'Wild, Ugly Faces We Carved in Its Skin'

“Scary or funny?” That’s how every pumpkin-carving session began. “Scary” was inevitably the answer, though we usually ended up laughing at whatever face I carved. It was an annual ritual, like trimming the Christmas tree, and took place on the newspaper-covered dining room table. Before we could trust the boys with knives, I did the honors, starting with cutting a circle around the stem and pulling out the slime-covered seeds by hand. These we washed, salted and baked in the oven, and a week later, after no one had eaten them, threw them out for the squirrels. At the time it never occurred to me that I might miss carving pumpkins, but with the boys away at school we no longer bother. I remember their excitement, a lost but remembered relict of childhood.

 

Before there were carved pumpkins and candles, there were Jack-o’- lanterns: “a will-o’-the-wisp, an ignis fatuus [foolish fire],” according to the OED. That usage dates from England in the mid-seventeenth century. A century later we have “something that lures a person into a dangerous, difficult, or unfamiliar situation or circumstance.” In 1837, Hawthorne in Twice-told Tales is credited with the first contemporary usage. The OED drains all the fun out of Jack-o’-lanterns:

 

“Originally North American. Esp. at Halloween: a lantern made by hollowing out a pumpkin (or occasionally swede, etc.) and cutting a design into the rind, often one representing the facial features.”

 

A swede, by the way, is a rutabaga, which reminds me of my first newspaper job, as editor of a weekly in rural Ohio. One morning a man walked into the office with an oversized rutabaga he thought resembled Richard Nixon in profile. I took his picture and his vegetable’s, and we published it. Simpler times. The Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem I remember reading in grade school, “The Pumpkin” (1850):

 

“Oh, fruit loved of boyhood! the old days recalling,

When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling!

When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin,

Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!”

'The Inner-Most Passages of the Human Heart'

“I am out of the world of readers. I hate all that do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather myself up unto the old things.”

It’s a familiar theme with Charles Lamb, part of the evolving Elia persona who authored the later essays. Here he is writing to Coleridge, his friend since childhood, on this date, October 30, in 1809. The first Elia essay was not published until 1820 in The London Magazine. In his letter, Lamb goes on to describe for Coleridge the bookshelves he has just cobbled together:    

 

“You never saw a book-case in more true harmony with the contents, than what I’ve nailed up in a room, which, though new, has more aptitudes for growing old than you shall often see—as one sometimes gets a friend in the middle of life, who becomes an old friend in a short time.”

 

Lamb was a lifelong advocate of old things and pastism, the temperamental opposite of presentism, a plague that rages today. The present is a benighted backwater, a provincial remnant of the past disguised as the most important thing in the world. I’ve heard of people who won’t watch silent films or those shot in black and white. The same perverse impulse is alive in those who won’t read fiction published before, say, 2000 or some other arbitrary date. Half a century ago, one of my English professors confided to me that most of her students weren’t able to read anything written before Hemingway. Today, such people sound almost literate. Turning our gaze in the other direction, the future, of course, doesn’t exist and perhaps never will. In his essay “My Books” (1823), Leigh Hunt writes of Lamb’s personal library:

 

“I believe I did mention his book-room to C. L., and I think he told me that he often sat there when alone. It would be hard not to believe him. His library, though not abounding in Greek or Latin (which are the only things to help some persons to an idea of literature), is anything but superficial. The depth of philosophy and poetry are there, the inner-most passages of the human heart. It has some Latin too.”

 

Hunt informally catalogs the contents of Lamb’s shelves. He notes the presence of a volume by Robert Southey – the only writer he mentions who was alive in 1823:

 

“It has also a handsome contempt for appearance. It looks like what it is, a selection made at precious intervals from the book-stalls,—now a Chaucer at nine and twopence, now a Montaigne or a Sir Thomas Browne at two shillings, now a Jeremy Taylor, a Spinoza, an old English Dramatist, Prior, and Sir Philip Sidney, and the books are ‘neat as imported.’ The very perusal of the backs is a ‘discipline of humanity.’”

 

Lamb’s tastes in books, obviously, was nearly flawless. In his preface to The Charles Lamb Day Book (1925), E.V. Lucas writes: “Lamb belonged externally very little to his own time. He cared nothing for politics or public events, although he was not sorry when the death of a royal personage gave him a holiday. He preferred, as he put it, to `write for Antiquity.’”

 

When an editor had rejected one of his sonnets, Lamb declared to Bryan Waller Procter in an 1829 letter: “Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!”

[After writing this I happened on “Remember Books—Reading On-Screen Is Not the Same,” an essay by Richard Brookhiser in National Review:

“What would I have been doing instead once upon a time? Reading an article about a medieval heresy. Reading a sonnet, a 14-line packet of pain and beauty. Reading a chapter about a battle, a hopeless love, my youth, his old age. Read­ing is always listening, to a voice. The bards never died, they got fonts. And if there was a voice, then you had one too. A listener is an observing soul.”]

'It Is Too Long'

Each year we publish an engineering magazine. Its tone tempers boasting with an effort to be scientifically rigorous. The intended audience is absurdly broad – alumni, deans of other engineering schools, students and prospective students, and anyone with ten minutes to kill. I imagine it being read by desperate patients in dentists’ waiting rooms. I write most of the contents and edit all of it. This year the magazine is forty-eight pages long and we are in the final proof-reading stage. The staff is impatient to get it to the printer – probably on Friday – but editing, even more than writing, is the facet of my personality that is legitimately obsessive-compulsive. It's a curse. I edit, mentally, the list of ingredients on a jar of salsa. 

 

As a newspaper reporter I learned – reluctantly, at first, then enthusiastically – that any copy can be revised and made better, usually by chopping. Excising even a single word can improve a sentence. Weigh the little darlings carefully, then wield your cleaver. So that’s what I’ve been doing – editing text I have already edited three or four times, and still finding words to remove. My mantra has been a brief sentence written by Jules Renard (1864-1910) in his journal for October 1898: “One could say of almost all literature that it is too long.”

 

I understand that writing about human leukocyte antigens is hardly literature, but the observation stands. Bad writers customarily favor quantity over quality. This may be particularly true for American writers. We might think of it as the Texas syndrome. My own tastes have shifted significantly over the decades. I favor epigram over epic, essay over treatise, short fiction over long. This is not out of laziness or intimidation. I would never suggest Tolstoy or Proust even omit a syllable, but in general the literary sprinter has it all over the marathon man. Padding, fluff and flab help no one.   

 

[See The Journal of Jules Renard, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, 1964.]

'A Serene Indifference to Hubbub'

I’ve been told an election is approaching, one deemed important in some quarters. I respect such an opinion without sharing it. The last time I avidly followed an American presidential election was the Kennedy/Nixon race in 1960. My parents were diehard FDR-style Democrats and JFK seemed to fire their imaginations, especially my mother’s. I had just turned eight and some of their enthusiasm had rubbed off. I would soon write my first book – a collection of potted presidential biographies, based on secondary sources. My research budget was modest.

 

This indifference to electoral politics is not a matter of philosophy but temperament. By nature I am not an enthusiast. I never had school spirit. As Max Beerbohm puts it in “General Elections” (Yet Again, 1909): “I admire detachment. I commend a serene indifference to hubbub.” Causes don’t move me. I inhabit a world of individuals, not demographics. Human nature is largely intractable and moral progress is a myth. The Gulag is a suburb of Utopia. Given appropriate stimuli, like the rest of the species I am capable of savagery – and of selfless sacrifice. No human is pure. As Evelyn Waugh puts it, “we are all potential recruits for anarchy.” Individuals can change; the species, never. Dr. Johnson contributed these lines to Oliver Goldsmith’s 1764 poem “The Traveller”:

 

“How small, of all that human hearts endure,

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,

Our own felicity we make or find.”

'Glowed with a Bright Halation'

Another new and poetically suggestive word: halation. I found it in an entry written on this date, Oct. 27, in 1929 (three days after the stock market crash that launched the Great Depression), in the journal of Charles Burchfield: “The woods are bare – the sunlight bright with scattered clouds – the southern horizon glowed with a bright halation.” Related to halo, the word is from the Greek by way of French, according to the OED. The etymology also notes that the Italian for halo is alone. I would love to see a poet play with this constellation of senses and sounds. 

Burchfield was a painter peculiarly sensitive to light as it changed through the day and year. You can understand his attraction to the notion of halation, defined by the OED as “a halo-like effect in which light spreads beyond the edges of a bright object.” Though usually applied to photography, we associate halation with the sun or moon as they shine with a luminous fuzziness, a diffuse coronal glow.

 

The Dictionary cites a passage from 1957 by E. S. De Maré in the journal Photography: “In the case of an east window in a church, halation can only be avoided entirely by lighting the interior wall around the window, so reducing the contrast.” The linkage of halation and church windows brought to mind the opening lines of Henry Vaughan’s “The World” (1650):

 

“I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm, as it was bright . . .”

'As Life Runs On, the Road Grows Strange'

“I value myself upon this, that there is nothing of the old man in my conversation. I am now sixty-eight, and I have no more of it than at twenty-eight.”

 

The conversation of men and women grows tiresome with age, a ceaseless recycling of complaints, regrets, pointless stories and self-importance. That’s the conventional view and there’s evidence to back it up. We’ve all known old people who rattle on too long, forcing us to invent plausible excuses for leaving the room. But let’s be honest: youth is no guarantee of scintillating conversation. I meet a lot of students and only rarely does one of them speak knowledgeably, articulately and with wit. Too often their conversation turns into a ritualized pas de deux of awesome’s and cool’s. Let’s be honest again: many old bores were once young and middle-aged bores. Senescence isn’t always the explanation.

 

One of history’s imposing talkers is Dr. Johnson, who delivered the passage quoted above on April 30, 1778, as recounted by Boswell. The Life of Johnson is a quilt of the old man’s conversations. It’s significant that Johnson would choose, among his many gifts, to brag of his conversational prowess. One of life’s sweetest pleasures, conversation in our day has dried up and blown away. The causes are many but loss of civility and a general absence of cultural knowledge must be chief among them. I turn sixty-eight today and hope there is “nothing of the old man in my conversation,” if that implies earnest, self-centered, repetitive dullness.

 

I used to brag that I wouldn’t live to see thirty, and I was well on the way to fulfilling that prophecy. No one is more surprised than I that I have reached this age and remain reasonably intact. I’ve never known what it meant to feel one’s age, even when young. I live with more pain than before but that doesn’t seem pertinent. Mentally I feel more alive. I saw my primary-care doctor recently and we talked about aging. She’s thirty-five, roughly half my age. What do I like about getting old? she asked. A new equanimity, I told her. I have a better notion of what is important and what is irrelevant. And what do I most dislike? The death of friends and acquaintances with whom I would like to resume conversations. An epigram by James Russell Lowell, “Sixty-Eighth Birthday” (1889), speaks for me:

“As life runs on, the road grows strange 

With faces new, and near the end

The milestones into headstones change,

’Neath every one a friend.”

'There Can Be No Substitute for It'

My taste for fiction has been hibernating for twenty years or more. This would have surprised my younger self, who often had two or three novels going simultaneously. In an unexamined sense, the novel was literature. This can be explained, in part, by my youth and a fruitful time for American fiction coinciding. A brief reminder: Nabokov, Malamud, Ralph Ellison, Bellow, Cheever, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Eudora Welty, et al. Many youthful enthusiasms, of course, haven’t survived – think Gaddis, Updike and Pynchon – but it was my springtime. I’m reminded of Miranda gushing, “O brave new world” and Prospero, with infinite gentleness replying to his daughter’s naiveté: “’Tis new to thee.”

 

Only lately have I noticed that I’m reading fiction again. It started early in the lockdown with short stories – Singer, Peter and Elizabeth Taylor, Chekhov, Malamud, Joseph Epstein, Babel, Kipling, Cheever, Elizabeth Bowen, Varlam Shalamov. The brevity of short stories was appealing. I could read two or three before turning off the light. Without quite being aware of it, I moved to longer forms – novellas or short novels -- by James, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov again. All are works I’ve read before, often many times, but reading the familiar carries surprises. The book remains the same but the reader is new. Chekhov’s “In the Ravine” and "My Life" floored me all over again, as did James’ “Madame de Mauves.”

 

In his recent essay “Duty, the Soul of Beauty: Henry James on the Beautiful Life” (Wiseblood), R.R. Reno says James “invites his readers into a different dream, an attractive vision of life penetrated by moral authority.” This thought may offer a clue as to the origin of my unexpected revival of interest in fiction. In recent years, history had supplanted fiction as the foundation of my reading life. Contemporary fiction is a dismal scene – propaganda or refried avant-garde experimentation. Those are the big attractions. That leaves only the enduring works of the past, the novels our forebears read as part of their education, moral and aesthetic. Now I’m reading Tolstoy’s The Cossacks (1863). In “Reading the Century,” the final essay in The Necessity of Anti-Semitism (Carcanet, 1997), the novelist and screenwriter Frederic Raphael writes:

 

“The necessity of fiction, as a mode, is that, however unreliable, it is part of what assists our access to knowledge. . . . Generally speaking, there is no such thing as collaborative insight, which is why art is not a science and also why there can be no substitute for it.”

'I Write in the Way that Pleases and Amuses Me'

There’s nothing new about people presuming to tell writers how they ought to write. A good critic never does that. He never says: “This is how you should have written it.” Yet the bookish precincts of the internet are overloaded with such diktats, often anonymous and always rude and impertinent. On this date, October 24, in 1924, Willa Cather cleaned the clock of a certain “Mr. Miller,” whose identify is otherwise unknown:

 

“I am so sorry my writing vexes you, and it will continue to vex you! I do not in the least agree with your assumption that one kind of writing is right and another kind is wrong. I write at all because it pleases and amuses me -- and I write in the way that pleases and amuses me.”  

 

By 1924 she had already published O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), My Ántonia (1918) and A Lost Lady (1923), among other books, and was well on her way to becoming the finest American novelist of the twentieth century (if we leave out Henry James).

  

“Again, there is one kind of story that ought to tell itself -- the story of action. There is another kind of story that ought to be told -- I mean the emotional story, which tries to be much more like music than it tries to be like drama -- the story that tries to evoke and leave merely a picture - a mood. That was what Conrad tried to do, and he did it well.”

 

As did Cather. Her “action” is secondary, yet her fiction is never inward-gazing, à‎ la Virginia Woolf. She writes: “I think the two greatest writers of fiction in modern times were Count Tolstoi and Ivan Turgenev, and I think they were equally magnificent in their achievement.” She neatly closes her letter with yet another jab at the presumptuous Mr. Miller, masked in graciousness: “You see, I pay you the compliment of coming back at you with some spir[i]t.”

 

Last week, after recounting yet another outrage at work, a friend concluded her email to me with this: “I’m on a Willa Cather jag right now, which helps considerably.”

'In the End We Are All Autodidacts'

My youngest son is a senior at a boys’ boarding school in Ontario and in the middle of the university-application sweepstakes. He is applying to twenty-three schools, though without significant financial aid he may end up making falafel at Halal Guys next year. My job as father is to lend encouragement, of course, but I’m also aware of how devalued an American university education has become. We were fortunate when my next-oldest son was accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy. I work for a university engineering school, where the degeneration is less advanced than in the humanities. As an engineer or mathematician, you either know your differential equations or you don’t, and if you don’t you might want to give Halal Guys another look.

 

Douglas Dalrymple at Idlings shares some of my anxieties. In a post titled “Literature is for Amateurs,” he recounts how his son enrolled in a community-college class putatively devoted to writing, only to discover it was a reconvening of the Soviet Writers Union. At that organization's first meeting, in 1934, Isaac Babel told the apparatchiks, flunkies and thugs: “I have invented a new genre --  the genre of silence.” He meant that Stalin and his gang had made it virtually impossible for honest writers to write. Doug quotes an essay by Joseph Epstein, “A Literary Education.” I’ll see his Epstein and raise him another. This is the essayist writing to his friend Frederic Raphael in Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet (2013):

 

“One of the great things about the bookish (and scribbling) life is that you never run out of things to read. Some people have better luck with their formal education than others, but in the end we are all autodidacts, going at things in our own disorderly way. Some have read more widely and deeply than others, but none can truly claim to be well read.”

 

All the best students are autodidacts but even they can use some encouragement along the way. We can no longer depend on most teachers or the apparatchiks in university administrations who enforce what Epstein calls “a small number of crude ideas.”

'Beautiful Accidents'

The vogue for titles drawn from literature seems largely to have passed. Once popular sources included Shakespeare, Donne’s sermons and the King James Bible. I suspect writers no longer read much and they assume the same is true of prospective readers. The cachet associated with taking your novel’s title from Ecclesiastes or Paradise Lost is long gone. 

In 1944, William Maxwell had completed his third novel and was having difficulty settling on a title. He considered something from Julius Caesar and asked his friend the poet and poetry reviewer for The New Yorker, Louise Bogan, what she thought. In a letter dated September 28, 1944, she called the Shakespearean title “v. good” but suggested:

 

“[W]hy don’t you just sit around for a month or two, reading all sorts of snippets of things, in anthologies and elsewhere (in books opened by chance)—while your publisher is going through the manuscript; pray to St. Anthony (of Padua) [patron saint of lost things] and St. Teresa (of Avila)—I’m sure the most beautiful and appropriate title possible will just fall in your lap.”

 

Bogan denies having undergone a conversion but says “waiting and praying” may result in “Beautiful Accidents.” She adds:

 

“The prettiest title for a novel I have heard for some time, is being held in suspension for the book to be written to it, by a frail young man in the Library [of Congress, where Bogan served as Poet Laureate] called Herbert Cahoon. He is rather given to surrealism, but the title comes from ‘The Last Rose of Summer,’ by Thomas Moore: All the Lovely Are Sleeping. I’m sure there are numbers of other titles hidden under our very noses, in the most familiar poetry and prose possible.”

 

Cahoon (1918-2000) went on to become a curator for the Morgan Library but never published the book. Maxwell soon settled on a title for his novel: The Folded Leaf (1945). It was suggested to him by Bogan and comes from the third section of Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters”: “Lo! in the middle of the wood, / The folded leaf is woo’d from out the bud.” Maxwell dedicated the novel to Bogan.

 

[The passages from Bogan’s letter are taken from A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, ed. Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005.]

'The Resemblance is Magical'

“[I]f the life of S.T. Coleridge were filmed, no one, positively no one but Buster Keaton could play the lead.” 

Odd casting. Coleridge was chubby for much of his life, an Olympic-class gasbag and longtime devotee of laudanum – tincture of opium, the tipple of choice for tormented poets. Keaton for most of his professional life was trim and athletic in an understated way. His finest work is silent, and alcohol, not dope, helped scuttle his career.

 

The suggestion at the top is made by Hugh Kenner in an August 23, 1963 letter to Guy Davenport. Kenner goes on:

 

“S.T.C. in the King’s Light Dragoons, under the pseudonym of Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke: ‘Whose is that rusty musket?’ ‘Is it very rusty, Sir? because if it is, I rather fancy it must be mine.’ A couple of years later his Watchman lasted 10 weeks, losing 500 subscribers at a blow because of an essay against fasting, to which a motto from Isaiah [16:11]: ‘Wherefore my bowels shall sound as an Harp.’”

 

Coleridge, like Gibbon and Proust, is one of literature’s improbable soldiers. In the first volume of his Coleridge biography, Richard Holmes describes the “outlandish”  pseudonym as “somehow so expressive of his total inability to ride a horse . . . He had saddle-sores and boils: ‘dreadfully troublesome eruptions, which so grimly constellated my Posteriors.’”

 

In other words, the cinematic Coleridge is ripe for comedic treatment. He’s a klutz, a dreamer and procrastinator. Keaton seems to have been a competent equestrian and all-around athlete. Famously, like Harold Lloyd, he performed his own stunts. He needed no special effects. He was a special effect. If Fred Astaire embodies witty, Mozartian grace, Keaton is stoical grace.

 

Five days after the letter quoted above, Davenport replied to Kenner: “Buster Keaton as Coleridge! Manifique! The resemblance is magical.” Davenport would soon draw a caricature of Keaton for use in Kenner’s The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy (1968). After undergoing surgery, Davenport writes in a letter to James Laughlin on April 15, 1993: “I crepitate about in jammies and dressing gown. My pain pill is something Coleridge could have done wonders with: six-track dreams going by at 70 mph.”  

 

Coleridge was born on this date, October 21, in 1772, and died, against all odds, on July 25, 1834. That he hung on until age sixty-one is an improbably poetic miracle.

 

[The letters quoted above can be found in Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (2018) and Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (2007).]

'The Deadline Governing Joy and Woe'

One might forgive the flood of invective washing over us if it were more amusingly composed. I enjoy a good ad hominem donnybrook as much as the next guy, but exchanging tired obscenities is no substitute for a satisfyingly vicious insult. Take an entry from Evelyn Waugh’s diary dated March 1964: “Randolph Churchill went into hospital. . . to have a lung removed. It was announced that the trouble was not ‘malignant’. . . . I remarked that it was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.”

 

In his final collection, The Darkness and the Light (2001), Hecht included a two-part poem titled “Lapidary Inscription with Explanatory Note.” Here is the first section:

 

“There was for him no more perfect epitaph

Than this from Shakespeare: ‘Nothing in his life

Became him like his leaving it.’ All those

Who knew him wished the son of a bitch in hell,

Despised his fawning sycophancy, smug

Self-satisfaction, posturing ways and pig-

Faced beady little eyes, his trite

Mind, and attested qualities of a shit,

And felt the world immeasurably improved

Right from the very moment that he left it.”

 

Note how the insult is clearly aimed at a specific individual and yet has broad applications. You’re likely to have already thought of someone on whom it could be pinned with perfect justice. The Shakespeare line is spoken by Malcolm in Act I, Scene 4 of Macbeth.

 

Hecht died on this date, October 20, in 2004 at age eighty-one. Speaking of lapidary inscriptions, carved on Hecht’s headstone at Bard College are lines from the final stanza of “Death the Poet: A Ballade-Lament for the Makers” (Flight Among the Tombs, 1996):

 

“Archduke of Darkness, who supplies

The deadline governing joy and woe,

Here I put off my flesh disguise

Et nunc in pulvere dormio.”

 

The Latin tag, used as the concluding line of each of the poem’s four stanzas,  is a variation on Job 7:21: “ecce nunc in pulvere dormiam et si mane me quaesieris non subsistam.” In the King James version: “And why dost thou not pardon my transgression, and take away my iniquity? for now shall I sleep in the dust; and thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be.”

'Those Sciential Apples Which Grew Amid the Happy Orchard'

Two-hundred years ago this month, in October 1820, Charles Lamb published the second of his Elia essays, “Oxford in the Vacation,” in London Magazine. Lamb was working as a clerk for the East India House, where he would retire in 1825 after thirty-three years. The first Elia essay, “The South-Sea House,” dealt playfully with his job and had been published two months earlier in the same magazine. The second essay further develops the Elia persona as “a votary of the desk–a notched and cropt scrivener.” Lamb was a good employee, but he permits Elia to make fun of his clerkship and the tension it created with his literary endeavors:  

 

“Well, I do agnize [sic] something of the sort. I confess that it is my humour, my fancy–in the forepart of the day, when the mind of your man of letters requires some relaxation–(and none better than such as at first sight seems most abhorrent from his beloved studies)–to while away some good hours of my time in the contemplation of indigos, cottons, raw silks, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise. ‘[I]t . . . sends you home with such increased appetite to your books . . . not to say, that your outside sheets, and waste wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them, most kindly and naturally, the impression of sonnets, epigrams, essays–so that the very parings of a counting-house are, in some sort, the settings up of an author.”

 

Anyone who has held down a “day job” – the reliable sort, with a steady paycheck and benefits – while scavenging for time to write in what remains of the day, will appreciate Elia’s bemused quandary. His life was complicated. He had a gift for friendship. Lamb loved food and drink, and his mentally ill sister Mary. He took his responsibilities as her caretaker (she had fatally stabbed their mother in 1796) seriously while maintaining a fulltime job and writing his poems and essays. He enjoyed taking his annual vacations near England’s great universities – Oxford and Cambridge. Lamb had never attended a university. He was, he writes in the essay, “defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of academic institution,” His biographer and editor E.V. Lucas writes:

 

“My own impression is that Lamb wrote the essay at Cambridge, under the influence of Cambridge, where he spent a few weeks in the summer of 1820, and transferred the scene to Oxford by way of mystification. He knew Oxford, of course, but he had not been there for some years and it was at Cambridge that he met [the poet George] Dyer and that he saw the Milton MSS.”

 

Lamb gained a fallacious reputation. He has been pigeonholed as strictly a sentimental or whimsical writer, a favorite of schoolmasters for generations. Much humor is time- and place-dependent, and few writers from two centuries ago can make us laugh aloud. But Lamb is more than a verbally sophisticated clown. His near-poverty as a child, the horrific nature of his mother’s death, his sister’s frequent “spells” and stays in insane asylums – all contributed to a certain nobility of the soul, a natural empathy for the cast-off and misunderstood. He was flawed. He was a drunk and expressed stupidly anti-Semitic sentiments in one of his essays. But my favorite Lamb/Elia is the one who celebrates books, who takes his place in the great English literary tradition we have inherited:

 

“What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.”

'How Their Lives Would All Contain This Hour'

“Secular though it is, the poem concerns a sacrament.” 

Traditionally speaking there are seven -- baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, extreme unction, order and matrimony -- though Protestants may recognize only baptism and the Lord's Supper. Loosely, other rites are sometimes called sacraments. Philip Larkin – never married, childless, by no means a believer – completed “The Whitsun Weddings” on this date, October 18, in 1958, three and a half years after the train ride that marked its genesis. The passage at the top is from James Booth’s treatment of the poem in Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (2014). Booth rightly calls the poem “the greatest masterpiece of [Larkin’s] new style.”

 

Those who read Larkin as a dour nihilist, an inveterate party-pooper, misread him. “The Whitsun Weddings” is novel-like in the sense of being a sympathetic, imaginative projection into people unlike himself, without resort to sentimentality.  As he sees the wedding parties at each train station, he thinks: 

“. . .none  

Thought of the others they would never meet  

Or how their lives would all contain this hour.”

 

Larkin notes the humble details of mid-century, middle-class English life without snobbery or condescension. His pace is thoughtful and almost leisurely. But the concluding lines transcend the merely documentary:

 

“We slowed again,

And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled

A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower  

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.” 

'You Are Going Out on a Romantic Limb'

“As to my epistolary style, when it shows traces of high-flown rhetoric, you may safely take it as a specimen of my curious variety of humor.”

 

The author is poet, critic and humorist Yvor Winters. He is writing on October 29, 1949 to the newly named editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Hayden Carruth, who went on to a long and successful career as a mediocre poet. We could use Winters today. In recent years, Poetry, like so many other magazines, has become unreadable, an embarrassment. Winters had previously written to Carruth about the awarding of the Bollingen Prize to the anti-Semite Ezra Pound. Now he was objecting to an editorial Carruth devoted to poets working for universities. In the December 1949 issue, Winters published “The Poet and the University: A Reply.” In an October 19 letter to Carruth, Winters, who had been teaching at Stanford for twenty years, writes:

 

“Your editorial struck me as foolish: as if you were taking upon yourself the neurotic burdens of all the spoiled children who think themselves poets and who believe that the world owes them a living. What if there were some odious drudgery in teaching? Who expects to get by without odious drudgery? My wife [Janet Lewis], who has never been strong [like Winters, she suffered from tuberculosis when young], has gone through 23 years of the odious drudgery of keeping house, and has managed to produce three novels, a novelette, a book of short stories, and a book of poems; she thinks I lead the life of Riley, and in comparison, I do.”

 

We can admire Winters’ self-respect and his rather noble defense of his wife, author of a great American novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941). In the second letter, Winters objects to Carruth saying “technique is valueless”:

 

“You are going out on a Romantic limb. The more a poet knows (a) about his material (that is, the critical understanding of human experience) and (b) about his medium (meter, metaphor, rhetoric, etc.) the better equipped he is. Joe Louis learned to box by the book, learned so well that his learning was second nature in the ring, so well that he might be able even to improve instantaneously on his learning; but that is only the greater justification of his learning.”

 

Winters adds at the conclusion of his letter: “I send you this letter merely to keep you out of deep water if possible. Please don’t take it amiss.”

 

In his final published letter to Carruth, dated November 13, 1949, he writes: “your unhappy young poets are most of them, I suspect, as anachronistic as Shelley. They don’t want to work at anything, either studying or teaching, and least of all thinking. . . . And why should they not be unhappy? Most of us are unhappy much of the time. Why get excited about it? And how happy do you think John Berryman would be in the engine room of a tanker? Try to be reasonable.”

 

Winters was born 120 years ago today, on October 17, 1900, and died January 25, 1968.

 

[See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by R.L. Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. And go here to read one of my favorite poems by Winters or anyone else.]

'Of Bush-Time Memories, This Lingers'

When writing about the pivotal event in his life and the nation’s, R.L (Bob) Barth sticks to the dry facts, like a rewrite man assembling a story for his newspaper in the old days. His poems are orderly, attentive to detail and rooted in his experience. You’ll find no self-congratulatory rhetorical flourishes or reaching after melodrama. Barth served as a Marine in Vietnam. Here is “The Patrol”:

 

“We slipped through NVA patrols around

Supplies dug into mountains and a class

Outside a Quonset hut, where cadres scribbled

Tactics on a blackboard, all this beneath

The triple canopy deep in the mountains.

 

“At times patrols passed barely three feet off,

While we knelt motionless and camouflaged.

I wanted a surprise assault right there,

But that was not our mission: ours to watch,

Call in intelligence and then di-di

 

“As quietly as possible; and yet,

As we withdrew, someone stepped on a twig.

Time stopped . . . The NVA began to gabble

And beat the bush, and I got on the horn

To call in air support to cover us.

 

“As the two Phantoms dropped five hundred pounders,

The shrapnel spinning near and secondary

Explosions rocking the landscape, we moved

Through the thick undergrowth until, at last,

Emerging from the jungle, we set up

 

“On a bare hilltop where we could observe

NVA sallies from the jungle, and

Laid out our fields of fire while radioing

For an emergency extraction mau len.

No choppers flew that evening. We dug in . . .”

 

Barth helps with the Vietnamese: di-di is “to leave, to go (pronounced dee-dee)”; mau len: “fast, quick.” Not a word in excess. No heroics or virtue-signaling. It’s not a “war story” in the civilian sense. The poem remains strictly within the consciousness of a single Marine describing a single engagement from more than half a century ago. The final phrase resonates. In 2003, the University of New Mexico Press published a collection of Barth’s Vietnam poems, Deeply Dug In. He is working on a new collection, tentatively scheduled for publication next year. In it he plans to move beyond his reliance on epigrams, his customary form in the past – “if only temporarily,” he adds. Here is the second new poem he sent me, “Six and a Wakeup”:

 

“Of bush-time memories, this lingers:

A mountain outpost with two fingers

Like a crab’s pincers that hooked down,

South to a valley; an ash mound

And scorched earth starkly documented

The rage some grunt platoon once vented;

And just beyond, at the far edge

A long berm formed a kind of ledge

Below which ran a dirt-packed road

Equipped to handle any load.

Between the pincers, tangled brush

Grew to eight feet; and in it, lush

Green vines, heat, and humidity

Were dense as the South China Sea.”

 

According to the U.S. Marine Corps History Division: “The Vietnam War was costly to the U.S. Marine Corps. From 1965 to 1975, nearly 500,000 Marines served in Southeast Asia. Of these, more than 13,000 were killed and 88,000 wounded, nearly a third of all American causalities sustained during the war.”

'Preserved in Tragedy Like Flies in Amber'

Here is how Whittaker Chambers concludes his review in Time magazine of Rebecca West’s The Meaning of Treason in 1947:

“[I]n a prosy age, her style strives continually toward a condition of poetry, and comes to rest in a rhetoric that, at its best, is one of the most personal and eloquent idioms of our time.”

West published a dozen novels and other fiction, but it’s as a journalist that she proved her literary worth. I refuse to use the pretentious label “creative nonfiction” and prefer to say that she was a great writer. Her essential books, along with The Meaning of Treason, are A Train of Powder (1955) and her masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941). The latter I’ve read twice and annotated heavily. It’s simply one of my favorite books.

About midway through the hefty volume, in the chapter titled “Serbia,” West writes about Milan Obrenović, Milan I, ruler of Serbia from 1868 to 1889, and his family. She visits his grave in the Krušedol monastery in the province of Vojvodina. West calls him “the king who was so little of a success that he was forced to abdicate,” and tartly describes his portrait (“the wide cat-grin of a tormented buffoon”) and those of his family. But here is the half-sentence I underlined: “. . . and more portraits of these unhappy people, preserved in tragedy like flies in amber.” West’s contempt mingles with sadness. Milan was less a monster than a clown.

I remembered West’s image when reading some of Robert Herrick’s poems, including this one:

“I saw a fly within a bead
Of amber cleanly buried ;
The urn was little, but the room
More rich than Cleopatra’s tomb.”

Amber – fossilized tree resin, often encasing prehistoric organisms -- may be the loveliest substance in the world, more beautiful than diamonds. Herrick’s precise birth and death dates are unknown. We know he was baptized on August 24, 1591 and buried on this date, October 15, in 1674.

[Chambers’ review, “Circles of Perdition,” is collected in Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers 1931-1959 (ed. Terry Teachout, Regnery Gateway, 1989).]

'Those Truths the Heart Knows'

There’s a memorable conversation recounted by Bernard Malamud in his 1957 novel The Assistant. Frank Alpine is walking with Helen Bober and having his first extended conversation with her. The scene is Brooklyn where Helen’s father runs a barely solvent Mom-and-Pop grocery. Unbeknownst to Helen and her father, Frank and another man had robbed the store at gunpoint, and Frank’s partner pistol-whipped Morris. After the robbery, Frank started clerking in the store.

He and Helen are attracted to each other. Both are nervous and inarticulate about their conflicted emotions. Frank goes to the public library knowing Helen will likely be there. He’s reading The Life of Napoleon. Helen asks why and he says: “‘I am a curious guy. I like to know why people tick. I like to know the reason they do the things they do, if you know what I mean.’” This exchange follows: 

“He asked her what book she was reading.

 

“‘The Idiot. Do you know it?’

 

“‘No. What’s it about?’

 

“‘It’s a novel.’

 

“‘I’d rather read the truth,’ he said.

 

“‘It is the truth.’”

 

Helen speaks for us, the novel-readers. (Earlier in the novel, while riding the subway, she was reading Don Quixote.) Frank is the positivist in the conversation. For him, books are true or untrue. In a sense, he is right, but what he means is nonfiction or fiction. We go to good and great novels for the truth of human nature. Think of novels as applied rather than theoretical truth-machines. The teachers are George Eliot, Tolstoy, Henry James and Proust. We can add Malamud to that list, at least in The Assistant (so Russian a novel) and The Fixer (1966), set in Russia and suffused with Russian (and Jewish) themes. Malamud came up in a conversation last week with Boris Dralyuk, which sent me back to The Assistant. Boris said some of Malamud’s short stories “shock and pierce me anew every time.”

 

Without quite knowing it, Frank Alpine is potentially an ideal reader of novels: “'I like to know why people tick.’” Reading the great novels, especially when we are young, is a lasting education, an inoculation against raids by mere ideas and theories on the human. One of the sub-themes of The Assistant is the centrality of novels to a well-rounded, educated life. A few pages after the conservation quoted above, Helen gives Frank library copies of Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment: 

"He noticed she handled each yellow-paged volume as though she were holding in her respectful hands the works of God Almighty. As if--according to her--you could read in them everything you couldn't afford not to know--the Truth about Life." 

 In his essay “What Happened to the Novel?” Joseph Epstein writes:

 

“The truths [Henry] James, and with him every great novelist, were interested in are the truths of the heart. James himself invoked his own readers to be a man or woman ‘on whom nothing is lost,’ and what is often lost in the realm of concepts and ideas are those truths the heart knows that no ideas can finally hope to encompass.”

'Give Thanks, Give Thanks'

An old friend, now dead, used to paraphrase Auden, though I’m certain Mike had never read a word of the poet’s work: “May your thinks be thanks.” Mike was fond of slogans, “mantras” he called them, that could be annoying when volunteered too glibly or often, but he had earned the right to buoy his spirits and, occasionally, mine. His life had been more difficult than most, thanks to family, mental illness, drugs and alcohol. By the time I met him, more than forty years ago, he had a good job, friends and something to offer others.

 

Auden’s line in “Lullaby,” published posthumously in Thank You, Fog (1974), is “Let your last thinks all be thanks.” I mentally amend “and first,” just to be comprehensive. Most of us never get what we deserve, and for that we ought to be grateful. I remembered Mike and Auden when reading “The Renaissance,” a poem Aaron Poochigian posted on Twitter. His epigraph is from Auden’s “In Memory of W. B.Yeats”: “In the prison of his days / Teach the free man how to praise.” Poochigian’s refrain is “give thanks, give thanks,” as in:

 

“for monkey bars and pranks

and the high of all-out play,

give thanks, give thanks.”

 

One of Poochigian’s trademarks is disciplined exaltation. His poems have a cockeyed slant. “The Renaissance” begins “For sun and thawing rigor / in manners, stances and features, / for giddy little creatures . . .” – a list of things he’s grateful for. Consider a duller, more cliched catalog: good health, a steady paycheck, marital bliss, blah, blah, blah. Good things, but who cares? Poochigian includes “Cokes and Sauerkraut franks.” In his tweet he writes:

 

“Everyone I know is in a crappy mood on this rainy Monday, so here’s something uplifting.

 

“Let’s hope poetry makes something happen.”

 

A nice allusion to the Yeats poem cited earlier: “For poetry makes nothing happen.”

'The Autumnal Twilight'

Donald Rayfield in Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997) makes an interesting observation: “In that fortnight in Petersburg [in December 1888] the crucial meeting was with the composer Piotr Tchaikovsky; like Levitan and, in the future Rachmaninov and the painter Repin, Tchaikovsky proved that musicians and painters best understood Anton’s art.”

 

I’m speculating, but could this be because the Russian writers of Chekhov’s time, more so than the composers and painters, tended to access his work ideologically, through the lens of politics? Chekhov’s interests as a writer were largely apolitical – an unpopular stance in contentious, late-nineteenth-century Russia. Tchaikovsky first read a Chekhov story, “The Letter,”  in 1887 and admired it enough to write a fan letter to the editor of the newspaper in which it was published. The composer and writer first met later that year in St. Petersburg, and again the following year in Moscow.

 

On this date, October 12, in 1889, Chekhov wrote a letter to Tchaikovsky in which he asks the composer for permission to dedicate his forthcoming story collection, Morose People (1890), to him. He writes:

 

“I’m preparing a new book of my stories for publication this month. The stories are dull and dreary as autumn and monotonous in style, and the artistic element in them is thickly interlarded with the medical, but that still doesn’t prevent me from making bold to address you a humble request: may I dedicate the book to you?”

 

The letter is in Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (trans. Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, 1973). In a note, Karlinsky tells us the admiration was mutual. Tchaikovsky asked Chekhov if they could collaborate on an opera libretto based on an episode from Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. Karlinsky acknowledges the “aura of melancholy that surrounds the art of both in in the minds of many  Russians,” but denies that Tchaikovsky is Chekhov’s counterpart in music. He writes:

 

“The obvious superficiality of this view does not detract from the beauty of its expression in one of Boris Pasternak’s most perfect poems, ‘Winter Is Approaching’ (1943), with its concluding lines:

 

‘The autumnal twilight of Chekhov,

Tchaikovsky and Levitan.'”

 

Go here for the Russian original of Pasternak’s poem and an English translation by Peter France and Jon Stallworthy.