'It’s the Glow of Life'

“Piled up, the books they wrote are not a necropolis. They are an arcadian pavilion with an infinite set of glittering, mirrored doorways to the unknown: which seems dark to us only because we will not be in it. We won’t be taking our knowledge any further, but it brought us this far.” 

“They” are the writers Clive James read or reread late in life, as recorded in Latest Readings (Yale University Press, 2015), four years before his death. Among the autumnal riches – Conrad, Dr. Johnson, Anthony Powell, Olivia Manning. He reread the poems of Basil Bunting and grew to love them, which ought to be encouraging to all of us. Long-held, carefully guarded judgments are, at least potentially, open for reevaluation, especially when the consolation they provide is needed most. I find the example of a dying old man repudiating an earlier lapse in discernment oddly stirring and encouraging. In the case of Bunting, most of the “School of Pound” is unreadable, but Bunting, who called out Pound for his anti-Semitism, remains the glowing exception. In 2010, James had been diagnosed with emphysema, kidney failure and leukemia, and lived to publish another dozen or so books (including a translation of Dante) before his death in November 2019.

 

But the passage quoted above moves me for another reason, one rather eccentric and rooted in my love of the Great American Song Book. The word pavilion will always be linked in memory to “Early Autumn,” composed in 1947 by Ralph Burns and Woody Herman, with lyrics by Johnny Mercer. Here they are, as transcribed in Reading Lyrics (eds. Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball, 2000):

 

“When an early Autumn walks the land

And chills the breeze

And touches with her hand

The Summer trees,

Perhaps you'll understand

What memories I own.

 There’s a dance pavilion in the rain

All shuttered down,

A winding country lane all russet brown,

A frosty window pane shows me a town grown lonely.

That spring of ours that started

So April-hearted

Seemed made for just a boy and girl.

I never dreamed, did you,

Any Fall would come in view so early, early.

Darling, if you care,

Please, let me know,

I'll meet you anywhere,

I miss you so.

Let’s never have to share

another early Autumn.”

 

Burns and Herman wrote the song in 1947 and Herman’s “Second Herd” recorded it that year. Wait for Stan Getz’s solo. Mercer added lyrics, at Herman’s request, in 1952.  Here is Ella Fitzgerald’s version from 1956. Who knew sadness could be so consoling? James writes in a brief essay, “When Creation Is Perverse,” included in Latest Readings:

 

“Art grows from the world, and the world, as Louis MacNeice said, is incorrigibly plural. This cruel but consoling fact really shows up when you start the slide to nowhere. The air is lit by a shimmering tangle of all the reasons you are sad to go and all the reasons you are glad to leave. It’s the glow of life: apparently simple, yet complex beyond analysis.”