'Better Laugh at Yourself'

My nurses, doctors and therapists come from Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Iran, Philippines, Mexico, India, China, Korea and Alabama. A rehab facility is a complicated, Hobbesian place, superficially resembling a hospital but more like the crowded locker room of a team refusing to accept it may be facing a losing season. There’s moaning in the night, and bad television, and you witness sullenness, inertia, wisecracking, goofiness, nobility and histrionic good humor. Patients are middle-aged or older, and our caretakers are half our age or younger.  On Saturday a man in a wheelchair was pushed into our group. His left foot had been amputated and the stump was heavily bandaged. He is tall and once was athletic but now sagged in his chair. When our chairs were adjacent I asked how long it had been since he lost the foot. “Nine days.” This was not a man in need of cheerleading, which might earn you a punch in the head.

Some of the nurses and other staff, though never the doctors, have evolved their own jaunty sense of dark humor shared only with a few patients. Some of it would be judged cruel and disrespectful by the needlessly sensitive, but that’s pretty much the definition of intramural humor shared among the members of a group. Every day these people see and do things the rest of us would prefer not to think about, and most, at least while on the job, maintain professional decorum.

In Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942), Rebecca West and her husband visit Split in Dalmatia, the site of Diocletian’s palace. They meet an Englishman who teaches English to the locals and has come to think of Split as home. He tells them:

“You evidently don’t understand that here in Split we are very much on parade. We’re not a bit like the Serbs, who don’t care what they do, who laugh and cry when they feel like it, and turn cartwheels in the street if they want exercise. That’s one of the reasons we don’t like the Serbs. To us it seems self-evident that a proud man must guard himself from criticism every moment of the day. That’s what accounts for the most salient characteristic of the Splitchani, which is a self-flaying satirical humour; better laugh at yourself before anybody else has time to do it.”

Today I shared an elevator with the one-footed man. "How you doing, man?  You all right?" he asked, and slapped my shoulder.  

[I have only intermittent internet connectivity and ability to write.]

'Laughter Rejoices in Bonds'

“[T]here is to me something rather dreary in the notion of going anywhere for the specific purpose of being amused. I prefer that laughter shall take me unawares. Only so can it master and dissolve me.”

When we say that someone has a “good sense of humor,” it is useful to define our terms. Let’s rule out compulsive giggling and joke-telling, dirty words with nothing behind them and Bob Hope. Comedians have a tough job because we know in advance they want to make us laugh. Most of the funniest people I have known have not been perky. They tend to be introverted, grim-minded or depressed. A sense of humor is more than a social grace; it is a way of looking at the world. This complements the observation above from Max Beerbohm’s essay “Laughter” (And Even Now, 1920).

Since entering the hospital last Friday I have done a lot of laughing. You might suggest my laughter is pharmacologically enhanced, and I couldn’t argue, but I’ve always found pain and uncertainty excellent goads to comedy. Correspondingly, I’ve made a lot of other people laugh, including my neurosurgeon. When I’m hobbling to the bathroom with my walker, where my raised toilet seat awaits me, what else can I do but laugh and make the nurses laugh? Think of Yeats: “They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay; Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.” Self-pity can be amusing to observe, but indulging in it is never funny. Back to Beerbohm:

“To such laughter nothing is more propitious than an occasion that demands gravity. To have good reason for not laughing is one of the surest aids. Laughter rejoices in bonds.”

'We Undergo Any Misery'

“Health indeed is a precious thing, to recover and preserve which, we undergo any misery, drink bitter potions, freely give our goods: restore a man to his health, his purse lies open to thee.”

Well, not quite open but certainly with my Aetna card handy. The good doctor is right: we willingly undergo much unpleasantness in order to feel pleasant, or at least reduce the pain. Robert Burton knows nothing of germ theory or anesthesia but I’ve come to rely on The Anatomy of Melancholy, as I do on Gray’s Anatomy.  The passage above is from Part Three, Section 1, Member ii, Subsection i, “Love of Men, which varies as his Objects,Profitable, Pleasant, Honest.”

This morning I’m scheduled for spinal surgery. I expect to spend four or five days in the hospital and won’t return to my job for an indeterminate time. Recovery, I’m told, will be slow. I’ve never failed to post something at least once a day since I started Anecdotal Evidence more than thirteen years ago, until now. As Douglas MacArthur said in a very different context, I shall return.

'That Little Murmur Wasn’t There Before'

I remember a little girl who was said to have a “heart murmur,” which conjured the image of a small internal voice forever nagging. She was deemed “delicate.” We shouldn’t yell around her or knock her down, and definitely don’t mention the murmur. It was all mumbo-jumbo, something adults told kids to make them behave. The Mayo Clinic attempts to clear things up for the lay audience:

“Heart murmurs are sounds during your heartbeat cycle — such as whooshing or swishing — made by turbulent blood in or near your heart. These sounds can be heard with a stethoscope. A normal heartbeat makes two sounds like ‘lubb-dupp’ (sometimes described as ‘lub-DUP’), which are the sounds of your heart valves closing.”

In other words, yet another illustration of nature’s fondness for iambic meter, and “turbulent blood” is awfully good. While recently writing an essay about light verse, I corresponded with a fine poet in Louisiana, Gail White, for whom humor and the more troubling human realities are conjoined twins. She wrote a poem titled “Heart Murmur,” which begins:

“‘That little murmur wasn’t there before,’

the doctor says, folding his stethoscope.

‘The valves are stiffening a bit with age.

It’s natural.’ So is the hangman’s rope.”

On Monday I underwent a heart catheterization which, like a heart murmur, sounds more ominous than it is. The cardiologist inserts a tube into the groin (always a giggle-inducing word), threads it into the coronary arteries and injects contrast dye to assess their blood flow. I watched the whole thing on a monitor suspended from the ceiling.

Now I’m left with an eggplant-colored and -sized bruise where the cardiologist breached my femoral artery. The point of the procedure was to investigate my “bundle branch block,” an alliterative phrase I love saying aloud. The heart seems to generate poetry. And the procedure cleared me for spinal surgery on Friday. I did a literature search and found this: “Poetry and narrative therapy for anxiety about spinal surgery.”

'The Things of the World Could Fall Into Abeyance'

In Book Seventh of The Ambassadors (1903), Lambert Strether, anxious over his conflicting obligations to Mrs. Newsome, Madame de Vionnet and Chad, finds a sanctuary in Paris:

“It wasn’t the first time Strether had sat alone in the great dim church – still less was it the first of his giving himself up, so far as conditions permitted, to its beneficent action on his nerves. He had been to Notre Dame with Waymarsh, he had been there with Miss Gostrey, he had been there with Chad Newsome, and had found the place, even in company, such a refuge from the obsession of his problem that, with renewed pressure from that source, he had not unnaturally recurred to a remedy meeting the case, for the moment, so indirectly, no doubt, but so relievingly . . .”

Llike his creator, Strether is not notably religious. He’s a sensitive man, wishing to do right by all involved, but uncertain how to proceed. In Note-Dame Cathedral he finds not resolution but a measure of solace:

“He trod the long dim nave, sat in the splendid choir, paused before the cluttered chapels of the east end, and the mighty monument laid upon him its spell. He might have been a student under the charm of a museum – which was exactly what, in a foreign town, in the afternoon of life, he would have liked to be free to be. This form of sacrifice did at any rate for the occasion as well as another; it made him quite sufficiently understand how, within the precinct, for the real refugee, the things of the world could fall into abeyance . . . Justice was outside, in the hard light, and injustice too; but one was as absent as the other from the air of the long aisles and the brightness of the many altars.”

James had published one of his most beautiful stories, “The Altar of the Dead,” in the collection titled Terminations in 1895. George Stransom, not among the formally faithful, finds a place to honor all but one of his dead. Again, the site is a Roman Catholic church, this time in London:

“He sank on his knees before his altar while his head fell over on his hands. His weakness, his life’s weariness overtook him. It seemed to him he had come for the great surrender. At first he asked himself how he should get away; then, with the failing belief in the power, the very desire to move gradually left him. He had come, as he always came, to lose himself . . .”

'Cathedrals House the Faithful'

Monday morning, when the cardiologist was finished with my heart, they wheeled me back to the recovery room where I learned about the fire that had gutted Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. In our foolishness we assume some earthly things are eternal. I was shocked and tempted to read the event as further evidence of the West’s decline, our betrayal of all that is most noble in humanity. I have wandered through Notre-Dame twice, in 1973 and 1999. I’m ignorant when it comes to architecture, though I read up on the cathedral before both visits. The only other structure I have entered that moved me as powerfully was the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., itself a sort of secular cathedral. In his essay “A Stone from the Cathedral” (Barbarian in the Garden, trans. Michael March and Jarosław Anders, 1985), Zbigniew Herbert writes:

“Millions, millions of tons of stone. Between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries more stone was excavated than in Egypt. The eighty cathedrals and five hundred churches built in this period, if gathered together, would effect a mountain range erected by human hands. In one of my books I saw a drawing of a façade of a Greek temple imposed on the façade of a Gothic cathedral. It was clear that many an Acropolis could be contained, as in a suitcase, inside cathedrals like Amiens or Reims. However, little results from such comparisons, at least little that would tell us about the functions of sacred buildings in different periods. The temples of antiquity housed the gods; cathedrals house the faithful. The immortals are always less numerous than their believers.”

'Some of More Intimate Significance'

“[A]ll literary encounters have a certain unceremoniousness about them. We surround ourselves with books so that we can call up Montaigne, or Eckermann, or Virgil, or Andrew Marvell, as the mood takes us or the drift of our interests at the time suggests. There are scores or hundreds of merely casual encounters, and some of more intimate significance.”

I wasn’t planning to read Dante again any time soon. My first encounter was in a high-school English class. We were assigned the Inferno in John Ciardi’s translation. I enjoyed it so much as a sort of Christian adventure story, a more sophisticated (and Catholic, and artful) precursor to Pilgrim’s Progress, that I read the subsequent volumes on my own. A few years later I read Christopher Singleton’s version and the accompanying notes. This time I read more like an amateur scholar. While enjoying the text, I wanted a more solid command of Dante’s thought, the history, philosophy and theology he weaves through his poem. Over the years I periodically returned to Singleton until, about five years ago, I read C.H. Sisson’s translation, first published by Carcanet in 1980. As a poem in English, it is the most successful and has become my default-mode Dante.

The passage quoted at the top is from Sisson’s introduction, “On Translating Dante.” The stance toward books he describes resembles my own approach to reading. No ceremony or plan. Guided by unpremeditated whim and happy serendipity, “the drift of our interests at the time.” The writers he cites – French, German, Roman and English, respectively – represent the national and linguistic tributaries leading to the Sisson River. Were I assembling a similar list, I would have to leave out the German and add the American and Russian.

I don’t know what moved me to read Sisson’s Dante again, apart from a growing distaste for triviality and self-indulgence in writing. Dante is always precise, human and commonsensical. In “Conversation on Dante,” Osip Mandelstam writes: “It is unthinkable to read the cantos of Dante without aiming them in the direction of the present day. They are missiles for capturing the future.” This will make no sense to the unsympathetic.

Today I’m scheduled to enter the hospital for a heart catheterization. If all goes well and the cardiologist clears the way, I will return to the hospital on Friday for spinal surgery. This Friday is Good Friday. From Canto XXI of the Inferno, we know Dante’s attempted escape from the forest begins on the morning of Good Friday 1300, which I didn’t remember when scheduling the surgery.

'I Knew His Goodness of Heart'

On April 9, 1865, the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered in the village of Appomattox Court House, Va., ending four years of civil war. In his Personal Memoirs (1885), Ulysses Grant writes:

“I had known General Lee in the old army, and had served with him in the Mexican War; but did not suppose, owing to the difference in our age and rank, that he would remember me, while I would more naturally remember him distinctly, because he was the chief of staff of General Scott in the Mexican War.”

It’s typical of Grant to minimize his importance and the impression he has made on others. If not exactly humility, this quality might be thought of as laconic American frontier pragmatism. Grant had a job to do (win a war, write a book), and bragging about it would only get in the way. Roughhewn, not know for elegant manners, he was an American gentleman:

“What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.”

Grant’s respectful, conciliatory words recall the greatest of Civil War poems, Melville’s “Lee in the Capitol (April, 1866).” In the prose “Supplement” appended to Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), in which the poem was published, Melville urged the Radical Republicans to practice “prudence, not unaligned with entire magnanimity,” and wrote: “Benevolence and policy—Christianity and Machiavelli—dissuade from penal severities toward the subdued . . .”

Grant was not a gifted politician, as his presidency (1869-77) proved. He was among the most adept of our generals and writers. After the surrender, Grant returns to the capital:

“While in Washington I was very busy for a time in preparing the necessary orders for the new state of affairs; communicating with my different commanders of separate departments, bodies of troops, etc. But by the 14th I was pretty well through with this work, so as to be able to visit my children, who were then in Burlington, New Jersey, attending school.”

On April 14, Lincoln invites Grant and his wife to accompany them to the theater that evening. Grant replies that they would like to do so but he is occupied with work and anxious to see his children. He learns of Lincoln’s assassination in Philadelphia:  

“It would be impossible for me to describe the feeling that overcame me at the news of these assassinations, more especially the assassination of the President. I knew his goodness of heart, his generosity, his yielding disposition, his desire to have everybody happy, and above all his desire to see all the people of the United States enter again upon the full privileges of citizenship with equality among all.”

Grant reacts as a man and a citizen. He thinks not of vengeance but of the impact the murder may have on the country and its future:

“I knew also the feeling that Mr. [Andrew] Johnson had expressed in speeches and conversation against the Southern people, and I feared that his course towards them would be such as to repel, and make them unwilling citizens; and if they became such they would remain so for a long while. I felt that reconstruction had been set back, no telling how far.”

'It Is the Only Work We Feel Like Reading'

“Most of the literary works with which we are acquainted fall into one of two classes, those we have no desire to read a second time—sometimes, we were never able to finish them—and those we are always happy to reread. There are a few, however, which belong to a third class; we do not feel like reading one of them very often but, when we are in the appropriate mood, it is the only work we feel like reading. Nothing else, however good or great, will do instead.”

Some find literary taxonomies of the prescriptivist sort unacceptable. The one described above by W.H. Auden makes sense and I suspect some who object will privately subscribe to it. You’ll find Auden’s essay on Byron’s Don Juan (a poem he consigns to the third class) collected in The Dyer’s Hand (1962).

Of necessity, the first class – “those we have no desire to read a second time” – is the most crowded. Good books are rare in any era. Ambitious young readers must plow through vast fields of them while their tastes and critical faculties remain works in progress. With age and experience come confidence and independence. The judgments of others matter less. Fashion and peer pressure can be happily ignored.

Naturally, the second class – “those we are always happy to reread” – is smaller, and many of its titles are self-evident – King Lear, for instance, and Rasselas, Tristram Shandy, Moby-Dick and Dead Souls. Auden’s third category is the most exclusive. It can feel like hunger. Perhaps only an older reader whose literary hedonism has been honed over the decades can maintain such a sui generis private library. On the top shelf, for this reader, is Pale Fire. Some think it the Ur-postmodern novel-as-game but Hazel Shade’s death is no game. Nearby are Zeno’s Conscience, Memoirs of Hadrian, Whittaker Chambers’ Witness, The Collected Essays of J.V. Cunningham, and L.E. Sissman’s Hello, Darkness: Collected Poems. Some days, usually after dark, no other books will do.

'Despair Before Us, Vanity Behind'

It’s a comfort to know that even the wisest among us are not immune to vanity. On this date, April 12, in 1940, George Santayana is staying at the Hotel Danieli in Venice, working on his memoir, Persons and Places, which will be published in 1944. He interrupts his work to reply to what his critics have written in The Philosophy of George Santayana (1940), edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp. Schlipp has asked him to supply a photograph “as informal as possible.” Can one imagine Santayana, then seventy-six years old, in shorts and a baseball cap worn backwards? In a letter to his friend the American poet John Hall Wheelock he writes:

“If [the photo] is at all good, I will send you a copy. I wish you could think of something more spiritual and less psychical for the frontispiece of your Triton volume [a fifteen-volume set of Santayana’s work published in 1936]. There are too many portraits, and not very good ones, in that edition; but you might like a new photograph for general advertisement. I will try to look as much like Gandhi as I can, as to the forehead: but I am afraid the figure may rather resemble Chesterton.” (The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937–1940, MIT Press, 2004.)

Santayana’s poetry tends to be rather high-caloric, rich in saturated fats. Sonnet XXV, among his better ones, closes with this:

“Such is youth;

Till from that summer’s trance we wake, to find

Despair before us, vanity behind.”

'To Keep Rubbish Merely Because It is Printed'

We hold meetings in a conference room furnished with a bookcase as vestigial as an appendix, positioned beneath a wall-mounted computer monitor the size of a queen-size mattress. Shelved in the bookcase, perhaps to enhance the academic atmosphere, are six or eight fugitive volumes. Among them are Who’s Who in America, 47^th edition, 1992-1993, and Modern Quantum Mechanics, 2^nd edition, by J.J. Sakuri and Jim Napolitano. Can one feel pity for inanimate objects? The bookcase and its contents are an assemblage titled “Obsolescence.”

What’s the alternative? No one would buy such books. Though readily available for detection-proof theft, no one has touched them. Science textbooks are notoriously evanescent, outdated before they are printed. I’m a soft touch for books but even I don’t want such titles – no interest, no room. Sir John Collings Squire (1884-1958) was an English poet, critic and editor. He writes in “On Destroying Books”:

“[M]ost people, especially non-bookish people, are very reluctant to throw away anything that looks like a book. In the most illiterate houses that one knows every worthless or ephemeral volume that is bought finds its way to a shelf and stays there. In reality it is not merely absurd to keep rubbish merely because it is printed: it is positively a public duty to destroy it.”

Read the entire essay to discover Squire’s suspense-filled account of getting rid of “books of inferior minor verse.” I’m too sentimental to follow his lead.

'Not Intense, But Discursive'

Good writers can rehabilitate a word, reclaim it for a respectable second life. Such a word is gusto, once the property of Madison Avenue. I associate it with a beer commercial from the 1970’s. It suggested faux-heartiness and steroidal masculinity. It was a word impossible to use with a straight face. William Hazlitt set me straight. In “On Gusto,” he attaches the word most often to painters. Titian and Rembrandt had it; Rubens, less so. He associates gusto with two writers, and who can argue with him?

“The infinite quantity of dramatic invention in Shakespeare takes from his gusto. The power he delights to show is not intense, but discursive. He never insists on any thing as much as he might, except a quibble. Milton has great gusto. He repeats his blow twice, grapples with and exhausts his subject. His imagination has a double relish of its objects, an inveterate attachment to the things he describes, and to the words describing them.”

The OED gives “keen relish or enjoyment displayed in speech or action; zest [another Madison-Avenue-tainted word].” It’s from the Latin gustare, “to taste.” Thus, de gustibus non est disputandum. Gusto in prose suggests energy, passion, excitement – but contained, not gushing. Gusto is best expressed concisely. It’s an extravagant quality that counters extravagance, and the best example I can give is Hazlitt at his best:

“We may eat a mutton-chop without complaining, though we should consider a haunch of venison as a greater luxury if we had it. Again in travelling abroad, the mind acquires a restless and vagabond habit. There is more of hurry and novelty, but less of sincerity and certainty in our pursuits than at home. We snatch hasty glances of a great variety of things but want some central point of view. After making the grand tour, and seeing the finest sights in the world, we are glad to come back at last to our native place and our own fireside. Our associations with it are the most steadfast and habitual, we there feel most at home and at our ease . . .”

Hazlitt was born on this date, April 10, in 1778, and is one of the supreme writers of prose in the language, despite being a sometimes rather silly man.

'I Looked Through the Book and Threw It Away'

“Once I asked him if he had read Shakespeare, Byron, Molière, or Schiller. I couldn’t get a definite yes or no out of him, but I realized that he hadn’t read any of them. He just hasn’t gone beyond what he had to do at school.”

More than a century later, we all know such people. Reading is a drudgery, a school obligation best shirked. Presumably, CliffsNotes still does a thriving business. Such a life is difficult to imagine. The author of the observation at the top is Nikolay Valentinov (1879–1964), an early Bolshevik who fled the Soviet Union in 1928. His subject is Lenin, one of the most consequential men of the twentieth century. Valentinov writes in Encounters with Lenin (trans. Paul Rosta and Brian Pearce, 1968):

“Lenin knows none of Goethe’s works except Faust. He divides literature into two parts: what he needs, and what he doesn’t need—I don’t quite know what criteria he uses for distinguishing between them.”

After reading Memoirs from the House of the Dead and Crime and Punishment, Lenin refused to read other Dostoevsky titles, which he described as “malodorous works.” Valentinov reports him saying:

“As far as The Possessed is concerned, it is plainly a piece of reactionary filth . . . I have absolutely no desire to waste my time on it. I looked through the book and threw it away. I don’t read such literature—what good is it to me?”

Lenin’s view of literature is binary and strictly utilitarian, not unlike that of ideology-driven readers and critics from any era. Here, Valentinov reports what he says about Ivan Goncharov’s masterpiece:

“I should like to take some of our party comrades—quite a lot of them—lock them up in a room and make them read Oblomov over and over again until they go down on their knees and say: ‘We can’t bear it any longer.’ Then they would have to be put through an examination: ‘Have you understood the essence of Oblomovism?’ Have you realized it is also in you? Have you finally resolved to get rid of this illness?’”

Punitive literature. Books as illness and cure. No sense of pleasure, of what Nabokov called “aesthetic bliss.” Lenin’s idea of a great Russian writer was Nikolay Nekrasov. Valentinov is witty when it comes to Lenin’s understanding of Tolstoy:

“I happened to hear Lenin say he liked Tolstoy’s War and Peace, although he thought that the moral and philosophical reflections woven into the novel were nonsense. But this was not very enlightening. I have yet to meet a Russian who would admit that he does not appreciate and enjoy this novel.”

Judging literature as literature, not as a means for transporting fashionable ideas, seems beyond a lot of people, maybe most of them.

'I Do Wonder What He's Reading Now'

In mathematics, we use inverse problems to assess the nature of regions not directly observable. Send sonic waves through the Earth. When they bounce back, we draw conclusions about what’s beneath our feet – land mines, corpses, oil. In other words, we start with effects and deduce causes, and don’t we do something comparable when considering the possessions of others? Haven’t you “read” someone’s bookshelves? There’s a risk of snobbery, of course. Lousy books suggest bad taste if not idiocy. Vonnegut? Gibran? Castaneda? You’re kidding. (I’m dating myself.)

In the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, Kevin D. Williamson has a wonderful essay, “A Man of Mystery Revealed by His Books,” about the vacation house he rented in Switzerland. “You’re supposed to be able to tell something about a man from looking over his books. But I can’t make this guy out.” He’s no phony, not the type who displays pristine fancy titles like trophies. The owner has, Williamson says, “real books.” Two subjects, he notes, are “splendidly overrepresented”: diplomacy and “its fraternal twin, espionage.” Might this guy be a diplomat or a spook? “Maybe,” Williamson says. “But not an amoralist.”

On the shelves he finds Isaiah Berlin, C.S. Lewis (about whom I echo Max Beerbohm on William James: “I was insensible to his thrillingness”), Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and volumes by and about Tolstoy and Orwell. There’s a hefty finance section, The Dean’s December and A House for Mr. Biswas. We’re dealing with an interesting fellow, perhaps a polymath or at least a reader and thinker without blinkers. No fanatic. Not a “one-book man.” He has Lord David Cecil’s biography of Beerbohm.

What might a renter conclude from the contents of my shelves? What’s with all the poetry? Why more books by and about Spinoza than any other philosopher? Who is this A.J. Liebling guy? What’s the big deal about insects? Why volumes by only one African writer (St. Augustine)? Has he read all that Henry James? As Williamson concludes his essay:

“Who is this guy? I don’t know. But I do wonder what he’s reading now.”

[Philip Terzian speculates on the identity of Williamson’s landlord.]

'A Tunnel Beckons Where Shadows Surround Me'

Laura deNoves died at the age of thirty-eight in the year 1348, on April 6, Good Friday, precisely twenty-one years, nearly to the minute, after Petrarch first saw her in Avignon. On Saturday, R.S. “Sam” Gwynn reminded us of these events and read Petrarch’s sonnet (translated by Joseph Auslander) commemorating that meeting in 1327:

“It was the morning of that blessèd day

Whereon the Sun in pity veiled his glare

For the Lord's agony, that, unaware,

I fell a captive, Lady, to the sway

Of your swift eyes: that seemed no time to stay

The strokes of Love: I stepped into the snare

Secure, with no suspicion: then and there

I found my cue in man's most tragic play.

Love caught me naked to his shaft, his sheaf,

The entrance for his ambush and surprise

Against the heart wide open through the eyes,

The constant gate and fountain of my grief:

How craven so to strike me stricken so,

Yet from you fully armed conceal his bow!”

Gwynn noted that the anniversary serves as a convenient date on which to observe “the beginning of lyric poetry,” at least in the West. He was in Houston for a poetry reading at our neighborhood library. Three others who “identified” as poets were on the bill. For almost twenty-five years, Gwynn has been coming to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center here in Houston (he lives in Beaumont), and he read several poems that describe the experience. Here is “At the Center” (No Word of Farewell: Selected Poems 1970-2000, 2001):

“The pianist is playing Debussy

Beside the lobby cappuccino bar—

Soft smiles and pastels everywhere. You see,

The point’s not to remind you where you are

Or how you are; the point is not to dwell

On thoughts like these. Look at this normal crowd

Such as you’d find in any good hotel.

But why does no one say its name out loud?

“Later you pass through elevator doors;

Rising to higher levels, you recall

Rumors you’ve heard of rumors from these floors—

How some guests never leave, how they display

A preference for short hair, or none at all,

How no one asks how long you plan to stay.”

Whenever I read that sonnet I’m reminded of Kubrick’s The Shining. Gwynn introduced a related poem, “Bone Scan,” by noting that the title refers to skeletal scintigraphy, which gives you “a very nice picture of what you’re going to look like in about two-hundred years”:

“Shadows surround me, building in the air

Like clouds, were I inclined here to compare

My kingly state to portents in the sky.

I could say the expected: I could lie,

Claiming our long-term forecast will be fair.

“So, family and friends, do not despair.

Shadows mean nothing. There is nothing there.

Knives will find nothing wrong. Still, I know why

                   Shadows surround me.

“The night my father died, I moved my chair

Close to his bed to touch his meager hair

While shadows gathered in his room that I

Might gather I was not too young to die.

Now, circuits close. A tunnel beckons where

                   Shadows surround me.”

Gwynn is a poet of comic realism. Much of the wit derives from looking unhappy reality in the face, without posturing. There is another side to Gwynn’s work. We risk misunderstanding by calling it “religious,” and “spiritual,” that mushy word, will never do. “Christian” is close, though in a thoroughly nondenominational, non-dogmatic sense. He asked the audience if any of us were step-children or had step-parents. Then he read “Something of a Saint” (Dogwatch, 2014), a poem about the man he called “the most famous stepfather in history” – Joseph (the Joiner, as Joyce called him), Mary’s husband. Here is the tenth of the poem’s thirteen four-line stanzas:

  

“So they nailed Him to the dogwood cross his own stepfather made,

And I shook with shame to see Him as I hid there in the shade,

Where I heard the lamentations that my dying stepson made

In the darkness of the noon on Calvary.”

'The Time That is a Man's Own'

I’ve always had a job, even if it was freelancing, a tough way to earn a living. Even better, I’ve always enjoyed the jobs I had, at least most of the time. Old grudges fade. Work seems to me like a natural extension of education, especially for a writer. There’s always something to pick up along the way, scraps of information, a growing sense of competence that grows into confidence, camaraderie, a front-row seat at the human comedy. Still, I understand why some people look forward to retirement, especially if you’ve simply had enough or your health is failing.

In 1792, Charles Lamb went to work as a clerk at East India House, the home office of the East India Company, and though he often complained about it, his clerkship reliably supplied him with comic fodder. After thirty-three years, he retired. On this date, April 6, in 1825, he wrote two letters to friends announcing his new-found liberation. The first went to William Wordsworth, not a notably humorous fellow who must frequently have been baffled by Lamb:

“Here I am then after 33 years slavery, sitting in my own room at 11 o’Clock this finest of all April mornings a freed man, with £441 a year for the remainder of my life, live I as long as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity and starved at 90.”

Little was sacred to Lamb, even his own fortunes:

“I came home for ever on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelm’d me. It was like passing from life into Eternity. Every year to be as long as three, i.e. to have three times as much real time, time that is my own, in it! I wandered about thinking I was happy, but feeling I was not. But that tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of the gift.”

That same day he wrote to his Quaker friend Bernard Barton: “My spirits are so tumultuary with the novelty of my recent emancipation, that I have scarce steadiness of hand, much more mind, to compose a letter. I am free, B.B.--free as air.” He repeats much of what he has already told Wordsworth, and adds:  

“I will live another 50 years; or, if I live but 10, they will be thirty, reckoning the quantity of real time in them, i.e. the time that is a man’s own.”

Lamb almost reached the ten-year mark, dying on Dec. 27, 1834, at age fifty-nine.

'My Skill Set is Reading'

“Every day is about reading.”

I know that and perhaps you do as well, but few of us have the nerve to say it aloud, for public consumption. Dedicated reading has devolved into a harmless eccentricity, like collecting watch fobs. When I see a kid playing a video game or staring at his phone, a crabbed little voice in my skull asks, “How long since he last read Dead Souls? Or The Dunciad?” Even I recognize this impulse as annoying and anachronistic but a boy can dream, can’t he?

The observation at the top was delivered Wednesday by my friend Melissa Kean, the centennial historian at Rice University, who spoke on “The Books that Shaped My World,” a series of talks sponsored by the Fondren Library. I’m a rare attender of such events, which have a way of turning into self-congratulatory Dale Carnegie sessions, but I know Melissa is no conduit of hot air. Like many of us, she taught herself to read, at age three. She described the odds and ends that served as reading matter in her childhood home in Iowa, including electronics journals and Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The books that “shaped her world” as a child included Yertle the Turtle (“a dark tale of lust for power and empire building”), the Uncle Remus stories (“deeply insightful about human nature”), and Harriet the Spy (“You’ve got to be careful with what you know about people”). When her daughters were young, she enrolled in a beginning Hebrew class at the Jewish community center in West Omaha. They offered free childcare. Melissa is not Jewish.

She has five degrees, including a Ph.D. in history from Rice and a J.D. from the University of Iowa, and describes herself as “a professional noticer.” Like any sane person, she loves and hates academia. She spoke of favorite novels set in universities, including Lucky Jim, Pictures from an Institution and Stoner. Her taste in short stories overlaps with mine – Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, Peter Taylor and Joseph Epstein (“He does late life as well as anyone”). She told the story I recounted on this blog in 2010 about reading The Gulag Archipelago at the beauty parlor. She likes Shakespeare, Dickens, Montaigne and War and Peace (“Everybody loves Natasha”). Like me, Melissa loves to embrace and subvert a good cliché: “My skill set is reading.”

'I Read Slowly, Richly, Not to Say Juicily'

A longtime reader writes: “I’ve noticed you mention Edward Gibbon pretty often. I’ve always want to read him but the book is so big and intimidating. Can you talk me into reading it?” No, but I’ll defer to George Lyttleton, who puts it like this in a May 2, 1957, letter to Rupert Hart-Davis (The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters, Vol. 2):

“I love re-reading. Each night from 10.30 to 12 I read Gibbon out loud. I read slowly, richly, not to say juicily; and like Prospero’s isle the room is full of noises—little, dry, gentle noises. Some matter-of-fact man of blunt or gross perceptions might say it was the ashes cooling in the grate, but I know better. It is the little creatures of the night, moths and crickets and spiderlings, a mouse or two perhaps and small gnats in a wailful choir, come out to listen to the Gibbonian music—`Twenty-two acknowledged concubines and a library of 62,000 volumes attested the variety of his inclinations’—what sentient being, however humble, could resist that?”

Not I, and I hope my reader agrees. We no longer read Gibbon strictly for the history, any more than we read Shakespeare for the costumes. Not every reader will be convinced he ought to consume all six volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the glory of its prose and the grandness of its vision, but a few will. Lyttleton is describing the charm of bedtime rereading, the cozy autonomy of one book, one lamp, one reader. In reply, Hart-Davis asks Lyttleton who Gibbon was writing about. On May 9, Lyttleton replied:

“That Gibbon sentence describes the emperor Gordian whose ‘manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father.’ Then comes the sentence I quoted, which ends: `and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former [‘concubines’] as well as the latter [‘62,000 volumes’] were designed for use rather than for ostentation.’”

On May 12, Hart-Davis replied: “I daresay that Gibbon’s broad blade carved out his meaning with more force and exactitude than did the bending rapiers of latter-day swordsmen.” This is rare book talk, a pleasure most of us can indulge in only infrequently. Well-read people are an endangered species. Lyttleton was seventy-four in 1957. The Decline and Fall was a book he already knew well. He was no historian. He read exclusively for the sheer pleasure of it, the most respectable of reasons, and I trust my longtime reader will emulate Lyttleton’s example.

'Disagreeable to the Eye and Wounding to the Soul'

“[I]n the large towns of East Germany, everything, or almost everything, was either grey or brown: not necessarily old, dirty or down-at-heel, but a sad grey or a dull – as it were, dead -- brown.”  

The author is Michel Pastoureau, the French historian of color, writing in The Colours of Our Memories (trans. Janet Lloyd, Polity, 2012). In a section titled “Greyness,” he describes his first visit behind the Iron Curtain, in 1981, in East Germany. Everything seemed “gloomy, weary and vulgar.” This is not the flashy, aggressive Las Vegas-style vulgarity, which implies a corrupted aesthetic sense. Rather, it suggests the absence of any aesthetic sense among totalitarians – the visual counterpart to socialist realism.  

“The number of aesthetic experiences accessible to a city-dweller in [Communism] is uncommonly limited,” Czesław Miłosz writes in The Captive Mind (trans. Jane Zielonko, 1953). He identifies the monotonous drabness as an intentional aspect of Communism – sensory deprivation as a spirit-numbing political tool, present everywhere in clothing and architecture. “Fear paralyses individuality,” he writes. “[T]he union of colour and harmony with fear is as difficult to imagine as brilliant plumage on birds living in the northern tundras.”

Pastoureau discovers what he concludes is the defining color of Communism, a shade he had never before seen, present in raincoats, building facades, bicycles and automobiles:

“It is not easy to find words to describe it. It was not, strictly speaking, just a purplish brown, rather a shade somewhere between brown, grey and purple with (and this is perhaps the most remarkable thing about it) a slight tinge of greenish yellow as if, as a finishing touch, there had been an attempt to add a hint of ‘mustard’ to this revolting colour. In the West it would have been hard to produce such a colour and impossible to sell it.”

One more reason to favor a market-driven economy. Pastoureau continues:

“Disagreeable to the eye and wounding to the soul, it was as ugly as could be and, on top of everything, there was something brutal and uncivilized about it that appeared to stem from the most uncouth codes of social life, a kind of Urfarbe (original colour) inherited from the barbaric times of the first industrial revolution and resistant to all modernity.”

'Uncouth Words in Disarray'

You know you’re in trouble when the editor of an anthology devoted to putatively funny verse writes in his introduction:

“I have, in general, avoided ‘light verse’ or vers de société, and I have made no attempt to find suitable extracts from the longer poems of Chaucer, Skelton, Marvell, Dryden, Pope [!], Byron [!] and Browning. Among long poems that are exclusively, continuously and irresistibly funny, Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark [!] is unique, and rather than chop it into mincemeat I have omitted it altogether.”

The author of this credo is Michael Roberts (1902-1948), who published The Faber Book of Comic Verse in 1942, not a notably funny year. Based on his selections, it’s fair to conclude that Roberts was a man unburdened with a sense of humor. Of course, he was once a member of that well-known comedy troupe, the Communist Party of Great Britain. Only one criterion counts when it comes to comic verse: amusement, ranging from a nod of the head to moist, helpless laughter. The real test, of course, is whether the poet can get a laugh when the reader is alone, without an audience. The social component in laughter is strong. Solitary, non-pathological laughter is rare. Nothing in Roberts’ anthology evoked it in me.

In his New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978), Kingsley Amis said, “Anon. is not my favorite poet.” He may be Roberts’. He devotes space to “In the Dumps”:

“We’re all in the dumps,

For diamonds are trumps;

The kittens are gone to St. Paul’s!

The babies are bit,

The Moon’s in a fit,

And the houses are built without walls.”

In other words, sub-Lear nonsense. Amis described Lear’s work as “whimsical to the point of discomfort.” The writer of comic verse must resist two primary and opposed temptations if he seriously hopes to make people laugh. On one side, the black hole of didacticism, the irresistible tug of gravity in the form of a “message.” On the other, nonsense, the cute counterpart to so-called Language poetry. By succumbing repeatedly to both, Roberts ends up with unrelieved dreariness. One of his miscalculations is to ignore vers de société, which Amis defines like this: “a kind of realistic verse that is close to some of the interests of the novel: men and women among their fellows, seen as members of a group or a class in a way that emphasizes manners, social forms, amusements, fashion (from millinery to philosophy), topicality, even gossip, all these treated in a bright, perspicuous style.”

Some readers might nominate E.B. White, who remains an idol to some, though I find him in prose and poetry insufferable. I think of White as the founder of the Sensitivity School of American Writing – resolutely unfunny, always self-regarding, out to make sure you like him. Roberts includes White’s “Commuters”:

“Commuter—one who spends his life

In riding to and from his wife;

A man who shaves and takes a train

And then rides back to shave again.”

Inadvertently, Roberts includes a few good poems which, if not always laughter-provoking, are able to stand on their own merits. Here is an untitled poem by Samuel Johnson, written as a swipe at Thomas Warton’s poetry, that serves as a comment on Roberts’ anthology:

“Wheresoe’er I turn my view,

All is strange, yet nothing new:

Endless labour all along,

Endless labour to be wrong;

Phrase that Time has flung away;

Uncouth words in disarray:

Trick’d in antique ruff and bonnet,

Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.”

'Say a Fool Told It to You'

LEAR: “Dost thou call me fool, boy?”

FOOL: “All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with.”

We all need fools in our lives to remind us of our foolishness. If no one else is up to the task, we must be brave and do it ourselves. Though sometimes unpalatable, the task is never difficult. Just pay attention and keep notes. “Stultus sum. Translate me that, and take the meaning of it to yourself for your pains.” We all get the message, even with threadbare Latin: “I am foolish [or stupid].” The line is from Charles Lamb’s “All Fool’s Day,” which always brings to mind Sherwood Anderson’s story “I’m a Fool.” Lamb’s essay is the essential text for this most humbling of days:

“I have never made an acquaintance since, that lasted; or a friendship, that answered; with any that had not some tincture of the absurd in their characters. I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you. I love the safety, which a palpable hallucination warrants; the security, which a word out of season ratifies. And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.”