'If There's a Deity, It's Mars'

Time and ignorance wring the meaning out of holidays. When I was a boy, Memorial Day meant a parade ending at a small nearby cemetery, the one where my mother now is buried. Prayers, speeches, wreathes, the firing of a three-gun salute by Marines in dress uniforms. It was a day off from school, a preview of the coming summer, but we went through the motions of patriotism and remembrance. Not much of that today. As the weekend approaches, people talk of gasoline prices. In his epilogue to the third volume of The Civil War: A Narrative, Shelby Foote writes:

 

“Observed throughout the North on May 30, Memorial Day hopscotched the calendar in the South, where individual states made their choices between April 26, May 10, and June 3. In any case, whenever it came, this day belonged to the veterans and their fallen comrades, and they made the most of it, beginning with their choice of a speaker, always with the hope that he would rival the ‘few appropriate remarks’ Lincoln had uttered at Gettysburg on a similar occasion.”

 

Foote recounts a speech delivered on Memorial Day 1884, at Keene, N.H., by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935). As a Union army captain during the Civil War, Holmes had been wounded three times. In 1864, when Lincoln stood on a parapet at Fort Stevens, Holmes is supposed to have yelled, “Get down, you damn fool!” Twenty years later, speaking to fellow Civil War veterans, Holmes said Memorial Day was “the most sacred of the year,” and would always be observed by Americans. He continued:

 

“But even if I am wrong, even if those who are to come after us are to forget all that we hold dear, and the future is to teach and kindle its children in ways as yet unrevealed, it is enough for us that to us this day is dear and sacred . . . For one hour, twice a year at least – at the regimental dinner, where the ghosts sit at table more numerous than the living, and on this day when we decorate their graves – the dead come back and live with us. I see them now, more than I can number, as I saw them on this earth.”

 

Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1841-1906) was a student of the Swiss-born zoologist Louis Agassiz at Harvard when the Civil War started. He graduated summa cum laude in 1862 and returned to his native Kentucky. There he was commissioned to raise the Fifth Kentucky Battery on the Union side, despite coming from a slave-owning family. He detested the Republican Party and many of his Kentucky friends had already joined the Confederate cause, but Shaler believed in the principle of the Union, which he called “a most useful convenience for uniting like states for protection and interchange.”

 

Shaler served for two years until illness forced his resignation. For almost forty years he taught geology and paleontology at Harvard, and late in life wrote the poems, written in sturdy blank verse, collected in From Old Fields: Poems of the Civil War. It was published by Shaler’s wife shortly after his death. Try to find a copy of Selected Civil War Poems of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (Scienter Press, 2004), edited by R.L. Barth. Included is an excerpt from “The Great Raid,” including these lines which describe the symptoms of what we have learned to call PTSD:

 

“He who hath known of war has memories

Of sorry deeds that startle him in nights,

And make him creep back to this blessed day

With wonder what he was when they were done

At bidding of hard duty.”

 

A Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, Barth says of the passage: “Even here, however, notice the emphasis on duty; the memories are part of the price a soldier pays.” Barth’s epigram “De Bello” is collected Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems (Broadstone Books, 2021):

 

“The troops deploy. Above, the stars

Wheel over mankind’s little wars.

If there’s a deity, it’s Mars.”

'Light a Hundred Candles in Your Brain'

I’ve never read a book that kept me awake at night. I’ve often stayed up too late, even on work nights, when a book wouldn’t let go, but that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about books so exciting, scary or disturbing that even with lights out and head on pillow, their after-life in my brain made sleep impossible. Perhaps I’m just too cold-hearted or tired.

A friend in New York City sent me an entry from a charming little book by Rose Macaulay, Personal Pleasures (1935). The title is explicit. Macaulay fills 365 pages with mini-essays about the mundane things that give her pleasure such as “Hot Bath” and “Taking Umbrage.” Here is an excerpt from the piece my friend sent, “Reading in Bed”:

 

“You are reading, I would suggest, a novel; preferably a novel which excites you by its story, lightly titillating, but not furrowing, the surface of the brain.”

 

Nothing is easier to get lost in than a novel, an alternate world peopled with strangers who are familiar. So far, I’m in contented agreement with Macaulay, who was a good novelist (The Towers of Trebizond, 1956). Here’s where we part ways:

 

“Not poetry; not history; not essays; not voyages; not biography, archeology, dictionaries, nor that peculiar literature which publishers call belles-lettres. These are for daytime reading; they are not somnifacient; they stimulate the mind, the esthetic and appreciative faculties, the inventive imagination; in brief, they wake you up. You will never, I maintain, get to sleep on Shakespeare, Milton, or Marvell, or Hakluyt, or Boswell, or Montaigne, or Burton’s Anatomy, or Sir Thomas Browne, or Herodotus, or any poetry or prose that fundamentally excites you by its beauty, or any work that imparts knowledge. These will light a hundred candles in your brain, startling it to vivid life.”

 

She wipes out more than half my library. I should add that I’ve never used a book as a soporific. Reading is an end in itself. All of the forms and writers Macaulay lists I’ve read in bed, on the couch, in a hammock, at my desk, in an airplane. The setting is less important than time and sufficient light.

'Anecdotal Evidence About the Human Heart'

Wendy Cope’s most recent poetry collection is fetchingly titled Anecdotal Evidence (Faber & Faber, 2018). The phrase refers to uncorroborated claims rooted in personal observation. A lawyer may object and the judge sustain but you and I rely on anecdotal evidence every day. Few of us are chemists or mathematicians, and even they aren’t scientifically rigorous at the bowling alley. Our beliefs and values, what we think, what we know, and what we think we know are cobbled together from direct observation, prejudice and sheer fantasy. Among sophisticates, “data” has replaced knowledge, and there’s still something around called social “science.” Meanwhile, what is most human about us cannot be quantified. 

Cope takes her title from the first poem in her book, “Evidence,” which begins with a quote attributed to a “scientific researcher”: “A great deal of anecdotal evidence suggests that we respond positively to birdsong.” Careers have been built on saying such fatuous things. Keats knew better. Here is Cope’s poem:

 

“Centuries of English verse

Suggest the selfsame thing:

A negative response is rare

When birds are heard to sing.

 

“What’s the use of poetry?

You ask. Well, here’s a start:

It’s anecdotal evidence

About the human heart.”

 

Whether we’re reading Dante, Yeats or Wendy Cope, poetry amounts to a report on who we are and why we do what we do. In his foreword to In Defense of Reason (1947), Yvor Winters defines a poem as “a statement in words about a human experience” --  in other words, anecdotal evidence. When we’re gone, what remains of us? Anecdotal evidence.

'No Honest Fun in the Cracking of Skulls'

“I crave low comedy, of the lowest and most humorous sort laid on with a shovel, rammed in with a slapstick, soaked with a seltzer siphon.”

 

More than DNA our sense of humor distinguishes us from the rest of the herd and is a reliable gauge of mental health. If not insane, the humorless at least deserve close observation. They cannot be trusted. Loud, moist, Falstaffian laughter for them is a social lapse, like farting at a funeral, though I’ve known people with a well-developed sense of humor who hardly titter. Their laughs are events of the interior. That’s foreign to me but I respect it, and distinguish it from those who don’t laugh at all because they are twits and bores. Who can imagine Lenin laughing?

 

The speaker at the top is H.L. Mencken in “A Plea for Comedy,” a column he published on this date, May 28, in 1910 in the Baltimore Evening Sun. Mencken is celebrating vaudeville, America’s then popular and widely condemned contribution to world culture. Historians tells us vaudeville was at the start of its decline around the time Mencken was writing, thanks to early forms of cinema. Many of us know vaudeville by way of its survivors who thrived in the movies – Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Burns and Allen, and latecomers like the Three Stooges of the pre-Shemp Curly era. Not, thank you, Abbott and Costello. Mencken writes:

 

“There are bilious and inhuman folk who maintain that low comedy is not amusing; that it is not pleasant to see the first comedian wallop the second comedian over the head with a rubber ax; that there is no honest fun in the cracking of skulls. Let us pity all who think so! They miss a lot in life.”

 

Vaudeville, of course, is dead, and I fear its spirit remains on life supports. What kills it is earnestness, the wish to propagate a message. Nothing is deadlier to comedy than a dogged dedication to didacticism. In 1942, Max Beerbohm spoke on the BBC about the English counterpart to American vaudeville in “Music Halls of My Youth”:  

 

“Perhaps you will blame me for having spent so much of my time in Music Halls, so frivolously, when I should have been sticking to my books, burning the midnight oil and compassing the larger latitude. But I am impenitent. I am inclined to think, indeed I have always thought, that a young man who desires to know all that in all ages and in all lands has been thought by the best minds, and wishes to make a synthesis of all those thoughts for the future benefit of mankind, is laying up for himself a very miserable old age.” 

'I Have Thus Played the Sedulous Ape'

Robert Louis Stevenson in “A College Magazine” (1887) describes a writerly practice that makes a lot of sense: 

“Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality.”

 

More good advice that I’ve never taken. Over the years I’ve parodied the style of certain writers, usually in homage, not condemnation, but otherwise it never occurred to me to consciously ape another writer’s way with words. When I covered jazz for a newspaper, I shamelessly borrowed the stylistic tics of Whitney Balliett, but that was because I loved his prose and worked hard to filter through it my own way of looking at things. Only one reader recognized the indebtedness and he was a jazz drummer. Stevenson writes of his practice.

 

“I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of part”

 

Now that I think about it, I did, on one occasion in high school, ape another writer’s style, teetering just short of plagiarism. For a brief spell in tenth grade, I lacked the antibodies that make one immune to the gush of Thomas Wolfe’s purple prose. I was the perfect age to be infected by Look Homeward, Angel and wrote a “prose poem” titled “November.” The only thing I remember about it is likening the color of the sky to pewter. I wrote it in the eponymous month and by the time it was published in the school literary magazine at the end of the academic year, I was embarrassed by the damn thing. Stevenson goes on to catalog the writers he copied:

 

“I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to [Étienne Pivert de Senancour’s] Obermann.”

 

What a stew of styles. Like most good writers, Stevenson was a good reader, learning something from all, even if the lesson involved what to avoid. In The March of Literature (1939), Ford Madox Ford seems to have this passage in mind when he writes:

 

“[T]his writer can well remember the time when Robert Louis Stevenson was roundly styled un-English because he announced himself as playing the sedulous ape to Sir Thomas Browne. That was because the English critic, disliking all the arts, was filled with disgust at the idea that another form of art should be forced upon his attention.”

 

What I’m most enjoying while reading Stevenson systematically is the music of his prose. His rhythms are wonderfully seductive when they don’t tip over into self-conscious parading of cleverness. He knows how to sinuously structure long sentences. Ford writes elsewhere in The March of Literature: 

 

“It is to be remembered that a passage of good prose is a work of art absolute in itself and with no more dependence on its contents than is a fugue of Bach, a minuet of Mozart, or the writing for piano of Debussy.”

'Cranks, Hacks, Poverty-stricken Scholars'

Starting at age eleven I was permitted to ride the bus to downtown Cleveland, a half-hour trip along West 25^th Street. To this day, the smell of diesel exhaust brings it all back. The license of it was exhilarating: on my own in the city with a few bucks in my pocket and not a parent in sight. I went to book and record stores, a magic shop high up in an office building, and to the main Cleveland Public Library on Superior Avenue. At that age I was a chess obsessive, a phase that passed with the arrival of puberty, and the library housed what remains the largest collection of chess books (some 32,000 today) in the world. There, and in the ill-lit main collection, I spent hours.

That is probably where I learned to feel at home in a library. I would already have made a list of the books I wanted, and in those pre-internet days I relied on the massive card catalogues and trusted in serendipity. Some of my fellow library-goers at first seemed scary to this suburban kid. Old men, perhaps younger than I am today, wearing too many items of clothing, murmuring and reading close to the page with magnifying glasses. I wished to become one of them. They seemed free to ignore what others thought of them, intent on the words they held to their noses. I read Louis MacNeice’s “The British Museum Reading Room” (1939) and thought again of those contented old men:

 

“Cranks, hacks, poverty-stricken scholars,

In pince-nez, period hats or romantic beards

And cherishing their hobby or their doom . . .”

'The Pure Astonishment of Life'

William Maxwell writing to Sylvia Townsend Warner in February 1960:

“I am reading or was reading the most deadly book about Yeats, by an American professor named Richard Ellmann. No conversations, no anecdotes, no descriptions of what he wore or had to eat. He could just as well have been a certified public accountant. No astonishment.”

 

We could say Maxwell is reacting like a novelist, certainly not like an academic. Or perhaps his reaction is that of any dedicated reader. Ellmann’s first two books were devoted to Yeats, and I don’t know which one Maxwell was reading. The only Ellmann title I’ve read is his 1959 biography of James Joyce, an early specimen in the overinflated, resolutely dull biography category. I remember it as a laborious slog, ironic given that Ulysses bursts with comedy and felt life. Maxwell speaks for the common reader, those of us who expect books to be vivid, true to life, even exciting. In 1997, in his new introduction to The Outermost Dream: Essays and Reviews (Graywolf Press), originally published by Knopf in 1989, Maxwell writes:

 

“[W]hen I read for my own enjoyment I cannot—or mostly do not—read authors whose way of writing doesn’t give me pleasure. But of course style is not in itself enough. One wants blowing through it at all times the breath, the pure astonishment of life.”

 

A capacity for astonishment is not confined to any particular form or genre. It can be modest and muted, as in a Chekhov story (“Gooseberries”), or exulting, as in a poem by Yeats (“All Soul’s Night”). In an April 1955 letter to Warner, Maxwell praises her like this: “Do you know you have the most astonishing gift for bringing imaginary houses to life?” In March 1977, the year before Warner’s death, he writes to her: “But someday I shall astonish you as you astonish me every time I get a letter from you.”

 

[The letters quoted are from The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell 1938-1978 (Counterpoint, 2001).]

'The Privilege of Being Able to Read'

“Using the toilet seat is the first step towards literature. I learned to read off the Bromo carton – ‘succeeded after long experiment in combining the curative properties of Bromo-chloratum’ – when you’ve cleared that fence, the world is before you.” 

All true, though I learned to read while moving between the kitchen and living room. Two words I could read because I had learned how to write them – Zorro and Bosco.  

The former I knew from the Disney television series that premiered the year I started kindergarten. With his sword, Zorro would inscribe the letter Z on the ample belly of Sgt. Garcia. My pencil became a rapier when I wrote Zorro with a flourish on paper. Bosco was a chocolate syrup that sponsored a Cleveland kids’ show hosted by Captain Penny. Both words are five-letter, two-o trochees, and may have appealed to me musically. Both I learned from television. That medium is said to have launched our multigenerational wave of illiteracy and aliteracy. Perhaps, but my experience says otherwise.

 

The passage at the top is dated April 23, 1957, in a letter the English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote to her friend and editor William Maxwell (The Element of Lavishness; Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell 1938-1978, 2001). I‘ve read nothing else by Warner though I’ve read every word Maxwell published. Based on her letters, which are thoughtful, tough-minded and witty, and deeply appreciative of Maxwell’s gifts as an editor, I’ll try her fiction. You wouldn’t know from her letters that Warner was a Communist. How often is a reader moved to read a writer’s fiction based on her letters? I can’t think of another example. Maxwell writes to Warner in a letter dated December 30, 1958:

 

“Someone gave me a copy of a paper-backed one-volume edition of the journals of the brothers Goncourt, and I am beside myself with pleasure over it. Every night I get through one page, and then sit and hold it, all of it, in my mind, with rapture. At such times, knowing, alas, that it isn’t true, I say to myself that all I ask of life is the privilege of being able to read.”

'The Most Incisive Conversationalist of Them All'

“The two great writers who have never let me down over the years are Samuel Johnson and Oscar Wilde. They always manage to brighten my life with something new, full of flavor, and to the point.”

Both, of course, were wits, remembered, if at all today, less for their writing than their brilliance as conversationalists. Their admirer’s fate is similar. As Ted Gioia reminds us in “The Greatest Wasted Musical Talent of the Century,” Oscar Levant, along with being a world-class concert pianist was a “film composer, dance band pianist, conductor, movie actor, Broadway musical collaborator, and talk show host.” I first heard of Levant when he appeared as a guest on Jack Parr’s talk show in the early 1960s. As often happens with popular culture figures dating from the preceding generation, I reacted against my parents’ judgment of Levant. They detested him, perhaps for his pose of stylized masochism. I thought he was hilarious. Gioia writes:

“Yet what eventually brought him fame were none of these pursuits, rather his wit and capacity for biting one-liners.”

The sentences quoted at the top are from the third of his three memoirs, The Unimportance of Being Oscar (1968). The others are A Smattering of Ignorance (1940) and The Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1965), all combining gossip with Levant’s neurotic shtick, and all worth tracking down and reading. On the same page as the Johnson/Wilde observation, Levant likens Robert Lowell, whom he met for dinner, to “a Gentile Clifford Odets” and describes how his wife sang “Who Put the Overalls in Mrs. Clancy’s Chowder?” to the poet in the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel. “My wife,” he writes, “can sing about four bars on key. After that, the song sounds like an Arnold Schoenberg composition.” Schoenberg was Levant’s friend and teacher. Later in the same chapter, Levant writes:

“Another enthusiasm of mine—and a personal revelation—were the books with one-word titles (Loving, Nothing, etc.) of Henry Green, the pseudonym of the Birmingham businessman-author. I read them in 1952 when I was convalescing form my heart attack and found them brilliantly amusing.”

Ted Gioia is becoming one of the most interesting, knowledgeable and entertaining writers around today, with an instinct for interesting people and subjects. I’ve been reading him since 1988 when he published his first book, The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture. Along with the Levant piece, Gioia has written recently about Whitney Balliett and Yvor Winters. In the Levant essay he writes:

“If I could ever assemble one of those dream dinner parties with a guest list drawn from anybody in history, I would pack the table with those impressive self-made authorities, such as Isaac Asimov, Martin Gardner, Orson Welles, and—probably the most incisive conversationalist of them all—Oscar Levant.”

Along with a supplemental guest list of Johnson, Wilde and Gioia.

'Nothing Ever Vanishes'

For the first time in fourteen months, Kaboom Books is open for business seven days a week. On Friday, the shop was almost crowded. Everyone wore masks but the shot of hand sanitizer from a squirt gun is now optional. We did well, as usual. My middle son, home briefly from the Naval Academy, picked up Roger Penrose’s Shadows of the Mind (1994), a sort of sequel to The Emperor's New Mind (1989). 

I was pleased to find the Everyman’s Library edition of Swift’s Journal to Stella, the 1948 printing. These compact hardcover volumes, smaller than mass-market paperbacks, have a nice heft and are a pleasure to hold. The yellow dust jacket is ragged along the edges but otherwise the book is solid. A previous owner pressed his seal on the frontispiece: “Library of Harry Goldgar.”

 

Another small volume – a Robert Louis Stevenson travel omnibus including An Inland Voyage, Travels with a Donkey and The Amateur Emigrant (1956). The publishers are Collins and W.W. Norton. On the title page in ink, so close to the binding as to be nearly illegible, is written “Paul Elder, SF 1959.” On the frontend paper are two address labels, both in Houston, one for Mary Elizabeth Gillette, the other for Mrs. J.M. Gillette. I see that Mrs. Gillette died in 2005.

 

And a novel I bought more than fifty years ago when it was first published – Nabokov’s Mary (1970), translated by the author and Michael Glenny. It first appeared in Russian in 1926. Nabokov’s protagonist, Lev Glebovich Ganin, a Russian émigré in Berlin, muses:

   

“’Where is the happiness, the sunshine, where are those thick skittles of wood which crashed and bounced so nicely, where is my bicycle with the low handlebars and the big gear? It seems there’s a law which says that nothing ever vanishes, that matter is indestructible; therefore the chips from my skittles and the spokes of my bicycle still exist somewhere to this day. The pity of it is that I’ll never find them again -- never.’” 

'Tell Those Secrets in a New, Funny, Gentle Way'

From the tribute to Pee Wee Russell written by Whitney Balliett (Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2001) after the clarinetist’s death in 1969: 

“His style – the chalumeau phrases, the leaps over the abyss, the unique why? tone, the use of notes that less imaginative musicians had discarded as untoward – was paradoxically, his final snare and his glory. People laughed at it. It was considered eccentric, and because eccentricity, the kindest form of defiance, baffles people, they laugh. But those who don’t laugh understood that Russell had discovered some of the secrets of life and that his improvisations were generally successful attempts to tell those secrets in a new, funny, gentle way.”

 

A rare and beautiful word, “chalumeau” refers to the lowest register played on the clarinet. You don’t have to know Russell’s music to appreciate the celebratory spirit in Balliett’s words and the larger statement he is making about art and artists. Russell was an eccentric – that is, he worked away from the center. It’s easy to laud artists for their putative eccentricity, when too often it’s merely calculated attention-seeking --  a trombonist making fart sounds with his horn or a poet scorning punctuation and capital letters. The latter example suggests that willful eccentricity can soon become trite. Balliett might have written a similar description of Lester Young or Thelonious Monk. The latter never sounds as though he’s the “wild and crazy” guy at the party. Listen to “Blue Monk,” in which Russell joins Monk at the 1963 Newport Festival.

 

Being gifted and eccentric is rare. Who are the Pee Wee Russells of literature? The first writer who comes to mind is the English novelist Henry Green. Perhaps Max Beerbohm. Marianne Moore. Laurence Sterne. There’s much to be said in favor of such writers, but theirs is an unlikely and difficult way to produce first-rate work, and imitating them is fatal.

'As Glorious As Ever'

A reader in Texas tipped me to Michael Dirda’s column in Wednesday’s Washington Post. He was in Portland, Ore., to see family, and visited Powell’s Books. When we lived near Seattle, we made two trips to Portland, spending hours with the boys in Powell’s. From my desk I can see the copy of Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island I bought there. My reader is right on the money: 

“Although [Dirda] knows world literature, comparative lit etc., he tends too much toward genre. But I like to catch those moments when his and my interests coincide.”

 

Those may be the kindest words ever uttered regarding a critic or reviewer. We were without electricity for more than nineteen hours on Tuesday and Wednesday as the result of a thunderstorm. Plenty of time to read, little time to write. Dirda’s headline is a keeper:

 

“An afternoon inside a bookstore was as glorious as ever. Here’s what I bought.”

'Without My Being at All Prepared for It'

Occasionally I jump ahead to the death-bed scene when reading a biography, the way some people, incapable of waiting to learn whodunit, cut to the final page of a mystery. In real life, there’s only one denouement. It’s the quality of the ending that interests me; not whether the subject dies but how. 

Consider Dr. Johnson’s death at age seventy-five, with its mingling of grotesquery and nobility. In his final months, he suffered from general circulatory disease, made evident six months earlier by a stroke; chronic bronchitis and emphysema, accompanied by growing breathlessness; congestive heart failure, the cause of Johnson’s fluid retention; and rheumatoid arthritis. His friend and biographer Sir John Hawkins reports Johnson’s final coherent words were Iam moriturus (“I who am about to die”), an echo of the gladiators’ salute to Caesar: “Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant.” Dying is often sloppy and undignified.

 

Now think of Johnson’s other friend and biographer, James Boswell. A lifetime of drinking and whoring, including recurrent cases of gonorrhea more than a century and a half before penicillin, left Boswell a wreck. In December 1795, while staying at Auchinleck, his family estate in Scotland, he wrote a verse, “Pathetic Song,” that suggests his mood. It includes these lines: “’Tis o’er, ’tis o’er, the dream is o’er, / And life’s delusion is no more.” Boswell returned to London and, as reported by Peter Martin in his 1999 biography:

 

“[H]e threw himself with abandon into what life still had to offer him there. He drank heavily, seemingly without a thought for the morrow . . . He drank so much wine and brandy that it became common gossip.”

 

On April 14, at a meeting of the Club, Boswell was stricken with a fever, headache and upset stomach. His kidneys were failing. He suffered from uremia brought on by chronic urinary tract infections. The pain was constant and severe. He was unable to read or write. On May 18, when he asked to be taken out of bed, Boswell fainted. The doctors could do nothing. He died early the next morning on this date, May 19, in his London apartment on Great Portland Street. His friend, the Shakespeare scholar Edmond Malone wrote in a letter two days later:

 

“I shall miss him more and more every day. He was in the constant habit of calling upon me almost daily, and I used to grumble sometimes at his turbulence; but now miss and regret his noise and his hilarity and his perpetual good humour, which had no bounds. Poor fellow, he has somehow stolen away from us without any notice, and without my being at all prepared for it.”

 

Boswell lead a reckless, self-destructive life and lived long enough to write the greatest biography in the language.

'No More Obnoxious and Pestiferous Idiot'

The adjective pestiferous might have been coined by if not for H.L. Mencken. Understandably, he relished the word. It has an elevated, finicky, pompous sound. One can imagine W.C. Fields pronouncing it. On this date, May 18, in 1910, Mencken published an article in the Baltimore Evening Sun headlined “The Pestiferous Fly,” which is little more than a public service announcement from the American Civic Association of Washington. Or is this Mencken’s parody of condescending do-gooder-ism, a prescient subverting of the nannyism of our own age? Among the “Six Important Don’ts” reported are: 

“Don’t have feeding places where flies can load themselves with ejections from typhoid or dysenteric patients.”

 

“Don’t allow your fruits and confections to be exposed to the swarms of flies.”

 

“Don’t let flies crawl over the baby’s mouth and swarm upon the nipple of its nursing bottle.”

 

The assumption behind such warnings is that people are mush-headed defectives, too dumb to take common-sense sanitation measures. In “A Boon to Bores,” Mencken’s 1922 assault on the telephone,” he writes: “There is in the whole world no more obnoxious and pestiferous idiot, no more villainous enemy of civilized decency and quiet, than the modern telephonomaniac.” In “The Life of Man” (Prejudices: Third Series, 1922), Mencken turns his scorn species-wide: “[M]an is a local disease of the cosmos—a kind of pestiferous eczema or urethritis.”

 

Pestiferous predates Mencken by more than three centuries, The OED’s first citation is from the fifteenth century. The primary meaning has become “morally or socially harmful; pernicious,” including a usage by Joseph Conrad (a Mencken favorite) in his 1909 story “The Secret Sharer”: “I knew well enough the pestiferous danger of such a character where there are no means of legal repression.”

 

Subsequent definitions include “bringing or producing plague, esp. bubonic plague; injurious to health, noxious, deadly; pestilent, pestilential,” “infected with a contagious disease, esp. bubonic plague,” and “of an organism, esp. an insect: harmful, destructive.”

 

The OED does not site a favorite usage of pestiferous, from Chap. XI of Bleak House, in Dickens’ description of Nemo’s graveyard: "a hemmed-in church-yard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who are not departed . . .”

'Also They Think All Patients Are Idiots'

I bought The Habit of Being, the collection of Flannery O’Connor’s letters edited by Sally Fitzgerald, when it was published in 1979 – hardcover, first edition. I found myself reading the letters more often than her stories and novels. My practice with Keats is similar, reading his correspondence more than his poetry. Partly that’s because I read prose the way a prose writer does – with attentiveness, eyes open for tricks of the trade. Poetry gives pleasure, and it can suggest ways to handle words in prose, but I’m not a member of that guild. Like most people, including most poets, I will never be able to write even mediocre poetry. Prose feels like home. I accept that I am, after all these years of denial, prosaic. 

About five years later I was working in Indiana and had a friend whose wife had been diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus, the disease that killed O’Connor in 1964 at age thirty-nine. She was about thirty years old, strong and confident, with a young daughter, but finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with mundane demands. She was always in pain but seldom complained, though you could see it in her face. Her husband had epilepsy, resulting in a medical discharge from the Army. These people were proud and tried to be self-reliant but needed a lot of help. The wife was not a bookish person but I thought O’Connor’s story might interest her so I loaned her my copy of The Habit of Being and never saw it again. I moved to upstate New York in 1985 and lost touch with them. Thinking of O’Connor always carries with it a conjoined memory of Kathy and Jim. I replaced the hardback with a paperback edition a long time ago.

 

Among O’Connor’s correspondents was Elizabeth Fenwick Way, a mystery writer she met at Yaddo in 1948. Fenwick was also diagnosed with lupus, a milder form of the disease. Though nine years older than O’Connor, Fenwick outlived her by thirty-two years. In a letter written to Fenwick on this date, May 17, in 1961, O’Connor suggests she ask her doctor to prescribe chloroquine – a drug recently in the news. The most refreshing thing about O’Connor is her brusque common sense. She is funny about things other people treat solemnly, and vice versa. To Fenwick she writes:

 

“Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren’t is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.”

'In a Room the Hubbub Comes Back'

 “I seem too deaf to see what I read.” 

Removed from its original comic context, the observation says something important about reading. Just as I read aloud as I’m writing – yes, under my breath – so too do I read aloud anything worth reading, whether Keats or Joseph Epstein. A good writer works hard on the sound of his words; a polite reader listens carefully.

 

Charles Lamb is writing on this date, May 16, in 1826, in a letter to his Quaker friend Bernard Barton. After getting his customary Friends jokes out of the way, Lamb moves on – jokingly – to his growing deafness: “In the street, with the blended noises of life about me, I hear, and my head is lightened, but in a room the hubbub comes back, and I am deaf as a Sinner.” Anyone with incremental hearing loss will sympathize. The good thing about losing your hearing (I’ve had two surgeries on my left ear, to no avail) is that it renders so much boring conversation nonsensically surreal. You guess, usually incorrectly, at what the others are trying to say, substituting other words: “Weenie big blasts? Coats.” I still don’t know what that was all about. Lamb goes on:

 

“Did I tell you of a pleasant sketch [Thomas] Hood has done, which he calls Very Deaf Indeed? It is of a good naturd [sic] stupid looking old gentleman, whom a footpad has stopt, but for his extreme deafness cannot make him understand what he wants; the unconscious old gentleman is extending his ear-trumpet very complacently, and the fellow is firing a pistol into it to make him hear, but the ball will pierce his skull sooner than the report reach his sensorium.”   

'Not Unfrequented By the Devil'

“It was a sort of flat paradise; but, I am afraid, not unfrequented by the devil.”

 

We seem to like irregularities in our landscapes. We mock flatness and flock to mountains and mere hills. I grew up in Cleveland, roughly twelve miles from Lake Erie, and never thought of it as flat, at some 600 feet above sea level. Only later, to the west, living in places like Bowling Green, Montpelier and Bellevue, did I get some idea what people meant when they complained about Midwestern, glacier-scraped flatness. Of course, that made the region attractive for agriculture. My university, previously an ag school, was partially surrounded by corn and soybean fields. The highest elevations in a nearby town were mountains of sugar beets. Turn south and that imperceptibly changes to modest hills. The highest elevation in Ohio is Campbell Hill, at 1,550 feet, in the West Central part of the state.    

 

Houston is so flat – roughly fifty feet above sea level – it’s perennially prone to flooding.

 

The sentence at the top is from the title essay in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Across the Plains (1892), which he subtitles “Leaves from the Notebook of an Emigrant Between New York and San Francisco.” Stevenson rides a westbound train and probably passed close to Cleveland:

 

“[M]orning found us far into Ohio. This had early been a favourite home of my imagination; I have played at being in Ohio by the week, and enjoyed some capital sport there with a dummy gun, my person being still unbreeched.”

 

It’s easy to forget how wildly Europeans in the nineteenth century romanticized the United States, even the Midwest. Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850. His prose has started to interest me. He continues:

 

“My preference was founded on a work which appeared in Cassell’s Family Paper [1853-1867], and was read aloud to me by my nurse.  It narrated the doings of one Custaloga, an Indian brave, who, in the last chapter, very obligingly washed the paint off his face and became Sir Reginald Somebody-or-other; a trick I never forgave him. The idea of a man being an Indian brave, and then giving that up to be a baronet, was one which my mind rejected. It offended verisimilitude, like the pretended anxiety of Robinson Crusoe and others to escape from uninhabited islands.”

 

No longer a boy, Stevenson finds a new sort  of wonder in the vast, flat Midwest:

 

“But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it. We were now on those great plains which stretch unbroken to the Rocky Mountains. The country was flat like Holland, but far from being dull. All through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, or for as much as I saw of them from the train and in my waking moments, it was rich and various, and breathed an elegance peculiar to itself.  The tall corn pleased the eye; the trees were graceful in themselves, and framed the plain into long, aërial vistas; and the clean, bright, gardened townships spoke of country fare and pleasant summer evenings on the stoop. It was a sort of flat paradise; but, I am afraid, not unfrequented by the devil.”

'Some Retro Wretch Who Writes in Rhyme'

Later this month, life-long North Carolinian Fred Chappell will turn eighty-five. He’s a rare writer who pivots from writing good novels – see his “Kirkman Tetralogy” – to turning out some of our funniest poems, though you’re unlikely to mistake him for a writer of “light verse.” See his four-volumes-in-one Midquest: A Poem (1981). Chappell taught for forty years at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He earned the right to mock the vanities of poets and academics, as he does in “The Sorrows of Intellectual Life” (2003, the year before Chappell retired), subtitled “freely imitated from the Seventh Satire of Juvenal.” The Roman poet’s theme is one of Dr. Johnson’s – the unreliability of patronage. No wonder Johnson wrote two imitations of Juvenal. Here is Chappell: 

“But don’t expect the envied Guggenheim

If you’re some retro wretch who writes in rhyme.

Those prizes go to New York poets who

For years have shagged each other black and blue.”

 

Like all the best comic writers, Chappell knows nothing is funnier or more hopeless than cold, bleak reality. He concludes the poem:

 

“Best stay as you are. Spend your vacation

Reading up the history of our nation.

Read Lincoln’s speeches and John Adams’ letters,

Peruse the thought of those who were our betters;

Memorize the feats of Washington;

Savor the freedoms our citizen-soldiers won;

Inform your students when our patriots died;

Hoard your pennies; pretend you’re satisfied.”

'Facetiously But With Respect'

Some of the things we think we know are wrong. Other things we know without knowing how we know them, which sometimes makes them wrong. And sometimes we don’t bother to ask enough questions. Take the familiar nickname given to Dr. Johnson: “the Great Cham.” What does that mean? Who gave it to him? What’s a “Cham”? Until this week I never asked. The OED is straightforward about cham: “An obsolete form of khan, formerly commonly applied to the rulers of the Tartars and Mongols; and to the emperor of China.” 

It entered English as early as the fifteenth century. Shakespeare used it in Much Ado About Nothing (1598). Modern synonyms might include “head honcho,” capo dei capi, “top dog,” El Jefe. So, who applied it to Johnson, and in what spirit? The answer is pleasing: the author of Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker, Tobias Smollett, who writes in a March 16, 1759 letter to John Wilkes:

 

“I am again your Petitioner in behalf of that Great Cham of Literature, Samuel Johnson. His Black Servant, whose name is Francis Barber, has been pressed on board the Stag Frigate, Capt. Angel, and our Lexicographer is in great distress. He says the Boy is a Sickly Lad of a delicate Frame, and particularly subject to a Malady in his Throat which renders him very unfit for his Majesty’s Service.”

 

Smollett’s appeal was successful, as Boswell reports in his Life of Johnson:

 

“Mr. Wilkes, who upon all occasions has acted, as a private gentleman, with most polite liberality, applied to his friend Sir George Hay, then one of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty; and Francis Barber was discharged, as he has told me, without any wish of his own. He found his old master in Chambers in the Inner Temple, and returned to his service.”

 

We know Smollett’s sobriquet for Johnson because Boswell dutifully transcribed the Scot’s letter to Wilkes. In his 1974 biography of Johnson, John Wain writes that Smollett applied the nickname “facetiously but with respect.” Smollett’s humor could be raucous and cruel, though not here. In 1964, Signet published a paperback edition of Roderick Random with an afterword by John Barth, whose eighteenth-century pastiche The Sot-Weed Factor had been published in 1960. He writes of Smollett’s novel:

 

“The novel’s humor is mainly of the bedroom-and-chamberpot variety, running especially to more or less sadistic and unimaginative practical jokes. Money and sex Roderick values—enough, at least, to fawn, bribe, intrigue, smuggle, seduce, deceive, dissemble, and defraud to have them—but what he really gets his kicks from is revenge.”

'A Good Name for What's All Over'

When our father died in 2005, my brother inherited the house on the West Side of Cleveland we had lived in as kids. I lived there from 1955 to 1970, when I left for college, and in some primal way – in dreams, in memory -- it remains “home.” About seven years ago, Ken sold it. During my last visit to Cleveland, in 2016, we drove by the house and it was a mess – trees and hedges chopped down, grass overgrown, windows patched with cardboard. A neighbor said squatters were living in the garage and the owners were dope dealers. Now I see the house and yard have been cleaned up and the realtors have posted a “virtual tour” of the interior. 

That too is jarring but in different ways. The carpets have been stripped to expose plank floors. I never knew we had so much knotty pine and I’d forgotten the fireplace my father built in 1964. In photo 3, I see the room we called “The Little Room” – it once held my mother’s clothes mangle -- has been painted Delft blue. My bedroom, in photo 16, is painted red like a New Orleans bordello. The place looks familiar, yet not. There’s no sense of outrage, of a fondly recalled place defiled. I’ve been away too long for that and I’m not by nature sticky-sentimental. Rather, the memories I associate with those rooms no longer match. There’s a sense of temporal dissonance. Two poets have described similar experiences. Eric Ormsby writes in “Childhood House” (Coastlines, 1992):

 

“Somehow I had assumed

That the past stood still, in perfected effigies of itself,

And that what we had once possessed remained our possession

Forever, and that at least the past, our past, our child-

Hood, waited, always available, at the touch of a nerve,

Did not deteriorate like the untended house of an

Aging mother, but stood in pristine perfection, as in

Our remembrance.”

 

The least sentimental of poets, Kingsley Amis, remembers a neighbor’s house in “Bobby Bailey” (Collected Poems 1944-1979, 1979):

 

“Of course. I know that, every year, some people

Simply get up and go

Too far for you to see, much less drop in on,

Less yet stay with. I know

 

“‘The past’ is a good name for what’s all over;

You can’t, in fact, return

To what isn’t a place. It does sound like an

Easy lesson to learn.”

'A Very Idiot, a Funge, a Golden Ass'

I’ve never been shy about using profanity in the proper setting and with the proper stimuli. Overuse mutes its impact. Even what used to be the big one in English has been enervated beyond recovery. Instead of shocking the listener, the word now suggests its user has a limited vocabulary and perhaps suffered a head injury. A friend and I used to tally the number of times the “f-word” was used in movies. The undisputed champ for a long time was Raging Bull, which scored bonus points for using the word as every known part of speech, including a preposition. Scorsese’s film now seems as gritty as a Jane Austen novel. 

We try to vary our vocabulary so as not to bore friends and ourselves. We stop hearing words repeated too often and can always use new, profanity-free synonyms for dolt, feeb, chowderhead and politician. A writer from half a millennium ago comes to our rescue. Three times in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton uses the seventeenth-century insult funge. French in origin, of course, it’s the root of our modern English word fungi – that is, yeasts, molds and mushrooms. The coinage is Burtons’s and no one else seems to have used it, which seems ungrateful. The first OED definition is “a mushroom or fungus,” last used in the eighteenth century. In Burton’s usage it means “a person lacking intelligence or common sense; a fool.”

 

The OED’s first citation can be found in the introductory “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” in which Burton writes: “How would our Democritus have been affected to see a wicked caitiff, or fool, a very idiot, a funge, a golden ass, a monster of man . . .”

 

Second: “When as indeed, in all wise men’s judgments they are mad, empty vessels, funges, beside themselves.”

 

And finally, most impressively of all, Burton catalogs the prices paid by dedicated drinkers:

 

“They drown their wits, seethe their brains in ale, consume their fortunes, lose their time, weaken their temperatures, contract filthy diseases, rheums, dropsies, calentures, tremors, get swollen jugulars, pimpled red faces, sore eyes, &c.; heat their livers, alter their complexions, spoil their stomachs, overthrow their bodies; for drink drowns more than the sea and all the rivers that flow into it (mere funges and casks) . . .”

[Dave Lull has recovered another funge I had missed: “Be not ashamed of thy birth then, thou art a gentleman all the world over, and shalt be honoured, when as he, strip him of his fine clothes, dispossess him of his wealth, is a funge . . .”]

'His Careful Attention to Fashion'

As usual when I'm looking looking for something else, I happened on something more interesting, a curious document titled Information Relative to the Appointment and Admission of Cadets to the United States Military Academy, West Point, N.Y. This edition was published in 1942, with the war already underway. In the “Validating Examinations” section is a sub-section titled “English Grammar, Composition, and Literature.” Take a look at what the U.S. Department of Defense considered essential knowledge for its future Army officers. In the multiple-choice section, applicants are given four options for identifying twenty book titles and authors, including:

 “Tale of a Tub: (1) a satire on religion (2) a travel story (3) the history of a glutton (4) on early navigation.”

 

“Moby Dick is a (1) detective story (2) whaling story (3) history of a drug addict (4) book of early experience in the form of an autobiography.”

 

“Essays of Elia was written by (1) Elia (2) Stevenson (3) Robert Benchley (4) Lamb [obviously, a trick question].”

 

“Samuel Johnson is known for his (1) early dictionary (2) his careful attention to fashion (3) his love lyrics (4) his French novels.”

 

Subsequent exercises are devoted to basic grammar. The final section calls for applicants to write an essay of at least three-hundred words on one of the following subjects:

 

“1. What I have gained from reading Shakespeare.

2. Why I have selected the Army as a career.

3. How the depression affected my home town.”

'This Made One of Them Thoughtful'

Were it possible to distill our last century into nineteen lines of blank verse and close it with a bitter, O. Henry-like denouement, it might be Anthony Hecht’s “The Ceremony of Innocence” (The Darkness and the Light, 2001): 

“He was taken from his cell, stripped, blindfolded,

And marched to a noisy room that smelled of sweat.

Someone stamped on his toes; his scream was stopped

By a lemon violently pushed between his teeth

And sealed with friction tape behind his head.

His arms were tied, the blindfold was removed

So he could see his tormentors, and they could see

The so-much-longed-for terror in his eyes.

And one of them said, ‘The best part of it all

Is that you won't even be able to pray.’

When they were done with him, two hours later,

They learned that they had murdered the wrong man

And this made one of them thoughtful. Some years after,

He quietly severed connections with the others

Moved to a different city, took holy orders,

And devoted himself to serving God and the poor,

While the intended victim continued to live

On a walled estate, sentried around the clock

By a youthful, cell phone-linked praetorian guard.”

 

Sound familiar? Readers of Koestler know the scene depicted in the opening lines, as do those familiar with the fates of Babel, Mandelstam and Bonhoeffer, among millions of others. Hecht gives his poem a title borrowed from Yeats. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” he suggests, as it was in 1919. Readers have complained that the poem’s ending seems tacked on, an after-thought of cheap irony. But isn’t human destiny capricious? Doesn’t it often strain credulity? Don’t bad people sometimes repent? Don’t the wrong people die every day?