'You Know What I Mean'

I should have known but that most commonplace of words, good-bye, is likely a compressed form of “God be with you” and “God be with ye.” The former is confirmed by the OED as a parting valediction from at least the late fifteenth century, and the latter from a century later. The definition suggests that a cliché can be suffused with good manners invisible from frequent usage: “used to express good wishes when parting or at the end of a conversation.” The Dictionary in its entry cites Shakespeare four times, including Costard the rube speaking to Biron in Act III, Scene 1 of Love’s Labour’s Lost: “I thank your worship: God be wi’ you!” – a line that is at most serviceable, hardly Shakespearean. I looked into good-bye when reading the saddest use of that simple word I know:

 

“I can scarcely bid you good bye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.”

 

Those are the final sentences in the final letter John Keats ever wrote, on November 30, 1820, three months before his death at age twenty-five. The poet is writing from Rome. His recipient is Charles Brown (1787-1842) who, in the words of Hyder Edward Rollins, editor of Keats’ letters, “now has a sort of immortality of his own.” Keats was fortunate in his friends. He was lovable. They loved him. With Keats in Rome was Joseph Severn, the patron saint of friendship. Keats and Brown, the poet’s senior by eight years, had met in 1817. The following summer they made their walking tour of northern England and Scotland. After the death of Tom Keats from tuberculosis, the disease that would kill the poet in another two years, John lived with Brown at Wentworth Place in Hampstead, now the Keats House. “Brown’s kindness and attention," Rollins says, "were unremitting.” Keats writes in his letter:

 

“I must have been at Bedhampton nearly at the time you were writing to me from Chichester - how unfortunate - and to pass on the river too! There was my star predominant! I cannot answer any thing in your letter, which followed me from Naples to Rome, because I am afraid to look it over again. I am so weak (in mind) that I cannot bear the sight of any hand writing of a friend I love so much as I do you.”

 

That Keatsian phrase – “There was my star predominant!” – is an allusion to The Winter’s Tale. In Act I, Scene 2, Leontes says:

 

“It is a bawdy planet, that will strike

Where ’tis predominant; and ’tis powerful, think it,

From east, west, north and south: be it concluded,

No barricado for a belly; know’t;

It will let in and out the enemy

With bag and baggage: many thousand on’s

Have the disease, and feel't not. How now, boy!”

 

Keats’ tour de force of good-byes comes in the long letter he wrote to George and Georgiana Keats between September 17 and 27, 1819:

 

“You know at taking leave of a party at a door way, sometimes a Man dallies and foolishes and gets awkward, and does not know how to make off to advantage—Good bye—well—good-bye—and yet he does not—go—good bye and so on—well—good bless you—You know what I mean.”

'To Hell with the Crowd'

“What we suffer, what we endure, what we muff, what we kill, what we miss, what we are guilty of, is done by us, as individuals, in private.” 

The anti-collective, non-aligned impulse runs deep. Demographics mean nothing. We recognize one data set, one focus group, one party: Homo sapiens. The rest is lazy pigeonholing. The wonderful poet Louise Bogan is writing in a December 23, 1936 letter to the poet-translator and longtime friend Rolfe Humphries. He had joined the League of American Writers, a Communist Front group organized the previous year. Bogan calls him “one of the Comrades” when Humphries bloviates about the Spanish Civil War. She continues:

 

“I still hate your way of doing things. To hell with the crowd. To hell with the meetings, and the public speeches. Life and death occur, as they must, but they are all bound up with love and hatred, in the individual bosom, and it is a sin and a shame to try to organize or dictate them.”

 

To her credit, Bogan remained loyal to Humphries as a friend despite his ridiculous politics, until his death in 1969. More recently, we’ve seen politics grow increasingly corrosive of relationships among family members and friends. That human bonds should be severed by something as trivial and childish as politics hardly flatters our species. In a July 8, 1938, letter to Humphries, Bogan writes:

 

“You can easily see that I’m terribly mad, at the moment, about the C.P. [Communist Party], and all its works. The girls at the subway entrance saying, in soft tones, ‘Stop the mad dogs of Fascism; help our boys dodging Franco’s bombs,’ frankly make me sick. If the C.P. doesn’t stop all this ‘mad dogs’ ‘depraved’ stuff it will lose—well, I was going to say the respect of all intelligent people. But I take that back. There aren’t, as far as I can see, any intelligent people left.” 

 

[All quoted passages are from A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, ed. Mary Kinzie, 2005.]

'Other Absurdities of This Nature So Very Gross'

We are probably better buffered than most Americans against advertising. We have no cable-television connection. Our spam filter does its job, and any online site that throws up an advertising obstacle course we generally skip. We subscribe to few magazines and no newspapers, and I listen to CDs in the car, almost never the radio. When people start recounting the commercial they found so amusing last night, I’m gone. It’s reassuring to know there’s nothing new about such sentiments. Consider Joseph Addison’s essay in The Tatler on September 14, 1710:

 

“I cannot excuse my fellow-labourers for admitting into their papers several uncleanly advertisements, not at all proper to appear in the works of polite writers. Among these I must reckon the Carminitive Wind-expelling pills. If the doctor had called them his carminitive pills, he had done as cleanly as any one could have wished; but the second word entirely destroys the decency of the first. There are other absurdities of this nature so very gross, that I dare not mention them.”

 

Imagine what Addison would make of advertisements for pills, liquids and creams that treat hemorrhoids, erectile dysfunction, diarrhea and constipation, not to mention condoms and feminine hygiene products. Of course, Addison was a pragmatic editor and publisher. He understood that periodicals relied on advertising for their ongoing existence. He specifically cites “collections of advertisements that appear at the end of all our public prints.” This brings to mind an interesting, seemingly contradictory phenomenon: the sense of nostalgia induced by the advertising of the past. Only when no longer current is advertising of interest. Years ago a friend gave me the issues of Life magazine that bracket the date of my birth in 1952. On the back of the November 3 issue is an ad for Camel cigarettes: “Why did you change to Camels, Farley Granger?” And Farley answers: “I tried Camels as my steady smoke for 30 days—they beat any other cigarette I’ve smoked!”

 

Back to “Carminitive Wind-expelling pills.” From the context, you’ve probably figured out the meaning of the first adjective: “Of medicines, etc.: Having the quality of expelling flatulence.” One wonders what the OED is refering to with that all-inclusive “etc.”

'Only a Mantelshelf for Books'

In keeping with our era’s apocalyptic flavor, I sense the Robinson Crusoe Fantasy is growing in popularity. You’ll recall in Chap. VI when Crusoe builds a raft and salvages what he judges most useful from the shipwreck: “bread, rice, three Dutch cheeses, five pieces of dried goat’s flesh (which we lived much upon), and a little remainder of European corn,” etc. Today, a similar process is underway, for instance, among survivalists – evaluating what is essential, optional and irrelevant in the way of fuel, medical supplies and guns. More benignly, I see readers deciding what books to bring when the grid goes down and civilization collapses. The latest to do so is Douglas Dalrymple at Idlings: 

“I imagine a sequestered life – in a mountain cabin or a bolthole near the sea – where I’m planted for the rest of my days with nothing to do but tend to my own comfort, walk in the afternoons, and read by the fire. It’s a small, snug place, with only a mantelshelf for books – a minimal library. But which books to stock it with? This is my version of the old desert island game.”

 

His list of literary staples overlaps heavily with my own. The only title on Douglas’ list I haven’t read – or even heard of -- is Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend. I can do without the Cervantes and Dickens, and might substitute Tristram Shandy and Pale Fire. I would replace Francis Parkman’s History of France and England in North America with Henry Adams’ nine-volume  History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The most surprising item on Douglas’ list is Paradise Lost – surprising because I know he is Roman Catholic, though recently he wrote appreciatively of Milton’s epic. His most inspired choice is The Oxford Book of Aphorisms, edited by John Gross. At some point, the smallest of forms, the aphorism, converges with the most expansive, the epic. What they share is density of meaning.

 

Douglas’s criteria are honest and commonsensical: “books that make good company, reward re-reading, and give pleasure.” In addition, and perhaps already implicit in those standards, I would require lasting substance, books that cannot be exhausted. There’s nothing wrong with escapist fare, “beach books,” pure distraction, but not for the long haul. Only three titles on Douglas’ list date from the twentieth century. The rest were written earlier. His list is idiosyncratic, as any serious reader’s would be, but not freakishly so. Generations of readers have already agreed with him.

'A Totally Different Human Being'

“[T]here has been an evolution of circumstances, and now it becomes necessary to talk about what, by one of those bits of mental prestidigitation with which we protect our sanity, we had succeeded in not even thinking about. We pushed it into some closet in a back room of the mind, and shut the door.”

Even the most fortunate among us – good, careful, inoffensive people – may be tempted to lock away the unthinkable and seal the door with bricks and mortar. Our species is capable of extraordinary acts of courage and selflessness, and of motiveless depravity. We flatter ourselves, but no one is immune. Solzhenitsyn puts it like this in Part I, Chapter 4, “The Bluecaps,” in The Gulag Archipelago:

 

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

 

Boris Dralyuk and I were exchanging thoughts about West Coast jazz, specifically about Shorty Rogers, who played trumpet and flugelhorn, and the trombonist Frank Rosolino, one of the masters of his still under-appreciated instrument. Only later did I realize that today, November 26, is the forty-second anniversary of his death. The passage quoted at the top is from an essay the late Gene Lees published in Jazzletter in 1983. He later collected “Why?” in his Meet Me at Jim & Andy's: Jazz Musicians and Their World (Oxford University Press, 1988). Here is Lees on Rosolino the man and musician:

 

“Frank Rosolino was among the best-loved men in jazz. One of the finest trombone players in the history of the instrument, he had a superb tone, total facility, a deep Italianate lyricism, and rich invention. Frank was, very simply, a sensational player. . . . He was one of the funniest men in the world, with a wit that literally wouldn’t quit. Frank bubbled.”

 

Early on the morning of November 26, 1978, in his home in Van Nuys, Calif., Rosolino shot and killed his nine-year-old son Justin, shot and severely wounded his other son, seven-year-old Jason, then took his own life. Jason was left blinded but, at age fifty, is still alive and nearly the age of his father at the time of his death. Lees’ account of the murder-suicide and subsequent events is one of the most painful and powerful pieces of writing I know. It has haunted me for more than thirty years. Boris says of Lees, “what a smart, no-nonsense writer.” Consider that Lees was writing about a friend and a musician he admired enormously, who had committed unfathomably evil acts. He gives Rosolino his due but isn’t afraid to call him what he was: in his words, an asshole. As Solzhenitsyn writes in his subsequent paragraph:

 

“During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood.”

“[W]herever people who write and think gather together, Russian literature is loved and praised.”

We fell in love with everything Russian – not Soviet. Life as we knew it from Russian novels was more intense than our conventional existence. Saul Bellow wrote of his youth in Chicago with Isaac Rosenfeld: “We were so Russian, as adolescents, and perhaps we were practicing to be writers.”  For the Russians, things, even ideas, mattered. You can understand the attraction this would hold for a teenager mainlining adrenaline, hormones and literature. Above, Rebecca West is writing in her essay “Barbarians” in the January 9, 1915 issue of The New Republic. By then, Aylmer and Louise Maude had translated much of Tolstoy and Constance Garnett was giving the Anglophone world our first look at Dostoevsky and Chekhov. West describes her visit to a London bookshop:

 

“Yet the first thing I saw in the bookshop of this delicate-spirited suburb was a pile of thick red books which I knew to be, at the first sight of their binding, Mrs. Constance Garnett’s translations of Dostoevsky’s novels.”

 

There’s a cloying romanticism to West’s understanding of Russia and her literature, not unlike the romanticism some of us knew as young readers. Russia is always ripe for misunderstanding in the West. A Western-facing writer, Ivan Turgenev, friend to Flaubert and James, seems familiar to us, less exotic. A friend roughly my age who has already read much of Turgenev is reading A Sportsman’s Notebook for the first time:   

 

“The stories are beautifully wrought, as is almost all of Turgenev's fiction, to which I’m more partial than you. Turgenev is given in these stories to wonderful descriptions of nature--trees, birds, skies, weather. He has few equals in this department. He has an unfortunate tendency in several stories, though, to idealize his peasants and/or caricature his landowners. His evident political agenda detracts from the persuasiveness of the work.”

 

I first learned of A Sportsman’s Notebook from a non-Russian source, Sherwood Anderson, who claimed to have read the book twenty times. West in her essay mentions Turgenev only in passing, classifying him with Tolstoy as an aristocrat who was “inclined to repudiate [his] nationality.” Even so intelligent a writer as West romanticizes and thus misunderstands the Russians:

 

“And Tolstoy, though he cast off his aristocracy like a cloak, never made anything more of the people than a beloved hobby; the peasants in his books are unnaturally plump and firm and smiling, like the babies in patent food advertisements. It was the poor man, the starveling Dostoevsky, the shopman’s son Tchekhov, the hawker Gorky, who were able to write the story of Russia.” 

'The Colors of Disused Railyards in Winter'

“The strange-ness of railroad yards — North from Youngstown — A straight line snow – pale woods dense swamps – scrawny stumps & elm trees — the old Thanksgiving mood commences — fence posts & dead weeds have a strange look –“

 

By the time I was a boy, diesel had replaced most steam-powered locomotives. Much of the romance associated with the railroad should by then have evaporated, but the nature of nostalgia is such that it persists even when we never knew its object first-hand. Not counting the rapid-transit line in Cleveland, I rode my first train in France in 1973. The sound of a train whistle and a brief view of shining rails still evoke visions of the Territory ahead, an earlier America.

 

The passage at the top is from an entry the painter Charles Burchfield made in his journal on this date, November 24, in 1917. He was living in Salem, Ohio, about twenty-five miles southwest of Youngstown. The world viewed from a train is often scruffy and unimproved -- marshes, woods, collapsing fences, scrapyards, the backsides of rundown houses. Who chooses to live next to a rail line if he has a choice in the matter? Burchfield writes like a painter. His woods are “pale.” In November in Northern Ohio, trees are leafless. “Strange” shows up twice in this brief passage. Early winter in such a landscape is stark and monochromatic. The “old Thanksgiving mood” sounds like a very private reference, certainly not warm and festive. Burchfield’s father, a tailor, died when he was five years old.

 

The poet Eric Ormsby was born in Georgia, grew up in Florida and wouldn’t know a Northern winter for many years, yet he too seems drawn to railroads and winter landscapes. See “Railway Stanzas” in Coastlines (1992) and here is “Railyard in Winter” (Bavarian Shrine and Other Poems, 1990):

 

“The colors of disused railyards in winter;

the unnamed shades of iron at four o’clock;

the sun’s curiosity along abraded stones;

corrosion that mines the speckled lichen of woods;

the islands of stubbly rust on padlocked doors;

the fierce shoots of winter grass among cinders;

the fragile dim light, infused with tannin,

that falls clear on the stamped bottle glass

and regales the cast-off boot.

The colors of shale

cratered with dark rain. The rough knots

of crabgrass near the steps of the loading dock

and their sandy, scruffed umber.

The hues

of all negligible things: the nugatory blue

of slag chunks between the ties. Then, the smell

of those resinous blisters of red on the fence,

like a childhood of pines.

Such unpeopled places

luxuriate on Sundays. What was made for use

discloses in uselessness its transient magic,

assumes the radiance of the useless grasses.”

 

Like a painter, Ormsby is a sensualist of surfaces. Like Burchfield, he sees beauty in the useless. See Burchfield’s watercolor November Railroad Mood, painted in 1946.

'The Quintessential Voice of American Letters'

“In all human beings, if only understanding be brought to the business, dignity will be found, and that dignity cannot fail to reveal itself, soon or late, in the words and phrases with which they make known their high hopes and aspirations and cry out against the intolerable meaninglessness of life.” 

The final phrase cinches it. The sentence begins in inspirational mode, the sort of speech one might expect to hear at a luncheon meeting of the Kiwanis, a service club characterized by “moronic Kiwanian optimism,” as H.L. Mencken once put it. It is the final sentence in the first edition of The American Language (1919). Only in the concluding four words does it become indelibly Menckenian.

Mencken was the most enthusiastically articulate of writers. He reveled in words and published millions of them in his half-century as a journalist who transcended journalism. He forged one of the great American prose styles while occasionally writing some embarrassingly foolish things. The cruelest irony reserved for a writer struck Mencken on this day, November 23, in 1948. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that left him with semantic aphasia. For the final eight years of his life, his ability to read, write and speak remained severely damaged.

 

Read the concluding chapters in Terry Teachout’s The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (2002) to appreciate the sadness of Mencken’s fate. But also read Terry’s description of Mencken’s contribution to American literature:

 

“He was to the first part of the twentieth century what Mark Twain was to the last part of the nineteenth—the quintessential voice of American letters. Perhaps even a sage of sorts, too, though an altogether American one, not calm and reflective but as noisy as a tornado: witty and abrasive, self-confident and self-contradictory, sometimes maddening, often engaging, always inimitable.”

 

Even better, read Mencken’s Days Trilogy, the Prejudices series and The American Language with its two supplements.

'I'm Appalled at the Arrogance'

“Whenever I see someone denigrate a book that is 100 years old or more, and scornfully call it bad, boring, and overrated, I can’t help wondering why they can’t be a bit more, you know, humble.”

Because humility is a rare human impulse and denigration is easier than gratitude. Think about it in reductive terms: Someone writes a book. It is widely read or not. Some critics champion it. Others dismiss it. A century later, a reader takes it from the library shelf and something tells him to give it a chance. In my experience, that’s a critical moment, one I don’t understand. Choosing a book about which you know little or nothing is an act of hope and faith. I won’t get into the merits of “vibes,” except to say they exist. As an adolescent, that’s how I first encountered Kafka and Dostoevsky, writers once important to me. The method isn’t foolproof. Sometimes we choose dull or stupid books, or books that aren’t right for us. Perhaps we are not the ideal reader. Kafka and Dostoevsky are no longer right for me but others prize them. The library is a big place

The passage at the top was written by a blogger in England, Hai Di Nguyen. I like the simplicity and charm of the sentiment. Literature is a vast gift, free for the taking. It's not that old is good and new is bad. Our ancestors wrote plenty of lousy books. Our blogger has standards:   

“Of course, not all writers I initially don’t like end up becoming favourites. I still struggle with Henry James. I have reservations against Charlotte Bronte, and doubt I can ever warm to George Eliot. People do have personal taste.”

Serious readers are idiosyncratic. I love James and Eliot, and have never read Brontë. I see that Nguyen loves The Tale of Genji. Despite several resolutions, I still haven’t read it. Part of humility is knowing our weaknesses and limitations. Do I read Lady Murasaki or Proust again? At my age, the decision isn’t obvious. How refreshing to encounter a young reader so ambitious, open-minded, confident and industrious:

“To me, Tolstoy and Melville are giants, towering above almost everyone else in literature—when facing Anna Karenina, War and Peace, or Moby Dick, I’m overwhelmed, I’m in awe of their genius. When I see a reader express not only dislike but also disdain towards them, part of me is amused—these books need no defence. But at the same time, I’m appalled at the arrogance.”

Like humility, awe is sparsely distributed among readers and other humans.

'We Are All Pythagoreans'

“Remember, that you can not trifle with mathematics. The old proverb was, ‘In mathematics as in war, leave nothing unconquered behind.’”

 Among the professional groups I deal with on the job, mathematicians are my favorite. I like the company of rigorous thinkers who are also limber-minded; specifically, those whose thinking is more rigorous than mine, a fairly vast population, but who posit hypotheticals without anxiety (think of this quality as the mathematical counterpart to Keats’ “negative capability”).

 

I was speaking the other day with a mathematician about imaginary numbers. “Imaginary” in this context does not exactly mean fictional, like Hamlet or Lear. Rather, it indicates a complex number we can write as a real number multiplied by the imaginary i. It takes the form of a + bi, in which a and b are real numbers and i = √(−1). All of which reminded me of a poem by the late Tom Disch, “The Dot on the i,” in his final collection, About the Size of It (Anvil, 2007). Few poets have been as comfortable with mathematical concepts as Disch. J.V. Cunningham, who taught math to pilots during World War II, is another.

 

“When it comes to the sense

Of beauty, we are all Pythagoreans,

Transfixed upon the ineffable and inexplicable

Significance of a number; for instance

(Or especially?), i, the square root of minus-one.”

 

Disch has a deft touch with math. He makes it understandable, amusing and deeply human:

 

“[I]t is this

Limitlessness of all that is little that allows

A theoretic possibility of a plenum

Coextensive with the mind and reach of each

Man and woman alive, and unalive, of absolutely

Everyone, in a democracy of dust where even the largest

Integer is a function of the number one,

And may be laid low by i. Incredible, isn’t it?”

 

The sentences quoted at the top are from a letter Willa Cather wrote to her nephew, Charles Edwin Cather, on this date, November 21, in 1945. She continues:

 

“Mathematics are serious business with you now, Charles. When you do not understand a point perfectly, you must find a good coach who will pound it into you. If you slide over a single point, it will trip you up in the end. God won't be good to you and give you a moment of inspiration, but a faithful coach can make it clear to you if you give him enough time and money, and you must not be stingy of either.”

 

Charles Cather (1923-2011), who grew up to be an attorney, was not stingy. He left $5.8 million to support Cather initiatives at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

'One Can Hardly Bear to Read Them'

William Maxwell was an appreciative reader, one who read for pleasure and solace, and was always grateful for the books our forebears left us. In a 1997 essay, “Nearing Ninety,” he expressed his only regret associated with death: “[W]hen people are dead they don’t read books. This I find unbearable. No Tolstoy, no Chekhov, no Elizabeth Bowen, no Keats, no Rilke.” The last book he read, in the final months of his life, was War and Peace. When he had read a third of the book his eyesight began to fail, and the novelist Annabel Davis-Goff read the remainder of Tolstoy’s novel to him aloud She recounts the experience in an essay collected in A William Maxwell Portrait (2004):  

“Reading War and Peace with Bill allowed me a rare and privileged view of how a great writer reads. I had, I suppose, known that anyone who writes above a certain level must read differently from most of us. Nabokov, in the introduction to his Lectures on Literature, asks what a reader needs in order to read a book properly. . . . His four correct answers: imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense.”

I suggest finding the book and reading Davis-Goff’s entire essay. It’s too piercing and beautiful to paraphrase. As she writes:

“There are sequences in War and Peace so affecting that one can hardly bear to read them. Petya’s death; Natasha sacrificing Prince Andrei as she falls in love with the worthless Kuragin; Nikolai Rostov losing a fortune playing faro with Dolohov. These scenes horrify me every time I think about them. To read them aloud to someone of Bill’s sensibility made it possible for me to appreciate their full power.”

Maxwell was strongly affected by the death of Prince Bolkonsky. David-Goff tells us he admired most of all the scenes set at Bald Hills. They finished reading the novel though not the epilogue. Maxwell died on July 31, 2000, at age ninety-one. Tolstoy died, after much family melodrama, on this date, November 20, in 1910. On his bedside in the stationmaster’s house at Astapovo, Tolstoy left two books at the time of his death: The Brothers Karamazov and Montaigne’s Essais.

'Except Perhaps Among the Old Comedians'

We all know those unhappy souls who work hard to be thought of as comedians. Every family, every workplace, has one. They exert themselves to be funny. It becomes a tic. They memorize jokes and foment puns. They have been told they are funny because the people in their lives don’t wish to be honest and cruel. Worst of all, when no one laughs at their efforts, they do. Their attempts at humor are desperate and straining. They tend to be sad cases and make those around them uncomfortable and sad.

 

In his 1977 biography, W. Jackson Bate identifies four qualities in Dr. Johnson that combine to form his “gift for humor.” First, his “ready and fertile wit,” followed by a gift for mimicry, the “refreshing and contagious gusto with which he could throw himself into things” and “his own gift for laughter.” That final point is particularly interesting. Some of us enjoy making others laugh because we enjoy laughing ourselves. Many have pigeonholed Johnson as a conservative, a grim moralist and a depressive fearful of his sanity. All of these descriptions are true and all are ideal goads to humor.

 

Sir John Hawkins, Johnson’s first biographer and a man notably unburdened with humor, wrote that “in the talent of humour there hardly ever was  his equal, except perhaps among the old comedians.” Mrs. Thrale remembered Johnson saying that “the size of a man’s understanding might always be justly measured by his mirth.” Boswell reports: “Johnson’s laugh was as remarkable as any circumstance in his manner. It was a kind of good humoured growl. Tom Davies described it drolly enough: ‘He laughs like a rhinoceros.’” Max Beerbohm writes in “Laughter”: “Echoes of that huge laughter come ringing down the ages.”

'Lamentably Desultory and Immethodical'

“My reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical.” 

Mine, too. I’m no scholar or “expert,” God forbid, despite what a reader recently called me. Only once have I set out to read a writer systematically -- Henry James – and that was to earn my B.A. in English thirty years after dropping out the first time around. I’m pleased, at last, to have the diploma, though it has had precisely no impact on my IQ or bank account. The admission quoted above is from “The Old and the New Schoolmaster” by Charles Lamb, who read widely and idiosyncratically, as all serious readers do, and never attended a university. He continues:

 

“In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world. . . . I know less geography than a school-boy of six weeks’ standing. . . . I have no astronomy. . . . Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of miscellaneous study.”

 

Like all newspaper reporters, part of my job description was to be an instant expert. Reporters are by definition generalists. We know a little about many things, but our only expertise is writing on deadline. Theodore Dalrymple recently put it like this: “As every journalist and lawyer knows, it takes about half an hour to become an expert on any subject.” If recent history has taught us anything, it is to distrust self-appointed experts, especially the prognosticator sub-species, even more so if they append a string of degrees after their names and insist on being addressed as “Dr.” when they have no M.D. In The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969; rev. ed. 1991), John Gross sings a love song to literature and its inexpert readers:

 

“Isn’t there a certain basic antagonism between the very nature of a university and the very spirit of literature? The academic mind is cautious, tightly organized, fault-finding, competitive – and above all aware of other academic minds. . . . Think of the whole idea of regarding literature as a discipline. Literature can be strenuous or difficult or deeply disturbing; it can be a hundred things – but a discipline is not one of them. Discipline means compulsion, and an interest in literature thrives on spontaneity, eager curiosity, the anticipation of pleasure; it is unlikely that a reader who comes to a book under duress, or weighed down with a sense of duty, will ever really read it at all, however much he may learn about it. Even the most intensely serious literature needs to be approached with a certain lightness of heart, if it is to yield its full intensity.”

'There’s an Other, a Reflection'

I’ve since learned my experience some thirty years ago is not uncommon. The bathroom was steamy as I got out of the shower. I dried myself with the towel and was using it to wipe condensation from the mirror when I was startled to see my father peering back at me: his big face, high forehead, indifferently trimmed mustache. I felt found out. What I had spent much of my life avoiding had happened. In ways I would prefer to ignore, I was my father. No psychobabble, no talk of “closure,” just a sense that we are, in ways often obscure and elusive, who we come from. Boris Dralyuk has translated three poems from the Russian of the wonderful Julia Nemirovskaya, including “Mirror”:‍

“My father left me his face

and all that was his to give.

I’ll carry this mirror always –

in it, father still lives.

 

“My father left me my home

and everything it contains.

I enter for half an hour –

a wasp beats against the panes.

 

“On his birthday we’ll sit a while,

silently drinking wine.

To live means a life being lived –

not necessarily mine.”

 

In his response to a comment, Boris describes his relationship with his father as “fraught,” a word that means loaded or burdened. With time, we build the muscles to carry the load, or we finally put it down. Boris also speaks of “the mirroring effect of literature — the way the writing of others reveals us to ourselves.” There are many reasons we read, not all of them selfish. Prominent among them is seeing likeness in difference. I’m no Pierre Bezukhov but part of me is. Borges phrases it like this in “Mirrors” (trans. Alistair Reid):

 

“The glass is watching us. And if a mirror

hangs somewhere on the four walls of my room,

I am not alone. There’s an other, a reflection

which in the dawn enacts its own dumb show.”

'The Minor Sages Went Up in Smoke'

While looking up something about the poet-critic J.V. Cunningham, I happened on a brief review of his collection The Judge Is Fury written by Robert Hillyer (1895-1961) and published in the June 28, 1947 issue of The Saturday Review. It’s worth quoting in full: 

“This book should not be dismissed briefly, for it is important. The poems excel in a field that today other poets—except Frost, on occasion—have left untended: the epigram. The verse is hard and classic. The wry analysis of emotion, the Platonic humor, are akin to Santayana; the deftness of the cool and clipped syllables brings Landor to mind. My only complaint is that Mr. Cunningham introduces identical rhymes as lavishly as a French poet. He is too fine an artist to have done this unintentionally, but the effect in English still sounds weak in my ear. Mr. Cunningham’s book will probably not attract a large modern audience, but he should have the satisfaction of knowing that he is carving —even if not always with perfection—in stone, while so many of his contemporaries are still dabbling in the sticky dough left from the Romantic popovers.”

 

That’s my idea of how to write a capsule review. I wish more reviews were so pithy, with hardly a wasted word. Everything is focused on the book, not on the author of the review. Too many reviews are autobiographies sprinkled with token references to the work at hand. The Landor reference is right on the money, though I’m not certain I understand the Santayana comparison. The final sentence is amusing and true.

 

Hillyer is a forgotten footnote. He served as an ambulance driver in World War I with his Harvard friend John Dos Passos. His Collected Verse (1933) won the Pulitzer Prize. He taught at Harvard for twenty-six years and was a friend of Robert Frost. If remembered at all, it’s for the Ezra Pound Affair. In the June 11 and 18, 1949 issues of The Saturday Review of Literature, he published two lengthy articles – “Treason’s Strange Fruit: The Case of Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Prize” and “Poetry's New Priesthood.” While under indictment for treason and hospitalized in St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital, the anti-Semite and Fascist sympathizer had been awarded the first Bollingen Prize from the Library of Congress for The Pisan Cantos. This is the poet who, while broadcasting for Radio Rome in 1943, with the Holocaust well underway, declared: “I think it might be a good thing to hang Roosevelt and a few hundred yids.” Pound is an early specimen of a type common today: the artist who feels entitled, because he is an artist, to spout off about any subject, especially one he knows nothing about it.

 

In his articles, Hillyer dismissed Pound’s book as a “vehicle of contempt for America” and as a mockery of “our Christian war dead.” His objections were both moral and aesthetic. He wrote that if the Cantos were judged a worthy poetic achievement, then “everything we have known of poetry in the English language from Chaucer to Frost is not poetic achievement.” No snobs are so violently snobbish as poets and their enablers. Hillyer and his defenders were derided as middlebrows and philistines. It would be nice to honor Hillyer as a worthy poet, but his gift was middling and creaky. Here is his “Letters,” which packs an old-fashioned sting:

 

“O that our living literature could be

Our sustenance, not archaeology! . . .

My scholar shall be brilliantly forbidden

to dig old garbage from a kitchen midden . . .

Far better Alexandria in flames

Than buried beneath unimportant names;

And even Sappho, glory that was Greece’s,

Lives best, I blasphemously think, in pieces.

That Chinese Emperor who burned the books

Succumbed to madness shrewder than it looks;

The minor poets and the minor sages

Went up in smoke. The great shine down the ages.”

'The Mass of Uniformly Achieved Work'

“I feel more & more acutely that, inasmuch as you are going in for animals, you have devoted remarkably little attention to the porcupine, who, I am sure, would reward you richly should you study him.” 

Marianne Moore is the head zookeeper among poets. Others minored in animal husbandry – La Fontaine (whose fables she translated), John Clare, Apollinaire – while Moore’s major was zoology. By 1925, when Yvor Winters wrote her the letter quoted above, she had devoted poems to lions, snails, snakes, mongooses, dock rats, tigers, fish, monkeys, whales, peacocks, mice, chameleons, among others, real and metaphorical. Later came the wood-weasel, jerboa, ostrich and pangolin (“scale / lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity”), and the less exotic toad and grasshopper.   

 

Moore often celebrates animals equipped with armor and spines, though seldom first-rank predators. The only reference to porcupines I find in her work is in “Apparition of Splendor,” in which she begins with Dürer’s engraving of a rhinoceros, “Like a porcupine, or fern,” and then quotes a line from Oliver Goldsmith.

 

Moore is the great pleasure-giver among the high-Modernists. She virtually patented the interpolation of quotations from other writers, often unidentified. Here is the final stanza of “Apparition of Splendor”:

 

“Maine should be pleased that its animal

is not a waverer, and rather

than fight, lets the primed quill fall.

Shallow oppressor, intruder,

Insister, you have found a resister.”

 

In his January 18, 1925 letter, Winters praises Moore’s “intensity, perfections, & originality of your work, &, what is more astounding yet, the mass of uniformly achieved work & the almost complete absence of anything not achieved, impresses me more every time I think of it or look at it.”      

 

Moore was born on this date, November 15, in 1887.

'The Chestnut Holds Her Gluey Knops Upthrust'

Some words look like typos. Phlegm is one. Similarly, apothegm. Both appear to be missing vowels, and I always double-check the spelling. In the second stanza of “January” (1894) by Robert Bridges I found another faux-typo:  

 

“The trees their mournful branches lift aloft:

The oak with knotty twigs is full of trust,

With bud-thronged stems the cherry in the croft;

The chestnut holds her gluey knops upthrust.”

 

Knops? Could be a levidrome* (a word spelling another word in reverse order). Almost a publisher. And “gluey knops upthrust” sounds a little salacious. The OED – a wet blanket, as usual – offers a more prosaic definition, and cites Bridges’ usage: “the bud of a flower; a compact or rounded flower-head or seed-vessel.” That usage dates from late-fourteenth-century Middle English. Earlier it meant “a small rounded protuberance, a knob (esp. one of an ornamental character, e.g. upon the stem of a chalice, a candlestick, etc.); a boss, stud, button, tassel.”

 

It’s one of those wonderful English words that has metastasized over the centuries. It came to mean an ornamental loop or tuft of yarn, a folk name for red clover, the protuberance formed by the front of the knee or elbow, and a wart or pimple. No wonder English poetry once flourished. Bridges served as the literary executor for his friend Gerard Manley Hopkins who used a variant spelling of the word in the journal he was keeping in 1871: “Then the knot or ‘knoop’ of buds some shut, some just gaping.”

 

*SPONK is an acronym for spontaneous osteonecrosis of the knee.

'Our Faculties Are Unequal to the Subject'

“[W]e very often differ from ourselves.” 

I know I’m not the man I was when I woke up this morning. I was foggy, befuddled and briefly memory-less, my customary pre-caffeinated state. Slowly the world leaked in. Consciousness grows like mushrooms after a spring rain and as quickly disappears in sleep, intoxication or death. We fancy ourselves solid and at least semi-permanent. Experience teaches otherwise. We are not nothing, a fiction, but a loosely aligned colony of mutating selves, not an empire.

 

In The Adventurer #107, published on this date, Nov. 13, in 1753, Dr. Johnson continues: “How often we alter our minds, we do not always remark; because the change is sometimes made imperceptibly and gradually, and the last conviction effaces all memory of the former: yet every man, accustomed from time to time to take a survey of his own notions, will by a slight retrospection be able to discover, that his mind has suffered many revolutions . . .”

 

Imagine holding, unchanged, the opinions, convictions, values and beliefs you did at seventeen, twenty or thirty-three. My first reaction to such a thought experiment is embarrassment. I was an idiot then, while fancying myself quite worldly and sophisticated. Young people, who have little experience and less judgment, are likeliest to fall for grandiose theories and violent convictions.

 

A reader upbraids me for having not stated my preference in the presidential election. She asks if I’m a “coward . . .  afraid to come right out and say who you voted for.” No, it’s just not an interesting subject. Besides, I didn’t vote. I don’t expect others to agree with me. My opinions on any subject are the least pertinent things you can know about me. Don’t reduce me to my opinions or lack of them.  

 

“We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinion, because we very often differ from ourselves. . . . Such is the uncertainty in which we are always likely to remain with regard to questions wherein we have most interest, and which every day affords us fresh opportunity to examine: we may examine, indeed, but we never can decide, because our faculties are unequal to the subject; we see a little, and form an opinion; we see more, and change it.”

`To Be Gentlemanly Without Being Genteel'

“To be gentlemanly without being genteel, free and blunt in expression in the manner of European intellectuals, was and is a style at the opposite extreme from the foam-rubber, public-relations language that we nowadays adapt to all occasions.”

 

Still true, except for the part about European intellectuals, or most of them. Jacques Barzun describes a lively, confident mode of speech among grownups, rooted in respect and fearlessness when it comes to cerebral and aesthetic roughhouse. So much of what we hear and read amounts to formulaic ass-kissing or sniffy little death sentences. Not much in between. Neither requires much thought.

 

Barzun is writing in A Stroll with William James (1983), my favorite among all of his books. James was his hero. The genius concentrated in the James Brothers, William and Henry, is almost indecent. He titles a chapter in his book “The Reign of William and Henry.” Here is a sample of what Barzun is talking about, from a characteristically spirited letter (not cited by Barzun) James writes to H.G. Wells on June 6, 1905. One need not agree with James’ enthusiasm for Wells’ work – in this case, A Modern Utopia (1905) -- to appreciate the enthusiastic prose in which it is expressed:

 

“You have a tri-dimensional human heart, and to use your own metaphor, don’t see different levels projected on one plane. In this last book you beautifully soften cocksureness by the penumbra of the outlines—in fact you’re a trump and a jewel, and for human perception you beat Kipling, and for hitting off a thing with the right word, you are unique. Heaven bless and preserve you!—You are now an eccentric; perhaps 50 years hence you will figure as a classic!”

 

Barzun laments the loss of so vivid a sensibility as James’ (he died in 1910) and the energized manner in which he had expressed it. After quoting a letter James wrote to John Jay Chapman, Barzun says their age encouraged development of “strong personalities, while manners permitted strength and individuality to be admired. What met with contempt was vulgar feelings—suspicion, envy, self-pity; they were not to be given room in heart or mind; indeed, they were to be chased out if they crept in, and conduct must be in keeping. I use ‘conduct,’ and not our social-science term ‘behavior,’ to stress the primacy of responsibility and control.”

 

The notion that manners permit and even encourage strength and individuality must sound quaint to many contemporary readers. But just as meter and rhyme inspire, refine and make stronger the meaning in verse, so does civility tame our self-indulgence and foster friendship and love. Barzun writes:     

 

“The surprise is that a facade-free personality should also be sensitive and possessed of genius. Long habit makes us want our geniuses scarred. The sign of their authenticity is their affliction. They must be disagreeable, self-centered, dissolute, unscrupulous, maniacal, enslaved to alcohol or drugs. The festering wound, like Philoctetes’, must be there or they can’t draw the bow.”

'War’s War'

“A soldier's time is passed in distress and danger, or in idleness and corruption.” 

Forty years ago I knew a firefighter in a small Ohio city who had served in Vietnam as a “tunnel rat.” He was the smallest man in the department, built like a jockey, and the angriest. He was loud, impressively obscene in speech and forever complaining about the city administration and the fire chief (who once, in confidence, told me he called Bill “Mad Dog”). His job in Vietnam was to enter and destroy underground tunnels built by the Viet Cong – a nightmarish assignment. In an off-the-record conversation, Bill told me that being a firefighter was sometimes like being a tunnel rat – long stretches of tedium in the fire station punctuated by moments of impossible terror. It was the only time I ever heard him reflect on his military service or speak thoughtfully about anything. I took his class and he certified me in CPR.

 

The passage quoted above is from Dr. Johnson, as recounted by Boswell. Johnson never served in the military but in the same passage from 1778, Boswell tells us his friend “always exalted the profession of a soldier.” R.L. Barth took the title of his 1988 collection A Soldier’s Time, Vietnam War Poems from Johnson’s observation and used the sentence as his epigraph. In 1968-69, Bob was a Marine serving as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in Vietnam. His poems are virtually the only ones to come out of that war worth reading. Bob is a student of war, his and others’. He has written extensively about the earlier war in Vietnam, the one that culminated in the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. He often acknowledges a kinship with soldiers from other ages, as in “A Letter to the Dead”:  

 

“The outpost trench is deep with mud tonight.

Cold with the mountain winds and two weeks’ rain,

I watch the concertina. The starlight-

Scope hums, and rats assault the bunkers again.

 

“You watch with me: Owen, Blunden, Sassoon.

Through sentry duty, everything you meant

Thickens to fear of nights without a moon.

War’s war. We are, my friends, no different.”

 

Bob’s most readily available book is probably Deeply Dug In (University of New Mexico Press, 2003). In his introductory poem, “Reading The Iliad,” he juxtaposes Vietnam and an earlier war:

 

“Volume and desk, coffee and cigarette

Forgotten, the reader, held in Homer’s mind,

Looks on both Greeks and Trojans fighting yet

And heroes and foot-soldiers, thin and blind,

 

“Forced-marching for the Styx. But suddenly

Stunned by the clamor under smoky skies,

Boastings and tauntings, he looks up to see?

Not the god-harried plain where Hector tries

 

“His destiny, not the room--but a mountain

Covered with jungle; on one slope, a chateau

With garden, courtyard, a rococo fountain,

And, faces down, hands tied, six bodies in a row.”