'A Certain Unceremoniousness'

“Would you anathemize, banish, imprison, execute us, and burn our books?” 

Of course they would, given half a chance. Pettiness, insecurity and hunger for power are a steady state in human affairs, even when merely latent. The cause du jour, whether communism, fascism or religious zealotry, is just an excuse. Our species is reliably savage. The passage above is from Andrew Marvell’s “A Short Historical Essay Touching General Councils, Creeds, and Impositions in Matters of Religion.” It’s not among his major works, which are his poems, but a reminder that moral progress is a myth and that 2021 could soon turn as barbarous as the English seventeenth century with its civil war and regicide.

 

The poet’s survival during this bloody period recalls Montaigne’s during the previous century’s religious wars in France. Marvell was a master of ambiguity and nuance, navigating the political and religious treacheries of his day. Take his poem “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” (1650). Is it pro-Cromwell or anti-Cromwell? Read superficially, the former seems the case. But Marvell is moved by the fate of Charles I:

 

“He nothing common did or mean

Upon that memorable Scene:

But with his keener Eye

The Axes edge did try:

Nor call’d the Gods with vulgar spight

To vindicate his helpless Right,

But bow’d his comely Head,

Down as upon a Bed.”

 

Among Marvell’s strongest modern admirers is C.H. Sisson, who calls the “Horatian Ode” the “greatest political poem in the language.” In the introduction to his 1980 translation of The Divine Comedy (Carcanet, 1980), Sisson writes:

 

“. . . all literary encounters have a certain unceremoniousness about them. We surround ourselves with books so that we can call up Montaigne, or Eckermann, or Virgil, or Andrew Marvell, as the mood takes us or the drift of our interests at the time suggests. There are scores or hundreds of merely casual encounters, and some of more intimate significance. The latter have their times, and their place in one’s development as a reader or a writer.”

 

Marvell was born four hundred years ago today, on March 31, 1621. He died in 1678 at age fifty-seven.

'By Art Amid the Accidents of Fate'

The Harvest & the Lamp (Franciscan University Press, 2020), a collection of poems by Andrew Frisardi, arrived on Palm Sunday. Frisardi is an American-born poet who has lived near Orvieto, Italy since 1999. He is a scholar and translator of Dante and has translated Giuseppe Ungaretti and the Milanese dialect poet Franco Loi. What a pleasure it is to discover a good, previously unknown poet, something hasn’t happened since I first read Aaron Poochigian several years ago. 

Frisardi’s poems aren’t puzzles. Neither do they resemble bumper stickers. They often begin conversationally but never bloviate. There’s a relaxed terseness about them. I’ve read only a handful of his poems thus far because I’m delaying gratification. In the collection’s first poem, “The Yellow Moth” (it’s not a nature poem, thank God, though Frisardi pays attention to the natural world), he writes, apropos of spring and the Lenten season:

 

“How does the earth do it, year after year

Becoming young again?”

 

As though to answer the question he writes:

 

“Where I am in the world, it’s Lent, Quaresima.

Grotesques of Carnival that celebrate

Flesh have given way to vigils and ash.

And yet this ancient custom happens right

When spring is set, as if to say rebirth

Is not a given, it’s what we create

By art amid the accidents of fate,

And in our times of dying – call it grace.”

 

In the collection's next poem, “Easter Morning,” Frisardi writes:

 

“From a bush nearby I hear an unknown whistle,

indomitably upbeat: ‘Wake! It’s time!’

The birds are in their skeletal cathedral

and I am in my body that’s not mine.”

 

Poetry this good humbles a reader. We don’t see it very often. Criticism seems beside the point.

'His Bad Language That Is Always Good'

“The beauty of his incessant abuse is a matter of art for art’s sake. The pleasure which an educated taste would receive in hearing Cobbett call a duchess an old eat or a bishop a dirty dog is almost onomatopoeic, in its love of a melody all but detached from meaning.” 

Like William Cobbett (1763-1835), G.K. Chesterton came to literature through the servants’ entrance. He was a journalist, Cobbett a farmer and pamphleteer, and neither a litterateur. They work in the vigorous prose tradition in England that includes Nashe, Dekker, Swift and Defoe. We might call it applied prose rather than strictly literary. In William Cobbett (1925), Chesterton tells us he found “words that are like weapons rusting on the wall . . . the most choice terms of abuse becoming obsolete in face of rich and even bewildering opportunities in the way of public persons to apply them to.”

 

The only book by Cobbett I have read, and I’ve read it several times, is Rural Rides (1830). The Penguin copy I bought in 1983 is brown and brittle, and the cover is held in place with a rubber band. The book recounts the journeys by horseback Cobbett made through Southeast England and the Midlands between 1822 and 1826. Cobbett is difficult to pigeonhole politically. He was radical and reactionary, and doesn't fit into our contemporary categories. Rural Rides, likewise, eludes classification. Chesterton writes:

 

“[T]he Rural Rides are pure literature. Perhaps they are all the more literature because they might be counted loose and colloquial even for language. It would be a breathless experience even to hear a man talk in as slap-dash a style as Cobbett wrote; but the thing would be brilliant as well as breathless. Everything comes into this great soliloquy: details, dogmas, personalities, political debates, private memories, mere exclamations such as a man utters in really riding along a road.”

 

Chesterton makes a further point about Cobbett’s use of language:

 

“Many professors have in a merely literary sense recognised Cobbett as a model; but few have modelled themselves upon their model. They were always ready to hope that their pupils would write such good English. But they would have been mildly surprised if any pupil had written such plain English. . . [T]he strongest quality of Cobbett as a stylist is in the use he made of a certain kind of language; the sort of use commonly called abuse. It is especially his bad language that is always good. It is precisely the passages that have always been recognised as good style that would now be regarded as bad form.”

'You Must Obtain It By Great Labour'

Two weeks ago I asked the librarian at the circulation desk what she was reading. She held up, finger marking her place, The Light Ages: A Medieval Journey of Discovery (Allen Lane, 2020). When I asked for a capsule review she said the book held her “rapt.” Two observations: 1.) I can’t remember the last time I heard someone correctly use “rapt.” 2.)  I can’t ever remember seeing a librarian at her post intently lost in a book. We might judge the latter “ironic” but librarians are busy people, even during a pandemic, and not all librarians are inveterate readers. 

When I returned to the Fondren on Saturday I found my librarian friend had finished reading The Light Ages and put it on hold for me – further evidence that as a professional class, librarians are among the most thoughtful people in the world.

 

Across from the circulation desk I noticed a library cart with a sign printed with the two most beautiful words in the English language: “Free Books.” For once, these weren’t discards but books the library probably already had in their collection and chose not to keep. A satisfying haul:

 

Gogol’s Wife and Other Stories (New Directions, 1963), Tommaso Landolfi, which I haven’t read in fifty years

 

Collected Poems 1921-1951 (Grove Press, 1953), Edwin Muir

 

Samuel Johnson and the New Science (University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), Richard B. Schwartz

 

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Vintage Books, 2008), Oliver Sacks

 

Children in Exile: Poems 1968-1984 (Vintage Books, 1984), James Fenton, inscribed by Linda Leavell and dated “25 March 85.” Leavell earned her Ph.D. in English from Rice University in 1986. I read her Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore (2013).

 

And best of all, a sturdy hardcover edition of T.S. Eliot’s Selected Essays 1917-1932 (Harcourt, Brace, 1932). He famously writes in “Tradition and Individual Talent”: “Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”

'In Reality Life Hasn’t Changed Much'

There are no generic, one-size-fits-all friends. Think of each as a species, not a genus. Correspondingly, with each we mutate and become, at least briefly, different people. Human sensibility is not monolithic and unchanging. We are plural. With each friend we share a different set of memories and expectations. Some friendships are strictly cerebral. In others we can indulge in the confessional mode or tell dirty jokes. Friendship can spill into love, and love, if enduring, almost certainly must contain friendship. There are power imbalances and friendships in which power plays little role. Some are happily cold, others uneasily hot. There’s nothing hypocritical or duplicitous about what I’m describing. Humans are more complicated than we choose to believe. 

A Garden Carried in a Pocket: Letters 1964-1968 (ed. Thomas Meyer, Green Shade, 2004) collects some of the letters exchanged by Guy Davenport and Jonathan Williams. In his introductory note Davenport writes:

 

“The self, as some fancy psychologists have said, is always several selves, a congeries of identities. We like people who make us like ourselves (Jonathan is one of these). We tend to have a different self for all our acquaintances, accomplished hypocrites that we are. Consequently, we never really know another person. What’s going on in a friendship is that friends find each other interesting, appreciate each other’s jokes (this complicates things for the readers of other people’s mail), and enjoy each other’s company.”

 

A friend and former newspaper colleague now living in Philadelphia wrote to me on Friday:

 

“I thought of you recently when the Inquirer published a real gem of a crime report. I would have loved to have witnessed this.

 

“A couple of officers responded to a report of a burglary in progress. When they arrived at the address they saw a U-Haul truck pulling away from the curb. They followed it, until the driver of the truck stopped suddenly, jumped out and ran up to the police car and said, ‘I don’t want anything to do with this, and there’s a body in the back.’ He was quite right. There was a body in the back, dismembered in a trash bag. I do love a good crime story.”

 

Now that’s a friend – someone who thinks of you when they read a satisfying dismemberment story. Tim recently finished reading Proust’s masterwork: “I read the volumes slowly over several years. It was too intense to read them one after another. I loved the ending, in which the writer decides to write a novel about what we’ve just read. The descriptions of parties is another favorite.”

 

Now he’s reading another favorite, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “The history and the cultural background are great, but the things that I like the most are the simple descriptions of a day’s travels — the homes, the monasteries, the people met on a bridge.”

 

You can see why Tim would be so good and interesting a friend. And he’s full of surprises: “I’ve survived and have been vaccinated. It felt like a death sentence had been lifted. In reality life hasn’t changed much.”

'I Would Rather Be Attacked Than Unnoticed'

If I could take only one volume of Dr. Johnson’s to that mythical desert island, much swooned over by readers with too little time and too many distractions, I would pack Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81). Not an easy choice. Rasselas is tempting – one of my favorites, a book that mingles the novel with wisdom literature. And don’t forget The Rambler's learned, moving moral essays. Most tempting is Johnson’s Dictionary, an anthology of English prose and poetry. A good dictionary always makes for entertaining reading. I select the Lives because in it Johnson combines biographical storytelling with critical assessment, which in his case means tart, unexpected judgments. Take this from his “Life of Pope”: 

“Pope was from his birth of a constitution tender and delicate; but is said to have shewn remarkable gentleness and sweetness of disposition. The weakness of his body continued through his life, but the mildness of his mind perhaps ended with his childhood.”

 

There’s nothing bland or mincing about Johnson. You can read the lives for their human interest even when the poet in question is unfamiliar. Like John Aubrey in his Brief Lives, Johnson understands the worth of a good anecdote. Here is one about Thomas Yalden, when the poet was a student at Magdalen College:

 

“It was his turn one day to pronounce a declamation, and Dr. Hough, the president, happening to attend, thought the composition too good to be the speaker's. Some time after, the doctor, finding him a little irregularly busy in the library, set him an exercise for punishment, and, that he might not be deceived by any artifice, locked the door. Yalden, as it happened, had been lately reading on the subject given, and produced with little difficulty a composition, which so pleased the president that he told him his former suspicions, and promised to favour him.”

 

In his biography of Johnson, John Wain describes the Lives as “Johnson’s gentlest, most companionable work.” This is true yet Johnson is often at his most entertaining when cantankerous. In his “Life of Milton” he famously said of “Lycidas” that “the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing.” Johnson knew what he was doing and how some readers would react. Boswell reports that on this date, March 26, in 1779:

 

“He said he expected to be attacked on account of his Lives of the Poets. ‘However (said he,) I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an authour is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse; an assault may be unsuccessful; you may have more men killed than you kill; but if you starve the town, you are sure of victory.’”

 

Today, in the circle-jerk world of poetry reviewing, this would trigger more than a few poets who deserve a good triggering. In his Lives, Johnson is not gratuitously cruel. Much of his cruelty seems perfectly appropriate. As a postscript to an essay about Kingsley Amis collected in The Revolt of the Pendulum: Essays 2005-2008 (Picador, 2009), the late Clive James writes:

 

“One doesn’t say that Aubrey’s Brief Lives set the desirable measure, but it always helps to remember how much got said by Johnson in his Lives of the Poets, any one of which is the first thing to read on the poet in question. Not, of course, the only thing: but surely our aim, like Johnson’s, should be to keep abreast of the essentials first.”

'Eating the Heart Out of a Subject'

While speaking with an engineering student the other day, I recounted to him the fate of Mr. Krook, brother to Mrs. Smallweed in Bleak House, who burst spontaneously into flames and was reduced to a heap of ashes. He listened patiently and when I finished asked, “Who is Dickens?” I was reminded of the time twenty years ago, while working for a university in upstate New York, when I mentioned to an engineering professor Kipling’s 1902 short story “Wireless,” one of his best. He replied, in effect, “Who’s Kipling?” 

I won’t fulminate about these men. Both are intelligent and personable. The student is still an undergraduate and likely to do well in life. Ignorance of once-popular English literature won’t hold him back, though I marvel at how far we have descended in a mere century. Incrementally, decision by decision, educators and others, abetted by parents, have made aliteracy the default setting for our brightest kids. This has nothing to do with the brouhaha over the “Two Cultures.” We’re left with less than half a culture.

 

One of the great synthesizing minds of that culture is the Canadian-born physician Dr. William Osler (1849-1919), who helped found Johns Hopkins Hospital and established the first residency program for medical students. This admirer of Robert Burton and Laurence Sterne, in Aequanimitas, with Other Addresses to Medical Students, Nurses and Practitioners of Medicine (1904), wrote a prescription for a liberal education:

 

I. Old and New Testament

II. Shakespeare

III. Montaigne

IV. Plutarch’s Lives

V. Marcus Aurelius

VI. Epictetus

VII. Religio Medici

VIII. Don Quixote

IX. Emerson

X. Oliver Wendell Holmes -- Breakfast-Table Series

 

You can quibble with specifics, but you get the idea. Osler’s suggestions find applications far beyond medicine – and engineering. Incidentally, Osler befriended Rudyard Kipling. I’ve written about him several times. In a 1921 lecture, “The Student Life,” he writes:

 

“Divide your attentions equally between books and men. The strength of the student of books is to sit still—two or three hours at a stretch—eating the heart out of a subject with pencil and notebook in hand, determined to master the details and intricacies, focusing all your energies on its difficulties. Get accustomed to test all sorts of book problems and statements for yourself, and take as little as possible on trust.”   

'This Modest Book Appeared'

An old friend, one I first met forty years ago, has retired from the Whirlpool Corp.’s washing machine plant in Clyde, Ohio, the largest in the world. The plant opened in 1952, the year my friend and I were born. Clyde is in north central Ohio, about seventy-five miles west of Cleveland. Seven miles to the east along Route 20 is Bellevue, where I landed my first job as a reporter for a daily newspaper in January 1981, after years of editing a weekly. I was an urban/suburban boy living in a small town, and I loved it. Mundane rural things seemed exotic.

Sherwood Anderson was born in 1876 in Camden, Ohio, and his family moved to Clyde in 1884 and lived there until 1895. Readers will know that Anderson modeled his fictional Winesburg on Clyde. I first read Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a collection of linked stories, when I was seventeen. The book grabbed me and only let go years later when Anderson’s mushy style and reliance on refried Freud grew tired after repeated readings. I still think fondly of the book and would encourage young readers to read it at least once. Scenes in the book have blurred with my memories of Bellevue and Clyde.

Irving Howe’s second book was Sherwood Anderson (1951), a critical biography. (His first, incidentally, was a life of Walter Reuther, and his third a critical study of William Faulkner.) Like me, he first read Winesburg, Ohio as a teenager. Howe joined the Army in 1943 and was heading to his post in Alaska when he made what he calls a “pilgrimage.” He writes in the Anderson book:

“One Sunday in 1943 I was hitchhiking through Ohio; it was my last week end before sailing overseas with the army. I remember with an undiminished sense of exhilaration a journey I took along a side road that led to Clyde, Anderson’s home town and model for Winesburg. As I should have anticipated, Clyde looked much like other American small towns and the few of its people with whom I talked were not particularly interested in Sherwood Anderson. But my pilgrimage nonetheless gave me a sense of satisfaction I could hardly have explained.”

Anderson is a writer best read early, recalled fondly and seldom or never returned to, like a former girlfriend. It’s the sort of book that turns into a myth in memory. The novelist Amos Oz discovered Winesburg, Ohio in 1959, when an Israeli publisher brought out a Hebrew translation. In his autobiography, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004), Oz writes:

“Before I read this book, I did not know that Winesburg existed and I had never heard of Ohio. Or I may have remembered it vaguely from Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Then this modest book appeared and excited me to the bone; for nearly a whole summer night until half past three in the morning I walked the paths of the kibbutz like a drunken man, talking to myself, trembling like a lovesick swain, singing and skipping, sobbing with awestruck joy and ecstasy: eureka!”

'If I Am a Man of Some Reading'

I read Montaigne’s Essays as a sort of oversized secular breviary. Wisdom is seldom so amusing. He entertains the way a gracious old friend entertains. Seasoned readers will know his hobbyhorses and wait for the punchlines. He is consolation. Theodore Dalrymple in “Montaigne’s Humanity” calls the Frenchman’s essays “a soothing balm.” Part of the reason, I suspect, is that Montagne is “the least ideological of writers,” as Dalrymple notes. Ideologues are strident, tedious and formulaic, and seldom recognize life's nuances and flux. Montaigne’s thoughts, even when ridiculous, are his own. Reading Montaigne, we can seldom guess the content of his next sentence. Dalrymple writes: 

“Montaigne repeatedly warns us against too great a certainty about our knowledge and our conviction that our way is the only right way. He warns against pride in our own learning and intelligence.”

 

The snobbery of the purportedly educated classes has metastasized and grown more stubborn as the worth of higher education has plummeted. A friend said in conversation the other day that a college degree has become a certification of illiteracy and cultural ignorance, which is only a modest exaggeration. It’s an empty trophy. Montaigne defers to such forbears as Plutarch and Seneca while our contemporaries dismiss them. He writes in “Of Books” (trans. Donald Frame):

 

“I have no doubt that I often happen to speak of things that are better treated by the masters of the craft, and more truthfully. This is purely the essay of my natural faculties, and not at all of the acquired ones; and whoever shall catch me in ignorance will do nothing against me, for I should hardly be answerable for my ideas to others, I who am not answerable for them to myself, or satisfied with them. Whoever is in search of knowledge, let him fish for it where it dwells; there is nothing I profess less. These are my fancies, by which I try to give knowledge not of things, but of myself. The things will perhaps be known to me some day, or have been once, according as fortune may have brought me to the places where they were made clear. But I no longer remember them. And if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retentiveness.”

 

More than twelve years ago I read Donald Frame’s 1965 biography of Montaigne with Dalrymple in mind, and noted their affinities in a post for Anecdotal Evidence. Here is a passage from the biography still pertinent to both men:

 

“I believe it is above all his sturdy, honest independence, his cheerful self-acceptance, that draws the crowd of readers to his book today. Our love of moral independence is ambivalent; our anxiety and sense of guilt make us often hanker rather for an `escape from freedom.’ And here we have a man, not the best that ever lived no doubt but assuredly far from the worst and better than most of us, who with scandalous serenity lays himself on the line and says in effect, quite simply, Here I am.”

'Every Condition Indulges Some Darling Fallacy'

George Orwell remains a problem for this reader. His fiction is idea-heavy and never comes to life. He was a casual, though not ideological, anti-Semite. He never entirely shed the socialist delusion. And yet he wrote a handful of essays that rank among the finest in the language. He’s awfully good on Dickens and Kipling, and scattered through his journalism are essential nuggets of good prose. “Bookshop Memories” is a gem. In the column he published on this date, March 22, in 1946, titled “In Front of Your Nose,” he writes: 

“[W]e are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

 

Orwell’s point applies most obviously to politics but its applications are nearly universal. Homo sapiens is the species that lies, most often to ourselves. “To see what is in front of one’s nose,” he writes, “needs a constant struggle.” Orwell seemed to have had little regard for Dr. Johnson, though he is here echoing the earlier essayist’s The Adventurer #69:

 

“[T]the universal conspiracy of mankind against themselves: every age and every condition indulges some darling fallacy; every man amuses himself with projects which he knows to be improbable, and which, therefore, he resolves to pursue without daring to examine them. Whatever any man ardently desires, he very readily believes that he shall some time attain . . .”

'Durable, Inexhaustible, Essential, Inadequate'

A friend has sent me an anthology, Joy: 100 Poems (Yale University Press, 2017), assembled by Christian Wiman, who defines his theme as “a flash of eternity that illuminates time, but the word ‘eternity’ does sit a bit lumpishly there on the page.” Joy is a word I would never presume to define with precision. As an emotional state it will always remain ineffable, as do so many human things. I’m not certain we can seek joy the way we seek food to assuage hunger, and unexpectedness seems to be a prerequisite. 

For my tenth birthday my grandparents gave me a chemistry set – the gift I most wanted and least expected. I remember trembling, not believing what I was seeing, as I tore away the wrapping paper and uncovered test tubes, Erlenmeyer flasks and a bottle of cobalt chloride. Was that joy? Less presumptuous words come to mind – greed, thrill, satiety – however briefly. “The one abundance you can count on in this life,” Wiman writes, “is lack.” I’m reluctant to use joy in any setting other than the spiritual. Otherwise we risk turning it into the new awesome, a word lost to us forever. Wiman is rightly reluctant to nail down the word, which he describes as “durable, inexhaustible, essential, inadequate.”

 

His selection of poems is also somewhat inadequate. Wiman limits himself to work written by poets born “during or after modernism.” That is, the twentieth century, the least joyful, most savage of centuries, and an era of diminishing returns in poetry. By leaving out the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Wiman eliminates Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne and the other poet laureates of joy in English. He does include some gems which may or may not express joy but are beautifully written: Louis MacNeice’s “Meeting Point,” A.E. Stallings’ “Blackbird Étude” and Les Murray’s “Once in a Lifetime, Snow,” among others.

 

An afterthought for some enterprising publisher: Why not continue the theme started by Wiman and devote subsequent volumes to other emotional states? Make it a series. I would pay good money for an anthology dedicated to, say, truculence. To give the future editor a head start, let me suggest he begin with Jonathan Swift, Philip Larkin and Turner Cassity.

'To Furnish Out an Essay'

As  good as any explanation I’ve read for maintaining a blog long after the vogue for blogging has evaporated: 

“He that questions his abilities to arrange the dissimilar parts of an extensive plan, or fears to be lost in a complicated system, may yet hope to adjust a few pages without perplexity; and if, when he turns over the repositories of his memory, he finds his collection too small for a volume, he may yet have enough to furnish out an essay.”

 

A reader asks why I write something daily when I have, at most, a few hundred readers. That’s a few hundred more than I ever expected, and I don’t, for the most part, write for them. An honest writer will admit he writes to please himself (which occasionally means earning a few bucks, though not in this case). It can be a benign form of egotism. No one is forced to read your words. Writing this way is like carving your name in the bark of a tree deep in the woods: “I am here.” Some will find that a comfort; others, an annoyance; most will never see it. The rest is momentum.

 

The passage quoted above is from the first of The Rambler essays, published on this date, March 20, in 1750. Johnson would publish an essay every Tuesday and Saturday for the next two years – 207 in all. He would subsequently write two other sets of essays, The Adventurer and The Idler, but The Rambler is his deepest work. Though seldom confessional in the modern sense, these essays reveal the conflicted, compassionate, massively learned Johnson we have come to know. W. Jackson Bate calls them “an extended prose application of 'The Vanity of Human Wishes.'" Johnson is ever a moralist but we accept him in that role because he never excludes himself from judgment. His is the voice of fallible, ever-suffering humanity. His concluding words in the first Rambler are characteristic:

 

“And if he finds, with all his industry, and all his artifices, that he cannot deserve regard, or cannot attain it, he may let the design fall at once, and, without injury to others or himself, retire to amusements of greater pleasure, or to studies of better prospect.”

'What Love Is in the Stews'

A sentence in the section titled “Causes of Love-Melancholy” in Burton stopped me: “In Italie and Spaine they have their stewes in every great Cittie.” Stewes? Or stews, as we would write it. I heard a fading echo but couldn’t quite grab it. From its context in The Anatomy of Melancholy, I knew Burton didn’t have dinner in mind. A few phrases later he assures us that “fornications, adulteries, are nowhere so common . . . how should a man live honest among so many provocations?” So, off to the OED, where I discovered a wonderful old, discarded meaning for a familiar word. In a word: brothel.

The lexicographers tell us it earlier had meant “a heated room used for hot air or vapour baths: hence, a hot bath.” From this came the bordello sense, “on account of the frequent use of the public hot-air bath-houses for immoral purposes.” Nashe, Steele, Boswell, Dickens (Oliver Twist) – all used it in the whorehouse sense. I felt grateful yet again to have been born into a language so profligate it could pack dozens of discrete senses into a single four-letter word, without fear of redundancy.  

 

A brief search lead to an interesting use of the word, by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762). Among her acquaintances was Alexander Pope, who apparently was smitten with her. See William Frith’s painting of Lady Montagu’s reaction to Pope’s declaration of love in 1722. Pope replied with attacks on her in The Dunciad and elsewhere. In “Verses Addressed to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace,” Lady Montagu replied in kind:

 

“Satire shoud, like a polish’d Razor keen,

Wound with a Touch, that’s scarcely felt or seen.

Thine is an Oyster-Knife, that hacks and hews;

The Rage, but not the Talent of Abuse;

And is in Hate, what Love is in the Stews.” 

'An Eccentric Lost in Paradise'

Borges often pictured paradise as a vast library, as in his prologue to “Catalog of the Exhibition Books from Spain” (trans. Suzanne Jill Levine, Selected Non-Fictions, 1999): 

“Each in his own way imagines Paradise; since childhood I have envisioned it as a library. Not as an infinite library, because anything infinite is somewhat uncomfortable and puzzling, but as a library fit for a man. A library in which there will always be books (and perhaps shelves) to discover, but not too many. In brief, a library that would allow for the pleasure of rereading, the serene and faithful pleasure of the classics, or the gratifying shock of revelation and of the foreseen.”

 

The blind librarian’s qualifications are charming and reader- (not librarian-) friendly: “fit for a man,” not infinite; books previously unknown, “but not too many.” Like any serious reader, Borges’ envisions his paradisal library built with “the pleasure of rereading” in mind.

 

Nabokov the lepidopterist imagines a different sort of paradise, one in which loss and frustration are not absent. “In Paradise” was published in Russian on this date, March 18, in 1928, in the émigré newspaper Rul' (“Rudder”), founded by Nabokov’s father in Berlin. Here is the author’s translation:

 

“My soul, beyond distant death

your image I see like this:

a provincial naturalist,

an eccentric lost in paradise.

 

“There, in a glade, a wild angel slumbers,

a semi-pavonian creature.

Poke at it curiously

with your green umbrella,

 

“speculating how, first of all,

you will write a paper on it

then — But there are no learned journals,

nor any readers in paradise!

 

“And there you stand, not yet believing

your wordless woe.

About that blue somnolent animal

whom will you tell, whom?

 

“Where is the world and the labeled roses,

the museum and the stuffed birds?

And you look and look through your tears

at those unnamable wings.”

 

Pavonian is an adjective that means resembling a peacock. Nabokov uses the word again in a beautiful passage in Speak, Memory, which begins: “The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait.”

 

He then recalls a memory his father shared with him, of catching a rare butterfly with his German tutor on Aug. 17, 1883, sixteen years before the novelist’s birth:

 

“He and his brothers had stopped short in helpless excitement at the sight of the coveted insect poised on a log and moving up and down, as though in alert respiration, its four cherry-red wings with a pavonian eyespot on each.”

 

In their note to the poem in Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (Beacon Press, 2000), editors Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle suggest the insect described may be the moth Saturnia pavonia, found throughout the Palearctic region, including Russia.

'Thought on Tetty, Dear Poor Tetty'

History is dense with peripheral people who would likely be forgotten but for their lives having intersected, often briefly, with some historically memorable figure. After all, most of us are peripheral and will soon be forgotten. Take Henry Porter (1691-1734), a Birmingham mercer or woolen draper, a dealer in textiles. John Wain writes of him in Samuel Johnson (1974): 

“Porter seems to have been a decent man, an industrious though not particularly successful merchant, coming from a sold middle-class background – his father had been a governor of King Edward’s School, Birmingham – and doubtless a pleasant and welcoming host to the young prodigy from Lichfield.”

 

That is, Dr. Johnson. We remember Porter because he died, leaving his wife, Elizabeth Jervis Porter, a widow. The Porters married in 1715 and had three children. Johnson had known them since 1732. On first meeting Johnson, Elizabeth told her daughter Lucy: “That is the most sensible man that I ever saw in my life.” Soon Johnson was courting Elizabeth and they married ten months after Henry Porter’s death. The groom was twenty-five, the bride forty-six. No one but the principals seemed happy about the union. Sniggering in literary London was common. W. Jackson Bate writes in Samuel Johnson (1977):

 

“Marriages in which the wife was so much older were not unheard of. But, rightly or wrongly, the popular mind associated the husband in such cases with an unaggressive type of man—rather mousy, dependent, perhaps slightly infantile. Certainly the idea of such a marriage did not fit one’s notion of Johnson, with his huge, unwieldy frame, his immense physical strength, his courage and rhinocerine laughter, his uncanny incisiveness of mind.”

 

Johnson would always refer to his wife as “Tetty” and told his friend Topham Beauclerk: “It was a love marriage upon both sides.” Tetty died at age sixty-three on this date, March 17, in 1752. She never got to meet Boswell or read her husband’s Dictionary, Rasselas or Lives of the Poets. Johnson never stopped grieving. Her epitaph, composed by Johnson, reads “Formosae, cultae, ingeniosae, piae [beautiful, elegant, talented, dutiful].” John Hawkins says in his 1787 biography of Johnson: “The melancholy, which seized Johnson, on the death of his wife, was not, in degree, such as usually follows the deprivation of near relations and friends; it was of the blackest and deepest kind.” In 1764, twelve years after his wife’s death, Johnson wrote in a diary:

 

“Having before I went to bed composed the foregoing meditation and the following prayer, I tried to compose myself but slept unquietly. I rose, took tea, and prayed for resolution and perseverance. Thought on Tetty, dear poor Tetty, with my eyes full.”

 

Thanks to Henry Porter and his timely death, Johnson came to know all of this joy and grief.

'Bubble-Work That Only Fools Pursue'

The least we ask of a friend is that he not become meddlesome. Granted, it’s a fine line. Where does caring end and meddling begin? At roughly the point presumption replaces true concern. The prerequisite for friendship is respect. There’s nothing respectful about presuming to know what’s best for another person and feeling hurt when your precious counseling is dismissed or ignored. In “Dear Friends" (The Children of the Night, 1897), Edwin Arlington Robinson answers those who would tell him to give up his vocation, his reason for being:

 

“Dear friends, reproach me not for what I do,

Nor counsel me, nor pity me; nor say

That I am wearing half my life away

For bubble-work that only fools pursue.

And if my bubbles be too small for you,

Blow bigger then your own: the games we play

To fill the frittered minutes of a day,

Good glasses are to read the spirit through.

 

“And whoso reads may get him some shrewd skill;

And some unprofitable scorn resign,

To praise the very thing that he deplores;

So, friends (dear friends), remember, if you will,

The shame I win for singing is all mine,

The gold I miss for dreaming is all yours.”

'A Feeling for the English Sentence'

“You speak of a ‘universal longing for a world beautiful.’ In the first place, this longing is by no means universal. It is rather exceptional. And don’t, please, speak of a ‘world beautiful!’ That is the only bad phrase in your letter. But it is bad. It is what I call ‘women’s club phraseology.’ You could have said that better, had you tried.” 

The son of a friend asked for help writing a college admissions essay. I asked him to prepare a first draft, something I could work with. My impression is that he’s gotten accustomed to others doing his work. He’s glib and ingratiating and has made a career, thus far, of coasting on charm. He’s not stupid and has read more books than most of his contemporaries, but his first draft was a tissue of airy nothings. He parrots what he thinks teachers want to hear. That’s how he has been taught, and up to this point it has been a strategy that worked. There was no evidence of critical thinking, of evaluating the worth of the ideas expressed. It was empty happy talk. The pieties of the day can be relied on to do the job.

 

The writer quoted at the top is Willa Cather. Her correspondent is a Mr. Phillipson, about whom little is known. Her letter is dated March 15, 1943. It suggests lazy, cunningly passive prose is nothing new among young people:

 

“I get hundreds of letters from college students, friendly and enthusiastic, but the weakness of their sentence structure is often appalling. They seem convinced that friendly and enthusiastic clauses need have no particular relation to each other or to the main stem of the sentence. Sometimes these letters show insight and a real feeling for literature. But how can these boys expect to play sonatas when they cannot play scales? I am chiefly interested in your letter because you seem to have a feeling for the English sentence. In writing, that is the beginning of everything.”

 

We’ve gone through four drafts. The kid is getting frustrated, though he remains mostly polite with me. His mother confides that her son calls me a “hard ass,” though I’ve made it clear I can drop out any time he likes. No hard feelings. Nothing personal. It reminds me that all of us had to learn how to write effectively, without padding or other bullshit. I’ve told him that often I don’t even begin to understand something until I have written about it. That puzzled him but also seemed to intrigue him.

 

[Good to see this in an annotation to the letter: “Cather had met [Rebecca] West by early 1927, and later that year West positively reviewed Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) for the New York Herald Tribune Books. Cather continued to cultivate West as a critic, ensuring that she got copies of her books, leading to West’s positive review of Shadows on the Rock (1931).” I could make a case for Cather and West as the finest, most important female writers of their time.]

'I’ll Have at You With Hip and Haw'

Imagine John Keats as a novelist. Whose fiction might his have most resembled? He is certainly as witty as Jane Austen, his senior by twenty years, but her world is likely too narrow and feminine for the poet, too bounded by manners and morals. Please don’t suggest George Eliot, born fifteen months before Keats’ death. Dickens is closer, for his humor and linguistic extravagance, but his pathological sentimentality removes him from consideration. Fielding or Smollett? Perhaps, especially the latter with his rowdy, cruel, knock-about sense of comedy. But my best guess is Sterne, dead twenty-seven years before Keats’ birth. 

Keats’ letters, his supreme contribution to world literature, are rich in bawdy. Keats was not the ethereal milquetoast beatified by earlier generations. We know he was treated for syphilis. And he liked a well-told dirty joke. Keats left no critical judgment of Tristram Shandy or A Sentimental Journey, but we know he read at least the former. He describes his friend Thomas Richards – like Keats, the son of a livery stable-keeper – as “Shandean.” In the September 1819 letter to his brother and sister-in-law, George and Georgiana Keats, Keats writes:  

 

“I feel I can bear real ills better than imaginary ones. Whenever I find myself growing vapourish, I rouse myself, wash and put on a clean shirt brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoestrings neatly and in fact adonize as I were going out – then all clean and comfortable I sit down to write.”

 

The passage recalls another in Book IX, Chap. XIII of Tristram Shandy:

 

“—I never stand conferring with pen and ink one moment; for if a pinch of snuff, or a stride or two across the room will not do the business for me—I take a razor at once; and having tried the edge of it upon the palm of my hand, without further ceremony, except that of first lathering my beard, I shave it off; taking care only if I do leave a hair, that it be not a grey one: this done, I change my shirt—put on a better coat—send for my last wig—put my topaz ring upon my finger; and in a word, dress myself from one end to the other of me, after my best fashion.”

 

Keats’ letters are peppered with unannounced allusions to many writers, Shakespeare in particular. Another editor, in the passage cited above, hears an echo of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy – a book Keats owned and annotated. Best of all, in a letter written on this date, March 14, in 1818, to John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats ventriloquizes Tristram Shandy’s Uncle Toby, a retired army captain obsessed with military tactics and fortifications:

 

“I’ll cavern you, and grotto you, and waterfall you, and wood you, and water you, and immense-rock you, and tremendous-sound you, and solitude you. I’ll make a lodgment on your glacis by a row of Pines, and storm your covered way with bramble Bushes. I’ll have at you with hip and haw small-shot, and cannonade you with Shingles—I’ll be witty upon salt-fish, and impede your cavalry with clotted cream.”

 

Keats’ imagination was playful and capable of endearing whimsy. Let’s put aside Keats the solemn cherub.

'Even the Last Rat and Last Kestrel Banished'

In his Vietnam War poems, R.L. Barth occasionally honors a kinship with soldier-poets who wrote of wars fought before he was born. Take “A Letter to the Dead”: 

“The outpost trench is deep with mud tonight.

Cold with the mountain winds and two week's 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.”

 

First published in Looking for Peace (Abattoir Editions, 1985), it is collected again in Bob’s Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems (Broadstone Books, 2021). Several months ago he wrote a poem addressed to Blunden, as yet unpublished, titled “Edmund Blunden (1896-1974)”:

 

“A shepherd in a greatcoat (the MC

Appended, unacknowledged) you patrolled

Old battlefields, the trenches, no man’s land,

The rear, the transports, nature all despoiled,

The shattered houses, farms, and roadside shrines,

But most of all you celebrated: troops,

The comrades you remembered all your life.

You would not, could not, let the horror go,

Nor undermine affection for your friends.

I honor you for that. I understand.”

 

“MC” is the Military Cross, then the second highest (now third highest) military decoration awarded by the British Armed Forces. In World War I, Blunden saw continuous action from 1916 to 1918, and survived the fighting at Ypres and the Somme. His friend Siegfried Sassoon said Blunden was the Great War poet most obsessed with his memories of the Western Front. In November 1968, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Armistice, Blunden wrote in the Daily Express:

 

“I have of course wondered when the effect of the Old War would lose its imprisoning power. Since 1918 hardly a day or night passed without my losing the present and living in a ghost story. Even when the detail of dreams is fantasy, the setting of that strange world insists on torturing.”

 

Barth’s description of No Man’s Land on the Western Front, with “nature all despoiled,” echoes many lines in Blunden’s poems, including these from one of his finest, “Report on Experience” (Near and Far, 1929):

 

“I have seen a green county, useful to the race,

Knocked silly with guns and mines, its villages vanished,

Even the last rat and last kestrel banished―

     God bless us all, this was peculiar grace.”

 

The poem’s first line – “I have been young, and now am not too old” – recalls the King speaking in I Henry VI, Part 1, Act III, Scene 4: “When I was young, as yet I am not old.” Also, Psalm 37:25.