'How Beauteous Mankind Is!'

Outside the window above my desk grows a firebush, a sprawling shrub covered with tubular flowers the color of traffic cones. As I write, a mud dauber flits among the blossoms. One afternoon last week, after hours at the keyboard, feeling stiff, sore and irritable, I looked out the window and saw, four feet from my nose, a miracle suspended among the flowers: a ruby-throated hummingbird, its wings a blur, its body iridescent. Then it was gone.

That same evening I watched Jacques Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, France’s supreme contribution, along with À la recherche du temps perdu, to civilized living. In the car the next day I listened repeatedly to Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” performed by Philippe Entremont. At night I reread Pnin. I’ve concluded that I needed to address the charm, delight and wonder deficit. The human world in all its gratuitous ugliness was too much with me. Perhaps you have felt the same way of late. Beware: the ugliness is contagious.

There’s a quality I think of as aggrieved earnestness. People so afflicted are tuned to a narrow wavelength. Humor, beauty, irony and the frothier forms of pleasure elude them. They will never get Beerbohm. Their world is an unhappy place in need of correction at whatever the cost. They nag and bore us. They are yentas, regardless of sex. Their idea of conversation is a shrill sermon. They would never look twice at Matisse.

Of course, there’s much to be serious about. A playful sense of irony will never cure cancer. Most grownups know that. In Act V, Scene 1 of The Tempest, Ferdinand and Miranda are playing chess. She says:

“O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in it!”

Prospero, her father, with infinite gentleness replies to Miranda's naiveté: “’Tis new to thee.” Those four monosyllables never fail to move me.

Next up,Laurel and Hardy. And P.G. Wodehouse.

'A Cause that Could Never Have Been Gained'

A native of New York City and for the previous twenty years a resident of Europe, Henry James returned to the United States in August 1904 and remained until July 1905, touring his homeland from coast to coast. Early in 1905 he visited the American South for the first time, stopping in Richmond, Va., where he viewed the South-facing bronze statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The work of the French sculptor Marius Jean Antonin Mercié, it had been dedicated May 29, 1890. James saw in it “a strange eloquence . . . a kind of melancholy nobleness,” as he later wrote in The American Scene (1907):

“The equestrian statue of the Southern hero, made to order in far-away uninterested Paris, is the work of a master and has an artistic interest--a refinement of style, in fact, under the impression of which we seem to see it, in its situation, as some precious pearl of ocean washed up on a rude bare strand.”

Vandals, naturally, have targeted the Lee statue. Bringing it down will require much engineering prowess or a significant quantity of explosives. Lee and his horse are twenty-one feet tall and stand on a granite pedestal forty feet tall. On April 15, 1861, James’ eighteenth birthday, President Lincoln had issued his first call for volunteers. Three days earlier, Southern guns had fired on Fort Sumter. His younger brothers and two of his cousins enlisted in the Union Army. James was drafted but declared medically unfit for military service. One can’t imagine Henry James marching with a musket on his shoulder. In his chapter of Richmond, the Lee monument suggests to James “a quite conscious, subjective, even a quite sublime, effort to ignore, to sit, as it were, superior and indifferent . . .” In his final view of the statue, James closes his Richmond chapter with this:

“As I looked back, before leaving it, at Lee’s stranded, bereft image, which time and fortune have so cheated of half the significance, and so, I think, of half the dignity, of great memorials, I recognized something more than the melancholy of a lost cause. The whole infelicity speaks of a cause that could never have been gained.”

'Manifestly Produced for a Rapid Effect'

“Coulette is good. I sometimes think about those poets who will get lost soon to the ages--Justice, Bowers, Nemerov, perhaps even Hecht and Wilbur. I suppose that’s the way of the world but they seemed so rooted at one time. . . Don’t even get me started on Lou Groza . . .”

I didn’t know Lou Groza either. He was a football player. The others were poets, some of our best, all dead in recent decades. The bearer of glad tidings is the poet and editor David Sanders in an email he sent me on Saturday. It’s a good reminder. In the abstract, all of us know we will be forgotten, as will all of the good people we admire and even the rotten ones. But when we’re young and naïve, we read the masters among our contemporaries and assume they (and we) are immortal. I have to remind myself that Hecht and Wilbur are dead. Writers without readers are dead or at least in author limbo. The sense of being bereft is exacerbated by the knowledge that good poetry, like the California condor, is an endangered species. Magazines we once anticipated with excitement – Poetry, Sewanee Review – are unreadable. Paul Valéry in Vol. 2 of his Cahiers/Notebooks (trans. Rachel Killick and Brian Stimpson, Paul Lang, 2000) might be writing about most of the poetry of  our age:

“Contemporary painting and literature – – excluding thoughtful reflection, examination of detail – Newspaper readers, window-shopper attracted by bright posters  and cunning displays, these are the superficial customers who have to be instantaneously aroused, simply aroused – not, as previously, drawn into a complete world.”

Valéry also writes: “Reading newspapers leads to reading everything as if it were a newspaper.” Granted, few read even newspapers anymore. I’m reminded of some lines in the running for the John Lennon “Imagine” Prize for the dumbest ever written by a putative poet: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”

'The Voices of the Distant and the Dead'

People throw around quotations on the internet as though they were used tissue, with absent or mistaken attributions, misquotation and no context.  When I quote a writer, I try to let you know where you can find the passage, short of a cumbersome bibliography. The Quote Investigator is on the case, with mixed results. Still, the quotations arrive, floating without tether like the Hindenburg. A reader sent me this, attributing it only to William Ellery Channing:

“It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers.”

 

A little fulsome in a distinctly nineteenth-century New England manner, but I sort of like it. An essentially American sensibility is at work here, echoing Jefferson. Free access to books, without question, can promote democracy. Censorship, de jure or otherwise, is the first tool of dictatorial regimes. But is the Channing quote accurate and where did he say it? A brief search turned up the source: “Self Culture,” a lecture Channing delivered in Boston in 1838. His prose tends to a gassiness not unlike Emerson’s – high-minded, over-reliant on the third-person singular and redolent of the pulpit. In We Are Doomed (2009), John Derbyshire characterizes Emerson as “a key progenitor of modern smiley-face liberalism,” and I hear a similar strain in Channing, who defines self-culture as “the care which every man owes to himself, to the unfolding and perfecting of his nature.”

Henry James writes in an 1887 review of A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson by James Eliot Cabot: “He has no great sense of wrong – a strangely limited one, indeed for a moralist – no sense of the dark, the foul, the base. There were certain complications in life which he never suspected.” Channing is given to earnest happy talk and seems not to recognize the persistence of human evil. Here is how he continues the passage quoted above:

"[Books] give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am. No matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling. If the Sacred Writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof, if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise, and Shakspeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live.”

Read this and Channing's earlier celebration of books sounds less convincing.

'All Words Are Good Words'

Yiyun Li is a Chinese-American writer about whom I know almost nothing and whose name I had never heard before Thursday when a reader sent me a brief interview with Li in which she says at least one interesting thing. Asked what book she is reading, Li replies:

“A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson (with regular help from the OED and Merriam-Webster). All words are good words. I find reading a dictionary the best way to befriend them at a time when they are so often abused in public life.”

And not exclusively in public life. What a pleasure it is to meet someone who is articulate and enjoys formulating interesting sentences, in writing or speech. On Thursday I spoke with an Israeli-born computer scientist about computational molecular biology and he made the well-thumbed subject of DNA/RNA/proteins interesting again with lively, precise, jargon-free language. He called it “our central dogma,” playing off an earlier religious reference. We were off and running.  

I used to think sentiments like Li’s were self-evidently universal among writers. Then I read Joyce Carol Oates. Our medium is words. We ought to have a good time playing with them, even when our ostensible subject is a solemn one. Li is exhilaratingly naïve: “All words are good words.” Theoretically, yes. But awesome, for instance, once reserved for the divine, now casually applied to lunch, is eternally disgraced and must be discarded. It is no longer a good word. Newly learned words are always a useful gift. Ford Madox Ford writes in Chap 7 of The March of Literature (1939):

“[I]f a man’s vocabulary is small and he employs his words in groups of three or four, the number of expressions at his disposal will be proportionately limited and in consequence he will have to use—and all his fellows will have to use—the same phrase so often that it will finally become nauseating or ridiculous.”

That’s how politicians talk and people from other walks of life who wish to be ignored. One definition of bore is someone indifferent to language, who uses and discards it like dental floss. I recently reread Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, a somewhat bruising experience. Doughty’s problem is not indifference to language but a cloying preoccupation with it. Orwell suggested that prose ought to be transparent. Doughty’s too often approached opacity – the words, that is, not their referents. Later in the same chapter, Ford writes:

“A really good style, in whatever language, must be founded on the vernacular; the nearer it can come to the common speech of the day without having a shocking, comic or gross effect, the better the style will be. Grossness, indeed, is preferable to overdelicacy for the writer who wished his work to go down to posterity. For tomorrow very often accepts words and phrases that the writer’s own day will shudder over as being vulgar neologisms.”

Ford goes on to acknowledge that neologism is “a not very attractive word.” Ford died on this date, June 26, in 1939. Though only sixty-five at the time of his death, he published more than eighty books, seven or eight of which are essential.

'The Two Sides Occasionally Conversed Pleasantly'

Among the mounting number of statuary casualties in the ongoing tantrum is Ulysses S. Grant, victorious general, fellow Ohioan, eighteenth president of the United States and one of our best writers. Only Lincoln among the presidents exceeded him in sheer writing ability. His Personal Memoirs is on the short list of essential American nonfiction, up there with Principles of Psychology and Witness. Few have written so meticulously about war. We can all learn from the clarity of his prose. Here’s a  sample from Chap. XXXVIII of his Memoirs (1885), describing an engagement in the Vicksburg Campaign of 1862-63:

“At three points on the Jackson road, in front of Ransom's brigade, a sap was run up to the enemy's parapet, and by the 25th of June we had it undermined and the mine charged. The enemy had countermined, but did not succeed in reaching our mine. At this particular point the hill, on which the rebel work stands rises abruptly. Our sap ran close up to the outside of the enemy's parapet. In fact this parapet was also our protection. The soldiers of the two sides occasionally conversed pleasantly across this barrier; sometimes they exchanged the hard bread of the Union soldiers for the tobacco of the Confederates; at other times the enemy threw over hand-grenades, and often our men, catching them in their hands, returned them.”

A “sap” is a covered trench permitting attackers to approach a besieged position while under fire. Union troops packed the mine with 2,200 pounds of gunpowder. On July 25, the explosion blew apart the Confederate lines and was followed by a Union infantry assault. The 45th Illinois Regiment charged into the 40-by-12-foot crater but were stopped by Confederate infantry. The Union soldiers were pinned down while the Confederate forces rolled artillery shells with short fuses into the pit. Union engineers built a casement, permitting the troops to escape. Union miners dug a second mine from the crater and packed it with powder. On July 1, it too was detonated. Vicksburg surrendered on July 4.

The passage quoted above is notable for Grant’s “human touch” in the final sentence. He reminds us that the American Civil War was personal and often intimate. There’s also a touch of grim humor in the grenade anecdote. In Chap. XXX, describing the start of the Vicksburg Campaign, Grant describes an event with renewed pertinence:

“It was at this point, probably, where the first idea of a ‘Freedman’s Bureau’ took its origin. Orders of the government prohibited the expulsion of the negroes from the protection of the army, when they came in voluntarily. Humanity forbade allowing them to starve. With such an army of them, of all ages and both sexes, as had congregated about Grand Junction, amounting to many thousands, it was impossible to advance. There was no special authority for feeding them unless they were employed as teamsters, cooks and pioneers with the army; but only able-bodied young men were suitable for such work. This labor would support but a very limited percentage of them.”

Grant describes how a solution was reached:

“The plantations were all deserted; the cotton and corn were ripe: men, women and children above ten years of age could be employed in saving these crops. To do this work with contrabands, or to have it done, organization under a competent chief was necessary. On inquiring for such a man Chaplain Eaton, now and for many years the very able United States Commissioner of Education, was suggested. He proved as efficient in that field as he has since done in his present one. I gave him all the assistants and guards he called for. We together fixed the prices to be paid for the negro labor, whether rendered to the government or to individuals. The cotton was to be picked from abandoned plantations, the laborers to receive the stipulated price (my recollection is twelve and a half cents per pound for picking and ginning) from the quartermaster, he shipping the cotton north to be sold for the benefit of the government. Citizens remaining on their plantations were allowed the privilege of having their crops saved by freedmen on the same terms.

“At once the freedmen became self-sustaining.”

'Love Long and Slow Thoughts and Books'

Something Adam Zagajewski told my friend Cynthia Haven a decade ago has stuck in my head. She asked the veteran of Soviet Poland about the likely future of poetry and its readers in the age of social media, and Zagajewski replied:

“We’ll be living in small ghettos, far from where celebrities dwell, and yet in every generation there will be a new delivery of minds that will love long and slow thoughts and books and poetry and music, so that these rather pleasant ghettos will never perish — and one day may even stir more excitement than we’re used to now.”

Like every Pole, Zagajewski is an adept of irony. It’s his genetic inheritance, as it is mine. (My paternal grandparents were born in Kraków and came to the U.S. as young adults. The Irish infusion from my mother’s side turns Polish irony into something like unreliable fulminated mercury.) How seriously Zagajewski takes his vision of the literary future (our present) is difficult to say. On the whole it’s a hopeful forecast, though his choice of ghetto may trouble some readers. Originally it meant the district in an Italian city where Jews were restricted. In The American Scene (1906), when Henry James revisits his home town of New York City he observes “the denizens of the New York Ghetto, heaped as thick as the splinters on the table of a glass-blower, had each, like the fine glass particle, his or her individual share of the whole hard glitter of Israel.”

More recently we think of poor neighborhoods in American cities inhabited by blacks. The OED assures us that ghetto can now mean a place “occupied by an isolated group; an isolated or segregated group, community, or area.” Zagajewski, I think, is using this sense of the word, though he certainly would be familiar with the Warsaw Ghetto.

His prophecy is coming true. Readers – and I mean “serious” readers of poetry and other genres, a chronically endangered species – have formed informal networks, pockets of affinity, as humans always do. Anecdotal Evidence has regular readers younger than half my age (“a new delivery of minds”) and a few who are my senior. They “love long and slow thoughts and books and poetry and music.” The blog attracts submoronic visitors as well, but that’s inevitable. Those who blame everything on the internet (among whom I number myself in lazier moments) forget that without it I would never have met my best readers, those for whom books are at least as important as they are for me. COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdown have intensified these gatherings and made them more precious. To read only the headlines, you might conclude the human race has been replaced by defective automatons. On this date, June 24, in 1797, Charles Lamb wrote to his childhood friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

“I see nobody, and sit, and read or walk, alone, and hear nothing. I am quite lost to conversation from disuse; and out of the sphere of my little family, who, I am thankful, are dearer and dearer to me every day, I see no face that brightens up at my approach. My friends are at a distance; worldly hopes are at a low ebb with me, and unworldly thoughts are not yet familiarised to me, though I occasionally indulge in them. Still I feel a calm not unlike content. I fear it is sometimes more akin to physical stupidity than to a heaven-flowing serenity and peace.”

I understand Lamb’s vacillations of understanding.

'Encouraging the Growth of Benign Flora'

Koumiss you’ll find in the Oxford English Dictionary between koulan* and kouprey**. The word is Tartar in origin and defined as “a fermented liquor prepared from mare’s milk, commonly used as a beverage by the Tartars and other Asiatic nomadic peoples.” It is also applied to the “spirituous liquor” distilled from this beverage. In 1901, Chekhov underwent the “koumiss cure” at Axyonovo, a Urals resort in Ufa Province that treated tubercular patients. With his wife, Olga Knipper, Chekhov spent his honeymoon there. Writing on this date, June 23, in 1901, Chekhov tells his friend Vasily Sobolevsky, the editor of Russian Bulletin:

“During my koumiss cure here I’ve gained ten pounds and my cough has grown weaker, but all the same I’ll be returning home with exactly what I brought here: dull sound beneath the clavicle.”

The translators are Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky in Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973). In a footnote, Karlinsky explains that before the discovery of x-rays, the customary method for examining a patient with tuberculosis was to thump him on the chest: “The quality of sound obtained and its location informed the doctor of the extent of damage to the lung.” Chekhov adds: “I’ve been drinking koumiss, but I haven’t been able to drink more than four bottles a day; otherwise I get sick to my stomach.”

A brief online search suggests koumiss might have some therapeutic effect, acting as a diuretic and thus relieving mucous membranes of congestion. It’s hardly a cure for tuberculosis but might relieve symptoms. The disease killed Chekhov three years later. He was a doctor. Typically, even though he’s the one at the health resort, he spends half the letter diagnosing Sobolevsky and prescribing treatment:

“Your degeneration of the arteries or what is known as atheromatosis [fatty deposits on the lining of arteries], is as natural at your age as hair turning gray . . . You should do a lot of walking but do not exhaust yourself; avoid beef and eat fowl, veal, fish and ham; don’t drink any alcohol, not even a drop; if you must, drink only beer, but make sure it’s high-quality beer . . .”

According to Donald Rayfield in Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997) Dr. Vladimir Shchurovsky examined Chekhov, observed lesions and “irreversible necrosis” in both lungs, and prescribed the koumiss cure. Rayfield continues:

“For the first time since childhood, Anton put on weight. Four bottles of koumiss daily made him twelve pounds heavier by mid-June. Fermented mares’ milk was easily digestible. It was also thought to raise the body’s defences against tuberculosis, encouraging the growth of benign flora at the expense of tubercular bacilli in the gut. Olga, although she found her own ten stone weight [140 pounds] excessive, tried it herself. Koumiss made them drowsy, drunk and lascivious.”

*koulan: “a species or sub-species of equine quadruped (Equus onager), closely allied to the Dziggetai (with which it is united by some), found in central and southern Asia: the wild ass of Mesopotamia (Iraq), Persia (Iran), and the banks of the Indus.”

**kouprey: “a large wild ox, Novibos (or Bos) sauveli, first discovered in Cambodia in 1937.”

'Grimly Rejoiced in the Awful Sack'

“Anno 1527, when Rome was sacked by Burbonius [Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor], the common soldiers made such spoil that fair churches were turned to stables, old monuments and books, made horse-litter, or burned like straw; reliques, costly pictures defaced; altars demolished; rich hangings, carpets, &c. trampled in the dirt.”

The human urge to sack, defile, vandalize, despoil, tear down and raze has a long and ever-present history. Let’s distinguish it from a related crime, theft, which is most often motivated by greed and envy. Heaving a brick through a window in order to steal a flat-screen television is one thing; it almost makes sense. Pulling down the statue of someone about whom you know little or nothing, and that was paid for with private or public funds, is quite another. There’s a blind hatred in many humans for all that is sacred, noble and aesthetically pleasing. Such things reproach us and remind us that we are not always worthy of them. Entropy never sleeps but its slow-grinding work is accelerated by the human mania for desecration. The passage above is from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. He confirms what we already suspected -- vandals will not remain content destroying only inanimate objects:

“. . . senators and cardinals themselves dragged along the streets, and put to exquisite torments, to confess where their money was hid; the rest murdered on heaps, lay stinking in the streets; infants’ brains dashed out before their mothers’ eyes.”

Once the appetite for vandalism is whetted and goes unstanched, what’s next? Churches, synagogues, libraries and schools, and then human beings, individually and in groups. Murder is vandalism with its logic extended. Even the educated and enlightened revel in the destruction, so long as it’s undertaken by proxies. Referring to Martin Luther in The Pleasure of Ruins (1953), Rose Macaulay writes:

“Rome to him had no virtues. He was, no doubt, of those who grimly rejoiced in the awful sack and massacre by the Imperialist troops in 1527. This shattering event and its consequences, while increasing the number of Roman ruins, for some years kept visitors nervously away, as well as driving into exile and beggary hundreds of the noble families and the scholars.”

'The Writer Got It Right'

Kaboom Books has reopened three days a week and the owner, John Dillman, greeted us at the door with a squirt gun loaded with hand sanitizer. We brought our own masks but John was passing them out too. He has a new pandemic-driven rule: If you handle a book and decide not to buy it, don’t reshelf it but put it in one of the baskets placed around the shop.

My youngest son came with a list and quickly found some of what he wanted: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Down and Out in Paris and London. I trusted in serendipity and, as usual, wasn’t disappointed. My first find, in the fiction section, was a book I learned about just few years ago and read in a library copy: Eugenio Montale’s The Butterfly of Dinard (University Press of Kentucky, 1971), translated by G. Singh. In his preface, Montale refers to its contents as “short stories – culs de lampe.”

Next, Karl Shapiro’s Essay on Rime with Trial of a Poet (University of Michigan Press, 2003). The first title is a 2072-line blank-verse meditation on modern poetry, written in 1944 while Shapiro was serving in the U.S. Army in the South Pacific. He had no access to a library. The tone is polemical, mock-scholarly and often comic: “Suspect the novelist the title of whose book / Is lifted from a sermon or a play.” There go Hemingway and Faulkner, both of whom were alive when Shapiro published his book in 1945. Trial of a Poet was inspired by Shapiro’s service on the jury that awarded the crackpot and anti-Semite Ezra Pound the Bollingen Prize: “What will our children’s children say / About our art-monsters in future years . . .” 

D.J. Enright’s Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book (1995), the first of three grab bag volumes the English poet assembled late in life. Here’s a sample:       

“One pleasure in reading almost anything: focusing on a word or sentence and asking oneself how one would have put it. Gratifying if one’s rephrasing seems an improvement. Pleasing if, seeing why it is how it is, one concludes that the writer got it right, righter than one would have oneself.”

'They Have at Least This Requiem'

Stephen Edgar’s new poem, “The Noise of Time,” shares a title with Osip Mandelstam’s autobiographical prose – story? essay? – published in 1925. The poem’s speaker listens to a CD of Sviatoslav Richter’s piano recital recorded in Sofia in 1958: Mussorgsky, Chopin, Schubert, Liszt, Rachmaninoff. The audio quality is poor: “the faintest hiss” and “A few odd snuffles and cleared throats / Rudely descanting on the notes, / And, intermittent and remiss, / The creak of seats and scuffing feet.” Then the speaker remembers the context:

“. . . shades of the Eastern Bloc,

Drabness, dread and the midnight knock,

The list of names too long to trace.”

The audience of more than sixty years ago dwells in what Edgar calls “that grey-lit frozen zone.” He means the drab limbo of post-Stalin Bulgaria, but also that vaporous region inhabited by the unknown and forgotten dead:

“These listeners in the concert hall,

They have at least this requiem,

Though all they have left us to recall

That they have been, inscribed on air,

Is no more than a shifting chair

Or the ill-timed loosening of phlegm.”

Chap. XIII, “Komissarzhevskaya,” of Mandelstam’s “Noise of Time” (The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown, 1986) begins:

“My desire is not to speak about myself but to track down the age, the noise and the germination of time. My memory is inimical to all that is personal. If it depended on me, I should only make a wry face in remembering the past. I was never able to understand the Tolstoys and Aksakovs, all those grand Bagrovs, enamored of family archives with their epic domestic memoirs. I repeat—my memory is not loving but inimical, and it labors not to reproduce but to distance the past.”

In his introduction to “The Noise of Time,” Brown writes of Mandelstam: “He was preeminently the poet of the present moment, of the literal fact in all its particularity, believing that only the instant of the artist’s perception has any chance of withstanding time’s attrition . . .”

'No Pulse of Words of Their Own'

Nadezhda Mandelstam writing of the Soviet Union in the 1930’s in the second volume of her memoirs, Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974), and sounding rather as though she were describing the United States in 2020:

“A mob assembled in a public square or hall and welded into one compact whole is not the same as the crowds of human beings scattered around—on city streets and country roads, in houses and apartments. It is the dispersed crowds who really constitute ‘society,’ but in this country there is nothing to bind them together, since all the forms of association that arose historically have been destroyed; at the same time the compact, howling mobs, the ‘masses,’ have no pulse of words of their own—they are completely under the sway of their ‘leaders’ (or ‘demagogues,’ as they used to be called).”

Is a “dispersed crowd” still a crowd? I think Mandelstam means something like regular, non-aligned people, citizens, loose aggregates of relatives, friends, neighbors, fellow parishioners and coworkers. Burke called such associations “little platoons.” Nothing is more natural or less official. Such gatherings are always watched suspiciously by busybody governments and mobs. The private realm, where humanity flourishes, is too dangerous to be left alone.

The family I grew up in was not notably social. We weren’t churchgoers. My parents were Democrats of the Roosevelt sub-species and belonged to city-wide bowling leagues. They played poker with one set of friends and canasta with another. My father was a longtime member of Ironworkers Local No. 17 in Cleveland and, after the war, helped organize a social club of high-school buddies who called themselves the Royal Azures (picnic in summer, Christmas party for the kids). The thought of joining a mob or paying serious attention to a demagogue never entered their minds. Come to think of it, the only organizations I’ve ever joined were the Newspaper Guild (AFL-CIO) and the American Automobile Association. I’ve never defined myself by what I belonged to or any other superfluous demographic category. Mandelstam writes:

“The crowd easily loses touch with the past and does not see the future . . . [It] has a short memory, but something human always survives in it; hence the distress it feels whenever it is egged on to wanton violence by its leaders. The frenzied mobs at the beginning of our era were terrifying, but they were not as hideous as the submissive crowds who later, at public meetings, voted the death penalty for fellow citizens.”

'On Good Terms in a Quiet Sort of Way'

Thirty years ago today I visited Guy Davenport at his home on Sayre Avenue in Lexington, Ky. We had exchanged letters for several years but this was our only in-person meeting. His yard and house were notably clean and orderly, the opposite of a bohemian hovel. He owned many oversized art books and I marveled at how well he had organized them on his shelves. He had the most tasteful tchotchkes I’ve even seen.

I can’t claim to have much insight into Davenport the man. I knew him as a writer and teacher, though never in a formal sense. With me he was always generous and encouraging. When I reviewed his 1989 volume A Balthus Notebook (Ecco Press), he replied with a letter of gratitude in which he didn’t exactly correct me but expanded on what I had written. His first instinct was to share knowledge. It was a memorable exercise in tact and courtesy. As a newspaper reporter I had met and interviewed many “celebrities.” None was so charming and just plain interesting as Guy Davenport.

One of the pleasures of reading Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (Counterpoint, 2018) was learning more about his private nature. The editor Edward M. Burns does a heroic job of annotating the correspondence of formidably learned men. The two fat volumes in a slipcase total 2,016 pages and weigh almost eight pounds. One of the most moving and revealing letters in the collection was written by Davenport from his hometown of Anderson, S.C., on Feb. 21, 1964. It begins:

“I’ve been down here—home—all week. Daddy died Wednesday; funeral this morning, Friday.”

You know a Southerner wrote this. Davenport was thirty-six and called his father “Daddy.” Guy Mattison Davenport had spent most of his working life as a shipping clerk for the Railway Express Agency. Davenport describes his father’s lung cancer and emphysema, and continues:

“We all—Mama, my sister, and I—saw him just before he died. He was a jolly, easy sort and everybody in town knew him, so that some 300 folk came to the funeral and an ocean of flowers fills the house and makes a great mound on his grave. He was 64. We were always on good terms in a quiet sort of way; I never ‘rebelled’ and he never coerced. He was always proud of my drawing and my education, and I reciprocated by taking seriously his hobbies—an impressive collection of Indian weaponry and utensils, trees and flowers, fervent expeditions to visit everything historical and antiquarian.”

And there we have the origin of Davenport’s finest essay, “Finding” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), which begins:

“Every Sunday afternoon of my childhood, once the tediousness of Sunday school and the appalling boredom of church were over with, corrosions of the spirit easily salved by the roast beef, macaroni pie, and peach cobbler that followed them, my father loaded us all into the Essex, later the Packard, and headed out to look for Indian arrows. That was the phrase, ‘to look for Indian arrows.” Children detect nothing different in their own families: I can’t remember noticing anything extraordinary in our family being the only one I knew of that devoted every Sunday afternoon to amateur archaeology.”

In the essay, Davenport goes on to trace his artistic interests and attentiveness to detail to these childhood rambles: “Our understanding was that the search was the thing, the pleasure of looking.” In a metaphoric nutshell, that was his credo. Davenport continues in his letter to Kenner:

“I chose I John 4: 17-21 for his eulogy—the minister thought a scholarly son ought to set the tone of the sermon. He could only have lived in terrible pain, and we are thankful for the mercy that gave him a swift death. Mama has been beautifully brave, and Southern custom has kept us distracted from raw grief—e.g., twenty-three dinners ‘brought in’ yesterday: Homeric, or even Tlinkit Eskimo, generosity.”

'Some Hindrances Will Be Found'

An old friend and former newspaper colleague, Steve Bornfeld, has published an essay about aging, the slow death of an industry and losing one’s job to the pandemic. Titled

“The Cost of Quarantine,” it might better be called “The Cost of Being Human.” Steve is almost five years younger than me. One of the hazards of getting old is coming to believe that our earthly rewards are nigh. We’ve endured this long and paid our dues, where are the goodies we deserve? In The Rambler #127, Dr. Johnson reminds us of the poet for whom “the latter part of his life seldom equalled the sallies of his youth.” To his credit, Steve skirts self-pity but doesn’t indulge. He writes:

  

“But at age 63, the thrill of the unknown is missing for the ex-8-year-old. Much of my life has been spent, my flaws calcified, my talents tapped. Perhaps tapped out. I don’t know who I’m supposed to be now. Is reinvention really possible?”

That’s the American Way, isn’t it? I’ve known Steve for more than thirty years. He’s a word-man with a healthy work ethic. You’ll note an undertone of wit in his essay, even echoes of growing up in The Bronx. At some lower frequency he sees the unhappy comedy in what is happening. Such knowledge doesn’t pay the rent but it may temper the mind sufficiently to launch yet another assault on reality. Johnson writes:

“Some hindrances will be found in every road of life, but he that fixes his eyes upon any thing at a distance, necessarily loses sight of all that fills up the intermediate space, and therefore sets forward with alacrity and confidence, nor suspects a thousand obstacles, by which he afterwards finds his passage embarrassed and obstructed. Some are indeed stopt at once in their career by a sudden shock of calamity, or diverted to a different direction by the cross impulse of some violent passion; but far the greater part languish by slow degrees, deviate at first into slight obliquities, and themselves scarcely perceive at what time their ardour forsook them, or when they lost sight of their original design.”

There is another potential outcome. I would still like to believe that despite all the unignorable evidence, the ability to write – accurately, stylishly, on deadline – remains a marketable skill. I can provide contact information if you have some ideas, and I won’t charge Steve a commission.

'Stick to the Integrity of Your Character'

On the endpaper at the back of Helen Pinkerton’s copy of Parade’s End (Everyman’s Library, 1992), faintly written in pencil, are the only words she wrote in the book: “p. 489 T. on the war.” T. is Christopher Tietjens, the hero of Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy (1924-28). That page is in the cycle’s second novel, No More Parades. Capt. Tietjens is now at the Western front in France and is speaking with Col. Stanley Levin, who has just complained of “This beastly war!” Tietjens’ reply is marked by Helen’s customary way of noting a passage, with brackets at the beginning and end:

“’The beastliness of human nature is always pretty normal. We lie and betray and are wanting in imagination and deceive ourselves, always, at about the same rate. In peace and war! But, somewhere in that view there are enormous bodies of men. . . . If you got a still more extended range of view over this whole front you’d have still more enormous bodies of men. Seven to ten million. . . . All moving towards places towards which they desperately don’t want to go. Desperately! Everyone of them is desperately afraid. But they go on. An immense blind will force them in the effort to consummate the one decent action that humanity has to its credit in the whole record of history; the one we are engaged in. The effort is the one certain creditable fact in all their lives. . . . But the other lives of all those men are dirty, potty and discreditable little affairs. . . . Like yours. . . . Like mine. . . .’”

Here is Levin’s reply, not marked by Helen: “‘Just heavens! What a pessimist you are.’” Tietjens answers: “‘Can’t you see that that is optimism?’” In civilian life, Tietjens works as a government statistician. He is a gentleman. Ford describes him as “the last Tory,” representative of a species that “died out sometime in the 18th century.” His wife is narcissistic, vindictive and adulterous, one of literature’s memorable female monsters. Tietjens tells Levin that when the weather improves, the Germans will advance and “‘we’re probably done.’” Levin replies that the English “‘can’t possibly hold them.” Helen marks Tietjens’ next set-piece of a speech:

“‘But success or failure,’ Tietjens said, ‘have nothing to do with the credit of a story. And a consideration of the virtues of humanity does not omit the other side. If we lose, they win. If success is necessary to your idea of virtue – virtus – they then provide the success instead of ourselves. But the thing is to be able to stick to the integrity of your character, whatever earthquake sets the house tumbling over your head. . . . That, thank God, we’re doing. . . .”  

No declaration could be less modern, less pragmatic. On the Western front, Germans advancing, wife cheating, Tietjens makes the case for “stick[ing] to the integrity of your character.”

Helen had an abiding interest in war and military history, focused especially on the American Civil War. She published Melville’s Confidence Men and American Politics in the 1850’s (1987) and Crimson Confederates: Harvard Men Who Fought for the South (2009). She was a member of Civil War Roundtables in the Bay Area and visited most of the major battlefields. We shared an admiration for Grant’s Personal Memoirs and I remember how pleased she was when I recommended Omar Bradley’s A Soldier’s Story (1951). My favorites among her poems are the four narrative verse letters she wrote about the American Civil War, collectively titled “Crossing the Pedregal.” Find them in Taken in Faith: Poems (2002) or A Journey of the Mind: Collected Poems 1945-2016 (2016). The author of Moby-Dick speaks in “Melville’s Letter to William Clark Russell,” one of these dramatic monologues:

“Boys in the wild wind fell

Like autumn leaves in a New England gale,

Or lay in swathes, blue as a Cape Cod pond,

Their fresh young flesh scythed down with ripened wheat

Or plucked unripe in orchards, berry patches,

Their bodies, under dying horses’ hooves,

Crushed like the late June clover their feet crushed

Hastening to Gettysburg.”

[All ellipses in quoted passages from Parade’s End are Ford’s.]

'Something One Knows Is for Oneself'

“The moments in reading when one comes across something one knows is for oneself stay in the mind and are fondly recalled.”

One of those moments came to me more than ten years ago the first time I read “Red-Tailed Hawk” by Helen Pinkerton (1927-2017). I no longer remember where I found the poem, though probably was online. Poems about the natural world that don’t dabble in nature mysticism or nature worship are rare. This one starts in muted wonder and admiration, true, but with the closing couplet enters a deeper realm, one with philosophical heft. Helen notes the unseen, the invisible thermal that lifts the hawk:

“Yet it was real, the warm column of air–

Like being, unrecorded, always there.”

Soon, thanks to Cynthia Haven, I was able to write to Helen and express my gratitude for her work, and that started an exchange that was at first formal and a little stiff but soon relaxed into the easy give-and-take of friendship. Mostly we talked about family and books. I remember her excitement seven or eight years ago when she read Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, and her steadfast loyalty to her former teachers at Stanford, Yvor Winters and J.V. Cunningham. Helen died on Dec. 28, 2017 at the age of ninety.

One of her daughters, Erica Light, has shipped me a box of books from Helen’s personal library, carrying on the family tradition of generosity. Included among the gifts are three copies of the poetry journal La Fontana, one of which, from 1994, is a celebration of Edgar Bowers’ seventieth birthday. The passage quoted at the top of this post is from a prose remembrance of Bowers by the English poet Robert Wells, who goes on:

“Here was something unhoped-for actually in existence, and it felt as if some scarcely acknowledged lack was being made good.”

That’s precisely what I experienced when I discovered Helen’s work and the entrée she gave me to the rest of the Stanford School of Poets, especially Winters, Bowers, J.V. Cunningham, Janet Lewis (Winters’ widow and Helen’s close friend), Turner Cassity and Charles Gullans. Here are the books Erica sent me:       

Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End, with Helen’s pencil annotation inside the back cover

Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville’s Reading (1988), with annotations

Herman Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War: Civil War Poems

(Prometheus Books, 2001), with forward by James M. McPherson and heavy pencil annotations throughout

The Spring 2007 issue of the journal Renascence, with an article by John Baxter on Helen’s ekphrastic poems, “Bright Fictions”

How Words See (Occasional Works, 1988), a collection of ekphrastic poems, including one by Helen, edited by Ann Rosener

Laurel, Archaic, Rude: A Collection of Poems, presented to Yvor Winters on his retirement by the Stanford English Department in 1966. (Erica notes that Helen was its unacknowledged editor)

Doctor Johnson’s Prayers (1945), with an introduction by Elton Trueblood, a gift to Helen from, Erica tells me, her old friend Walter Martin of Chimera Books

Erica also includes, in her words, “offprints of my own two articles published while I wrote my dissertation for the University of Michigan on the Sienese painter Matteo di Giovanni di Bartolo (c.1430 - 1497). Back then, connoisseurship was still taught in history of art departments, now, not so much, I understand.”

She added paperbacks of Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952) and A Woman of Means (1950) by Peter Taylor, both old favorites. Here is a passage marked by Helen in Wells’ tribute to Bowers. She writes in pencil “E.B. & Y.W.” and might have added “H.P.”:

“I admired, too, the balance of the poetry, the way that it rested within itself, the conviction of meaning at the poem’s centre extending through its structure to validate the details. It avoided the fragmentary and aspired to completeness of expression. Perhaps this was the counterpart of its paradoxical desire for complete consciousness, for the never-quite-to-be-known boundary between the human and the elemental beyond which consciousness fails. In their various ways, the poems reached out to a border where, for the living, there is nothing to do but approach, wait, and then go back. They also articulated the loneliness inherent in this elemental relation, the devaluing of other, lesser, experience, and a consequent sense of being adrift, wandering.”

'As Euphuistic as Donne or Burton'

“Lamb’s mind and memory were so stored with English reading of an older date, that the occurrence of a particular theme sends him back, quite naturally, to those early masters who had specially made that theme their own.”

Alfred Ainger (1837-1904) is another name in that vast mausoleum of once-prominent critics, editors and industrious readers remembered only by kindred spirits. Ainger was a divine in the old-fashioned sense (OED: “any ecclesiastic, clergyman, or priest”) and served as chaplain to Queen Victoria. He knew Hood and Crabbe and wrote memoirs of them. He edited Lamb’s collected works in six volumes (1883-88). The passage quoted above is from the brief life of the essayist (1882) he wrote for the English Men of Letters series (in which Henry James wrote of Hawthorne and George Saintsbury of Dryden). For the Dictionary of National Biography he wrote the entries for, among others, Lamb and Tennyson. Clearly, Ainger sensed a temperamental affinity, never explicitly stated, with Lamb. One wonders if Ainger was a drinking man. His paragraph in the life continues:

“When he chose to be fanciful, he could be as euphuistic as Donne or Burton—when he was lead to be grave or didactic, he could write with the sententiousness of Bacon,--when his imagination and feeling together lifted him above thoughts of style, his English cleared and soared into regions not far below the noblest flights of Milton and Jeremy Taylor. When on the other hand he was at home, on homely themes, he wrote ‘like a man of the world,’ and of his own century and year.”

Ainger is a little off here. True, Lamb had different voices and tones for varying subjects, but his default mode is a distinctly anarchic sense of humor. He puns and free-associates across his essays and letters. Few first-rate writers could carry off his love of pure, friendly silliness. I read him not for wisdom but for a good laugh. His puns may be the best imposed on harmless readers between Shakespeare and Joyce. In an Aug. 9, 1815 letter Lamb writes to Southey:

“. . . I am going to stand godfather; I don’t like the business; I cannot muster up decorum for these occasions; I shall certainly disgrace the font. I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.”

Ainger describes Lamb’s manner in such passages as a “peculiar playfulness.”

'Punners and Rhymers Must Have the Last Word'

On this date, June 13, in 1713, Jonathan Swift was installed as dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, the city of his birth, a position he would hold for thirty-two years, until his death in 1745. In a July 8 letter to Esther Vanhomrigh, known to Swift as Vanessa, he writes:

“At my first coming [to Dublin], I thought I should have died with discontent; and was horribly melancholy, while they were installing me, but it begins to wear off, and change to dulness.”

The rhythm of that sentence and its deferred punch line remind me of Evelyn Waugh, who planned to write a biography of Swift. In Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper (1992), Waugh tells his friend he has just read Nigel Dennis’ Jonathan Swift: A Short Character (1965), and observes: “I found many affinities with the temperament (not of course the talent) of the master.” Swift’s prose, vivid and terse, often surprises his readers. He’s blunt but seldom predictable, unlike so many polemicists and would-be satirists. He favors homely details. From the same letter to Vanessa:

“I am now fitter to look after willows, and to cut hedges, than meddle with affairs of state. I must order one of the workmen to drive those cows out of my island, and make up the ditch again; a work much more proper for a country vicar, than driving out factions, and fencing against them.”

Swift is the most instructive of writers for other writers. I refer young writers to him when they ask for advice on the craft of prose or verse. Here are the opening lines of “The Dean Of St. Patrick's to Thomas Sheridan” (1718), written as a response to a “trifle” his friend had sent him:

“I cannot but think that we live in a bad age,

O tempora, O mores! as ’tis in the adage.

My foot was but just set out from my cathedral,

When into my hands comes a letter from the droll.”

Recall, this is written by the dean of the National Cathedral of the Church of Ireland, founded in 1191:

“Hum - excellent good - your anger was stirr'd;

Well, punners and rhymers must have the last word.”

'The Sound of Drums and Trumpets in a Battle'

BOSWELL: “But may not a man attain to such a degree of hope as not to be uneasy from the fear of death?” JOHNSON: “A man may have such a degree of hope as to keep him quiet. You see I am not quiet, from the vehemence with which I talk; but I do not despair.”

This dates from the Age of Heroic Conversation. No twaddle. Get right to the important things. The occasion was tea at the home of the Rev. Williams Adams, Johnson’s tutor at Pembroke College, Oxford, and his lifelong friend. The date was June 12, 1784. Johnson was seventy-five years old and would be dead in six months. Like Philip Larkin, he was haunted by thoughts of death, though Boswell adds after the exchange above:

“[L]et it be remembered, that Johnson’s temperament was melancholy, of which such direful apprehensions of futurity are often a common effect. We shall presently see that when he approached nearer to his aweful [sic] change, his mind became tranquil, and he exhibited as much fortitude as becomes a thinking man in that situation.”

I’m impressed not so much by Johnson’s formidable sensibility – he was extraordinary by any measure – but by how close his contemporaries were to his average. Their lives were shorter than ours, likelier to be blighted by disease, less materially prosperous. Yet how rarely we hear the note of aggrieved entitlement that characterizes our age. Largely this can be explained by the centrality of religion in their lives and the solace it provided. What do we have to take its place? Boswell goes on:    

“From the subject of death we passed to discourse of life, whether it was upon the whole more happy or miserable. Johnson was decidedly for the balance of misery: in confirmation of which I maintained, that no man would choose to lead over again the life which he had experienced. Johnson acceded to that opinion in the strongest terms.”

In Boswell’s account of the evening, Johnson, as he often does, returns to the theme of hope: “We are for wise purposes ‘Condemn’d to Hope’s delusive mine,’ as Johnson finely says.” Then Boswell enters into his text, not into the tea at Adams’ residence, lines from a poem by Dryden:

“When I consider life, ’tis all a cheat;

Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit;

Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay:

To-morrow’s falser than the former day;

Lies worse; and while it says, we shall be blessed

With some new joys, cuts off what we possessed.

Strange cozenage! none would live past years again,

Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain;

And, from the dregs of life, think to receive

What the first sprightly running could not give.

I'm tired with waiting for this chemic gold,

Which fools us young, and beggars us when old.” 

Cozenage: “the practice or habit of cozening; cheating, deception, fraud.” Chemic: “of metal: produced by alchemy; counterfeit.” (Both OED). Boswell writes:

“It was observed to Dr. Johnson, that it seemed strange that he, who so often delighted his company by his lively and brilliant conversation, should say he was miserable. JOHNSON: ‘Alas! it is all outside; I may be cracking my joke, and cursing the sun. Sun, how I hate thy beams!’ I knew not well what to think of this declaration; whether to hold it as a genuine picture of his mind, or as the effect of his persuading himself contrary to fact, that the position which he had assumed as to human unhappiness, was true.”

Boswell adds a footnote after “his mind”: “Yet there is no doubt that a man may appear very gay in company, who is sad at heart. His merriment is like the sound of drums and trumpets in a battle, to drown the groans of the wounded and dying.”