'Yet the Painting Was Beautiful'

Boswell reports that he and Dr. Johnson dined on March 31, 1772, with General Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican patriot exiled in London. The conversation, always fluid and expansive with Johnson, moved on from the naturalness of marriage to aesthetics: 

“We then fell into a disquisition whether there is any beauty independent of utility. The General maintained there was not. Dr. Johnson maintained that there was; and he instanced a coffee cup which he held in his hand, the painting of which was of no real use, as the cup could hold the coffee equally well if plain; yet the painting was beautiful.”

 

As Boswell relates it, the next subject of conversation at General Paoli’s was “the strange custom of swearing in conversation,” but on the question of beauty I’m with Johnson. To risk a rhyme, beauty is a gratuity, perhaps chief among life’s consolations. To be without an aesthetic sense is to be impoverished. The absence of such a sense and its impact on the moral life would make an interesting study and might help explain much human behavior.

 

Fortunately, beauty and utility are not mutually exclusive. I bought a new claw hammer last year for mundane household projects. I’m no handyman but this hammer of nicely tooled wood and forged steel is a pleasure to hold, admire and use. I like its heft and balance and the grain of the wood. The old one we’ve used for years is tarnished and the handle is made of molded red plastic. It’s gratuitously ugly, though it usually gets the job done.

 

For 50 years my brother has worked as a picture framer. Many of his big corporate jobs call for the framing equivalent of that ugly hammer. They are more like assembling a plastic model kit than creating a frame and mat from scratch that complements the photo or painting. Years ago he framed for me Carl Van Vechten’s photo of Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck (1954). Above my desk hangs a reproduction of Rembrandt’s etching “Self-Portrait Leaning on a Stone Sill” (1639). The frame is fluted and finished in dull gold. Into the bottom piece of the frame I’ve wedged a postcard with the photo of Louis Armstrong taken by Philippe Halsman that appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1966. I could live without these objects in my house but life would be poorer.

 

Let’s not even get started on modern architecture, the true blight in most cities. In the final chapter of The Pleasure of Ruins (1953), Rose Macaulay reminds us to look at new buildings geologically, beyond the scale of a single human lifetime:

 

“Very soon trees will be thrusting through the empty window sockets, the rose-bay and fennel blossoming within the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside them. Very soon the ruin will be enjungled, engulfed, and the appropriate creatures will revel.”

 

It’s a chastening thought (and goes on for another half-page), like the Time Traveller’s view of the dress shop across the street from his lab in George Pal’s film of The Time Machine (1960). Macaulay gets even more apocalyptically inspired in her final sentences:

 

“Ruin must be a fantasy, veiled by the mind’s dark imaginings: in the objects that we see before us, we get to agree with St Thomas Aquinas, that qua enim diminutae sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt, and to feel that, in beauty, wholeness is all. But such wholesome hankerings are, it seems likely, merely a phase of our fearful and fragmented age.”

 

Macaulay takes her Latin phrase from this passage in Summa Theologica (translated by T.C. O’Brien): “Beauty must include three qualities: integrity, or completeness--since things that lack something are thereby ugly; right proportion or harmony; and brightness—we call things bright in colour beautiful.”

 

I think immediately of Matisse and Klee. In his essay “The Faire Field of Enna” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), devoted to Eudora Welty, Guy Davenport writes:

 

“Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world. Ancient intuition went foraging after consistency. Religion, science, and art are alike rooted in the faith that the world is of a piece, that something is common to all its diversity, and that if we knew enough we could see and give a name to its harmony.”

'It Can Also Do Nothing Beautifully'

I remember first reading stray poems by Aaron Poochigian online four or five years ago. They were distinctive, especially in their heightened use of interesting words, slangy and Elizabethan. An odd association: his language sometimes reminded me of Saul Bellow’s Augie March, minus the Whitmanian gassiness. His lines didn’t seem passive, inert on the page or screen, nor was he carping about anything. The poems gave the impression of a learned guy not trying to impress you with his learnedness or faux-humility. I could hear Yeats and Auden. Poochigian seemed like a man at home in the world, with something worthwhile to say about it – substance and style. Even the rare poem with political content didn’t hector or otherwise carry on embarrassingly. 

For my birthday in 2018 I asked for Poochigian’s book-length Mr. Either/Or: A Novel in Verse (Etruscan Press, 2016) and read it twice in a month. Later I ordered Manhattanite (Able Muse Press, 2017) and last year a friend gave me American Divine (University of Evansville Press, 2021). To them I added Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments (Penguin, 2009), his Sappho translation. In a 2019 interview with Mike Juster, Poochigian says of the poems in American Divine:

 

“The project began with my hankering to come up with a polytheistic version of George Herbert’s great list-poem, ‘Prayer,’ which ends:

 

“Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,

The land of spices; something understood.’

 

“Herbert, an Anglican priest, was an expert on prayer. Well, I am not George Herbert, nor was meant to be. Nope, I’m just a human American man, but I still feel a need to pray, that is, to speak, sometimes out loud and sometimes in my head and usually at night, to a disembodied listener.”

 

What’s the last time you heard an American poet talk like that? Read “Centralia, PA,” collected in American Divine. For sixty years a fire has been burning under the defunct town in East Central Pennsylvania, started by someone burning trash in the landfill and igniting a coal deposit. Consider the first stanza:

 

“Up a collapsing asphalt road

there is a quaint coal-mining town

that lost its priest and postal code

because brimstone will not stop burning

from casket-deep to two miles down.

When no amount of higher learning

could suffocate the fires of Hell,

the Feds bought all the locals out

but me. Me. Someone needs to tell

the tale of still evolving wrong.

Call me Gasp the Landlocked Trout,

and ragged is my song.”

 

Poochigian resists the kneejerk urge to harangue, suggesting that he trusts his readers to comprehend the outrageousness and absurdity of the environmental disaster. Neither does he resort to cheap jokes, yet the poem’s humor quotient is high. The slant and progression of Poochigian’s poems are often unexpected. When reading the first lines you can never guess how the final lines will read:

 

“Come close, now, world,

and heed a burr

that is a mess

of phlegm:

 

“may no reprieve,

no trick of time, redeem

the reckless them

who zoned a dump

atop an old coal seam.

And him, the chump

who, by igniting trash,

birthed an inferno, hollowed out the land

and turned our breath to ash—

I curse his hand!”

 

Like Kay Ryan, Poochigian is an inspired rhymer. “Dump”/“chump” is especially endearing. In his interesting refutation of Auden’s statement that “poetry makes nothing happen,” Poochigian says in his interview:

  

“So, yes, poetry can do lots of things; it can also do nothing beautifully. Useful poetry is not better than useless poetry. I only feel the need to say this because there is an assumption, in some academic circles, that poetry that does something—helps with the grieving process, serves as a political act, teaches some social virtue, etc.—is somehow better than poetry that does nothing other than be poetry. People who think that poetry should have some 'real-world' practical effect are, curiously, coming down on the side of the 'trade-school' view of universities, the one that dismisses the liberal arts as useless. Many of my favorite poems are simply beautiful. Take a look at Frost’s 'The Silken Tent,' for example.”

 

[My review of Poochigian’s translation of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (Liveright, 2021) will be published on April 6 in the Los Angeles Review of Books.]

'That Was Awful Slop'

“When we poets believe that we are thinkers, moralists, or preachers, that we're going to give you the word -- now this is wisdom, kid -- we reveal more terribly than others how stupid we are.” 

That’s Howard Nemerov in a 1975 public interview at Skidmore College (my dear ol’ alma mater). Robert Boyars asks him to “say something about the poet and politics,” and Nemerov replies with memories of President Kennedy’s assassination and how, “like a great many other poets I went right home and spent all day writing a poem.” He published it in The New Leader and never permitted it to be reprinted. “When things had calmed down,” he says, “I recognized sadly that it was a terribly bad poem . . .” Off hand, I can’t remember reading any good poems about the assassination. Momentous public events tend to bring out the flatulent in all of us, poets most of all. Unless your name is Dryden or Swift, you probably ought to stay away from such things.

 

Two years earlier, in Gnomes and Occasions, Nemerov included “On Being Asked for a Peace Poem,” which begins:

 

“Here is Joe Blow the poet

Sitting before the console of the giant instrument

That mediates his spirit to the world.

He flexes his fingers nervously,

He ripples off a few scale passages

(Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?)

And resolutely readies himself to begin

His poem about the War in Vietnam.”

 

Those who remember the war will perhaps remember the bales of bad poetry it inspired, when self-righteous purity of heart was mistaken for deathless verse. The war years coincide roughly with the final ascendancy of free verse among American poets. Could there be a connection? Nemerov continues:

 

“This poem, he figures, is

A sacred obligation: all by himself,

Applying the immense leverage of art,

He is about to stop this senseless war.”

 

In World War II, Nemerov served as a fighter pilot, flying more than one-hundred combat missions with the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Eighth U.S. Army Air Force. Anything potentially can be the matter, the pretext or subject, of poetry and the other arts, but that's the operative word: art. Poets are not “thinkers, moralists, or preachers,” at least while writing poems. Screeds and screams are not poetry. Nemerov goes on in his interview:

 

“I like to think I've succeeded in writing poems that try to say what the world is, instead of what it ought to be, though I'm sure as I age I make my moralizing sententiae as nobly and with as grand a gesture as anybody else. But I don't think I've lately committed the sin on the scale I achieved in the Kennedy poem -- that was awful slop.”

'Quite Unlike Their Dear, Bright Selves'

“On the night of March 28, 1922, around ten o’clock, in the living room where as usual my mother was reclining on the red-plush corner couch, I happened to be reading to her Blok’s verse on Italy—had just got to the end of the little poem about Florence, which Blok compares to the delicate, smoky bloom of an iris, and she was saying over her knitting, ‘Yes, yes, Florence does look like a dimniy [Russian for smoky] iris, how true!’ I remember—’ when the telephone rang.” 

Old Nabokov hands will be reminded of another telephone call, the one ringing in the final sentence of his 1948 story “Signs and Symbols.” Such calls often bring bad news in Nabokov, as in the passage above from Chap. 2 of Speak, Memory. Instead of describing the nature of the call, Nabokov next digresses into his mother’s future, noting only in passing that “a cast of my father’s hand a watercolor picture of his grave in the Greek-Catholic cemetery of Tegel, now in East Berlin, shared a shelf with émigré writers’ books, so prone of disintegration in their cheap paper covers."

 

One-hundred years ago today, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, the novelist’s father, was murdered in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall by Russian monarchists. The former Russian foreign minister, Pavel Milyukov, was delivering a lecture – “America and the Restoration of Russia” -- to a crowd of some 1,500. The event was sponsored by the exiled Constitutional Democratic Party -- the Kadets – formed during the Russian Revolution of 1905. The Kadets are customarily described as “liberal” in the Russian context. They favored an eight-hour work day and Jewish emancipation. After seizing power, the Bolsheviks issued an arrest warrant for the senior Nabokov. As a member of the first Duma, in 1906, he had already been deprived of court rank and imprisoned by the Tsarist government.

 

Two far-right monarchists, Peter Shabelsky-Bork and Sergey Taboritsky, entered the Berlin hall intending to kill Milyukov. One of them fired a revolver at him and shouted, “For the tsar’s family and Russia.” Nabokov leaped from his seat, grabbed the arm of the shooter – Shabelsky-Bork -- and tried to disarm him. Taboritsky shot Nabokov three times, killing him instantly. Seven others were wounded but Milyukov remained unharmed. Forty years later, another botched but fatally effective assassination would figure in Pale Fire.

 

After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Nabokov family had fled St. Petersburg and found refuge in Crimea. In April 1919, they settled in England, where the younger Vladimir attended Cambridge. A year later they moved to Berlin. In 1937, the novelist, his wife and son moved to France, fleeing the Nazi twin of Communism, and in 1940 to the United States for what he called the “spacious freedom of thought we enjoy in America.” Ironies and bitterness abound. Nabokov, an apolitical man who wanted to get on with his art, was hounded all his life by politics.

 

His father’s assassins were convicted of the murder and sentenced to fourteen-year prison terms, but served only a fraction. Upon his release, Shabelsky-Bork befriended the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. The novelist’s younger brother, Sergey, died in a German concentration camp. Here is the closing paragraph of Chap. 2 in Speak, Memory:

 

“Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then -- not in dreams -- but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.”

[For a thorough account of the murder and its impacts on the Nabokov family and the Russian émigré community, see Bryan Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990).]

' Imbibe What Is Useful to You'

In his Confessions of Edward Dahlberg (1971), the author quotes with approval from a letter by Chekhov: “I divide literary works into two classes: those I like and those I do not like.” Chekhov wrote this to the promising young writer Ivan Leontyev (pseudonym: Ivan Shcheglov) on March 22, 1890, and I suspect even the most erudite literary critics, during bouts of pre-dawn honesty, would agree. We all rationalize our judgments and tastes, and sometimes dress them up with fancy arguments. Snobbery plays a part. The late Terry Teachout steered me right when he observed that there is no such thing as a guilty pleasure. We enjoy a book (or music, or painting, or movie) or we don’t. Here is the context of Chekhov’s useful admission as translated by Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky in their Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973): 

“As to the word ‘artistic,’ it frightens me the way brimstone frightens merchants’ wives. When people speak to me of what is artistic and anti-artistic, of what is dramatically effective, of tendentiousness and realism and the like, I am at an utter loss, I nod to everything uncertainly, and answer in banal half truths that aren’t worth a brass farthing. I divide all works into two categories: those I like and those I don’t. I have no other criterion.”

 

A student writes to ask what I find so interesting about Chekhov’s story “My Life” (1896), cited in Saturday’s post. I mustered some arguments but quickly experienced that sense of futility I know whenever I pretend to be a critic and presume to advocate for a work of literature. I can express how Misail Poloznevit’s story still moves me after many readings and how deftly Chekhov narrates it, but none of that really explains the sort of love and loyalty it inspires in me, as do many of his stories. But that’s all a posteriori. I’m reduced to pointing at the story and saying, “This is really good. You might enjoy it too. Get it a try." After quoting the Chekhov letter in his Confessions, Dahlberg writes:

 

“Go through Aristotle’s Poetics, Horace, Dryden’s essays, La Bruyère’s The Characters and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Imbibe what is useful to you, and you will forget the rest anyway.”

'Tradition Is So Stubborn in Russia'

“For the workers to arise and break the chains of capitalist oppression was unexpectedly easy work in 1917 but those chains were gossamer compared to the cast-iron shackles of a Russian tradition that has so far outworn every idea of the new.” 

Murray Kempton is writing in 1988, on the cusp of a promising change in Russian tradition. Three years earlier, Mikhail Gorbachev had become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Soon after, I was covering a speech by the late Richard Luger, then a U.S. Senator from Indiana. I don’t recall his precise words but Luger confidently dismissed Gorbachev as just another Commie despot. Within a few years some of us found ourselves in the unlikely position of rather reluctantly rooting for the Commie.

 

Kempton filed his column after a visit to Moscow. His final conversation there was with a Soviet journalist and former son-in-law of Nikita Khrushchev, Alexi Adzhubei, who asked Kempton if he was a Sovietologist. The American replied: “To me, the only Sovietologist who is always up to date is Anton Chekhov.” Adzhubei reacted with “a knowing smile.” Kempton goes on:

 

“None of us could be so bold as to advance a particular Chekhov story as the greatest of all but ‘My Life’ would be a splendid candidate. At one juncture, its hero marries a young woman of wealth, who is transiently possessed by an itch to go back to the land. They go off to convert her estate into a working farm and spend a horrid few months until, disgusted by the crafts and coarseness of the peasants, she abandons all lofty notions and flees to London to study singing.

 

“From there, she writes to ask for a divorce and to report that she has bought herself a ring engraved in Hebrew, ‘All things pass away,’ and that it would be her talisman against future infatuations. And he reflects: ‘If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose would be, “‘Nothing passes away.’”

 

“And nothing seems ever to pass away in Moscow. Russian history asserts itself there as all but immutable and immovable, and so it asserted itself for Chekhov in 1900. The on-again, off-again harryings of Andrei Sakharov and Boris Pasternak would have been for him the oldest of tales.”

 

I think of Kempton and Chekhov after reading a recent article portentously titled “What classic Russian literature can tell us about Putin’s war on Ukraine.” The author cites Putin’s much publicized admiration for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Of course, when politicians issue lists of favorite or most-influential books, we’re skeptical. Richard Nixon recalled a youthful dalliance with Tolstoy, especially Resurrection. In the article, the author makes passing references to Putin’s other alleged favorites, Turgenev, Lermontov, Sergei Yesenin, Pushkin and Nikolay Karamazin. Conspicuously absent, though it’s no surprise, is Chekhov (and Babel, and the Mandelstams, and Nabokov, and so on). Kempton writes in his column:

 

“The czars will never be back but, after seventy years, their style of command has yet to pass away, perhaps because tradition is so stubborn in Russia that the techniques of journalism, wondrous as they are, come to appear so inadequate for dealing with her development year by year, let alone day by day.”

 

[Kempton’s column, published in New York Newsday on June 19, 1988, is collected in his Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events (1994). I clipped the column and saved it.]

'The Future Lies Inside the Silences'

There’s a valuable, seldom acknowledged service performed by writers who are themselves grateful readers. By documenting the importance of particular books to their lives and work, they are recommending them to us. 

Thanks to Guy Davenport I first read George Santayana’s Realms of Being and John Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera. Joseph Epstein directed me to Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. I was introduced to the books of historian John Julian Norwich by Robert D. Kaplan when reading the latter’s Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece (2004). That was the first Kaplan title I read, eighteen years ago, and since then I’ve tried to keep us with his prolific body of work. His job description is tough to pin down with a single word: journalist, political analyst, historian, travel writer, even literary critic. Kaplan is one for whom the intersection of books and life is a much-visited destination.

 

I’ve been reading In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond (2016), the prologue to which is titled “Nabokov’s Room,” a nod to his story “Cloud, Castle, Lake” (1937; trans. by author, 1941). Vasili Ivanovich escapes a noisy tour group and enters an inn where he takes a “most ordinary room.” From the window “one could clearly see the lake with its cloud and its castle, in a motionless and perfect correlation of happiness.” Vasili Ivanovich realizes that “in one radiant second . . . that here in this little room with that view, beautiful to the verge of tears, life would at last be what he had always wished it to be.” He would require few possessions, including books. Kaplan takes over:

 

“What would be the books—two dozen at the most, enough for a shelf—that I would bring to such a room in order to live out the rest of my life? Each of these books would have to hold deep meaning for me; to have pivotally affected my life, and not altogether for the better, for life to be life requires complications and even unpleasantness.”

 

Kaplan has already told us he’s no rare book snob, no collector of first editions. “One book means freedom; too many books, though, act as a barrier to further discovery of the world.” His most treasured volumes are decades-old paperbacks. Chief among them is The Governments of Communist East Europe (1966) by H. Gordon Skilling. He recounts buying the 1971 paperback in Jerusalem when he was about to leave the Israeli Defense Forces. It gave him, he writes, “a vocation, a direction: a fate.” In his prologue, Kaplan goes on to tell book stories the way some veterans tell war stories – Buddenbrooks, Fathers and Sons, John Reed’s The War in Eastern Europe (1916).     

 

In Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (1994), Kaplan chronicles his debt to Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941). In the first chapter of In Europe’s Shadow, “Bucharest 1981,” he acknowledges the importance to his thinking of Joseph Conrad’s two “monumental works,” Lord Jim (1900) and Nostromo (1904). The latter is on my short list of the greatest novels. Kaplan writes:

 

“Indeed, Conrad makes you feel that the destiny of the universe depends upon one poor man, or one sick child, while also letting you know the seeming hopelessness of their situation. This is why Conrad could be history’s greatest foreign correspondent, greater than Herodotus even. Because the future lies inside the silences—inside what people are afraid to discuss openly among themselves, or at the dinner table—it is in the guise of fiction that a writer can more easily and relentlessly tell the truth.”

 

[See also “Conrad’s Nostromo and the Third World,” published by Kaplan in 1998 in The American Interest.]

'The First Proselyte He Makes Is Himself'

“Readers may be divided into three classes -- the superficial, the ignorant, and the learned, and I have with much felicity fitted my pen to the genius and advantage of each.”

 

It’s not my job to assess readers and divvy them up accordingly. Leave that to Jonathan Swift and his readers. Late at night, alone in your skull, you know who you are. It’s my job to make myself plain to the hapless readers who wander in. Swift is writing in A Tale of a Tub (1704), his first major work, one that still confounds readers. What’s he up to? Swift demands his readers have a nimble mind, one at home with proliferating ironies. That wasn’t always the case with Dr. Johnson. Boswell recalls an evening with friends at the Literary Club on this date, March 24, in 1775:

 

“Johnson was in high spirits this evening at the club, and talked with great animation and success. He attacked Swift, as he used to do upon all occasions. ‘The Tale of a Tub is so much superiour to his other writings, that one can hardly believe he was the authour of it. There is in it such a vigour of mind, such a swarm of thoughts, so much of nature, and art, and life.’”

 

All true, but Swift often disturbed Johnson, who sometimes thought him insane. Boswell continues:

 

“I wondered to hear him say of Gulliver's Travels, ‘When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.’ [Johnson similarly dismissed another Irish-born writer, Laurence Sterne.] I endeavoured to make a stand for Swift, and tried to rouse those who were much more able to defend him; but in vain. Johnson at last of his own accord allowed very great merit to the inventory of articles found in the pockets of the Man Mountain, particularly the description of his watch, which it was conjectured was his GOD, as he consulted it upon all occasions. He observed, that ‘Swift put his name to but two things, (after he had a name to put,) ‘The Plan for the Improvement of the English Language,’ and the last ‘Drapier’s Letter.’”

 

For a critic as acute as Johnson to repeatedly belabor the failings of so great a writer suggests he recognized in Swift a personal affront. What we resent in others is often what most disturbs us in ourselves, and Johnson always feared madness. In his “Life of Swift,” he writes: “He is querulous and fastidious, arrogant and malignant; he scarcely speaks of himself but with indignant lamentations, or of others but with insolent superiority when he is gay, and with angry contempt when he is gloomy.” Except for “fastidious,” one can see Johnson in the description.

 

And this: “His asperity continually increasing, condemned him to solitude; and his resentment of solitude sharpened his asperity.” All his life, Johnson feared solitude and associated it with insanity. Swift wrote in A Tale of a Tub:

 

“When a man’s fancy gets astride on his reason, when imagination is at cuffs with the senses, and common understanding as well as common sense, is kicked out of doors; the first proselyte he makes is himself.” 

'Huge Without Grandeur'

In his poem “Monumental Is More than a Question of Scale,” Turner Cassity takes on the laughable kitsch of Soviet-era war monuments: 

“Magnificently sited, on the choicest real estate,

The Soviet war monuments weight Central Europe down:

Les Beaux-Arts bloated.”

 

Cassity published the poem in the January 1992 issue of Poetry, in the immediate wake of the Soviet collapse. Among its other offenses, communism has always been guilty of crimes against the aesthetic sense. Reading Cassity, I was reminded of the broken but steroidal statue of Lenin seen floating on a barge in Theo Angelopoulos’ 1995 film Ulysses’ Gaze. Size displaces other qualities. To paraphrase Marx, quantity becomes quality. Big is better. Cassity includes a passage that seems, after thirty years, especially relevant:

 

“USSR does better for itself. In Volgagrad,

Colossal, in a strictest sense, the sword-uplifting Rus

Defends and is the Motherland; and in Odessa, plain,

Remote, an obelisk of dark red granite claims a shore,

Commemorating who knows what. The possibilities,

The Ukraine being what it is, are numberless and grim.”

 

The Odessa obelisk is known as the Monument to the Unknown Sailor, erected in 1960 in memory of Soviet sailors killed defending the city against the Nazis. In design, it is less offensive than most Soviet military monuments. As Cassity suggests, the obelisk to an outsider might commemorate any of "numberless" crimes in Ukraine. Theodore Dalrymple recently visited Highgate Cemetery in London, the final resting place of Karl Marx, and viewed the philosopher’s tacky tomb:

 

“There is something totalitarian about Marx’s tomb (for which, of course, he can’t be blamed himself). The bust atop the tomb is inappropriately gigantic, suggesting that his thought brings out the grandiose in his admirers and followers, combined with bad taste and lack of aesthetic tact. A smaller bust would have done Marx more honor, but this is not a thought that incipient or frustrated totalitarians would entertain. No wonder that communist monuments were huge without grandeur.”

 

[Casssity’s poem is collected in The Destructive Element: New and Selected Poems (Ohio University Press, 1998).]

'To Know When You Have Made Good Ones'

“We are concerned not with semi-literacy but with the unaccountable lapses of serious poets: poets, let us say, sufficiently professional to look Buster Keaton in the face, who can yet address for instance an apostrophe to the ‘Spade! with which Wilkinson hath tilled his lands.’” 

The distinction is important. Some writing is unignorably awful because its author is inept, indifferent, tone-deaf, careless or stupid -- failings excusable among young writers, best discouraged by thoughtful elders. It’s small comfort at the time but reading one’s juvenilia in future years is a goad to humility. Hugh Kenner in The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy (1968) identifies another source of badness as exemplified by the line from Wordsworth he quotes above:

 

“Let us postulate that the bad verse of such a poet is verse which has been published by mistake. It has deceived its author, whose mind, fixed on some other quality, supposed it good, and it has continued to deceive him throughout the process of revision, of reading his composition to friends, of sending it to the printer, of reading proof, and inspecting the finished volume.”

 

“Some other quality.” Perhaps earnestness, the conviction that one’s thoughts are so important, so urgently in need of expression, that the end justifies the means. Just spew the words. They are their own validation. The absence of self-censure, when not merely boring is worth a good laugh. Thus, Kenner’s mention of The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, edited in 1930 by D.B. Wyndham-Lewis and Charles Lee. He writes of such poetry: “It is clear that when this can happen the criteria for good verse have become exceedingly elusive.” Kenner next recalls Dr. Johnson’s remarks, as recounted by Boswell, on the ease with which he could compose lines of verse: “‘The great difficulty is, to know when you have made good ones.’”

 

Lousy writing is unearned, a failure of scrupulousness, a surrender to self-indulgence. “Dull writing,” Kenner writes, “has never deceived anyone, not even its author. He is not deceived in finding it interesting, he is merely interested in it. Another person need not be.”

 

I’m reminded of something Jules Renard wrote in his Journal in 1891 (trans. Theo Cuffe): “Balzac is perhaps the only one who earned the right to write badly.”

'Like a Hibernating Bear'

In his poem “Whenever,” Robert Conquest endorses Wyndham Lewis’ call for “a tongue that naked goes / Without more fuss than Dryden’s or Defoe’s.” He means blunt, cant-free, indifferent to moral fashion. The poem proceeds in the form of an indictment: 

“Our age requires . . . But first we should expound

What sort of age it is. Just look around!

 

“An age that thinks it knows, what’s known to none,

Just how societies and psyches run.

 

“An age of terrorists and absolutes:

One primes the missile and the other shoots.”

 

Conquest’s judgment is sweeping: “intellectuals talking balls,” “ideologies of virulence.” And of course: “An age of people who’re concerned, or care, / With schemes that lead to slaughter everywhere.” Virtue-signaling abettors to murder, casual reversion to barbarism. Now Conquest the historian of Soviet Communism takes over: “. . . Age that ignored the unavenged Ukraine.”

 

In 1986, Conquest published The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986), documenting Stalin’s 1929-31 collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and the resulting famine known as the Holodomor. Millions of peasants were starved to death, deported to labor camps and executed. Conquest says in a 2006 interview: “Ukraine, like every republic in the former Soviet Union, has many scars. Ukraine was maimed by communism as a culture, as an economy, as a nation. How do you get healthy again after something like that? How do you recover?”

 

Let’s interrupt with the voice of Boris Khersonsky, a poet, psychologist and psychiatrist working at the Odessa regional psychiatric hospital. On Sunday, Boris Dralyuk, an Odessa native, read poems by Khersonsky he has translated during an online gathering, Cultivating Voices Live Poetry, devoted to Ukrainian poetry:

 

“Our microdistrict is teeming with saints –

Most are holy fools or martyrs, some have done stints

In prison. Many are alkies or suffer from other complaints:

Whenever they give us their blessing their fingers leave prints.

 

“A shame that the Lord grants his mercy mostly to others;

That the view from the big house can never suit you;

That all of us end up in fetters, doing hard labor;

That our neighbors all hate us – that it’s probably mutual.”

 

Dralyuk appeared on another panel discussion later in the day devoted to Soviet Jewish literature and sponsored by the Wende Museum. The other guest was the Odessa-born poet Lev Mak, who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974.

Dralyuk describes Mak as “an Odessan legend of underground Soviet verse (as well as a former Ukrainian weightlifting champ!), who has kept a low profile in LA for decades. His 'Hollywood' (my translation) is my Hollywood.” Boris refers to his first collection, My Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry Books, 2022). Here is his translation of Mak’s “Hollywood” (1981):

 

“That holy grove, wherein the Gorgon Fame

a bandage covering here suppurating eyes,

lows shamefully, enticing mortals

to copulate with her.

The waxen idols

 of Madame Tussauds speak of the moment

when that bandage is torn off

and the insatiable beast’s fury

floods her intolerable pupils with white heat.”  

 

When the moderator asked Mak for his reaction to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, the poet said, “I am 82. If I were even 10 years younger, I would go back there.” He mentioned a machine gun.

 

Now back to Conquest, his “Black Sea,” on the north coast of which sits Odessa:

 

“Lynx-lithe, a concentrate of light

Swoops, sudden, through the headland firs,

Claws slashing the soft lens of sight.

Even the thewed slope shakes and blurs.

 

“The sun’s outflanked the earlier shade

Of foliage with a horizontal

Blaze. Half-blind, we turn and wade

Through photon-seethe to our hotel

 

“But soon we’re over the effects

Of the harsh cosmos breaking through.

Fish from the bay, dry wine, sweet sex,

Then the veranda, when we view

 

“For now, a dimmer, different world

That wildness tamed; -- while over there

The ground beneath the trees lies curled

Up like a hibernating bear.”

See Boris’ post today, in which he writes: “In short, Lev [Mak] is a character — a character straight out of Babel — but he also writes verse no less moving, no less invigorating than [Eduard]  Bagritsky’s. And for the past few decades he’s made his home in Los Angeles, at a house so close to the beach that he can hear the waves lapping at the shore at night. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, LA is just Odessa on a different scale.”

[“Whenever” and “Black Sea” are found in Conquest’s Collected Poems (ed. Elizabeth Conquest, Waywiser Press, 2020.]

'A Blend of Anonymity and Doom'

The cheap hotel ambiance is unreconstructed film noir: “Not tears, not terror, but a / blend of anonymity and doom, / it seemed, that room, to condescend / to imitate a normal room.” The occupant is not Raymond Chandler’s creation but Nabokov’s – wittier yet sadder, the setting less room than parody of a room, pre-echoing Humbert Humbert: “Parody of a hotel corridor. Parody of silence and death.” The poem is “The Room,” published in the May 5, 1950 issue of The New Yorker. The atmosphere of the room is less specifically American than those in Nabokov’s road novel. 

There’s an impersonal gloominess about such places. On the wall, the speaker finds someone has written “‘Alone, unknown, unloved, I die.’” He comments, as if to subvert the pathos: “It had a false quotation air.” On another wall is a painting depicting “the red eruption which / tried to be maples in the fall[.]” The dig at Winston Churchill’s painterly gifts is gentle. “Restricted Rest” means no Jews. In Lolita, the Enchanted Hunters Motel is advertised as being “near churches,” which decrypts as “Gentiles only.” Nabokov and his family were veterans of anonymous rooms in Prague, Berlin, Paris and the U.S. The room might be an émigré’s final resting place. Here are the concluding stanzas:

 

“Perhaps my text is incomplete.

A poet's death is, after all,

a question of technique, a neat

enjambment, a melodic fall.

 

“And here a life had come apart

in darkness, and the room had grown

a ghostly thorax, with a heart

unknown, unloved -- but not alone.”

 

In a March 20, 1950, letter to his New Yorker editor, Katharine White, Nabokov writes that he has corrected two typos in the draft and adds: "I want to tell you again how grateful I am to the New Yorker for their generosity. I hope you can use the poem soon since Mr. Churchill is getting on in years and any accident or sickness that might happen to him would perhaps interfere with the publication of my good-natured dig.”

 

The Nabokov Online Journal informs us that “The Room” is probably the poem written by Nabokov in English that is most often translated into Russian. It also includes a new Russian translation by Andrey Vakhrulin, who says he has paid particular attention to “specifically Nabokovian words and idioms in order to render the poem’s gentle and serious sound.”

 

[Nabokov’s letter to White can be found in Selected Letters 1940-1977 (eds. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli, 1989).

'A Lesson in Calmness, Actually, in Fatalism'

“My concept of what I call a story obviously has nothing to do with expressing myself or recording drama that I have been involved in. My life has been exemplarily dull, charmingly dull. I love routine. Boredom is not boredom for me. My life has not been adventurous in any way, so there’s probably a raw element of romantic distance; writing about something that is far more interesting than anything you have experienced.” 

This week I’ve been reading stories again, a few each night before bed, something I did early in the pandemic. There’s comfort in the familiar, of course: Chekhov, Babel, Malamud, Singer. I started with Babel’s Odessa Stories in Boris Dralyuk’s translation because I wanted to feel some connection to Ukraine, even if merely literary. Writer and translator both are natives of the title city. In “Odessa” (1916) I found a sentence that made me nostalgic for a place I have never been: “Odessa has sweet and wearying evenings in springtime, the spicy aroma of acacia, and a moon overflowing with even, irresistible light above a dark sea.”

 

Speaking at the top is Guy Davenport in a 1994 interview I recently discovered. Davenport’s stories are unlike those of the writers named above. From the earliest in Tatlin! (1974), the impact is less emotional than intellectual or admiringly aesthetic. We read stories for various reasons and they can supply mutually exclusive pleasures. There is no universal story template. In conversation, a lousy storyteller showcases himself. Even if he’s not the main character, the hero of his tale, he dominates the telling, crafts the narrative to make himself look good, even when he feigns humility. That’s not Davenport’s way nor, in general, the practice of Chekhov and company. Few of their stories are overtly autobiographical in the banal sense. Davenport says in the interview:

 

“I’m not an exile. I feel perfectly at home in the United States. But I think I’m a kind of internal exile in that I don’t write about the United States. Someone once figured out that there are only three pages in all six of my books of stories so far that are set in the United States, and those are not contemporary.”

 

I’ve been rereading one of the essential twentieth-century books, My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, edited and translated in 1988 by Richard Lourie from transcripts of conversations Wat had late in life with Czesław Miłosz. Wat is recounting his own experience which, unlike Davenport’s, was painfully “adventurous.” After fleeing the Nazis he was arrested by the Soviets and spent more than two years in various jails and prisons in Poland and the Soviet Union, and eventually was exiled to Kazakhstan. He is a spontaneous and spirited storyteller. Listen to this:

 

“There were refugees from Byelorussia and Odessa in the hostel. One of them caught my eye, a middle-class person around forty-five; he looked very glazed and sad. His features weren’t especially Jewish. Very sad. I asked one of the others why that man was so depressed. His sadness was obvious, but he was also very calm. I was told that yesterday he had received word that his wife and three children had been evacuated from Odessa by ship and the ship had sunk. But he was so calm. A lesson in calmness, actually, in fatalism."

 

Singer might have devoted a passing digression to the refugee’s story, a bit of backstory. Babel, too. Chekhov might have had his stand-in speak to the refugee and draw out his story. It too would have been “a lesson in calmness.”

'By No Means Fit to Be Spoonmeat for Babes'

“Without question the World War I classic that would rest most comfortably on a shelf hard by the works of Izaak Walton, Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and Roger Scruton is Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–28).” 

That’s David Hein in “The Great Books of the Great War,” published in Modern Age. Hein suggests we reexamine the literature of World War I and the way it has been understood and packaged by critics and teachers: “[W]e discover, as we explore the outstanding literature of this era, that a reading list confined to the canonical texts typically assigned an undergraduate student may be deficient in major respects, too skewed toward wholesale disillusionment, even cynicism—a notion of the futility of everything.” In other words, not every Great War veteran was a nihilist, a proto-Joseph Heller. Hein is especially good on Edmund Blunden and his memoir Undertones of War (1928), Frederic Manning’s novel Her Privates We (1929), and Ford:

 

“Coming out of the First World War, in which he is blown up and shell-shocked during the Battle of the Somme, Ford Madox Ford confronts a blasted religious and ethical landscape. . . . [H]e does not surrender to a feeling of futility but offers a complicated and difficult countercultural alternative. Nearly a hundred years on, his contribution to the literature of the Great War, alongside fine books by others, will repay a conservative’s consideration.”

 

In July 1915, at age forty-two, Ford enlisted in the Welch Regiment. A year later, twelve days after the start of the battle, he was sent to the Somme in northeastern France in time for the bloodiest one-day engagement in English military history. Ford was blown into the air by the explosion of a German shell, suffered memory loss and for three weeks remained incapacitated. He was hospitalized again with lung problems exacerbated by exposure to poison gas, and in March 1917 was sent home as an invalid.

 

Not surprisingly, the war often figures in Ford’s post-war writing, overtly or tacitly, regardless of subject. While Parade’s End stands as a twentieth-century masterpiece, a supreme work of fiction, his other books deserve closer attention. A third of the way through The March of Literature (1938), in the middle of a digression on the English border ballads, Ford inserts a three-page digression-within-a-digression based on his Great War experience:

 

“The writer happens to have been present at what you might call a poplar recension of folksong during several weeks in the fall of 1916. His regiment having spent a disproportionate time in the trenches during the First Battle of the Somme, it was given a long fatigue to do at a long distance from the trenches, so that they might at once rest their weary bones and get some exercise.”

 

Ford’s regiment was given the task of repairing trenches behind the front lines, and he permitted the men to sing while working: “[T]hese heroes made themselves into an informal committee for the revising of all the regiment’s private versions of the British army songs—which are folk ballads by no means fit to be spoonmeat for babes.”