'His Rambunctious Iconoclasm'

On this date in 1964, Thelonious Monk appeared on the cover of Time magazine. People then paid attention to such things. It was deemed an honor. Only five jazz musicians have been thus displayed. The previous year, Thomas Pynchon had published his first novel, V., in which the jazz saxophonist McClintic Sphere appears. The character is usually understood as a nod to Ornette Coleman, but it’s useful to remember that Monk’s middle name was Sphere -- “not Square,” he would explain. The Time editors may have chosen Monk for their cover as much for his oddness of manner and dress as for his music. When Monk died in 1982, Whitney Balliett wrote in The New Yorker:

 

“The pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, who died last week, at the age of sixty-four, was an utterly original man who liked to pretend he was an eccentric. Indeed, he used eccentricity as a shield to fend off a world that he frequently found alien, and even hostile. A tall, dark, bearish, inward-shining man, he wore odd hats and dark glasses with bamboo frames when he played.”

 

The distinction between originality and eccentricity is critical. The latter often implies affectation. Unforgivably, some critics and listeners patronized Monk.  

 

Today we look back and see 1964 as an ominously transitional time for popular music. During the week of February 29, the Billboard Top 100 found The Beatles holding the first and second spots, followed by the Four Seasons, Al Hirt, The Rivieras and The Beatles again at No. 6. For fourteen weeks starting that month, The Beatles held the No. 1 spot. On May 9, Louis Armstrong, age sixty-three, briefly interrupted their supremacy with “Hello, Dolly” -- not jazz but performed by one of its masters. Monk never hit the pop charts.

 

His playing was percussive and spare. He had more in common with Count Basie than Errol Garner – no filigree, no arabesques. He left plenty of space between notes and wasn’t afraid of a little dissonance. When Philip Larkin reviewed his album Criss Cross in March 1964, Philip Larkin praised his “frequent and impressive lacunae.” Monk once said there was no such thing as a wrong note – a recipe for disaster if followed by a mediocrity. Now we judge him one of the premiere jazz composers, up there with Morton, Ellington and Mingus. His songs are standards: “Round Midnight,” “Well, You Needn’t,” “Epistrophy,” "Crepescule with Nellie." In 1958, reviewing three albums by Monk, Balliett writes:

 

“His compositions—with their bristling discords, unexpected notes, and coded titles . . . are often no more than old blues, harmonically remodeled and infused with a melodic sense as original and lyric as Ellington’s. A diffident, evasive performer, whose feet sometimes flap about like fish while he plays, Monk invariably manages either to thoroughly imbue his co-workers with his rambunctious iconoclasm or, once in a while, to make them as awkward as wallflowers at their first dance.”

'What Exquisite Logodaedaly'

“ZOWIE!! Your botanical pastourelle of tumescence is so beautiful. What exquisite logodaedaly. What Danish for the breakfast of our readers.” 

James Laughlin is writing to Guy Davenport on December 21, 1985. Davenport had sent him the story “Wild Clover,” published in New Directions 50 the following year. “Your gifts reduce me to stuttering at the keys,” Laughlin writes. The story was retitled “The Meadow” and collected in Davenport’s The Jules Verne Steam Balloon (North Point Press, 1987). I remember buying the volume from a bookstore in Albany, N.Y., and starting to read it as soon as I got back to my car.

 

“Linguistic quibbles,” Laughlin continues in his letter. “I can’t find ‘gutulliocae’ in my Harvard-days dictionary. Is it so bad that they couldn’t put it in? All I could find is ‘gutus,’ a ‘small drop.’”

 

W.C. Bamberger, the editor of Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (W.W. Norton, 2007), tells us in a footnote that “gutulliocae” means “small, droplike spots.” I don’t find the word in the OED. The closest is guttus, a term from classical archaeology meaning “a narrow-necked cruet or oil-flask.” A citation from an archaeological dictionary seems to confirm Laughlin’s guess: “a vessel with a very narrow neck and mouth, by means of which liquids could be poured out drop by drop.” Davenport uses gutulliocae in a brief section of “The Meadow” titled “The Patrol”:

 

“Quark said in the old Latin, mama of Quirinus, chaster than Vesta, cunninger than Minerva. Hrff! said Sabina, et lactentes ficos et gutulliocae. Carissa! said Quark. I saw you playing with the frogs and crickets, pretending to dance and pounce, laughing all the while.”

 

That Davenport’s language mashup should feature a character named Quark is fitting. The word for a subatomic particle was coined by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who borrowed it from Finnegans Wake: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”

 

Laughlin’s use of logodaedaly is likewise inspired. The OED defines it as “cunning in words; skill in adorning a speech.” Coleridge used it in Aids to Reflection (1825): “For one instance of mere Logomachy I could bring ten instances of Logodædaly, or verbal Legerdemain.”

 

The prose in Davenport’s fiction is not to everyone’s liking – even mine, on occasion. It is never less than rich and musical, and must be read with patience and close attention. It is lapidary, an overused word but here appropriate. He sets individual words in place like stones in a mosaic. Davenport’s first book was The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz (Beacon Press, 1963), a selection from the writings of the Swiss-born American biologist and geologist, with a long introduction by Davenport (collected in The Geography of the Imagination, 1981). Interpolated into “The Meadow” are many Agassiz-like botanical and geological passages, such as the section titled “Landtong,” from a Dutch word meaning “spit of land” or “headland.” The story concerns three teenagers on a camping trip in the Dutch countryside. Their carryings-on alternate with passages of scientific observation:

 

“The feldspar and quartz pebbles derive from Precambrian gneisses or granites and the small fragments of tourmaline and garnets from crystalline schists. The general inference, therefore, from the pebbles is that the beds in which they occur were uncomformably related to certain precambrian gneisses and certain slates, limestones, and quartzites of Cambrian or Lower Silurian age.”

'All the Mess That Makes Up You'

For much of 1939, W.H. Auden worked on The Prolific and the Devourer, a collection of aphorisms and reflections he abandoned a few weeks after the Nazis invaded Poland from the west, around the time the Soviets were invading from the east. The full text wasn’t published until 1981, eight years after his death, and it reflects Auden’s thinking at a pivotal moment in his life. He would soon leave England for the United States and a lingering Marxist sympathy for Christianity. Already a world-class poet, Auden in his thirties was growing up: 

“There are many people, and they number some artists among them, who today seek in politics an escape from the unhappiness of their private lives, as once people sought refuge in the monastery and convent. Driven by envy and hatred they spread discomfort wherever they go and ruin everything they touch. A wise political party will have nothing to do with them.”

 

More than eighty years on, Auden might be describing our world, c. 2022. That politics has usurped religious faith and often become an expression of private pathology is inarguable. No one turns political because he is happy and wishes to share his good fortune. Politics is no longer about patching potholes. It’s about adolescent petulance. The alternatives appear to be fanaticism or impotence. The sixties left us a pernicious scrap of bumper-sticker wisdom -- “All politics is personal.” False on the face of it, our young century has made it come true in a different sense. In his final installment of The Adventurer, published on this date, February 26, in 1754, Dr. Johnson reminds us of human limitation:   

 

“The power, indeed, of every individual is small, and the consequence of his endeavours imperceptible, in a general prospect of the world. Providence has given no man ability to do much, that something might be left for every man to do. The business of life is carried on by a general co-operation; in which the part of any single man can be no more distinguished, than the effect of a particular drop when the meadows are floated by a summer shower: yet every drop increases the inundation, and every hand adds to the happiness or misery of mankind.”

 

We are modest creatures with immodest pretensions. We confuse our discontent with the world’s. In “Admonition for the Seventh Decade” (Love in Another Language, 2017), Dick Davis suggests we look inward and come to terms with ourselves before taking it out on the rest of humanity:

 

“All the bluster and conceit,

All the hare-brained indiscreet

Obfuscations and obsessions,

All the ludicrous confessions,

Put them by now, put them by,

Clean them out before you die.

 

“Even though you can’t undo

All the mess that makes up you,

Find a modicum of quiet;

Quash the long uncivil riot

That goes on inside your heart;

Clear the drunks out, make a start.”

'The Bare Perfume of Things'

A reader chose The Ambassadors (1903) as the first book by Henry James she would read. That may have been a mistake. I admire her spirit but understand her inability to finish reading it. She didn’t even make it to James’ Greatest Hit in Book V, Chap. 2, when Lambert Strether exhorts “little Bilham” in Gloriani’s garden to “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.” Late James rightly gets a lot of readerly and critical attention and praise, but his rhythms, narrative indirection, syntax and other stylistic convolutions can challenge even the most attentive readers. Auden had good reason to call him “Master of nuance and scruple” – hardly qualities prized by many readers.

 

James is a writer perhaps best read in roughly chronological order. The earlier novels – Daisy Miller (1878), Washington Square (1880) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881), for instance – pose few technical problems. Or try some of his early stories, especially “Madame de Mauves” (1878). All are accessible, emotionally powerful and entertaining. Even James’ beloved brother William, after reading The Golden Bowl (1904), urged Henry to “sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in the style.” William wanted Henry not to be Henry, at least in print.

 

Henry published The American Scene in 1907, based on his 1904-05 visit to the United States, his first in twenty years. On May 4, 1907, in a letter to his brother, William described the book as “in its peculiar way . . . supremely great.” Then he gets down to business:

 

“In this crowded and hurried reading age, pages that require such close attention remain unread and neglected. You can’t skip a word if you are to get the effect, and 19 out of 20 worthy readers grow intolerant. The method seems perverse: ‘Say it out, for God’s sake,’ they cry, ‘and have done with it.’ And so I say now, give us one thing in your older directer manner, just to show that, in spite of your paradoxical success in this unheard-of method, you can still write according to accepted canons. Give us that interlude; and then continue like the ‘curiosity of literature’ which you have become. For gleams and innuendoes and felicitous verbal insinuations you are unapproachable, but the core of literature is solid. Give it to us once again! The bare perfume of things will not support existence, and the effect of solidity you reach is but perfume and simulacrum.”

William, of course, speaks for many readers, though Henry stayed the course and never gave up on “the bare perfume of things.”

'Resolutely Unsentimental, Ebulliently Grim'

Joseph Epstein once wrote that he relies on three writers to “lift one out of gloom, and away from the valley of small and large woes” – Montaigne, Justice Holmes (in his letters) and H.L. Mencken. I’ve tested his proposition and it works. What an odd trio, separated by three centuries. The Frenchman dispels gloom with his fortitude (kidney stones!) and his counterintuitive gift for being self-absorbed while not being egotistical. Holmes was able to draw humor and literary insights even out of that Leftist twit Harold Laski. And Mencken was a force of nature, crafting some of the finest American prose. 

But just when I’m falling for Mencken again he'll say something foolish, embarrassing or repellent. I read him for the same reason my sons consume energy drinks – that boost, that reminder that life is an unearned treat to be savored. And yet at one point, while praising the Hebrew Bible, Mencken will describe Jews as “the most unpleasant race ever heard of.” That’s blind, brain-damaged stupidity, unworthy of Mencken at his best. Though with him, of course, fairness is seldom the point. Harsh, cleansing humor is. I laugh when he describes Mississippi as part of the “Hookworm Belt” and North Carolina as situated in the “Malaria Belt.” The latter I tested on a native North Carolinian among our neighbors, and he hooted approvingly. One brandishes this as evidence that perhaps ours is not the most earnestly humorless of ages. William Hazlitt got it right in his introduction to Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819):

 

“You cannot force people to laugh: you cannot give a reason why they should laugh: they must laugh of themselves, or not at all. As we laugh from a spontaneous impulse, we laugh the more at any restraint upon this impulse. We laugh at a thing merely because we ought not.”

Mencken’s on my mind again because I’m rereading the late Terry Teachout’s The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (HarperCollins, 2002). Terry echoes my ambivalent reactions to Mencken’s prolific body of work, so much of which is wonderful – in particular the three volumes of memoir and The American Language. Terry praises the latter’s “quirkiness”:

 

“Rarely has a scholar, amateur or otherwise, succeeded in writing a book so revealing of his own habits of mind—and so blessedly free of pedantry—without compromising his essential seriousness.”

 

Terry puts Mencken in perspective by holding him up against Dr. Johnson, a writer he esteemed perhaps above all others. He concedes “a fundamental inadequacy in Mencken’s thought: a skepticism so extreme as to issue in philosophical incoherence.” Terry juxtaposes the two men:

 

“Like Johnson, Mencken was resolutely unsentimental, ebulliently grim, full of the sanity that comes from an unswerving commitment to common sense. But for Johnson ‘the mind can only repose on the stability of truth,’ while Mencken found nothing to be ‘wholly good, wholly desirable, wholly true.’ This unequivocal rejection of the possibility of ultimate truth, a position irreconcilable with his scientific rationalism, left him with nothing but a concept of ‘honor’ as shallow as the Victorian idea of progress in which he believed so firmly (and so paradoxically).”

 

People seem increasingly uncomfortable with our essentially contradictory nature. That’s no reason to deny yourself the pleasures of Mencken’s company and reject his enduring ability to “lift one out of gloom.”

'Where Be His Quiddits Now'

Hamlet is the least sympathetic character in the major plays, the prototype of every entitled, scolding, overeducated prig with a Twitter account. I root for Polonius, though in Act V, Scene 1, Hamlet almost redeems himself. It begins with two clowns digging Ophelia’s grave and arguing the finer points of Christian burial for a suicide. Their mock-erudition leads to the posing of a riddle: 

First Clown: “What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?”

 

Second Clown: “The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.”

 

A suitable introduction for the death-haunted arrival of Hamlet and Horatio. The First Clown uncovers the first of many skulls and throws it from the grave. The scene is made for broad, grim, Beckett-like humor. Hamlet speculates on the identity of the previous occupant of the skull:

 

“That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once: how the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain’s jaw-bone, that did the first murder! It might be the pate of a politician, which this ass now o'er-reaches; one that would circumvent God, might it not?”

 

Another skull is unearthed, giving Hamlet the chance to again display his witty eloquence:

 

“There's another. Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? Why does he suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery? Hum! This fellow might be in’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries. Is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? Will his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double ones too, than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The very conveyances of his lands will scarcely lie in this box; and must th’ inheritor himself have no more, ha?”

 

I love these comic riffs; in this case, playing on legalese. I realized I wasn’t sure about quiddits, though I assumed it was related to the old Scholastic notion of quiddity – whatness. In his Dictionary, Johnson defines quiddit as “a subtilty; an equivocation. A low word.” Johnson also gives us the related word, quillet: “subtilty; nicety; fraudulent distinction.” The popular sense that lawyers are sophists playing with words has a long history. Robert Browning uses quiddit and rather tackily rhymes it in the twentieth stanza of “Old Pictures In Florence”:

 

“Give these, I exhort you, their guerdon and glory

For daring so much, before they well did it.

The first of the new, in our race’s story,

Beats the last of the old; ’tis no idle quiddit.”

 

Soon comes the scene everyone’s waiting for. Hamlet gazes at the skull of Yorick, the king’s jester when the prince was a boy. I always liked that Olivier turns his head when speaking to Horatio. He smiles. That little touch always gets me. Other actors never take their eyes off Yorick's skull, but Hamlet loses me again when he and Laertes engage in a grief competition.

'Art Is No Excuse for Boring People'

One sort of interesting writer is an amateur with professional standards. He is an amateur in the etymological sense, writing out of love, and a professional by being painstaking and ruthless, indifferent to fashion and the market, ready to revise. To cite some out-of-the-way examples: Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Aldo Buzzi, J.V. Cunningham, Lev Shestov. To them I would add the name of Jules Renard, born on this date in 1864, in Châlons-du-Maine in northwestern France. He had a miserable childhood, virtually a writer’s prerequisite in the nineteenth century. His father didn’t speak to his mother for thirty years. Such experiences fueled his best-known book in France -- Poil de carotte (1894), or Carrot Top. The rest of us read his journal, kept from 1894 until shortly before his death in 1910 -- 1,200 pages in the Pléiade edition.

For more than half a century, we relied on The Journal of Jules Renard, translated by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, and published in 1964. Now we have Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020). Renard alerts readers to the sort of man he is: “Happy people have no talent.” He is a natural-born contrarian, but no depressive. His sense of dissent is ebullient. His charm is harshness tempered by wit. He has a country man’s pragmatic sense deployed in the big city.  

Renard has an eye and a carefully calibrated whimsical sense: “Goldfinches, dressed like jockeys” and “A sonnet. Fourteen lines in search of one idea.” And this, from April 7, 1894:

 

“To get rid of flies, take off all your clothes and coat yourself head to toe with a gluttonous liquid, mixed with a little honey or sprinkled with sugar, then take a slow walk around your bedroom. The flies flock to you, they stick to your skin, you can pick them off at your leisure. As a procedure it may lack elegance, but is infallible.”

 

Here he confirms one of my oldest convictions: “Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.” And again: “The indignation of satire is unnecessary. It is enough to show things as they are. They are ridiculous enough of themselves.”

 

As the journal proceeds, thoughts of death and dying, without morbidity, grow more frequent. In January 1902 he writes: “I never ask for news about those who are absent: I assume they are dead.” And two days later: “Please, God, don’t make me die too quickly! I shouldn’t mind seeing how I die.” And the linkage of writing and dying:

 

“What is needed is to pick up the pen, rule the paper, patiently fill the lines. The strong do not hesitate. They settle in, they sweat it out, they keep going to the end. They run out of ink, they use up all the paper.”

 

A lesson every writer should memorize: “Keep their interest! Keep their interest! Art is no excuse for boring people.”

 

Don Colacho might be thinking of Renard and other amateur professionals when he writes: “Admiring only mediocre works, or reading only masterpieces, characterize the uncultivated reader.” No one would mistake Renard for a mediocrity or genius. He is something more valuable -- excellent company.

'That Sense of Mystery'

Di Nguyen at the little white attic has suggested I visit a literary blog, Argumentative Old Git, tended by Himadri Chatterjee, who seems like a sensible fellow. In his Sunday post, “What I look for in fiction,” Chatterjee begins by asking: “Why do we like what we like?” Origins and motivations are often of interest, though ineffable. When I interview engineering students and faculty, I eventually get around to inquiring after the source of their attraction to computational mathematics or mechanical engineering. Some answers are revealing, others inarticulate and tedious. 

Chatterjee concludes: “I tried thinking of the novels and plays and short stories that I most love, but couldn’t really find any distinct pattern emerging.” My conclusion exactly. Critics often seek grand unified theories to explain such things, but most of us are more complicated and less consistent than that. Plus, we’re too busy reading. I love the work of Italo Svevo and Giovanni Varga. Where’s the commonality, besides both being Italian? To muddy things further, Varga was translated and championed by D.H. Lawrence, a writer Chatterjee admires and I detest. We can’t take offense at differences in taste. De gustibus . . .    

 

Next, Chatterjee asks a promising question, one likely to prove more amusing: “What don’t I look for in fiction? Or, in other words, what turns me off?” Again, he’s right on the money: he has no use for “representative narratives” – an ugly coinage stinking of academia. Not once in my reading life have I said to myself: “I think I’ll read a book by a Bulgarian. Or a Sikh. Or a quadriplegic.” Good fiction specializes in the human and transcends mere demographics. As Chatterjee puts it:

 

“Whatever the background of the character, whatever minority or majority they may belong to, however marginalised or centralised they may be, each character is, and should be depicted as, an individual. I find I have little time for ‘representative voices’. I certainly haven’t encountered any voice in fiction resembling my own, and neither would I want to: for one thing, I’d be too embarrassed.”

 

We read to self-forget. In my non-reading life I’m already too self-centered. I don’t go looking for me in novels, though that's the dogma foisted on kids in school. Chatterjee’s paragraph beginning “One finds one’s common humanity” is especially good. I differ with him when he writes: “Of course, childhood influences are important: what is impressed upon the mind when that mind hasn’t yet hardened remains for the rest of one’s life.” That’s the case with a handful of books I first read as a kid – Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, The Pilgrim’s Progress (about which Chatterjee agrees), Kim. But I also read a lot of crap, even science fiction, and I put away those childish things a long time ago and blessedly forgot them.

 

Obviously, Chatterjee is a practiced, commonsensical reader. I value experience over theory, and he avoids all the fashionable arguments and jargon. See what he has to say about George Eliot and Dickens, which is basically the opposite of my own judgment. Too much fiction comes packaged with a pre-fabricated explanation – the dreaded “message.” He writes:

 

“Human emotions point to a human mystery, and each human being is a profound mystery: the works I tend to respond to most keenly are those that confront me with that sense of mystery.”

 

Thanks, Di, for introducing me to Chatterjee. It’s always gratifying to read a grownup. He concludes his post:

 

“In any dispassionate view, we humans are really quite absurd beings: farting, puking, nose-picking creatures, with mean thoughts and often meaner acts. Even our transgressions tend not to be so great: small and petty – that’s all we are. And yet, by some mighty paradox, we are, nonetheless, in that old phrase that Shaw uses, temples of the Holy Ghost. And the religious imagery of that expression no longer embarrasses me as it might have done in my younger days. The literature that means most to me is that which attempts, at least, to confront and to depict this great mystery.”

'Tell Me That I Have to Die'

Too many deaths and near-deaths of late. What a silly thing to say, as though the cessation of life should be evenly distributed according to some algorithm of happiness. Consider a friend, a former newspaper colleague in upstate New York. Her first marriage ended in divorce – a sort of death. Her second husband, a friend of mine, died miserably of multiple sclerosis more than twenty years ago. She thought she had lost her third husband last weekend – diabetes, multiple coronary and circulatory problems, massive nose bleeds, a premature release from the hospital. 

W.H. Auden’s father, Dr. George Auden, was a physician, and he often expressed interest in medicine and respect for good doctors. In the posthumously published Thank You, Fog (1974), in a section titled “Shorts,” Auden offers his comic vision of the ideal physician:

 

“Give me a doctor partridge-plump,

Short in the leg and broad in the rump,

An endomorph with gentle hands

Who'll never make absurd demands

That I abandon all my vices

Nor pull a long face in a crisis,

But with a twinkle in his eye

Will tell me that I have to die.”  

 

Bluntness, when honest and well-informed, is never hurtful. I’ve had too many doctors who euphemize and pussy-foot and deliver what they think are pep talks, which leave me feeling worse. I once had a Syrian cardiologist with whom I could discuss Shakespeare (“that in Aleppo once . . .”). I actually looked forward to seeing him. He never patronized me. In 1969, Auden published “The Art of Healing,” dedicated to his recently dead personal physician and friend, Dr. David Protetch. In the ninth stanza he writes:

 

“For my small ailments

you, who were mortally sick,

prescribed with success:

my major vices,

my mad addictions, you left

to my own conscience.”

 

I want treatment suggested, not mandated. His touch must be simultaneously light and authoritative – one of several reasons why I prefer nurses to doctors. Under the entry for “Medicine” in A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970),  Auden writes:

 

“I can remember my father, who was a physician, quoting to me when I was a young boy an aphorism by Sir William Osler: ‘Care more for the individual patient than for the special features of his disease.’ In other words, a doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist.”

'Lacking Vitality They Remain Mediocre'

A reader complains that I indulge in “hero-worship.” Specifically, she cites Dr. Johnson and Nabokov. Her accusation is about half right. I have never worshipped a human being. Something about that sounds blasphemous and swoonily embarrassing. But I’ve always had heroes. Such behavior is held in contempt today. Kneejerk cynicism reduces everyone, if examined closely enough, to a shmuck. 

So, who are my heroes? Certainly the two guys mentioned above. Abraham Lincoln, Louis Armstrong, Yvor Winters, A.J. Liebling, Whittaker Chambers. None was infallible. All had failings, weaknesses. All could be, on occasion, difficult. Johnson, Lincoln and Armstrong had unpromising origins and overcame them, suggesting the old-fashioned virtues – perseverance, fortitude, dedication, discipline, a willingness to work hard. Nabokov came from one of the wealthiest families in Russia, and lost it all. A royalist killed his father, the Nazis killed his brother. Chambers was a Communist – until he wasn’t.

 

Willa Cather was never too sophisticated to be without a hero. On this date, February 19, in 1942, she sends her brother Roscoe “a very jolly book” – I Was Winston Churchill’s Private Secretary (1941) by Phyllis Moir. In her letter she writes:

 

“You know I am by nature rather given to hero-worship, and I haven’t had a real hero for a long time until Winston came along. I have been his devout admirer ever since I read his great life of Marlborough, in five huge volumes. It is certainly the finest biography or historical work that has appeared in my lifetime. I consider him simply the best living English writer. The great writers must have great vitality. They can have nearly every other gift, but lacking vitality they remain mediocre.”

'The Crisply Empirical, Immediately Accessible Tone'

Since his death in January I’ve been incrementally rereading Terry Teachout’s books and realizing that while he was alive I too readily categorized him as a nice guy with whom I enjoyed exchanging thoughts – not the shabbiest of verdicts. True, as an online acquaintance I met in person only once, he was reliably friendly and encouraging. He enjoyed sharing his gift for enjoyment. 

Seven or eight summers ago when my middle son, a trombonist, was attending a jazz clinic in Houston, I sent Terry a photo of Michael and the other band members giving an outdoor concert. He congratulated me on having a musically gifted son – the name Jack Teagarden came up – but seemed happiest with the fact that my son was the only white kid in a group of twenty or so young musicians. The others were black. Terry found encouragement in that – something that hadn’t occurred to me. Though created more than a century ago by blacks, the music’s audience today is largely white. Leave it to Terry to find an unexpected reason to be cheerfully optimistic.

 

Now that the man is gone, his books and other writings must speak for him, and I’m realizing how unpretentiously smart and learned this guy was. We’ve grown accustomed to criticism having been shanghaied by academics more interested in self-promotion than in championing the best in books, movies, music and painting. Dreary provocation has usurped pleasure.

 

My favorite among Terry’s books is probably The Terry Teachout Reader (Yale University Press, 2004). I remember buying it at Borders back in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., soon after it was published. It bears my favorite book cover illustration of all time – Fairfield Porter’s Broadway (1972). Terry was a smalltown kid from Missouri who fell in love with New York City after moving there in 1985. On the left Porter includes a sign hanging in front of a business, “Typewriters Ideal,” which Terry must have found pleasingly affirming.

 

The Reader collects more than fifteen years’ worth of essays, articles and reviews first published in newspapers and magazines. Terry possessed a hyper-sensitivity to the past – his own and the world’s – while consciously working to fend off nostalgia, that opium of the aging. In his “Introduction: Across the Great Divide,” he notes that since his career in journalism had started, “the world of my childhood disappeared, and America crossed a great cultural and technological divide.” So his collection of pieces, written under editorial and deadline constraints, may serve as “a chronicle, a road map of how we got from there to here, and what we lost – and gained – in the process.” He goes on to acknowledge he (like me) grew up in what he calls “the Age of the Middlebrow, that earnest, self-improving fellow who watched prime-time documentaries and read the Book of the Month.” Terry was among the least snobbish of critics. He reveled in American art without being a jingoist. I don’t remember anything Terry had to say about Marcel Proust but I do remember his love for James Gould Cozzens’ great novel Guard of Honor:

 

“[T]ime and again I find myself returning to the work of those artists who spoke in the crisply empirical, immediately accessible tone of voice now acknowledged by the whole world as all-American. Louis Armstrong, Budd Boetticher, Willa Cather, Raymond Chandler, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, Chuck Jones, Bill Monroe, Fairfield Porter, Dawn Powell, Frank Sinatra, Stephen Sondheim, Paul Taylor, Tom Wolfe: surely these and other like them rank high among our exemplary figures, the ones whose work is indelibly stamped ‘Made in U.S.A.’”

'A Kind of Punctiliousness'

When eccentric entered the language in the sixteenth century its uses were scientific. Consider the etymology: out from + center. It was the opposite of concentric; thus, two circles not sharing a common central point. It showed up in geometry, astronomy and mechanics. Shakespeare never used it. Another two centuries would pass before the modern, figurative sense emerged. In his Dictionary (1755), Dr. Johnson’s first definition is “deviating from the center.” In a word-association test today, likely responses to the noun form would be oddball or weirdo. 

An eccentric is not an iconoclast, rebel or anti-bourgeois hipster. We can think of their behavior as affected eccentricity, put on like a costume. Eccentrics are eccentric not because they revel in that designation but because that’s the way they are. Thoreau, for example, was not an eccentric. He was a Harvard graduate, a pampered snob contemptuous of people who merely worked for a living. American writers are not a notably eccentric bunch. I can see someone arguing that Henry James was a legitimate eccentric, a priest of prose who never married, had no children and lived almost exclusively to write.

 

The Promised Land of eccentricity was England, particularly in the nineteenth century. It nurtured oddballs. Among writers, consider Sydney Smith, Blake, Lamb, Ruskin and Beerbohm. As the inclusion of some of the names on that list makes clear, the membrane separating eccentricity from pathology can be highly permeable. Eccentricity is a genus not a species. Try Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics (1933) for an eccentric treatment of the subject.

 

One way to gauge the desirability of a society, its health, is to observe how it treats eccentrics. We’re hard on them today. Often, genuine eccentricity in thinking and behavior is barely tolerated. The private realm is shrinking. In England: An Elegy (2001), Sir Roger Scruton writes:

 

“Privacy engenders eccentricity, and the English were famous eccentrics. In every city of the world people dress and behave crazily; they show off, play the fool, disguise themselves with masks and affectations. English eccentricity, however, was the opposite of showing off, and quite without theatrical intentions. It was in fact a kind of punctiliousness.”

'I Will Complain, Yet Praise'

Seven years ago, the late Helen Pinkerton gave me her copy of The Poetical Works of George Herbert. The volume is heavier than it appears, bound in brown leather, scuffed but still sturdy. It has marbled endpapers, fore-edge, top and foot, and its cover and spine are stamped with gold. No foxing is apparent. It was published by D. Appleton & Co., New York, in 1854. Helen signed her name and the date: “Helen A. Pinkerton 12-1945.” In her note to me she wrote: 

“Going through my books of poetry, I came upon an old favorite, one of the earliest books I acquired when I began at Stanford in 1944-45. . . . I bought it just at the end of my second year at Stanford, probably at a bookstore in Palo Alto. There were quite a few excellent stores at that time. That I spent my hard-earned money on Herbert tells me that I must have already had contact with [Yvor] Winters and was exploring his favorite poets.”

 

I have more modern editions of Herbert, including a handy pocket-sized hardcover from Oxford University Press, but for reasons historical and sentimental I rely on Helen’s student text. There are no underlinings or marginalia, though she has checked in pencil certain poems in the table of contents, including “Church Monuments.” Winters ranked it among the finest in the language. In a letter written April 19, 1958, to Allen Tate (ed. R.L. Barth, The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, 2000), he says: “This is the only great poem that Herbert wrote. In his other poems there is a kind of childish pietism which is very hard to take. This poem is absolutely serious; it would appear to come from another hand.” A poem not checked by Helen or singled out for comment by Winters, “Bitter-sweet,” drew my attention this time:

 

“Ah my deare angrie Lord,

Since thou dost love, yet strike;

Cast down, yet help afford;

Sure I will do the like.

 

“I will complain, yet praise;

I will bewail, approve:

And all my sowre-sweet dayes

I will lament, and love.”

 

God loves, yet punishes – in a seemingly oxymoronic coupling of words, “deare angrie.” Divine attributes mirrored in humans, with a twist: “I will complain, yet praise.” That line grabbed me. It’s easy and even fashionable to complain: just listen. The gift is to recognize human failure, even evil, while remaining grateful and giving thanks. “Bitter-sweet” and other poems by Herbert reminded me of one by the late Richard Wilbur, “Praise in Summer,” from his first collection, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947):

 

“Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,

As sometimes summer calls us all, I said

The hills are heavens full of branching ways

Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;

I said the trees are mines in air, I said

See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!

And then I wondered why this mad instead

Perverts our praise to uncreation, why

Such savor’s in this wrenching things awry.

Does sense so stale that it must needs derange

The world to know it? To a praiseful eye

Should it not be enough of fresh and strange

That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,

And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?”

'The Same Indignant and Sarcastical Mode'

One of my favorites among the conversations recounted by James Boswell occurs on this date, February 15, in 1766. Boswell has just returned from the Continent after his three-year Grand Tour, ostensibly studying law at Utrecht, more often dallying with a Dutch girl and celebrity-gawking at Rousseau and Voltaire. Boswell and Dr. Johnson are meeting at the Mitre Tavern, renewing the unlikely pair’s friendship that had started in May 1763.

BOSWELL: “I having mentioned that I had passed some time with Rousseau in his wild retreat, and having quoted some remark made by Mr. [John] Wilkes, with whom I had spent many pleasant hours in Italy.” Johnson replies (“sarcastically”): “It seems, Sir, you have kept very good company abroad, Rousseau and Wilkes!”

 

BOSWELL:  “My dear Sir, you don’t call Rousseau bad company. Do you really think HIM a bad man?”

 

JOHNSON. “Sir, if you are talking jestingly of this, I don’t talk with you. If you mean to be serious, I think him one of the worst of men; a rascal who ought to be hunted out of society, as he has been. Three or four nations have expelled him; and it is a shame that he is protected in this country.”

 

Here, Boswell feebly argues that Rousseau’s intentions were good, a line of reasoning mustered to defend Lenin and other criminals. Johnson replies:

 

“Sir, that will not do. We cannot prove any man’s intention to be bad. You may shoot a man through the head, and say you intended to miss him; but the Judge will order you to be hanged. An alleged want of intention, when evil is committed, will not be allowed in a court of justice. Rousseau, Sir, is a very bad man. I would sooner sign a sentence for his [penal] transportation, than that of any felon who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have him work in the plantations.”

 

When Boswell asks if Rousseau is as bad as Voltaire, Johnson observes: “Why, Sir, it is difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them.” I find Johnson’s argument definitive, though Flann O’Brien supplied an equally convincing refutation. Was Boswell merely baiting his friend, hoping to elicit good copy for his biography? Hard to say, though he may have been perfectly sincere. Boswell was a lawyer and enjoyed arguing. Though the greatest of biographers, his mind was at once less acute and more conventional than Johnson’s. Though conflicted, Boswell approves of his friend:

 

“The roughness, indeed, which sometimes appeared in his manners, was more striking to me now, from my having been accustomed to the studied smooth complying habits of the Continent; and I clearly recognised in him, not without respect for his honest conscientious zeal, the same indignant and sarcastical mode of treating every attempt to unhinge or weaken good principles.”

 

I’m reminded that Randall Jarrell also had wise things to say about Rousseau. The excerpt is quoted in No Other Book: Selected Essays (ed. Brad Leithauser, 1999):

 

“Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.”

'Be My Valentine This Monday'

“A formal memorial service took place later in Westminster Abbey, not inappropriately, on St Valentine’s Day 1986.” 

Philip Larkin had died more than two months earlier, on December 2, 1985. The nurse reported his whispered final words: “I am going to the inevitable.”

 

We don’t often rank Larkin among the love poets (despite “An Arundel Tomb”). One can cavil over their quality but Larkin certainly accumulated an impressive quantity of valentine recipients. Among them was Betty Mackereth, his longtime secretary at Hull University. On St. Valentine’s Day 1976, Larkin left a card on her desk. Having earlier given her a toy crocodile, Larkin wrote on the front of the card “See you later alligator,” and inside: “You tasty morsel!” The sentiment quotient picked up a little bit with the two samples of valentine’s doggerel also written in the card:

 

“Be My Valentine this Monday.

Even though we’re miles apart!

Time will separate us one day --

Till then, hyphen with my heart.”

 

And this, a little more interesting, poetically speaking:

 

“You are fine as summer weather,

May to August all in one,

And the clocks, when we’re together,

Count not shadows. Only sun.”

 

It was Mackereth, the anti-Max Brod, who followed Larkin’s instructions and shredded and burned the thirteen fat notebooks the poet had kept between 1949 and 1980. Reading Larkin’s verses to Mackereth, I feel better about my own feeble St. Valentine’s Day efforts over the years.

 

[The passage quoted at the top and other biographical information is drawn from James Booth’s Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (2014).]

'For a’ the Life of Life is Dead'

“Coleridge, why are we to live on after all the strength and beauty of existence are gone, when all the life of life is fled, as poor Burns expresses it?”

 

My father-in-law, J. Michael P. Wood, died early Saturday in a hospital not far from his home in Fredericksburg, Va. In March he would have turned eighty-four. He spent the last six weeks hospitalized with multiple insults to his resilience, including blindness in his left eye and diminished vision in the right. He was a reader, solver of crossword puzzles and a formidable Scrabble player. Compromised eyesight would have made his life difficult.

 

Born in Nova Scotia, raised in Peru, he had a degree in electrical engineering from McGill, was a pilot and owned a marina, and for decades worked as a commercial realtor. I had the privilege of writing his obituary several weeks ago.

 

In the passage quoted above, Charles Lamb is writing to his childhood friend Coleridge on this date, February 13, in 1797. His Aunt Sarah, his father’s oldest sister, had recently died. Less than five months earlier, his sister Mary had fatally stabbed their mother. He writes:

 

“This afternoon I attend the funeral of my poor old aunt, who died on Thursday. I own I am thankful that the good creature has ended all her days of suffering and infirmity. She was to me the ‘cherisher of infancy,’ and one must fall on these occasions into reflections which it would be common-place to enumerate, concerning death, ‘of chance and change, and fate in human life.’ Good God, who could have foreseen all this but four months back! I had reckoned, in particular, on my aunt’s living many years; she was a very hearty old woman. But she was a mere skeleton before she died, looked more like a corpse that had lain weeks in the grave, than one fresh dead.”

 

Lamb refers to Robert Burns’ elegy for a friend, “Lament For James [Cunningham], Earl of Glencairn.” Here are the pertinent lines:

 

“In weary being now I pine,

For a’ the life of life is dead,

And hope has left may aged ken,

On forward wing for ever fled.” 

'A Sense of Fun and a Sense of Proportion'

Last Sunday, on the centenary of the birth of Dennis Norden, Nige reminded us of the BBC radio show My Word! For years I listened to its rebroadcast in the U.S. on National Public Radio, when that network was still listenable. Norden and his writing partner Frank Muir indulged in word games and literary quizzes, and I always marveled at their casual erudition and the elaborate punchline puns they confected, much in the style of Myles na gCopaleen’s Keats-and-Chapman shaggy-dog stories. Their humor was at once witty and silly, never didactic, and sounded to my American ears distinctly English.

In 1990, Muir edited The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose: From William Caxton to P.G. Wodehouse. I love intelligently edited anthologies. I owe much of my education to them. Muir’s is generous -- 1,162 pages, with selections from more than two-hundred writers. Hardly a name is missing, so why no letters from William Cowper or anything from Henry James and Nabokov?  The top five writers represented, in terms of pages filled, are, in descending order, Dickens, Twain, Perelman, Wodehouse and Austen. Muir’s introduction is worth reading for its own sake. His first sentence: “This book is intended to be not only an anthology raisonnée but also a gesture of gratitude and commemoration.” Muir’s touch can be aphoristic: “Wit is the aristocratic aspect of comedy.” And he defines what he’s after:

 

“The English sense of humour is an agreeable mixture of a sense of fun and a sense of proportion, which is not at all the same thing as a taste for buffoonery. Perhaps a small axiom could be proposed: beware of people who only laugh at jokes.”

 

[Muir does include a sample of Keats-and-Chapman punnage. The final line: “Great mines stink alike.”]

'No Wittier Book of Criticism'

What we ask of a critic is not that he be infallible in his judgments, devise a grand theory of everything or even that he be consistent. No, we expect a critic to write well and to have interesting things to say even when he’s wrong. We don’t want blandly kneejerk, fashionable opinions. Neither do we want attention-seeking provocation. We want a capacity for expressing strong approval and condemnation. Enthusiasm is welcome. So is a broad body of knowledge, a good memory, an ability to establish context and – perhaps most importantly – a ready sense of humor. Dr. Johnson had pungent things to say about Milton, Swift and Sterne, but has anyone as a result ever stopped reading them? 

Philip Larkin in his role as jazz critic has been accused of everything from moldy-fig-ism to racism, but is seldom accused of dullness. The important thing to know about Larkin is that he started young as a jazz fan and remained a fan all his life. There’s nothing academic or extra-musical about his love of the music. In a letter he writes: “I became a jazz addict at the age of 12 or 13, listened avidly to all the dance bands of the day and tried to learn to play the drums.” He started as an adolescent fanboy and developed into an unconventionally first-rate jazz writer.

 

Larkin’s first monthly column as the jazz critic for the Daily Telegraph was published on this date, February 11, in 1961. He collected a decade’s worth of these writings in All What Jazz: A Record Diary (1970; rev. 1985). In that first column, Larkin is already acting as an advocate for lovers of the music, complaining of the way record companies issue and reissue jazz recordings:

 

“Even the ordinary listener has plenty to complain of, the tired or raucous ‘name’ performances, the jumbling of sessions, the duplication, the deletion. For the fan, who knows what is not issued, the situation is well-nigh unbearable. The problem is to convince the record companies that the issue of jazz as jazz, and not as a poor relation of rock and roll, is commercial, and the only possible answer seems to be to buy such material when it does appear to the best of one’s taste and means.”

 

Larkin went on to develop a well-known, often humorous dislike of bop and its stylistic successors, viewing them as a betrayal of jazz. He describes John Coltrane’s sound on tenor or soprano sax as “a thin, keening noise, sometimes sour as an oboe, at times expiring in an upper-register squeak, possessed continually by an almost Scandinavian unloveliness.” Admit it, Coltrane lovers (among whom I number myself): that’s funny and at least occasionally true. The music on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew he mocks as “Muzak-like chicka-chicka-boom-chick.” Larkin’s tastes don’t always reflect mine (though I’m with him on Davis’ electric noodling), but his views can serve as a corrective to blanket endorsement of critically indulged music, often avant-garde in nature. You might be surprised that he felt “well rewarded” by Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited (he occasionally writes about blues and blues-inflected rock):

 

“Dylan’s cawing, derisive voice is probably well-suited to his material . . . and his guitar [Mike Bloomfield’s?] adapts itself to rock (‘Highway 61’) and ballad (‘Queen Jane’) admirably. There is a marathon ‘Desolation Row’ which has an enchanting tune and mysterious, possibly half-baked words.”

 

Again, there’s something to it. Seek out All What Jazz, if only to read the introduction. Here he broadens his critical stance to include “modernism” in all the arts:

 

“The term ‘modern,’ applied to art, has a more than chronological meaning: it denotes a quality of irresponsibility peculiar to this century, known sometimes as modernism, and once I had classified modern jazz under this heading I knew where I was. . . . My own theory is that it is related to an imbalance between the two tensions from which art springs: these are the tension between the artist and his material, and between the artist and his audience, and that is the last seventy-five years or so the second of these has slackened or even perished. In consequence the artist has become over-concerned with his material (hence an age of technical experiment), and, in isolation, has busied himself with the two principal themes of modernism, mystification and outrage.”

 

Clive James writes in “On Larkin’s Wit” (Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin, 2019):

 

“I thought at the time [1970] that All What Jazz was the best available expression by the author himself of what he believed art to be. I still think so, and would contend in addition that no wittier book of criticism has ever been written.”