly mannered, is a joy. His words are animated and animate this reader.

Leopardi’s allusion to Sterne was puzzling. The editors explain that the “brief fabric” line is translated from the first page of Ugo Foscolo’s preface to his translation of A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). “The text,” they write, “from the dedication to Pitt of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, reads differently: ‘. . . being firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles,--but much more so, when he laughs, that it adds something to this Fragment of Life.”

'So Moved By the Sight of It'

My books are a comfort and an irritant. When I travel, absence is soothed by the knowledge that when I return, I can reach again, effortlessly, for Henry James or Zbigniew Herbert. Even I recognize this as unflatteringly anthropomorphic, but human attachments remain a mystery. My books are almost certain to outlive me. I’d like to think my sons would divvy them up, find the treasures among them (literary, financial), argue over the prizes, sell the rest and throw a party with the dividends. I’ll be well past caring. When dispersed, they will no longer constitute a “library” – always more than a random gathering of books – but may end up as wood pulp or landfill. A well-tended lifetime accumulation of books is suffused with the sensibility of their curator. After his death, what remains is a commonplace cadaver without a soul.

Now to the “irritant” part: I have never found a satisfactory way to organize my books. This is partly a result of shelving constraints. All of my books by and about Anton Chekhov – twenty-eight volumes -- fit squarely on a single shelf. The neurotic part of me likes the compact neatness of the arrangement. The same goes for Guy Davenport (twenty-four volumes), A.J. Liebling (twenty-two) and Joseph Epstein (eighteen). But Tolstoy is a one-man diaspora, resting on portions of three shelves, not all of them exclusively Russian. To an indifferent reader, or one less neurotic, this won’t even register as a problem.    

The National Review asked nine writers to contemplate their book collections and the results are published as “Our Personal Libraries: A Symposium.” The most touching moment, and the one truest to book love as I understand it, comes in the response from David Pryce-Jones, who writes:

“In front of me is The Life of Goethe (1855) by G. H. Lewes, the lover but not the husband of George Eliot. Henry James owned this book and signed his name on the flyleaf, writing as usual with a steel nib that scattered ink blobs over the page. A friend of mine, the novelist Hugh Nissenson, was so moved by the sight of it that he kissed the book.”

Some of us will understand. I prize my first edition of J.V. Cunningham’s Tradition and Poetic Structure (Alan Swallow, 1960) not only because it was written by Cunningham, one of my heroes of the intellect, but because it is inscribed “for Irving Aug 29, 1960 JVC.” That’s Irving as in Howe, Cunningham’s closest friend at Brandeis. I’ve never kissed a book, though I’ve held some affectionately.

'It is Absurd for Art to be a Department of Politics'

“As to the word ‘artistic,’ it frightens me the way brimstone frightens merchants’ wives.”

We can all rattle off a lengthy list of vaporous words that others wield like hammers. Empty words pack formidable power in the wrong hands. Our writer, Anton Chekhov, continues:

“When people speak to me of what is artistic and anti-artistic, of what is dramatically effective, of tendentiousness and realism and the like, I am at an utter loss, I nod to everything uncertainly, and answer in banal half truths that aren’t worth a brass farthing. I divide all works into two categories: those I like and those I don’t.”

Spoken like an artist immune to the deformities of theory and ideology. Chekhov’s self-defense comes in a letter he wrote on this date, March 22, in 1890 to Ivan Leontyev (Schcheglov). He is reacting to the previous four years of critical baiting and endless accusations of “indifference,” “lack of involvement” and “absence of principles.” The translation is by Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky (Letters of Anton Chekhov, 1973). Chekhov’s words remain as pertinent as they were 129 years ago.

Jorge Luis Borges is another master of short forms. In 1938 he reviewed For an Independent Revolutionary Art: Manifesto by Diego Rivera and André Breton for the Definitive Liberation of Art, a title that reads like a parody of engagé writing. Borges is defiant:

“I believe, and only believe, that Marxism (like Lutheranism, like the moon, like a horse, like a line from Shakespeare) may be a stimulus for art, but it is absurd to decree that it is the only one. It is absurd for art to be a department of politics.” Years later it was revealed that Trotsky was the author of the Breton/Rivera manifesto.

Borges would soon learn first-hand the vagaries of politics. In 1946, shortly after his election as president of Argentina, Juan Perón “promoted” Borges from his job as third assistant at the National Library in Buenos Aires to “Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits” in the Córdoba municipal market. Borges declined. After Perón was overthrown in 1955, Borges was named director of the National Library. That same year, because of the growing severity of his blindness, doctors forbade him to read or write.

'One Might Be Eating Butterflies'

Between Sunday and Wednesday I saw four butterflies, each a different species, each flitting in a patch of sunlight without a flower in sight. I first moved to Texas almost fifteen years ago and my sensibility remains steadfastly Northern. Seeing butterflies in March not pinned in a specimen case is still dazzling. Spring didn’t even technically arrive until Wednesday, the same day as the Modern Library edition of V.S. Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door (1968) and Midnight Oil (1972), published in one volume in 1994, showed up in the mailbox. Happy serendipity delivered this passage, from the first memoir, to me:

“But we go to cold beef, for it is wicked to cook anything on Sundays—except Yorkshire pudding. This is sacred. Light as an omelette yet crisp in the outer foliations of what it would be indelicate to call crust, it has no resemblance to any of that heavy, soggy, pasty stuff known all over England and America by the name. Into it is poured a little gravy made of meat, and not from some packaged concoction. One might be eating butterflies, so lightly does it go down; it is my grandmother’s form of poetry.”

'I Might at Least Blunder Into Glory'

Every writer undergoes at least one apprenticeship, formal or otherwise. Some of us remain apprentices for life. One’s masters need not be Shakespeare or Proust. Humbler talents are probably advisable. After all, nothing is so discouraging as genius. I apprenticed under three masters, all of whom worked at least occasionally as journalists – Whitney Balliett, A.J. Liebling and V.S. Pritchett. All were brilliant, yet each made brilliance seem approachable. The styles of Balliett and Liebling were easiest to imitate, and I did. When young and writing about jazz I virtually plagiarized Balliett.

Most elusive, from a writer’s perspective, is Pritchett, master of essay and story (and one novel, Mr. Beluncle). His style is vigorous and subtly musical. He’s learned but not pedantic or vain, often very funny, and his approach is somehow masculine, without the self-parodying silliness of Hemingway or Mailer. He writes like late-period Dickens, if Dickens had been less instinctual and more disciplined a writer and knew when to take his foot off the gas. Few writers of fiction are more metaphorical and less “poetic” than Pritchett.

Pritchett published his first book, Marching Spain, in 1928. At age twenty-six, in the spring of 1927, he had walked three-hundred miles across Spain, from Badajoz to Vigo. Several years earlier, he had been sent to Spain to report on the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. That’s when he learned the language and first read contemporary Spanish literature – Azorin, Pio Baroja, Perez de Ayala, Unamuno. In an introduction he wrote for a new edition of Marching Spain in 1988, Pritchett tells us: “Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life became my Bible.” The comparison is not idle. Pritchett’s father, a feckless despot, was a dedicated follower of Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science. Pritchett tells his story in his first volume of memoirs, A Cab at the Door (1968), and fictionally in Mr. Beluncle. He was a secular man with a strong interest in, but no attachment to, organized religion.

During his long walk across Spain, Pritchett made a pilgrimage to Salamanca, where Unamuno worked as rector of the University of Salamanca from 1900 to 1924, and 1930 to 1936:

“I felt that in Salamanca I should in some unexplained way breathe of the spirit of Unamuno, who in these days was exiled from Spain by the unutterably stupid dictatorship. The crassest of all pilgrimages this, walking two hundred miles to find a man who had been forced out of his country because he happened to prefer liberty to generals. ‘God give thee not peace, but glory,’ he writes at the end of The Tragic Sense of Life. One is always one’s own hero; if I did not find peace I might at least blunder into glory.”

You will notice Pritchett’s prose is still apprentice work – a little overdramatized and emphatic, and too liable to turn lyrical. And directly autobiographical: “I do not want a religion in which I send my soul like a shirt to be washed at a reasonable charge and with the minimum of damage from all modernist improvements. I do not want a religion that will pad my jaws with optimism and complacency . . . And in the end I come back to Unamuno’s hombres de carne y hueso – man of flesh and bone – to the man who has the kingdom of heaven within him where mind, soul, and body are one.”

Pritchett died on this date, March 20, in 1997 at the age of ninety-six.

'Call Him the Maverick's Maverick'

“Beware of rattlesnakes, copperheads, cottonmouths, alligators, Mississippi dogfish, bad liquor, and characters out of Faulkner. Beware also of tellers of tall tales. Do not allow your speech to be corrupted, no matter what strange predicament you may encounter. And above all, keep a diary, so that you may read it to me next fall.”

The recipient of this wise counsel is Thom Gunn. His adviser, it will surprise those who hold stereotypes dear, is Yvor Winters, writing on July 21, 1956. Two years earlier, Gunn had graduated from Cambridge, published his first collection, Fighting Terms, and came to the United States from his native England to study with Winters at Stanford. I’m always touched by Winters’ thoughtfulness and hospitality. He met Gunn at train station, invited him home for dinner and made sure he had a place to stay. In the 1954 letter confirming all of the above, Winters writes:

“I don’t know whether to be pleased or not that you will see the Atlantic seaboard first, but I don’t know how to prevent it either. It is a dismal province, and you will like the west the better, I suppose, for having seen the worst the first.”

Which quality is more often misunderstood, or missed entirely, by readers and critics: Winters’ compassion and basic human decency or his sense of humor? For the rest of his life, Gunn remained grateful to Winters, publicly acknowledging the debt he owed the older poet. Among the earliest was “To Yvor Winters, 1955” (The Sense of Movement, 1957), in which he writes:

“[I]f we use

Words to maintain the actions that we choose,  

Our words, with slow defining influence,  

Stay to mark out our chosen lineaments.”

In an interview published after Gunn’s death in 2004, he suggests that his conception of poetry relies heavily on what he learned from his Winters: “My old teacher’s definition of poetry is an attempt to understand—not that one can succeed in understanding, but the attempt to understand. That’s Yvor Winters.” And the year before his death, Gunn edited Winters’ Selected Poems for the Library of America. In the introduction, Gunn writes: “I can attest to his being the most exciting teacher I ever had; even to disagree with him was exciting.” And this: “I heard someone calling Yvor Winters a maverick. I would go further than this and call him the maverick’s maverick.” He might, of course, have been writing of himself.

[See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by R.L. Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press.]

'Language Speaks Us'

Pain invites metaphor. The busy, well-intentioned doctor asks, “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?” and I never know quite how to answer. I understand the desire to quantify. It has the appeal of mathematical precision. He tries again: “Is it sharp? Dull? Burning? Stabbing?” and my reaction is the same. I wanted to please him (after all, he’ll be operating on my spine), so I tried this: “Sometimes it feels like a neural explosion. Like epilepsy, but in the bones, not electrical.” Even I thought that was a little fanciful, and he looked puzzled. “It hurts a lot, doctor. I can no longer walk up stairs.” He was polite enough to settle for that.

On Sunday, I felt something pop in my left knee as I twisted to shelve a coffee cup in the cupboard. I say “pop” though I heard nothing except the sound that came from my mouth: Gink-ah! That’s a rough transcription. It corresponds to no word in English or in the scraps of other languages that I know. It comes closest to “ginkgo,” as in Ginkgo biloba, but that’s not much help. Could this be a modest secular sample of glossolalia, speaking in tongues? It felt involuntary, unrelated to anything that had been in my thoughts immediately before the onset of pain. Had something undisclosed even to me bubbled to the surface? It’s a threat to our vaunted self-control that we contain undisclosed linguistic realms. God knows what I’ll say under anesthesia. In “Poetry as Isotope” (Facsimiles of Time, 2001), Eric Ormsby writes:

“Language has an inexhaustible exuberance. At some moments, and not only at moments of inspiration but rather quite humble moments of simple human giddiness or even silliness, we do not seem to speak but to be spoken through. At such moments, it seems, language speaks us.”

'Looking Into One's Heart and Plumbing It'

On Saturday I bought a copy of Unamuno’s Our Lord Don Quixote (trans. Anthony Kerrigan, 1967) because of the concluding sentence in Clive James’ essay on the Spaniard included in Cultural Amnesia (2007):

“The best writers contain within their souls all the characters they will ever create on the page; and those characters have always been there, throughout history; so the writer, no matter how modern he thinks he is, deals always and only in eternity.”

No doubt “soul” and “eternity” will trouble some readers, but I don’t think the crackpot notion of “collective unconscious” can be substituted for the first nor can “time immemorial” replace the second. I’ve read Don Quixote only once, and that was forty-seven years ago. I was bored but no longer trust all of my youthful reactions, positive or negative. After all, I even liked Steinbeck when very young. I keep a mental list of titles to read a second time because I can no longer depend on my first encounter. Cervantes tops it, and I bought the Unamuno volume hoping to rally my morale for reading a book Nabokov famously judged “cruel and crude.”

Unamuno criticizes the reputation of Don Quixote in Spain, where “erudition tends to mask the fetid sore of moral cowardice that has poisoned our collective soul [that word again].” He goes on:

“They pick out a book here and there, extracting sentences and doctrines which they put together and stew, or they spend a year or two or twenty rummaging around through files and stacks of papers in some archive or other so that they may announce this or that discovery. The object is to avoid looking into one’s heart and plumbing it, to avoid thinking and, even more, feeling.”

'The Milk of Fun Should Attract Him'

On the first page of ‘King of Critics’: George Saintsbury, 1845-1933, Critic, Journalist, Historian, Professor (University of Michigan Press, 1992) I learned a word appropriate to its subject that also manages, in four syllables, to articulate a readerly ideal: omnilegent. His biographer, Dorothy Richardson Jones, imagines the adolescent Saintsbury lingering over bookstalls in London, reading Lucretius or Pendennis:

“Oblivious of the people he bumps or nudges or barely misses, his nearsighted eyes devour the pages as he makes his way slowly home to Notting Hill, reading, reading, reading, as he was to do for the three-score years and ten to come. The omnilegent George Saintsbury is foreshadowed in this, his own description of the schoolboy he was.”

The OED defines omnilegent as an adjective that means “reading everything, familiar with all or a great amount of literature” – an impossibility that remains forever an inspiration. To neatly close the circle, the Dictionary cites Saintsbury’s usage in his essay on De Quincey (Essays in English Literature, 1890): “He was not exactly as Southey was, ‘omnilegent’; but in his own departments, and they were numerous, he went farther below the surface and connected his readings together better than Southey did.” Imagine having lived in an age when one might have realistically strived for “omnilegence.” The Victorians were stout fellows.

In Jones’ telling, Saintsbury’s lifelong reading regimen should not be attributed solely to Victorian hyper-industriousness. He was likewise driven by a craving for reliable pleasure and consolation in a pre-electronic, pre-digital world:

“Sunday reading, restricted as it was in many Victorian homes, focused upon a few books read and reread so as to become lifelong companions; among them, Bunyan, Scott’s poems, Lalla Rookh, the Essays of Elia, and Southey’s The Doctor. As Saintsbury saw it in 1923: ‘If a boy does not rejoice, however imperfectly, in The Knights, The True History, The Canterbury Tales, Gargantua and Pantagruel, L’Avare, Gulliver or Pickwick the first time he reads them in the original, there is no help or hope for him. The milk of fun should attract him: the meat of life—criticism, and the wine of art can wait.’”

'His Rucksack of Gift'

Posterity is no friend to artistry. For every Melville (famous, forgotten and feted, in that order) there’s an Edward Dahlberg or Adelaide Crapsey who go straight to forgotten and stay there. Anyone who writes knowledgably about books sooner or later performs acts of resuscitation, and it’s not all about altruism. Readers naturally want to share enthusiasms with others. We can thank Don Thompson for reminding us again of L.E. Sissman, one of our finest postwar poets. He published “Death of a Quizkid: L. E. Sissman and Postwar American Poetry” last year in the Levan Humanities Review:

“Sissman never fit in with the misfits; he was a businessman rather than a bohemian. His poetry was too restrained for the most part to attract advocates of Confessionalism, too buttoned down for the Beats, too concerned with the particulars of everyday life to satisfy Deep Image poets. But in the end, he was as autobiographical, as trenchant, as deep as any of them. And he was always himself. Sissman stood apart from every school of postwar American poetry, facing death too young with courage, poise, and humor.”

Thompson is not a polished writer. He deals too eagerly in prefabricated categories. He perpetrates what journalists call the “buried lede,” and doesn’t mention Sissman until the fifth of his ten pages. The first half of his essay reads like refried Wikipedia. But the pleasure he takes in Sissman’s words is obvious, and he reminds readers, especially young ones, what they are missing. If he moves one curious reader to seek out Hello Darkness: the Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman (1978), Thompson has performed an essential public service. These lines are from Sissman’s homage to the Irish poet, “Patrick Kavanagh: An Annotated Exequy” (Scattered Returns, 1969):

“[H]e got

On with the serious business of what

 An artist is to do with his rucksack

 Of gift, the deadweight that deforms his back

 And drives him on to prodigies of thought

 And anguishes of execution, bought

 At all costs of respectability

 And all expense of nice society,

 Until, alone, he faces homely him,

 The only other tenant of his room,

 And finds the world well lost.”

'Some Facts Are More Equal Than Others'

In 1983, in his review of two recently published volumes of Samuel Pepys’ diaries, V.S. Pritchett notes that Pepys owned a microscope, still a novelty among scientific instruments in the latter half of the seventeenth century. That much the reviewer could have gleaned from the diary’s scholarly apparatus. What distinguishes Pritchett as a critic is what he does with the information: “He was a man for the wonder and delight of the eye.” That sentence, twelve commonplace words, is itself a wonder and delight. Note the irregular march of iambs, the pleasing and Irish-sounding expression “a man for,” and the sentence concluding on a vowel sound, like a line in a song. “Eye” might even be a pun. Pritchett resumes his thought in the next paragraph:

“The beauty of the microscope is that it enlarges and reveals the mysterious intense life in small things. The one impression we have of the diary is that it is a written microscope revealing his own and London’s life; so that a casual reference to the way his French wife leaves her clothes lying about on the floor, or to seeing a mouse run across his desk and shutting it under one of the shelves ‘till tomorrow,’ or how people dissemble at auctions, becomes an event.”

Can you think of another book critic we read in order to learn how to write? Or one who pays attention so closely to small things and large? Or who thinks metaphorically without getting woolly or florid? Or who seems to have read every book any respectable critic ought to have read? I thought of Pritchett and his review because I’ve been following Pepys’ diary online. Take this excerpt from his March 14, 1664 entry:

“Thence to White Hall; and in the Duke’s chamber, while he was dressing, two persons of quality that were there did tell his Royal Highness how the other night, in Holborne, about midnight, being at cards, a link-boy come by and run into the house, and told the people the house was a-falling. Upon this the whole family was frighted, concluding that the boy had said that the house was a-fire: so they deft their cards above, and one would have got out of the balcone [sic], but it was not open; the other went up to fetch down his children, that were in bed; so all got clear out of the house. And no sooner so, but the house fell down indeed, from top to bottom. It seems my Lord Southampton’s canaille did come too near their foundation, and so weakened the house, and down it came; which, in every respect, is a most extraordinary passage.”

Pritchett can’t get enough of lived life, the texture of dailiness. He revels in the comedy. The same is true of his fiction, especially the stories and his best novel, Mr. Beluncle. Pepys is commonly knocked for not being a Romantic, not being sufficiently dashing or exciting, with the same going for his prose. Pritchett will have none of it. He loves Pepys for his dutiful normality:

  

“The simple monotone hums with preoccupations. The archaic sentences—and his eccentric spellings—may amuse us, but they are really the voice of real, lived-through days, indeed of time itself. Fact fetishist? Yes, but some facts are more equal than others. The Diary has the inconsequent surprises of the inner life, mixing the twinges of conscience, the resolutions to reform, the dissemblings, the brief appeals for forgiveness, with the zest of rebellion.”

'Some Prostitute on a Heap of Manure'

I’m as fond of vituperation as the next guy, especially when it’s colorful, imaginative and outlandishly disproportionate to its object. Invective always ends up saying more about its author than his nominal target. We have little to be proud of in this benighted age, but social media has spawned a wondrous Age of Opprobrium.

This week I happened upon a sample of denunciation from the past that possesses a sputtering, salivating, Twitter-like nastiness. Interestingly, it was written privately, without expectation of publication, meaning William Beckford (1760-1844), author of the unreadable Vathek, must have been really irked. This inscription was found on the fly-leaf to Volume IV of his copy of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:   

“The time is not far distant, Mr Gibbon, when your almost ludicrous self-complacency, your numerous, and sometimes apparently wilful mistakes . . . your affected moral purity perking up every now and then from the corrupt mass like artificial roses shaken off in the dark by some Prostitute on a heap of manure, your heartless skepticism . . .  your tumid diction, your monotonous jingle of periods, will be still more exposed & scouted than they have been. Once fairly kicked off from your lofty, bedizened stilts, you will be reduced to your just level & true standard.”

I’m especially fond of “tumid diction.” Beckford addresses Gibbon directly, as though he were in the room. What was the state of his mental health? I don’t know. I just enjoy the spectacle. It reminds me of another private performance, this one written by Thomas Carlyle in a notebook in 1831:

“Charles Lamb I sincerely believe to be in some considerable degree insane. A more pitiful, ricketty, gasping, staggering, stammering Tom fool I do not know. He is witty by denying truisms, and abjuring good manners. His speech wriggles hither and thither with an incessant painful fluctuation; not an opinion in it or a fact or even a phrase that you can thank him for: more like a convulsion fit than natural systole and diastole.—Besides he is now a confirmed shameless drunkard: asks vehemently for gin-and-water in strangers’ houses; tipples until he is utterly mad, and is only not thrown out of doors because he is too much despised for taking such trouble with him. Poor Lamb! Poor England where such a despicable abortion is named genius!”

That Gibbon and Lamb are among my favorite writers, and Beckford and Carlyle are not, is no coincidence.

'Be Prepared to Witness Anything'

I watched embarrassing quantities of television as a kid, most of it forgotten before I left the room, but one show remains fresh in memory: The Twilight Zone. Some episodes were shoddy and cheap, and there was much recycling of plots and themes. But the best ones had a concision about them, a pared-down, tightly plotted, O. Henry quality, that leave some episodes still vivid after more than half a century.

One from the final season I can replay in my head – “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” based on the story by Ambrose Bierce. It was a French production purchased by The Twilight Zone and first broadcast in the U.S. in February 1964. This was during the centennial of the Civil War, which I avidly followed. I read Fletcher Pratt and Bruce Catton, collected Civil War cards and visited Gettysburg for the first time with my family. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” shocked me. I was the right age.

I thought of that episode while reading Meade’s Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman (Kent State University Press, 2007). Lyman (1833-1897) was a Boston Brahmin, a natural scientist who studied under Louis Agassiz at Harvard and went on to serve as aide-de-camp to Major General George G. Meade. Lyman could write. Like Agassiz, he paid attention to detail. This is from his entry for Dec. 16, 1864:

“There were hanged three men of the 1^st Div. 2d Corps, for desertion to the enemy. Think it well to be prepared to witness anything, so made a point to ride over & see it.”

I admire Lyman’s attitude, one I learned to adopt as a newspaper reporter. Don’t turn away from reality. Stare at it. Study it. Draw conclusions. Don’t avert your gaze. Lyman’s scientific training may account for his willingness to “witness anything.” He continues:

“A portion of the division was under arms, round a high gallows. At the stated time the three men were brought, in an ambulance, preceded by the band playing a dead march, and followed by a waggon [sic] carrying their coffins. The condemned each had a white cap on; two were in rebel uniform, and one in our own.”

According to the Encyclopedia Virginia: “More soldiers were executed during the American Civil War (1861–1865) than in all other American wars combined. Approximately 500 men, representing both North and South, were shot or hanged during the four-year conflict, two-thirds of them for desertion.”

Lyman goes on: “On the scaffold a clergyman decorously read a service and the men kneeled to pray. This took some time, and there was a good deal of delay in putting on the ropes and tying the culprits; but, at last, the caps being pulled down, they were all thrown off at once, and hung so many bundles of clothes twisting round & round! The most painful part of the spectacle was when the ambulance passed, carrying them to execution.”