'Thoroughly Droll'

“How he would recommend this slice of white bread, or that piece of kissing-crust.” 

A hefty volume, Lamb on Food and Drink, could be assembled from the letters and essays of Charles Lamb. Mercifully absent in him are the shame and health-obsessed earnestness our age attaches to what we eat and drink. Though fussy myself, I enjoy the spectacle of trenchermen eating their fill and more. Tom Waits has called such people “pioneer[s] of the palate.” It seems so liberating, so contemptuous of the merely fashionable.

 

The delicious word that grabbed me this time is “kissing-crust,” in Lamb’s Elia essay “The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers.” The OED defines it as “the soft part of the crust of a loaf where it has touched another in baking.” Anyone who has ever baked bread will recognize and be charmed by the word. In Defining the World (2005), Henry Hitchings, in his chapter titled “Pleasureful,” writes of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary:

 

“. . . “[I]t abounds with curious words: some amusing because of their sheer unusualness, others because they suggest ideas or practices that sound thoroughly droll. Some are funny because they seem ludicrous and overinflated; others are obsolete but rewardingly succinct ways of capturing a particular trait.”

 

Among them, according to Hitchings, is kissing-crust, which Johnson defines as “crust formed where one loaf in the oven touches another.” Both Johnson and the OED cite The Art of Cookery (1708), a book-length poem by William King, in which he imitates Horace’s Ars Poetica: “These bak’d him kissingcrusts, and those / Brought him small beer.” The OED also cites Lamb. Kissing-crust is folk poetry, coined by some long-forgotten baker – sweetly human, crunchy and good for you.

'Give It One Lash the More at My Request'

Just for fun, as a sort of intellectual palate cleanser, I read Swift’s well-known September 29, 1725, letter to Alexander Pope, in which he modifies “world” with “rascally.” Swift was occupied correcting the galleys of Gulliver’s Travels, which would be published the following year. Rascally was a borrowing from French and originally referred to the rabble, the common folk. It came to mean, the OED tells us, “unprincipled or dishonest in character or conduct; untrustworthy, roguish,” which devolved into its modern “weakened sense: mischievous, cheeky.” Today, to be rascally could even be judged charming or cute. That’s not what Swift had in mind. He goes on in his letter to Pope: 

“When you think of the world give it one lash the more at my request. I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals; for instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Counsellor Such-a-one, and Judge Such-a-one: so with physicians—I will not speak of my own trade—soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally, I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.”

 

When you hear someone proclaiming his love for humanity in the mushy, grandstanding, Whitmanesque sense, check your wallet and watch your back. The con is on. Loving the sprawling, abstract mass makes it easier to send the individual to the Gulag for his own good. Swift is close to describing what Moses Herzog memorably dismissed as “low-grade universal potato love.” Swift is telling Pope that realism and common sense are the philosophical underpinning of Gulliver’s Travels:

 

“This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years, but do not tell, and so I shall go on till I have done with them. I have got materials toward a treatise, proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale, and to show it would be only rationis capax [“capable of reason”]. Upon this great foundation of misanthropy, though not in Timon's manner, the whole building of my Travels is erected; and I never will have peace of mind till all honest men are of my opinion. By consequence you are to embrace it immediately, and procure that all who deserve my esteem may do so too. The matter is so clear that it will admit of no dispute; nay, I will hold a hundred pounds that you and I agree in the point.”

'The Folly of Chance is the Logic of Fate'

On my first visit to his new apartment in Silver Springs, Md., my middle son, the family’s newly commissioned Marine, asked me to organize his bookshelves. The volumes fell into self-evident categories: Russian books in the original – Gogol’s Mjórtvyje dúshi – and in translation – War and Peace. Computer engineering, computer science, mathematics. History. Science fiction. Infinite Jest. Michael loaned me three books: 

Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature (Harper Colophon Books, 1964), edited by Patricia Blake and Max Hayward. I first read this in the late Sixties. It was my introduction to Zamyatin, Shklovsky, Zoshchenko, Paustovsky and possibly Babel.

 

Grey Bees (Maclehose Press, 2020) by Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk. In October, Michael met the novelist, who signed (in Russian) his copy on the title page. He was introduced to Kurkov by one of his Russian instructors at the Naval Academy, Catherine O’Neil.

 

Cardinal Points, Issue 11 (2021). This is a bilingual annual literary magazine published by the Slavic studies department of Brown University. Dralyuk serves as editor-in-chief and the other editors are Irinia Mashinski and Robert Chandler. I’ve been reading Cardinal Points online for several  years but this is the first time I have seen a hard copy. On the flight back to Houston I read a free-wheeling essay, “Lying to Ourselves” by Zsuzsa Hetényi, a professor of Russian at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Hetényi is an academic but thoughtful and funny, a wonderful discovery. She was asked questions by a Hungarian literary magazine during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic:

 

“To me the powerful new wave of the literature of memory and life-writing suggests that we’re just putting our old world into a museum for a future that is both terrifying and unknown. Because there is something that’s just about to disappear forever. This is confirmed by  the fact that there is now a massive new wave of Holocaust remembrance, a burgeoning of Facebook groups focused on collecting old photos, retro objects and popular art of the very recent past.”

 

Hetényi is a Nabokov scholar who has translated two of his Russian novels, Mary and Glory, into Hungarian. In the essay she admires the marvelous digression about a pencil in Transparent Things. In the next paragraph she tucks an allusion to Lolita in parentheses: “Evil fate (McFate) has now ensured that everyone must follow a set of rituals. Now everyone practices separation.” She goes on:

 

“The concept of the author I most often cite, Vladimir Nabokov, that death is not a fading away but back into the cosmos and nature, is of little help these days, unless as faith-like self-deception. A great disadvantage of the current disease and of many other forms of death is that death is preceded not only by suffering, but also by the humiliating nature of Hungary’s horrendous hospital and social conditions. Probably this is much scarier and lasts longer than death itself. So this is not the ecstatic poetry of melding back into nature that Russian poets imagine. The sarcasm of Nabokov is far more useful. ‘The folly of chance is the logic of fate.’ Now, that is universal – if somewhat half-empty/half-full, both discouraging and encouraging.”

 

The quoted line is from Nabokov’s short story “A Busy Man” (1931; trans. 1976). Hetényi writes:

 

“Close to my way of thinking is what Nabokov calls cosmic synchronization. This has been over-inflated by philosophically inclined analysts. It means that one can embrace and feel simultaneously several events at several distant points in the world.”

 

Her final Nabokov reference is to one of his best Russian novels, Invitation to a Beheading (1938; trans. 1959). The protagonist, Cincinnatus C., is a prisoner : “[H]e is informed of his death sentence in a completely absurd, petty operetta dictatorship, and then he is merely left to shrivel in prison. But one of Cincinnatus’s selves survives solely because he begins to write in prison (quarantine) diary. The subject of the diary is himself, because ‘no one can take me away from myself.’ Loneliness is the fundamental form of human existence.”

'Those Who Entered the Meat Grinder'

The U.S. Marine Corps has periodically issued Commandant’s Professional Reading Lists, oddly eclectic assortments of history, memoirs, self-help books, inspirational tracts, and fiction good and bad. Tolstoy once made it but so did Robert Heinlein. If I had to recommend only one book from one of the lists to Marines and civilian readers alike, it would be With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (1981) by Eugene B. Sledge (1923-2001). Sledge was born in Alabama, enlisted in the Marine Corps one year after Pearl Harbor, and saw combat in the Pacific Theater. He describes the savagery of the fighting with the Japanese and the esprit de corps among his fellow Marines. Sledge writes: 

“To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.”

 

My son Michael Ellington Kurp graduated on Friday from the U.S. Naval Academy with a B.S. in computer engineering and a minor in Russian, and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps.

'Losing the Present and Living in a Ghost Story'

 R.L. Barth tells me his friend and fellow Vietnam veteran Warren Hope, the poet, teacher and literary scholar, has died. In 1988, Barth and Hope, with the late Turner Cassity, published Mainstreaming: Poems of Military Life. Now Barth has written “Short-timer: An Elegy” -- for Warren Hope (1944-2022): 

“Ten days, I’m gone. Meanwhile, I crouch

On the steep slope by the LZ

Each dawn, watching as the troops slouch

Down to the choppers, though I see,

Behind the greasepaint, too few who know me.

 

“Cautious, in helmet and flak jacket

(There’s no such thing as too much care!)

I pinch a Lucky from its packet

And smile, then feel my longer hair,

Moustache, clean face. Where are they going? Where?

 

“Who cares! The hump-backed men embark

Up the vibrating ramp; and yet,

Despite myself and the half-dark,

I whisper, ‘Only nine?’ and fret,

‘One rifle’s missing from the silhouette.’

                                     “25 v. 2022”

 

Among the poets of World War I, Edmund Blunden seems to have been a gentle, thoughtful, dreamy man, who would name two of his children John and Clare, after the mad poet John Clare. He saw continuous action from 1916 to 1918, and survived the fighting at Ypres and the Somme. His friend Siegfried Sassoon said Blunden was the Great War poet most obsessed with his memories of the Western Front. In November 1968, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Armistice, Blunden wrote in the Daily Express:

 

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

 

In 1966, eight years before his death, Blunden wrote “Ancre Sunshine,” possibly the last poem written by a veteran of the Great War. It includes these lines:

 

“Here half a century before might I,

Had something chanced, about this point have lain,

Looking with failing sense on such blue sky.

And then become a name with others slain.”

 

In a 1994 essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets, Hope writes:

“[T]he fact of publication, while fixing the wording of poems, alters their context and meaning. Publication in fact severs poems from the contexts in which they originally arose and gives them the chance to live in any number of new contexts—contexts that may not have even been foreseen by their author. But this severing of poems from their original context does not represent a clean break. Something of that original context lingers with them as they take on a life of their own, separate from their author and the circumstances that compelled him to write.”

 

Those of us without experience of war must read the words of those who have survived such experience with tact and humility, and with some historical understanding. Self-righteously militant pacifism is at least as lazy and stupid a stance as bellicose jingoism.  

'Rivalry, Vanity, and Drink'

The proprietor of Anecdotal Evidence won’t remind readers that he enjoys a good anecdote. One needn’t fall for the biographical fallacy to savor a superior story. A revealing anecdote about a novelist has more in common with an O. Henry tale than with a critical article in a learned journal, and it’s usually more fun to read. As Dr. Johnson tells us in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775): 

“I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.”

 

Those words helped germinate this blog, as did “Anecdote and Storyteller,” an essay by Irving Howe posthumously collected in A Critic’s Notebook (1994). Howe defines an anecdote as a “brief, unelaborated, often humorous account of a single incident, taken to be piquant in its own right.” By that standard, one of my favorite literary anecdotes is the chance meeting of Keats and Coleridge. Howe adds: “One of its attractions is that in times of dislocation, the anecdote holds out the possibility that human beings may still connect, perhaps only briefly, through memory and story.”

 

One of our finest poets, X.J. Kennedy, now ninety-two years old, reviewed The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (1981), edited by Donald Hall. Like me, Kennedy enjoys a good anecdote and revels in the piquant, to use Howe’s word, as in this sample: “Mark Twain, who, when his infant nephew gives him a sweet and sloppy kiss, determines to ‘put up a monument to Herod.’” Kennedy speaks of anecdotes about American writers:

 

“These anecdotes illustrate, moreover, three of the book’s central themes -- themes that flow through our literary life as strongly and deliberately as the Mississippi -- rivalry, vanity, and drink.”

 

Then Kennedy sums up his pleasure in literary anecdotes and in Hall’s selection:

 

“Merely browse in Hall’s rich book, picking out the little hilarities, and you may wonder how such a nitwitted nationful of vain, jealous, posturing rummies possibly could have written American Literature. Read it through slowly, however, and you become convinced that our national classics are the work of human beings at least sporadically clever, decent, and wise. Playing chess with the Duchess of Bourbon, Benjamin Franklin captured her king. ‘Ah,’ said the French noblewoman, ‘we do not take kings so.’ ‘We do in America,’ Franklin replied.”

'The Poet Kept Smiling'

“I greeted the books with the joy and relief usually reserved for long-lost family members: here was the cure for loneliness, frustration, and boredom; here was the portal into other worlds that I could inhabit instead of the coldly unintelligible one in which I found myself.” 

After reading Maria Bloshteyn’s essay “A Motherland of Books,” I felt pampered and ungrateful for the ease with which I have always been able to acquire, read and often keep nearly any book I wanted. Living when and where I do, the censors, book burners and militant illiterates can’t touch me or my books. Bloshteyn, who left the Soviet Union with her family in 1979, quotes “Émigré Library” by her fellow Russian émigré Boris Dralyuk, who asks: “Our library is open, but for whom?”

Among the infrequently acknowledged virtues of books is consolation. Those we know well are portable, hospitable alternate worlds, homes away from home. Think of the Bible, Shakespeare, Conrad. Nabokov once referred to “those wonderful toys — literary masterpieces.” A blogger recently bragged that he doesn’t read books that make him feel comfortable. That can be dismissed as showboating machismo, of course, but it also suggests a sad poverty of imagination, the absence of an aesthetic and perhaps a moral sense. Most readers, thank God, don’t read like self-regarding postmodern critics. Bloshteyn writes:

 

“The Soviet Union proclaimed itself to be the best-read country in the world. This boast was largely true. If you got onto a bus or a streetcar in the seventies, most passengers would be reading. Entertainment at home—where television meant two or three channels of largely boring programming—was also reading.”

 

Read the passages in which Bloshteyn describes her family’s love for Pushkin. For those of us in the Anglosphere, substitute Shakespeare. Reading her essay, I felt pampered and ungrateful for the ease with which I can acquire, read and often keep nearly any book I wish. Living when and where I do, the censors, book burners and militant illiterates can’t yet touch me or my books. Bloshteyn describes culling volumes from her shelves in Canada and donating some of them to a library. I recently endured a comparable experience, undertaken mostly to make way for new volumes:

 

“The books I’m leaving at the book sale will be someone’s windfall to be treasured. Yet, I still feel like I am betraying the books. Their aged, weathered covers exude reproach. I might as well, like Shakespeare’s Prospero, be drowning them deeper than did ever plummet sound. I go again through the books that I’m giving away, pull several out of the boxes and set them aside, take a deep breath, and drive the boxes to the library.”

 

Recall the thoughts of another Russian reader and writer driven from his homeland:

 

“There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet [Nikolay] Gumilev was put to death by Lenin’s ruffians thirty odd years ago [1921] was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor’s dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.” 

 

[The Nabokov passages are taken from his Lectures on Literature (1980).]

'Its Mirth Is Boistrous'

The streets in downtown Annapolis between the Maryland State House and the U.S. Naval Academy are narrow and paved with brick. On Maryland Street, next to Galway Bay Irish Restaurant, where we had dinner Saturday night, is Old Fox Books, a small but carefully curated bookstore. I saw little junk on the shelves and the owner told me all of her books are digitally catalogued – a feat labor-intensive and much appreciated by serious readers. I was hoping to find a good sturdy hardback copy of my favorite Conrad, Nostromo, to replace the beat-up paperback I’ve had for years. No such luck.

However, I did find Literary Studies by Walter Bagehot, whose work I want to know better. This is the Everyman’s Library edition (1911; rev. 1950). In “Sterne and Thackery,” Bagehot makes it clear he’s not fond of the author of Tristram Shandy: “It is a great work of art, but of barbarous art. Its mirth is boisterous. It is provincial.” Well, . . .

 

I also found a nice first American edition of Literary Distractions (1958) by Msgr. Ronald Knox. Of him Matthew Walther wrote in First Things, with only modest exaggeration:

 

“The greatest writer of English prose in the last century, P. G. Wodehouse excepted, was not Lytton Strachey or Logan Pearsall Smith or the E. M. Forster of Pharos and Pharillon or Hugh Trevor-Roper. It was certainly not John Updike or William Faulkner, who did not always write English. It was not, alas, Evelyn Waugh. Nor, one is forced to admit, somewhat reluctantly, was it Dom David Knowles, the golden-voiced singing-master of monastic history. It is Msgr. Ronald Knox who must take the silver medal.”

'Mobile and Shimmering With Kinship'

“By the time of my birth, Stalin had been dead for 5 years 1 month and 4 days.”

 

Robert Chandler, the translator who gave us Vasily Grossman and Andrei Platonov, sent me a copy of The Naked World (MadHat Press, 2022) by Irina Mashinski. The book collects her poems translated or freely adapted from the Russian, and poems and short prose pieces written in English. Mashinski was born in Moscow in 1958, emigrated to the U.S. with her husband and daughter in 1991 and has published eleven collections of poems and essays in Russian. I know her as co-editor with Chandler and Boris Dralyuk of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015). With Chandler, Maria Bloshteyn and Dralyuk she translated Portraits Without Frames by Lev Ozerov.

 

The sentence quoted above is from “The Thaw,” the book’s opening piece. It suggests one of Mashinski’s themes: the unwelcome intersection of history and politics with private life. The title refers to the brief period in the Soviet Union following Nikita Krushchev’s secret speech to the 20^th Communist Party Congress in 1956. Krushchev denounced the cult of personality surrounding Stalin, and ushered in an easing of oppression and censorship that lasted into the mid-1960s. Mashinski writes:

 

“I was born in Moscow in the spring of 1958, the year of the impetus. It was during that year that [Yuli] Daniel and [Andrei] Sinyavsky [aka Abram Tertz] started publishing their work in the West, which eventually led to their show trial in 1965-66, which in turn inspired the dissident movement.”

 

In Mashinski’s poems and prose, history suffuses private life, often quietly, sometimes unpleasantly. Her parents met in 1957 during the Festival of Youth and Students, “when Moscow was, for the first time in decades, flooded with young people who smelled of soap and freedom and strolled and danced in the city’s freshly washed streets. My parents were part of this July whirlwind—and before I knew it, I appeared.”

 

She recounts the arrest and banishment of relatives – and the pleasures of a Soviet childhood with her family. She recalls a winter day spent skiing at the Architects’ Union resort in Sukhanovo with her father. While there she reads Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and is “overcome by the pain and sorrow.” She writes:

 

“I didn’t know back then—and I doubt that even my father knew when we were skiing in Sukhanovo—that tens of thousands of people were shot in those same woods in 1930-50s including the 20,761 executed by the decision of the Troika [three NKVD officials], between August 1937 and October 1938—people whose names are known now.”

 

One of the finest pieces in The Naked World, “The Poet and the Child,” appears near the end of the book and, at least on the surface, makes no overt references to politics. It reads as a gentle, nonpoetic, apolitical poetic manifesto. Mashinski relaxes and luxuriates in her understanding of human nature – precisely what Soviet Communism sought to manipulate and ultimately destroy:

  

“It is rare that a grownup acts by association in everyday life—as rare as a slip of the tongue. How often do we shove a rake into the tableware drawer? For a child, however, a rake and a fork are, basically, one and the same. A child doesn’t deal in labels but in the substance of things. Such deep metonymy requires unconditional faith. And it is faith that breaks down first. This is precisely what happens in adolescence.”

 

Mashinski recalls a time “when the world was mobile and shimmering with kinship.” She strives to recapture this sense:

 

“This is why the poetic world, which lacks consistent correlations and is not regulated by the direct logic of concepts—this world of objectified meanings and all-permeating kinship—is off limits to those who’ve become irreversibly grownup, who have traveled too far upon the road at the beginning of which stands the symbol.”

 

Mashinski’s work has the charm of a gifted child, one undefeated by experience and the crushing weight of history.

'Ridiculous Enough of Themselves'

Too much time spent Saturday in airports, airborne in a 737 and later in a restaurant. Good thing I packed Jules Renard's Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020): “The indignation of satire is unnecessary. It is enough to show things as they are. They are ridiculous enough of themselves.” Renard is on the short list of people from the past I wish I could have spent time with. Charles Lamb picked Fulke Greville and Sir Thomas Browne.

'As War Is the Extremity of Evil'

Among Dr. Johnson’s lesser-known works is a pamphlet, “Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Islands,” published in 1771. The previous year, England and Spain nearly went to war over possession of the desolate but strategically positioned islands in the South Atlantic, three-hundred miles east of what is now Argentina. When France declined to back Spain, England and Spain averted war without resolving their claims to the islands. In the words of his biographer, W. Jackson Bate, Johnson was responding to the “opposition [in Britain] clamoring for war.” Bate writes: 

“[H]e speaks of the shocking unawareness with which most of humankind will see a war started. The drab horror and suffering of war is completely beyond their experience. What little they know of it has been picked up from colorful accounts of battles in ‘heroic fiction.’”

 

Boswell likewise lauds Johnson’s arguments in the pamphlet:

 

“[E]very humane mind must surely applaud the earnestness with which he averted the calamity of war; a calamity so dreadful, that it is astonishing how civilised, nay, Christian nations, can deliberately continue to renew it. His description of its miseries in this pamphlet, is one of the finest pieces of eloquence in the English language. Upon this occasion, too, we find Johnson lashing the party in opposition with unbounded severity, and making the fullest use of what he ever reckoned a most effectual argumentative instrument, contempt.”

 

Readers who long ago decided Johnson was a bellicose reactionary may be surprised. He never experienced war firsthand but appreciated its horrors. His rhetoric is breathtaking:   

 

“As war is the last of remedies, ‘cuncta prius tentanda’ [“try everything first”], all lawful expedients must be used to avoid it. As war is the extremity of evil, it is, surely, the duty of those, whose station intrusts them with the care of nations, to avert it from their charge. There are diseases of animal nature, which nothing but amputation can remove; so there may, by the depravation of human passions, be sometimes a gangrene in collective life, for which fire and the sword are necessary remedies; but in what can skill or caution be better shown, than preventing such dreadful operations, while there is yet room for gentler methods!”

 

Today we leave for Annapolis, Md., where our son Michael will graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy on May 27 and be commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. Posts will continue, time and internet connection permitting.

'Yes! Among Books That Charm'

Like most humans I flatter myself that I’m in control of every thought and action. I’m the boss. Increasingly, age teaches otherwise. What goes on in consciousness is more like a third-rate vaudeville show than an earnestly delivered TED talk. I seldom know what’s coming next, juggler or baggy-pants comedian. Emotionally, I’m a fairly disciplined guy who resists self-indulgence, until I’m reminded otherwise: 

“There is laughter that goes so far as to lose all touch with its motive, and to exist only, grossly, in itself. This is laughter at its best. A man to whom such laughter has often been granted may happen to die in a workhouse. No matter. I will not admit that he has failed in life. Another, who has never laughed thus, may be buried in Westminster Abbey, leaving more than a million pounds overhead. What then? I regard him as a failure.”

 

How nice to be judged a success. The other night my youngest son showed me a Richard Prior clip and I laughed till I cried. Same reaction when not long ago I watched The Bank Dick for the twenty-seventh time and reread Charles Portis’ Masters of Atlantis. There’s a species of laughter akin to blissful inebriation and certain advanced spiritual states. The self is briefly forgotten. In fact, it disappears. Such moments are dependent to some degree on unexpectedness. Comedy is rooted in surprise. Preachiness kills it.

 

Max Beerbohm is author of the passage cited above, from his essay “Laughter” (And Even Yet, 1920). Ours is a world in which stridency and volume are mistaken for honesty. Beerbohm’s voice is hushed. Irony lies coiled, ready to spring from his soft-spoken manner. He is among those who, Joseph Epstein suggests in his appropriately titled Charm: The Elusive Enchantment (2018), “find life delightful and through their own charm bring delight to  others!”   

 

In “Diminuendo” (The Works of Max Beerbohm, 1896), Beerbohm writes:

 

“Yes! among books that charm, and give wings to the mind, will my days be spent. I shall be ever absorbing the things great men have written; with such experience I will charge my mind to the full.”

 

Beerbohm died on this date, May 20, in 1956, at age eighty-three.

'More Friends in the Other World'

“On Wednesday, May 19 [1784], I sat a part of the evening with him, by ourselves. I observed, that the death of our friends might be a consolation against the fear of our own dissolution, because we might have more friends in the other world than in this.”

Whether or not this represents his heartfelt conviction, we can admire Boswell’s attempt to console his ailing friend. In Dr. Johnson’s final months, he suffered from general circulatory disease, made obvious the previous year by a stroke; chronic bronchitis and emphysema, accompanied by increasing breathlessness; congestive heart failure, the cause of Johnson’s fluid retention; and rheumatoid arthritis. Boswell continues in his Life:

“He perhaps felt this a reflection upon his apprehension as to death; and said, with heat, ‘How can a man know where his departed friends are, or whether they will be his friends in the other world? How many friendships have you known formed upon principles of virtue? Most friendships are formed by caprice or by chance, mere confederacies in vice or leagues in folly.’”

Contrary to the end. This is more cynical about the nature of friendship than was customary with Johnson, as when he wrote, “Life has no pleasure higher or nobler than that of friendship.” Death and the torments of the afterlife, like the fear of imminent madness, plagued Johnson throughout his life. Boswell goes on:

“We talked of our worthy friend Mr. [Bennet] Langton. He said, ‘I know not who will go to Heaven if Langton does not. Sir, I could almost say, Sit anima mea cum Langtono.’ [May my soul be with Langton].’ I mentioned a very eminent friend as a virtuous man. Johnson: ‘Yes, Sir; but —— has not the evangelical virtue of Langton. ———, I am afraid, would not scruple to pick up a wench.’”

Nicely ironic, knowing what we know about Boswell the wench-picker-upper (and V.D.-picker-upper). Boswell continues: “He however charged Mr. Langton with what he thought want of judgement upon an interesting occasion. ‘When I was ill, (said he) I desired he would tell me sincerely in what he thought my life was faulty. Sir, he brought me a sheet of paper, on which he had written down several texts of Scripture, recommending Christian charity.’” Leslie Stephen, in his biographical sketch of Bennet, describes the Biblical citations as “texts enjoining mildness of speech.” In other words, what Coleridge described as Johnson’s “bow wow manner.”

Boswell goes on quoting Johnson:

“‘And when I questioned him what occasion I had given for such an animadversion, all that he could say amounted to this, — that I sometimes contradicted people in conversation. Now what harm does it do to any man to be contradicted?’ Boswell: ‘I suppose he meant the manner of doing it; roughly, — and harshly.’ Johnson: ‘And who is the worse for that?’ Boswell: ‘It hurts people of weaker nerves.’ Johnson: “I know no such weak-nerved people. Mr. [Edmund] Burke, to whom I related this conference, said, ‘It is well, if when a man comes to die, he has nothing heavier upon his conscience than having been a little rough in conversation.’”

 Johnson’s friend and first biographer, Sir John Hawkins, reports his final coherent words were Iam moriturus (“I who am about to die”), an echo of the gladiators’ salute to Caesar: “Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant.” In Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (1998), Lawrence Lipking describes the scene shortly before his death:

“Bloated with dropsy [edema], Johnson tries to discharge the water by stabbing his legs with a lancet and scissors until the bedclothes are covered with blood. He even reproaches his surgeon for not daring to delve far enough.”

Johnson was dead seven months after the conversation recounted by Boswell, on December 13, 1784. Boswell died on this date, May 19, in 1795.

'A Kitten Who Doesn’t Wish to Be Caught'

“Both Hemingway’s tight style and D.H. Lawrence’s sloppy one are now in the attic. Neither had any sense of humor whatsoever; this tells a lot. The Terribly Serious writer is serious in relation to his age, and the eternal verities wear very different clothes from one age to the next.” 

We seldom get a chance to congratulate our younger selves. More often they stir embarrassment but part of growing up is forgiving our former callowness and learning from it. I’m proud to have seen through Hemingway and Lawrence from the start. Their reputations, as understood by this adolescent reader, were for manliness and borderline smut, respectively. I hadn’t expected their gifts for dullness. Some of Hemingway’s early stories were worth reading once, but his style – the subject-verb-object flatness of the prose, so many sentences strung together with and’s, the gross sentimentality – quickly wore thin. I hadn’t expected to find The Sun Also Rises so boring, and I’m with Max Beerbohm when it comes to the author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover: “Poor D. H. Lawrence. He never realized, don’t you know — he never suspected that to be stark, staring mad is somewhat of a handicap to a writer.”

 

Guy Davenport is writing to James Laughlin on this date, May 18, in 1993. The letter begins with Davenport’s mention of Delmore Schwartz, “who had a great deal of originality as well as a heaping measure of the poets of his time.” He continues:

 

“It’s curious how differences and resemblances stand out only after an epoch is over. The famous patina of ‘period’ or junk (which can become charmingly Antique). There’s no way of getting Aesthetics out of history. Art of the highest order is exempt from aging—Joyce, Proust, EP [Ezra Pound], [Gerard Manley] Hopkins.”

  

That’s debatable. Pound’s Cantos are a disordered junk shop of archaisms, undigested learning and incoherence, and very much of their time. The self-consciously modern tends to age badly. Then consider, for instance, Laurence Sterne and Charles Lamb. In a blindfold taste, a seasoned reader could readily date them, yet their humor, their appreciation of sheer silliness, their psychological acuity and the texture of their prose often feel “modern,” even contemporary. Hemingway, father of the so-called hard-boiled school, comes off as corny and stilted, and Lawrence is the sort of guy we’re warned not to make eye contact with. In contrast, Davenport writes:

 

“The most interesting trajectories in time are those whose initial shine goes dull in a generation (I’m thinking of Kipling, Booth Tarkington, and O. Henry), lies low, and then emerges bright and fresh.”

 

I can’t speak for Tarkington but the others remain endlessly rereadable, the finest writers of short stories after the Russians and Isaac Bashevis Singer. One of the qualities I most admire in Davenport is his dismissal of fashion, literary or otherwise. He doesn’t recognize it. It might as well not exist. He writes elsewhere:

 

“We trust seriousness to be the firm ground beneath our feet while knowing full well that it is ultimately dull and probably inhuman. . . . Comedy is a free spirit, full of fun, and has no intention of explaining herself. In fact, much of her charm is in her mystery, in eluding the serious as successfully as a kitten who doesn’t wish to be caught.”

 

[You can find Davenport’s letter in Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.]

'What Was or What May Be'

One of life’s seldom-noted pleasures is being disagreed with politely, thoughtfully, interestingly. It’s a rare treat, preferable to being scolded. Even the reasonably secure and mature among us can feel a flash of defensiveness when challenged. In last Friday’s post, I dismissed nostalgia as “cheap and easy” and cited Roger Scruton’s dismissal of it as “unhealthy.” Nige of Nigeness replied in a gentlemanly manner: 

“Agreed, nostalgia certainly can be cheap and easy – but there’s a more exalted form, isn’t there, which is a kind of painful longing or homesickness (the root meaning). This might be ‘unhealthy’, but it’s genuine and quite profound, and, like other forms of longing (Sehnsucht), has certainly inspired some great art. Think Schubert’s songs, Housman’s ‘Into my heart’, etc. . . .”

 

Of course, Nige is correct. Too often I associate nostalgia with such sentimental sops as Mister Ed, “Classic Rock” and the Kennedy administration, all favorites of my generation, the Boomers. It’s safe to say these things are “unhealthy,” not to mention cheesy. Nige’s etymology is solid. The Greek root means “return home.” The word arrived in English in the eighteenth century, though our modern sense evolved late in the nineteenth. The OED defines that usage as “sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past, esp. one in an individual’s own lifetime; (also) sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past.” In other words, an unearned longing for something that likely never existed, a comforting pipedream.

 

In his essay “On Being Conservative,” Michael Oakeshott argues that to be truly conservative is to display “a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be.” We can think of progressives as reverse nostalgists, longing for a future that will never be. A nostalgist of genius is Vladimir Nabokov.

 

I waited to respond to Nige, not wishing to sound touchy or petty. The best readers, as usual, go on educating me. I was moved to write something while reading Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman (1978). Here is the final line of a poem from his first volume, “East Congress and McDougall Streets, Detroit, May 25”: “My thirst for the past is easy to appease.” Detroit was Sissman’s hometown.

'The American God, the Automobile'

Art Tatum was a jazz piano player of genius who was blind for much of his life and an enthusiastic drinker. Often, he insisted on driving. In Too Marvelous for Words: The Life and Genius of Art Tatum (Oxford, 1994), James Lester writes: “Art seems to have had a love affair with cars, and once told friends that his greatest regret in life was not being able to drive.” But that didn’t stop him. Lester reports a story from the 1940’s told by Al Hibbler, a singer with Duke Ellington’s orchestra who was also blind: 

“I thought, ‘Man, I’m crazy, sittin’ up here and I’m going to let this blind fool drive me? I’m a fool—and the keys were in the ignition! I’m getting out of here—and he ain’t driving me. I can see better ’n you can! I ain’t going to let you drive me all over.’ He got real mad about it. But it passed over, you know. . . . he’s drunk and I’m drunk. We both drunk as fools. Sittin’ up there drinkin’ all night and singin’. He wasn’t going to try it with me! Art could see just a little bit—but not well enough to drive no car. And I knew it and he knew it.”

 

Elsewhere, Lester refers to Tatum as a “blind navigator” and recounts the time he took his cousin Chauncey Long’s Model A and drove it into a tree. Perhaps it was pride, a blind man trying not to be dependent on others. After reporting that Ray Charles once demolished his own car, Lester writes: “For the visually handicapped to wish to be more mobile is certainly not surprising.”

 

Tatum’s opposite are people who never learn to drive – a choice that makes one, among Americans, a worrisome freak. Vladimir Nabokov never learned. He estimated that between 1949 and 1959, Véra, his wife, drove him more than 150,000 miles on lepping expeditions across the continent. The writer who documented roadside America in Lolita couldn’t drive, but seems not to have had anything against automobiles and driving, unlike Guy Davenport. A sub-theme present in many of Davenport’s essays is the evil of cars and their impact on the world. In “The Symbol of the Archaic” he derides “. . . the automobile, the machine that stole the city’s rationale for being, and made us all gypsies and barbarians camping in the ruins of the one unit of civilization which man has thus far evolved.”

 

In “Whitman” (!) he writes: “The largest American business is the automobile, the mechanical cockroach that has eaten our cities; that and armaments.” In “The Indian and His Image” he refers to “the American God, the Automobile.”

 

I’m sympathetic, but in a vacuum. I’ve driven for five-sixths of my life but have never enjoyed it. Driving is not relaxing. It’s work, like assembling Ikea furniture but more dangerous. The surest way to depress myself is to try calculating all the money I have spent in my life on automobiles – their purchase and maintenance, fuel, insurance, repairs and so on. Cars are the third-most common and tedious topic of conversation, after politics and sports. At my first three newspapers, I lived close enough to the office to walk there, and often did. Houston is unimaginable without a car. In the Whitman essay, Davenport notes that “a man in an automobile is as active as a sloth.”

 

[All the essays quoted can be found in Davenport's The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981).]

'Thought That He Knew How It Was Done'

A friend whose taste in books I generally trust suggested I read Adam Thorpe’s first novel, Ulverton, published in 1992. “Layered history” he called it. “You’ll like it.” So, I emailed Kaboom Books here in Houston, John Dillman put a copy aside and I picked it up on Saturday. I seldom read recent fiction, so I’m hoping the experiment pays off. I also realized I almost never buy books I haven’t already read, and I’m not certain what that means. It may suggest a lifelong reliance on libraries. Or caution, unwillingness to buy something I don’t want to keep or at least recommend to someone else. Or maybe cheapness. From John I bought two other (pre-read) books: 

The first American edition of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Knox Brothers (1977)

 

Zbigniew Herbert’s The King of the Ants: Mythological Essays (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, Ecco Press, 1999)

 

Fitzgerald’s book, a charming collective biography of her father (Edmund Knox, editor of Punch) and his three brothers (Ronald, theologian, Bible translator, author of Enthusiasm and crime writer; Dillwyn, cryptographer; Wilfred, Bible scholar), contains an unexpected passage I remember well, about Fitzgerald’s great- grandfather:

 

“George Knox, on the other hand, was the kind of Irishman who, like Samuel Beckett’s Watt, ‘had never smiled, but thought that he knew how it was done.’”

'A Man By Himself Is in Bad Company'

The library has a circulating first edition of Eric Hoffer’s second book, The Passionate State of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (Harper & Brothers, 1955). I’ve read it before and even when I disagree with him I find Hoffer’s plain-spokenness and common sense a balm. [My spelling software asked if I meant bomb.] His syndicated newspaper column in the late 60’s was one of the reasons I decided to become a reporter. 

The copy I’m reading has been heavily annotated by someone, usually with a ballpoint pen. By “heavily” I mean on almost every page of the 151-page volume. This constitutes ambitious vandalism, graffiti on a small canvas. There’s evidence that a second annotator has commented on the first set of remarks, leaving on some pages a dense palimpsest few will ever read. Both can be commended for good, legible penmanship and the intensity of their engagement with the text. Here is Hoffer’s Aphorism 262: “A man by himself is in bad company.”

 

This is Hoffer being provocative, especially to twenty-first-century sensibilities. The honest among us know precisely the hellishness we’re capable of. The first annotator writes in pencil, “Speak for yourself.” The second, in ink: “He obviously speaks from bad experiences!” Thanks, fellas.

 

In the preceding aphorism, Hoffer writes: “Much of man’s thinking is propaganda of his appetites.” Now our guide dates himself: “At least he knows his Freud – or is it his Norman O. Brown?” There’s a name I haven’t encountered in half a century. Elsewhere, our man cites Montaigne, Socrates, Pascal, Bertrand Russell and, most often, Nietzsche, usually in opposition to Hoffer. In other words, we’re dealing with an undergraduate, probably closer to my contemporaries than today's undergrads. Here is Hoffer’s Aphorism 179:

 

“When a situation is so unprecedented that no amount of knowledge or experience is adequate to master it, then the ignorant and inexperienced are more fit to deal with it than the learned and experienced. The unknown and untried give as it were a special fitness to the unfit.”

 

Admittedly, this is dubious. Hoffer is baiting the over-educated elite. I’m not sure either group is especially competent in a crisis. Our man resorts to his old reliable snobbery:

 

“This is so blatantly anti-intellectual that one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry."

 

I pick laugh.

'Nothing in This World Is Worth Buying'

A reader has asked me and others to recall a favorite television commercial from childhood and write about it. I declined. Two risks accompany the request. The first, campiness, I find simple to ignore. Camp prompts cheap and easy laughs, and feels dishonest. Laughs should be earned. Nostalgia, too, is cheap and easy. Roger Scruton described it as “an unhealthy state of mind,” and people my age seem particularly susceptible to it. 

During World War II, having returned to England from Italy, Max Beerbohm broadcast talks and readings on the BBC. Of them, Rebecca West wrote, “I felt that I was listening to the voice of the last civilized man on earth. Max’s broadcasts justify the entire invention of broadcasting.” On September 18, 1942, Beerbohm spoke on “Advertisements,” which had proliferated in England, in the form of signs and billboards, during his absence:

 

“[T]he kind of noisiness that had increased more than any other was that visible kind which is especially unbeloved by me. There had been an horrific increase in the volume, the torrential spate and flood of—advertisements.”

 

We don’t have cable so we’re spared the assault of commercials on network television, but like all Americans we know the blight of signs violating roadsides and even the bodies of tractor-trailers. Billboards have grown three-dimensional with the addition of cows, automobiles and oversized beer cans and hot dogs. Even the pumps at gas stations are topped with screens playing commercials, and don’t get me started on online ads and those on the front page of newspapers. Beerbohm writes:

 

“If I were endowed with wealth, I should start a great advertising campaign in all the principal newspapers. The advertisements would consist of one short sentence, printed in huge block letters -- a sentence that I once heard spoken by a husband to a wife: ‘My dear, nothing in this world is worth buying.' But of course I should alter ‘my dear’ to ‘my dears.’”

   

I remember a lesson from the publisher after he hired me for my first job as a newspaper reporter. We were touring the room where the pages were being laid out for that week’s edition. He said: “You’ll notice that the first thing we put on the page are the ads,” suggesting that stories and photos, the nominal reasons I had been hired, were dubious afterthoughts.

 

There’s really no argument about the effectiveness of advertising. It sticks in memory, insidiously, like other traumas. To that degree, it works. From childhood I remember, after sixty years, dozens of jingles from radio and television commercials for breakfast cereal, beer, Cleveland car dealers and even for products I have never purchased, like cigarettes. Of course, I watched an appalling volume of television when I was a kid. I’m reminded by Beerbohm not to get too worked up over such things:

 

“I wish, Ladies and Gentlemen, I could cure myself of the habit of speaking ironically. I should so like to express myself in a quite straightforward manner. But perhaps it’s as well that I can’t; for, if I could, my language might be over-strong for Sunday evening.”   

 

[You’ll find Roger Scruton’s line in On Hunting (St. Augustine’s Press, 1998). Max Beerbohm’s broadcast is collected in Mainly on the Air (1946; rev. 1957).]

'And Such a Deal of Skimble-Skamble Stuff'

In Act III, Scene 1 of Henry IV, Part I, Hotspur speaks of Owen Glendower to Glendower's son Mortimer:

“I cannot choose: sometime he angers me

With telling me of the mouldwarp and the ant,

Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies,

And of a dragon and a finless fish,

A clip-wing’d griffin and a moulten raven,

A couching lion and a ramping cat,

And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff

As puts me from my faith.”

 

Skimble-skamble sounds like the name of an early-60’s dance craze. In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson describes it as a “cant word.”  The OED speculates that Shakespeare coined the word, deriving it from scamble, meaning “to make one’s way as best one can; to stumble along,” a mutation of shamble and scramble – not a bad characterization of the way most of us live our lives. The OED cites a remarkably contemporary passage from Burton’s Anatomy using scamble as an intransitive verb:

 

“[W]hen they contemn learning, and think themselves sufficiently qualified, if they can write and read, scamble [scramble in some modern editions] at a piece of evidence, or have so much Latin as that emperor had, qui nescit dissimulare, nescit vivere [“one who knows not how to dissemble”], they are unfit to do their country service, to perform or undertake any action or employment, which may tend to the good of a commonwealth, except it be to fight, or to do country justice, with common sense, which every yeoman can likewise do. And so they bring up their children, rude as they are themselves, unqualified, untaught, uncivil most part . . .”

 

The OED’s definition of scamble as a transitive verb is priceless and recalls a mosh pit: “To struggle with others for money, fruit, sweetmeats, etc. lying on the ground or thrown to a crowd; hence, to struggle in an indecorous and rapacious manner in order to obtain something.”

 

Skimble-skamble repeats a sound with variation, using a nonsense word. Other examples of the same folk-linguistic strategy include wishy-washy and tittle-tattle. As an adjective the word means “confused, incoherent, nonsensical, rubbishy.” As a noun: “confused or worthless discourse. Also, writing of this nature.” In other words, a highly useful word.

 

About another word, mouldwarp, in Hotspur’s speech: “the European mole, Talpa europaea.” The OED cites No. XIII in Geoffrey Hill’s great Mercian Hymns (1971): “The men were paid to caulk water-pipes. They brewed and pissed amid splendour; their latrine seethed its estuary through nettles. They are scattered to your collations, moldywarp.”