'Your Delicate and Sympathetic Touches'

A reader experiences an almost cosmic sense of rightness on learning that two writers he admires are themselves mutually admiring. Jealousy and back-stabbing are endemic among writers. I once interviewed a poet who spent almost the entire time lambasting another, more prominent poet. I didn’t care for either’s work so I enjoyed myself. Consider this encomium: 

“He is the vaudeville magician par excellence, astonishing us again and again by producing out of the air, in front of our eyes, life untampered with. He is also a poet dealing in prose fiction with the shifting, fictitious nature of reality, with the artifice that we call Time, with the aurora borealis of memory. There is no discoverable limit to the range of his talent. And sadness is his very home.”

 

That’s William Maxwell’s tribute to Vladimir Nabokov when the latter was the recipient of the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1969. Maxwell gets it right, singling out Nabokov’s playfulness, philosophical depth, stylistic mastery and the ever-present note of sadness in his work. “He is one more in the line of great Russian storytellers,” Maxwell says, “and, strangely, he is our own. We got him through accident; history displaced him. Personal deprivation made him a great literary artist.”

 

Maxwell was Nabokov’s editor at The New Yorker beginning in 1955, after the retirement of Katharine White. Brian Boyd reports in the second volume of his Nabokov biography that Maxwell said no other writer except perhaps Rebecca West was as loyal to the magazine. And in her biography of Maxwell, Barbara A. Burkhardt tells us he read in manuscript Pale Fire, and the Russian novels The Defense and The Gift as they were translated into English. When The New Yorker published The Defense in two issues in 1964, Nabokov wrote to Maxwell: “Let me add that I much appreciate your delicate and sympathetic touches. The thing reads beautifully.” Rare words from Nabokov, who was notoriously resistant to editorial meddling.

 

For my money, Nabokov and Maxwell are the greatest American novelists of the twentieth century, the greatest pleasure-givers. Their only serious rival is Willa Cather.

 

[Maxwell’s tribute can be found in Conversations with William Maxwell (ed. by Barbara Burkhardt, University Press of Mississippi, 2012).]

'Hail, Memory, Hail!'

Beyond a certain age, frayed memory becomes a consistently worrisome theme among contemporaries. (How unfortunate that we don’t forget to talk about it.) Forgetting the name of the group that recorded “My Boyfriend’s Back” in 1963 becomes an ironclad diagnosis of incipient idiocy. We are a self-involved generation. Time to gorge, I'm told, on antioxidants. I wrote to an English friend, a poet who is close to my age: “I've noticed I've been making small mistakes with greater frequency of late -- forgetting names, not noticing typos, etc.” He replied:

 

“Well, if you are deteriorating mentally so am I, the most frightening thing of all my forgetting how to spell words. I also have what I call Small Word Blindness. I either forget to put them in or I don’t notice their absence. My proof-reading has never been good in any case.”

 

I’ve always had a reliable memory. Remembering things, especially dates, came easily. It’s reassuring to remember there’s nothing new about anxiety over memory loss. Listen to the poet Samuel “Breakfast” Rogers (Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, 1856):

 

“[Samuel] Boddington had a wretchedly bad memory; and, in order to improve it, he attended [Gregorvon] Feinaigle’s lectures on the Art of Memory. Soon after, some-body asked Boddington the name of the lecturer and, for his life, he could not recollect it. — When I was asked if I had attended the said lectures on the Art of Memory, I replied, ‘No, I wished to learn the Art of Forgetting.’”

 

Like most writers (like most human beings), Rogers has been largely forgotten. He was a witty fellow, good company, known for the breakfasts he held in his London home, attended by such luminaries as Scott, Byron and Turner. During his lifetime, Rogers’ best-known work was probably The Pleasures of Memory, with Other Poems (1802). At it’s heart, the long poem is a celebration of nostalgia:

 

“Hail, Memory, hail! in thy exhaustless mine

From age to age unnumber’d treasures shine!”

 

Rogers was born on this date, July 30, in 1763 and died in 1855 at age ninety-two.

'Bizarrely Eccentric Rules and Routines'

Everyone, I trust, is neurotic about something. We all have some micro-environment requiring micro-management. It’s a benign failing so long as it never escalates into the macro-scale. Take books. Mine I organize on the shelves by author and subject – that’s conventional enough – but within those loose categories I organize by size. I get itchy when I see volumes of widely divergent dimensions – dictionaries next to chapbooks – adjacent on a shelf. 

A friend sent me a link to this week’s Michael Dirda column in which the Washington Post writer reviews some of his bookish crotchets. “Over time,” he writes, “all readers acquire an array of personal, often bizarrely eccentric rules and routines that govern — or warp — how they interact with the printed word. . . . Perhaps you will recognize a few of your own.”

 

Dirda mentions his inability to listen to music while reading. That’s true for me as well. Nor can I have music going while I write. This is odd because for a quarter-century I worked in newspaper newsrooms, which are notoriously noisy places – police scanners, televisions, reporters complaining, editors arguing, reporters arguing, editors complaining. “I find this impossible,” Dirda writes, “which is why you’ll never see me working at a coffee shop.” Same here. I brew my own coffee.

 

Dirda and I share a number of dislikes: remainder marks, library-style plastic book covers, unremovable price stickers, and our refusal to read on electronic devices: “I’ve never,” he writes, “used a Kindle or any type of e-reader. I value books as physical artifacts, each one distinct. Screens impose homogeneity.” That one seems self-evident. I’ve never understood the ongoing fashion for e-books. The love of novelty or the latest gadget, I suspect. Perhaps my favorite agreement with Dirda is this:

 

“Buy only what you will read

 

“Mine is a personal library, not a focused collection. I never buy any book I don’t hope to enjoy someday. True collectors, by contrast, aim to be exhaustive and inclusive, gathering all sorts of material they have no intention of ever reading.”

Books are not for ostentation, vanity or home decorating. They’re more like tools. One of our neighbors has turned his garage into a clean, well-lit, perfectly organized woodworking shop, an environment I can admire and emulate. Books are not tchotchkes. I can conceive of rereading, some time, every book I own.

'With Deliberate Carelessness'

The oxymoronic form of the “prose poem” is best when the emphasis is on “prose,” not “poem.” Their chimeric nature usually cancels these little mutants. Baudelaire’s are sometimes interesting. Geoffrey Hill wrote some good ones in Mercian Hymns (1971). Otherwise, prose poems, the logical next step after free verse, arrive stillborn. Another occasional exception is Zbigniew Herbert. Included in Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, 1999) is “Still Life”: 

“Violently separated from life, these shapes were scattered on the table with deliberate carelessness: a fish, an apple, a handful of vegetables mixed with flowers. A dead leaf of light has been added, and a bird with a bleeding head. In its petrified claws the bird clenches a small planet made of emptiness, and air taken away.”

 

The key phrase is “deliberate carelessness.” Recall that in “Delight in Disorder,” Robert Herrick sees “a wild civility.” Part of the charm of still-life painting is its humble, homely messiness. Herbert’s collection of essays Still Life with Bridle (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, 1991) is a meditation on the aesthetic legacy of seventeenth-century Holland. The title essay relates Herbert’s discovery, in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, of a painting by an artist previously unknown to him: Jan Simon van der Beeck (1589-1644), better known as Torrentius. The painting, the only work by him known to have survived, lent its title to the collection. Herbert describes it as “a calm, static still life,” depicting a clay pitcher, a half-filled glass goblet, a pewter pitcher, two porcelain pipes, paper with musical notations, a book and, difficult to identify without Herbert’s help, a bridle. He writes:

 

“The background was the most fascinating of all: black, deep as a precipice and at the same time as flat as a mirror, palpable and disappearing in perspectives of infinity. A transparent cover over the abyss.”

 

Near the end of his twenty-eight-page title essay, Herbert writes:

 

“So many questions. I did not manage to break the code. The enigmatic painter, the incomprehensible man, begins to pass from the plane of investigation based on flimsy sources to an indistinct sphere of fantasy, the domain of tellers of tales.”

 

Herbert’s essay reads like a mystery, with Herbert himself in the role of self-confessed failure as a detective. Who was Torrentius? Political martyr (an appealing figure for a poet in Poland under Soviet rule) or mad man? A civilized man can live with such ambiguities and uncertainties, and even relish them. Herbert hints that such mysteries are emblematic of civilization.

 

In Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature (1998), Guy Davenport devotes an entire playful, discursive, scholarly volume to the still life, starting with its origins in Egypt (food for the dead) and Israel (the Book of Amos). He writes:

 

“Still life is a minor art, and one with a residue of didacticism that will never bleach out; a homely art. From the artist’s point of view, it has always served as a contemplative form used for working out ideas, color schemes, opinions. It has the same relation to larger, more ambitious paintings as the sonnet to the long poem. . . . We must not, however, imagine that still life is inconsequential or trivial.”

 

And later:

 

“Still life belongs in the slow sinews of a great swell that began with the cultivation of wheat and the fermentation of wine, bread and wine being two of its permanent images. It is an art that is symbiotic with civilization.”

 

With calm confidence, Davenport makes typically audacious generalizations:

 

“In still life, down through history, we find an ongoing meditation on where matter ends and spirit begins, and on the nature of their interdependence. Joyce, who left no art untouched or unchallenged, deployed still lifes throughout his work. The first sentence of Ulysses is one: 'Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.'”

 

In a Keatsian manner, Herbert remains vexed by Torrentius and his still life. He can’t figure him out. “Thus it is time to part with Torrentius,” he writes.

 

“Farewell, still life.”

 

Herbert died twenty-five years ago today, on July 28, 1998, at age seventy-three.

'Fly for Refuge to the Dentist’s Care'

Thanks to Eric Ormsby and his poem “Dicie Fletcher,” I learned of Solyman Brown (1790-1876), the poet laureate of pyorrhea. Brown was an American dentist and poet, author of Dentologia: A Poem on the Diseases of the Teeth (1833). Ormsby used six lines from the fourth of its five cantos as an epigraph to “Dicie Fletcher”: 

“Whene’er along the ivory disks, are seen,

The filthy footsteps of the dark gangrene;

When caries come, with stealthy pace to throw

Corrosive ink spots on those banks of snow–

Brook no delay, ye trembling, suffering fair,

But fly for refuge to the dentist’s care.”

 

We would call “caries” cavities. Poems about unlikely, seemingly unpoetic subjects once were fairly common. For better or worse, our forbears were serious people. James Grainger (1721-1766) wrote The Sugar-Cane: A Poem in Four Books (1764). Book I of William Cowper’s “The Task” is dedicated to “The Sofa.” It begins: “I sing the Sofa.” William Topaz McGonagall (1825-1902), often judged “the worst poet in the world” (lots of competition for that title, Messers Ashbery and Bly), gave us “The Tay Bridge Disaster” (1880).

 

Brown was no quack, at least given the state of dentistry in the mid-nineteenth century. He co-founded the American Society of Dental Surgeons in 1840 and wrote a sequel to Dentologia: “Dental Hygeia — A Poem.” In the earlier poem he presciently saw the future popularity of “cosmetic dentistry.” Nothing works better when you're selling something than an appeal to vanity:

 

“The fancied angel vanished into air,

And left unfortunate Urilla there:

For when her parted lips disclosed to view,

Those ruined arches, veiled in ebon hue,

Where love had thought to feast the ravished sight

On orient gems reflecting snowy light,

Hope, disappointed, silently retired,

Disgust triumphant came, and love expired!”

 

In Ormsby’s poem, the title character, a classics teacher, has a sore tooth and at first refuses the dentist’s offer of nitrous oxide: “’I have a horror of unconsciousness,’ she said.” The time is 1881, when laughing gas was still a novelty. No spoilers here. Read the poem.

 

[“Dicie Fletcher” is collected in Ormsby’s Daybreak at the Straits (2004), Time’s Covenant (2007) and The Baboons of Hada (2011).]

'Landscapes Enter Our Innermost Being'

I dreamed I was in Kraków again. I was walking in Planty Park, the fist-shaped green space that surrounds the city’s Old Town. The paths are covered in crushed stone and many of the trees are chestnuts, as in Paris. In a rapid cut, I was walking through stone corridors at Jagiellonian University, founded in 1364. In 2012 I was the North American representative at the wedding of my wife’s German cousin, who was marrying a Polish girl. Three hundred people at the two-day reception and I was the only American. Lots of vodka, wine and beer, and no brawls. The friendliest drunken crowd I’ve ever encountered.

The city and the dream felt welcoming and vaguely déjà vu-ish. I enjoy dreaming but don’t take it seriously. My paternal  grandparents came from some nameless village near Kraków early in the twentieth century, but it’s all a fog to their surviving descendants. Only as a teenager did I learn the original family surname was Kurpiewski. Did my grandparents change it or some hack on Ellis Island?

The late Adam Zagajewski was born in Lwów, Poland in 1945 before the Soviet Union annexed it. He studied at Jagiellonian and started writing poetry while in Kraków. In his prose collection Another Beauty (trans. Clare Cavanagh, 2000) Zagajewski writes:

 “I can’t write Kraków’s history, even though its people and ideas, trees and walls, cowardice and courage, freedom and rain all involve me. Ideas as well, since they cling to our skin and change us imperceptibly. The Zeitgeist chisels our thoughts and mocks our dreams. I’m intrigued by all kinds of walls; the space we inhabit isn’t neutral, it shapes our existence. Landscapes enter our innermost being, they leave traces not just on our retinas but on the deepest strata of our personalities. Those moments when the sky’s blue-gray suddenly stands revealed after a downpour stay with us, as do moments of quiet snowfall. And ideas may even join forces with the snow, through our senses and our body. They cling to the walls of houses. And later the houses and bodies, the senses and ideas all vanish. But I can’t write Kraków’s history, I can only try to reclaim a few moments, a few places and events; a few people I liked and admired, and a few that I despised.”

I was in Kraków for a week, long enough for it to join that small museum of places that soothe me and feel like a refuge, even in memory.

'I Have Lost the Race I Never Ran'

What is sadder than early promise unfulfilled? Think of the one-time prodigies, the whiz kids who withered. Think of Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849), the poet’s son, who inherited some of his father’s unhappy habits -- alcohol, not laudanum -- and few of his gifts. He was the little boy about whom his father wrote in “Frost at Midnight”: 

“My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,

And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,

And in far other scenes!”

 

Hartley and his parents were frequently estranged and he was largely raised by Robert Southey. He started drinking early and was expelled from Oriel College at Oxford. His life was littered with half-completed projects, including an unfinished lyric drama, Prometheus. In the second volume of his Samuel Taylor Coleridge biography, Richard Holmes writes of the elder poet’s final days:

 

“The figure who still haunted Coleridge was Hartley, a reproachful ghost of his own lost youth. The schoolmastering had failed, a second attempt at journalism in Leeds had been abandoned, and from 1829 he was again adrift in the Lake District, living mainly with a kindly family of farmers outside Grasmere.”

 

In 1833, Samuel was surprised to receive a copy of Hartley’s first and only book, Poems, dedicated to his father. In one of his sonnets he writes: “I have lost the race I never ran,” and says in “Lines——”:

 

“Because I bear my Father’s name

    I am not quite despised,

My little legacy of fame

    I’ve not yet realized.”

 

Hartley made his way home, drunk as usual, on a winter night in 1849, developed bronchitis and died on January 6 at age fifty-two. William Wordsworth, a year away from his own death, buried him in the Grasmere churchyard beside his family's graves. Samuel Taylor Coleridge died on this date, July 25, in 1834 at age sixty-one.

'Like Coming Home After a Long Absence'

Thirty-five years ago I was reading eight newspapers a day, sometimes more. I worked for the Hearst Corp. in a city, Albany, N.Y., with an a.m. paper, the Times Union, and a p.m., the Knickerbocker News. In 1988, Hearst killed the latter, where I worked, and the editorial staffs merged. That’s two. Add the Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Newsday (mostly for Murray Kempton’s column), New York Post, the Daily News and the Boston Globe (mostly for Bill Griffith’s “Zippy the Pinhead” comic strip), and you have eight. Occasionally I dabbled in such area papers as the Daily Gazette in Schenectady (where I later worked), the Record in Troy and the Post-Star in Glens Falls.

I have little interest in news and have always ignored sports. I read newspapers the way reporters often read them – quickly and cursorily, looking for items that attracted me, usually of non-professional interest. That could mean anything from an account of a juicy multiple murder to a rare thoughtful op-ed piece on a subject I cared about. An editor once told me that if you buy a newspaper and find in it one story that intrigues, amuses or informs you, one that you read to the final word, you got your money’s worth. I never cared to be "well-informed," never followed politics and can’t remember ever getting angry about a story I had read. Today, I read two newspapers – our neighborhood weekly and the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, mostly for the book reviews. I’ve never read a newspaper – that is, from page one to the classified ads --  online.

I’ve just read “Reading That Isn’t Reading,” a brief essay by David Heddendorf in the Spring 2015 issue of The Sewanee Review. Heddendorf wanted to find occurrences of the phrase “as all the world knows” in the collected works of P.G. Wodehouse. Five pages into The Code of the Woosters he finds it and continues his search in other Plum titles but finds no more. I like Heddendorf’s attitude:

“At this point an obvious question arises. Why didn’t I use Google or some other digital means of ransacking Wodehouse’s works? A few keystrokes would have swiftly and accurately completed a search that my skimming performed with plodding imprecision. Well, I had the books at hand. I felt reasonably sure of my memory. And I didn’t think the search would take very long. To tell the truth, though, the real reason I didn’t reach for some digital device is that the idea didn’t cross my mind until later. That’s just the sort of person I am.”

Heddendorf’s mode of enlightened skimming is familiar to me. That’s usually how I read newspapers, though I’m certain I have never read a paper looking for a specific word or phrase. “Racing through a book,” Heddendorf writes, “in search of a particular phrase was diametrically opposed to what reading ought to be. In fact it wasn’t reading at all.” Perhaps. But who reads a news story the way we read Henry James? Only the severely misguided. Now Heddendorf gets to his real concern, which is that not only can most of us read, but we have learned to read in different ways:

“Reading that isn’t reading has been around for at least a century or two. Who actually reads a newspaper? It’s more nearly as if we mine it, extracting information and amusement as they happen to catch our eye. That’s what headlines, captions, and subtitles are for—to guide our selective scanning. We don’t read a newspaper, we look at it. More recently this mode of looking has expanded into our other dealings with words, thanks to the Internet and the tools with which we search its contents. Rarely do we read an article, blog entry, or post without some search or link having instantly taken us there, assuring us the piece is worth our time. Even then we read restlessly, provisionally, ready to bail out when we become bored, irritated, or tired.”

Right on the money. But not all reading is a matter of focused distraction. The best reading, of course, is still found in books. As some of us age, we choose to linger while reading, not only slowing down but pausing, pondering, rereading. Most recently, that’s how I read Gary Saul Morson’s  Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter – a book I regretted having finished. Heddendorf writes:

“Reading has become a marginal distracted activity, wedged into our sparest time, diluted to the thinnest concentration. When we do happen to read some story or book closely and in its entirety, the feeling is like coming home after a long absence. The shock might even call up our earliest, most formative times with books, those turning points that stand out like conversion experiences.”

'Yes! Among Books That Charm'

I still rely on anthologies for a significant portion of my continuing education. A good one is a buffet that permits sampling without gorging, and you don’t have to feel guilty about nibbling on one of the entrées and finding it tastes bad. We just move along to the next selection. Among my earliest teachers was a mediocre and now forgotten poet but a gifted anthologist – Oscar Williams. Now I’m picking at The Eighteen-Nineties: A Period Anthology in Prose and Verse (ed. Martin Secker, 1948), with a rousing introduction by John Betjeman. It’s not a period I know intimately or feel particularly loyal to, though I’m surprised by the number of favorites it contains – Beerbohm, Housman, Yeats. Betjeman is encouraging: 

“Never was English more carefully written than in the nineties. Infinite pains were taken to use balanced sentences in prose, to create atmosphere, to write mellifluously, to delight in language.”

 

I’m also surprised by the number of names I don’t recognize – Hubert Crackenthorpe, Theo Marzials, Victor Plarr. The last named is author of Lives of the Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons (1930) but is represented in the anthology by two poems, including “Ad Cinerarium,” a sort of paean to cremation. A sample stanza:  

 

“When the artificers had slowly

Formed thee, turned thee, sealed thee, burned thee,

Freighted with thy freightage holy . . .”

 

The campy quotient is rather high among the selections. Rather than taking cheap shots at the contents, I’ll celebrate the contributions of Max Beerbohm, both taken from his first book, the audaciously titled The Works of Max Beerbohm (1896). “Eighteen-Eighty” is rather tepid by Max standards but “Diminuendo” is an early triumph, a retrospective look at his undergraduate years at Oxford, with a comical focus on Walter Pater. There’s more gravitas and verve in his conclusion:

 

“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. Nor will I try to give anything in return. Once, in the delusion that Art, loving the recluse, would make his life happy, I wrote a little for a yellow quarterly and had that succès de fiasco which is always given to a young writer of talent. But the stress of creation soon overwhelmed me. Only Art with a capital H gives any consolations to her henchmen.”

 

It’s also worth noting that the volume is among the hundreds I’ve encountered from the personal library of Edgar Odell Lovett (1871-1957), the Princeton mathematician who became the first president (1908-46) of Rice Institute (now University). Who can imagine today a university president reading Beerbohm, Housman or Oscar Wilde?

'Lost in the Stars'

Money was tight in the late nineties and I picked up freelance writing and editing work wherever I could find it. I wrote feature stories for a hospital magazine and a New York State nature journal. An English professor I knew had written an opera libretto based on Columbus’ voyages to the New World and I edited it. Another professor, who taught psychology at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., was fulfilling every academic’s dream by writing a memoir. Frank Calabria published Let It Be a Dance: My Life Story in 2001 after three rounds of editing. 

By avocation, Frank was a dancer. In 1993 he published Dance of the Sleepwalkers: The Dance Marathon Fad. He met his wife while working as an instructor for a dance studio in Brooklyn, which explains the title of his memoir. He was born in Astoria, Queens, and grew up in an Italian neighborhood. Among his neighbors was Tony Bennett, who died Friday at age ninety-six. Bennett was particularly close to Frank’s younger brother, Ernie Calabria, who worked as Harry Belafonte’s guitarist for nine years and recorded fourteen albums with him. He also played with Pablo Casals. Frank writes in his memoir:

 

“On one occasion, Tony Bennett called on his way to the Guggenheim Museum of Art—Bennett is a serious and talented painter. He invited Ernie and me to come along. As we drove in his white limousine, I felt like royalty. From the moment Bennett stepped out of the car, he was greeted by well-wishers. It took him a quarter of an hour to get from the street curb to the entrance of the museum.”

 

Bennett gave Frank and Ernie’s mother one of his still-life paintings. Frank describes the time Bennett came to the Calabria house in Queens and rang the bell:

 

“After a time, on the landing above, my grandfather appeared bowing his violin; the sound of the instrument had an eerie quality. Bennett called up, ‘Is Ernie home?’ In response my grandfather peered down at the caller for a long, long while. Then, without any sign of acknowledgment, he slowly turned around and disappeared from the landing, bowing the violin as he went. My grandfather’s ghostly performance left Bennett shaken as he left the house.”

 

In 1994, Ernie died of a heart attack at age sixty-six and Bennett spoke at his memorial service in Manhattan, relating the grandfather story. He sang Kurt Weill’s “Lost in the Stars,” and Bennett’s painting of Ernie was displayed in the chapel. “The portrait is half in darkness,” Frank writes, “and half in light. My brother was in contact with both worlds.”

 

Two things about Bennett's singing appeal to me: the sense of intimacy he establishes with listeners, as though he were singing to one person at a time, as in conversation; and -- a related quality -- the expressive attention he pays to lyrics. Whitney Balliett in his profile of Bennett, “A Quality That Lets You In” (Alec Wilder and His Friends, 1974), listens as the singer tells him a story:

 

“‘I like the funny things in this life that could only happen to me now. Once, when I was singing Kurt Weill’s ‘Lost in the Stars’ in the Hollywood Bowl with Basie’s band and Buddy Rich on drums, a shooting star went falling through the sky right over my head, and every­one was talking about it, and the next morning the phone rang and it was Ray Charles, who I’d never met, calling from New York. He said “Hey, Tony, how’d you do that, man?” and hung up.’”

'Her Only Levity Is Patience'

More than thirty years ago, on a curving road near Dolgeville, N.Y., in the foothills of the Adirondacks, the driver ahead of me purposely swerved his car to hit a box turtle crossing the road, as though reenacting a heavy-handed bit of symbolism in The Grapes of Wrath. The turtle was thrown into the tall grass along the berm. I pulled over and found him, scuffed but with his shell intact and already heading back to the pavement. I carried him down the hill and left him in a dry creek bed, hoping he would be discouraged by the long, steep climb back to the road. 

I have little tolerance for gratuitous cruelty and I can think of few animals less deserving of our abuse then turtles. Their protective armor and plodding ways make them kin to humans. Ten years ago, Levi Stahl staged a contest with Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary (1975) as the prize. It was made into a good movie in 1985 starring Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley. To win a copy of the novel all we had to do was submit our “best turtle story.” I wrote an account of another close encounter on a road, this time with an oversized snapping turtle. Go here to read it and the other submissions. Now read Kay Ryan’s “Turtle” from Flamingo Watching (1994):

 

“Who would be a turtle who could help it?

A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,

She can ill afford the chances she must take

In rowing toward the grasses that she eats.

Her track is graceless, like dragging

A packing-case places, and almost any slope

Defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,

She’s often stuck up to the axle on her way

To something edible. With everything optimal,

She skirts the ditch which would convert

Her shell into a serving dish. She lives

Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery

Will change her load of pottery to wings.

Her only levity is patience,

The sport of truly chastened things.”

 

Ryan too sees turtles as human-like and vice versa. Nice to see the good guys win for a change.

'I Check My Goods at the Door'

We all know the sort of party guest – or neighbor, or reader, or spouse – who talks solely in order to argue the obvious superiority of his own opinions. This breed is tiresome, and our instinct is to slip away -- politely, if possible. How often do we encounter someone who talks – or writes – not because he has an opinion to spout but because he wishes to learn something, to relieve his ignorance and begin to understand, who ponders and questions? 

In its Spring1993 issue, The Threepenny Review published a symposium devoted to the widely misunderstood notion of disinterestedness, especially in regard to reading. Disinterested is often used casually to mean “uninterested” or even “bored” rather than “impartial.” In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson defines the adjective as “superior to regard of private advantage; not influenced by private profit” and “without any concern in an affair; without fear or hope.” Seven writers responded to the journal’s prompt, including Thom Gunn, who begins: “The disinterested reader exists in the same way as the just judge and the faithful spouse.” Then he gets serious:

 

“I read to understand something I didn’t understand before, by this perhaps to learn, by this perhaps to change, however slightly; and therefore I can read best by forgetting the self in the presence of a more active imagination than my own. . . . As I enter a book, I check my goods at the door, to claim them again when I leave. Then I can test my opinions, my preconceptions, my ‘interests’ against anything I have found out; then I can evaluate.”

 

Reading, as Gunn sees it, is a sort of surrender, an agreement to withhold judgment, to play by the writer’s rules, at least temporarily. He would agree with Guy Davenport in his essay “On Reading”, where he says of his childhood (and adult) taste in books: “What I liked in reading was to learn things I didn’t know.” Many, I suspect, if they read at all do so to confirm what they already think they know. Davenport said he wrote not for critics but for “people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.”

 

It’s not a matter of suppressing the self but forgetting it. We already spend enough time in solipsistic infatuation. Why not throw back the curtains and illuminate the gloom.

 

“If you can't lose the self as completely in a poem as in a horror-movie,” Gunn writes, “I don’t see why you bother to read, as it must be a very boring exercise indeed. Of course the disinterest is not absolute, nothing is absolute. Reading is a process, isn’t it? . . . The reader aspires to the disinterest of the ideal scholar. . . . We find on the page what it has to give us, but we can only find it because we woo it, because we are ready to be its Romeo or its Juliet, because we are ready to bypass the self.”

 

[The Guy Davenport passages can be found in The Hunter Gracchus: And Other Papers on Literature and Art, 1996).

'Darting, Delicate, Exacting, Pan-Interested Mind'

Asked to name which “mental attitude” she judged “dismal, disastrous and distasteful,” Marianne Moore replied with a single word: “apathy.” It’s a complicated state, not easily dismissed. Dr. Johnson defined it as “the quality of not feeling; exemption from passion; freedom from mental perturbation.” In other words, not a wholly bad thing. Many things, from politics to video games, are worthy of principled indifference but not at the cost of perturbation. 

Chief among Moore’s virtues as a poet are curiosity and wonder coupled with precision of expression. A Moore poem resembles a Kunstkammer, a cabinet of curiosities drawn from every human realm. Not for her what Tennyson called “hollowhearted apathy, /  The cruellest form of perfect scorn.” There's too much to love in the world. Kay Ryan, a poet having a lot in common with Moore, lauds her “darting, delicate, exacting, pan-interested mind.” In her 1960 Paris Review interview with Donald Hall, Moore quotes George Grosz: “How did I come to be an artist? Endless curiosity, observation, research – and a great amount of joy in the thing.”

 

Artists endure who attend to the world. Details are precious. Art is collecting and arranging them. Moore’s poems, even those misread as nature poetry, sentimental bric-à-brac or whimsy, are cunningly made. The modern writer she most resembles is Vladimir Nabokov. “Beauty is everlasting, / and dust is for a time,” she wrote during World War II after seeing a photograph of a dead soldier in a magazine.

 

Moore’s condemnation of apathy above is from her reply to questions posed by Harper’s Bazaar and published as “Antidotes” in its July 19, 1963 issue. The magazine asked “Which play, book, painter, food, film, musical work, celebrity, activity, virtue, place, mental attitude, type of humor has seemed to you dismal, disastrous and distasteful?” Don’t go looking for self-revelations. Like  the animal she favored, Moore is admirably self-protective. As to the book she scorned, the poet answered:

 

“The Prince by Machiavelli: so dull; the advice, obvious (win the obstacle’s favor, enslave, or extirpate has not been working very well). Whereas the History of Florence says all by implication and sparkles like a diamond.”

 

Moore writes in “Armor’s Undermining Modesty” (1950):

 

“If tributes cannot

be implicit,

 

“give me diatribes and the fragrance of iodine,

the cork oak acorn grown in Spain;

the pale-ale-eyed impersonal look

which the sales-placard gives the bock beer buck.

What is more precise than precision? Illusion.”

 

[Moore’s responses to Harper’s Bazaar can be found in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, Viking, 1986).]

'Thought, and Thought, and Thought and Thought'

Like Yvor Winters (one of his admirers), Edwin Arlington Robinson is seldom credited with having a sense of humor. Conventional understanding today judges him -- assuming anyone reads his poems -- a socially maladjusted New England tippler who wrote poems about unhappy people. His beginnings in rural Maine were unpromising. He went unnamed for months after his birth in 1869 because his parents had hoped for a daughter. In 1870 they organized a drawing to name him. A family friend drew “Edwin” from a hat and because the friend was from Arlington, Ma., they made it his middle name. 

His older brother became a doctor and scuttled his career with opium. His younger brother married the woman on whom Robinson had an unrequited crush and then retreated into alcoholism. The poet was forced to leave Harvard when the money ran out. All he had was a vocation for writing poetry. J.V. Cunningham observed that Robinson was “almost without biography.”

 

And yet, we have “Miniver Cheevy” (The Town Down the River, 1910), a muted, eight-stanza comic masterpiece. If a poet writes a single overtly comic poem, can we judge him a humorist? Robinson tells us nothing about Cheevy’s life – except, at the end, his drinking. No mention of education,  job, wife, children. Cheevy is an inveterate dreamer, even as an adult. His sensibility is childish:

 

“Miniver loved the Medici,

   Albeit he had never seen one;

He would have sinned incessantly

   Could he have been one.”

 

Live long enough and you’ll meet several Miniver Cheeveys, especially if you attend or work for a university. They are just too good for this life. The idealist’s perennial lament:

 

“Miniver scorned the gold he sought,

   But sore annoyed was he without it;

Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,

   And thought about it.”

 

Hypocritical, of course, but that’s the least of it. Call it self-willed paralysis. The fourth “thought” cinches it. If Cheevy weren’t so laughable and ridiculous he would be heartbreakingly sad, made even sadder by the suspicion that Robinson intended the poem at some level to be a self-portrait.

'The Drab Shoelace of H'

A friend with a much-cherished case of synesthesia tells me my surname is brown – “the color of The Band’s second album.” I envy him. Like Nabokov, he is gifted with grapheme-color synesthesia, in which letters and their combinations come in colors. As if the visual world weren’t already sumptuous enough, a veritable Matisse painting, Steve sees letters and words as daubs on a palette. “K” on its own, he says, is consistently brown. Some of the remaining letters shift colors depending on context. Rimbaud wrote about it in "Voyelles."

Almost eighteen years ago I wrote a freelance story about synesthesia in which I described it as “an artful and harmless merging of the senses.” After the story was published, I heard from several people who had the condition or wished they did. All were eager to talk about it. For other lucky people, music arrives with colors.

In chapter 2 of Speak, Memory, Nabokov devotes several pages to his synesthesia, including a color key for each letter:  

“The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated) has for me the tint of weathered wood, but the French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites.”

He continues, reveling in his gift:

“In the green group, there are alder-leaf f, the unripe apple of p, and pistachio t. Dull green, combined somehow with violet, is the best I can do for w. The yellows comprise various e’s and i’s, creamy d, bright-golden y, and u, whose alphabetical value I can express only by ‘brassy with an olive sheen.’ In the brown group, there are the rich rubbery tone of soft g, paler j, and the drab shoelace of h.”

'He Writes to Give Me Pleasure'

A reader is angry and complains that the poems of Geoffrey Hill are “too difficult” to read, and he seems to be taking this as a personal affront, as though the late poet wrote verse designed to frustrate his efforts to read it. Hill’s response to this familiar complaint was admirably simple and illuminating:

 

“We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most ‘intellectual’ piece of work.”

 

I suggested to my reader that the solution is simple: don’t read Geoffrey Hill. Move on. Try William Carlos Williams. Burton gives the classic author’s rejoinder in The Anatomy of Melancholy: “I resolve, if you like not my writing, go read something else. I do not much esteem thy censure.”

 

Some writing is worth the effort necessary to appreciate it. A century ago many readers were baffled by Ulysses. Today, almost anyone reasonably schooled in English could read Joyce’s novel. Some are able to write accessibly without patronizing readers. In Portraits (Oxford, 1931), the British literary critic Desmond McCarthy writes:

 

“I often read [Robert Louis] Stevenson. One reason why I turn to him is that he writes to give me pleasure. How few modern authors do! They write to do us good, to expose us, to scold us, to teach us, to express their contempt for us, to exhibit their own indomitable minds; few write to entertain and delight us.”  

 

One legacy of literary modernism is authorial snobbery and condescension.

'The Most Perfect Conspiracy of Approval'

T.S. Eliot begins his 1919 essay “Ben Jonson” with these words: “The reputation of Jonson has been of the most deadly kind that can be compelled upon the memory of a great poet.” Eliot explains: 

“To be universally accepted; to be damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to be afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least pleasure; and to be read only by historians and antiquaries—this is the most perfect conspiracy of approval.”

 

A happy confluence of factors spurred me in 2010-11 to read and come to appreciate and enjoy Jonson’s poetry: immersion in the poems and criticism of Yvor Winters; my friendship with the late Helen Pinkerton, a former student of Winters’; publication of Ben Jonson: A Life (2011) by Ian Donaldson.

 

Jonson perfected the plain style of verse and became the master of epigrams in English (followed closely by J.V. Cunningham). Unlike his contemporary John Donne, Jonson’s poems are notably un-“metaphysical.” They are models of clarity and offer little fashionable grist for the academic mill. With a few footnotes identifying the people named by Jonson, any intelligent reader can appreciate his poems. Take “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare” and “On My First Son.”

 

Jonson isn’t the only writer to be so embalmed. Think of others who are “universally accepted” (sometimes for the wrong reasons) and yet go unread. Among poets, Housman comes first to mind, and I don’t include efforts to read him exclusively through the lens of his homosexuality. Like Jonson, his verses are simultaneously transparent and profound. Larkin called him “the poet of unhappiness,” which tells me he has something to say to any mature adult. We ought to consider as well his enormous popularity during World War I, in the trenches and on the home front. Housman, like Jonson, passes the inexhaustibility test. Kingsley Amis writes of him in  The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse (1988):

 

“Of course I think it ungrateful and wrong that Housman should never have been conventionally admitted as a great English poet, one of the greatest since Arnold, but not so surprising when you consider some of the people who have been so admitted. What are the objections to him? . . . His themes are restricted: I started to make a list of them until it occurred to me that the same objection would exclude from the canon Milton, Herbert, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats. . . . He turns his back on the modern world: next question. He made no technical innovations: get out of my sight.”

'Passion and Meditation and Landscape'

Charles Darwin in his Autobiography (1887) tells us he read poetry with “great pleasure” until around his thirtieth birthday. He mentions Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley. "Even as a schoolboy,” he says, “I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially the historical plays.” Then something changed and Darwin spends no time asking himself why. His five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle started in his twenty-second year, suggesting that he was still enjoying poetry at the time of the expedition. 

“But now for many years,” he writes, “I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.”

 

To his credit, Darwin doesn’t blame Shakespeare & Co. for his loss of interest. He merely observes, without emphasis and rather clinically, that his former reading inclinations have changed. This is where it gets interesting:

  

“Novels, which are works of the imagination [and poetry is not?], though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. . . . I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily – against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.”

 

So much for Darwin the literary critic. One wishes he would have named names. Who was he reading? The happy-ending qualification suggests Dickens but the Victorians cranked out warehouses of fiction, much of it three-deckers and most with an obligatory happy ending. But Darwin is no abject philistine. He goes on to express puzzlement and regret for this shift in reading tastes:

 

“This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.”

 

Now I can sympathize – to a degree. I too have lost some of the omnivorous hunger for fiction I had when young, though I still read Shakespeare and other poets. I’m mercifully free of the drive for “grinding out general laws” –in other words, theory. Nor do I sense “atrophy.” I think of it more as dormancy, still there but largely inactive. Now Darwin grinds out a general law:

 

“A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

 

This is touching and sad. I learned of this passage and went on to read the Autobiography years ago when reading A Weakness for Almost Everything (trans. Ann Goldstein, Steerforth, 1999) by the charming and unclassifiable Italian writer Aldo Buzzi (1910-2009). In a self-interview collected in the book, after expressing admiration for Nabokov, he asks himself, “What in your view is the ideal novel?” and responds:

 

“Today, at my age, it seems to me the ideal model for the novel is the one Proust wished to write (and did): ‘A novel full of passion and meditation and landscape.’”

 

Then he quotes a portion of the Darwin text and adds: “No one excommunicated him.”

 

[Two other books by Buzzi are available in English: Journey to the Land of Flies and Others Travels (trans. Ann Goldstein, Random House, 1996) and The Perfect Egg and Other Secrets (trans. Guido Waldman, Bloomsbury, 2005). I recommend all of them.]