'Certificate of Naturalization'

In our basement was a gray file cabinet we were forbidden to touch. Naturally I opened it and in one of the drawers I found an old leather wallet containing the ID cards of a stranger with the surname Kurpiewski. Who is this? Why is the name so similar to ours? I couldn’t ask because that would have been an admission of guilt. Only years later did I figure out that Karol (Charles) Kurpiewski was my paternal grandfather, who died shortly after I was born. When did he change the family name, and why? I have friends who can rattle off the branches of their family tree as easily as the alphabet, whereas my forebears are mostly a mystery even two generations back. 

While clearing out my late brother’s apartment, my nephew found our Polish grandfather’s naturalization certificate, dated September 17, 1920, eight months before my father’s birth. It’s filled with revelations and further mysteries. The surname is spelled in two ways, ending in “-ski” and “-sky.” Why Virginia and not Ohio? Because he was in the service, stationed at Camp Lee. He was “a subject of Russia”? New information but not a surprise. After the Armistice, Poland regained its independence as the Second Polish Republic. The certificate states my grandfather was then twenty-four, meaning he was born around 1896. No mention is made of a wife, children or an occupation, though I know in Cleveland he was an ironworker, as were his three sons.

 

Coincidentally, today is the 104^th anniversary of the Battle of Komarów in the 1919-21 Polish-Soviet War. The Poles achieved a decisive victory and the Soviet 1st Cavalry Army suffered a disastrous defeat. This was the conflict in which Isaac Babel rode as a correspondent with Semyon Budyonny, commander of the Soviet 1st Cavalry Army. Lenin, the arch-imperialist, wanted to regain control of the territories abandoned by Russia in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918 – a treaty soon annulled by the Bolsheviks. In his 1920 Diary, Babel writes on August 31, 1920:

 

“The military order to leave Zamosc, to go back to the rescue of the Fourteenth Division, which is being forced back from Komarow. The shtetl has again been taken by the Poles. Poor Komarow. “

 

This is the war Babel turned into the stories he collected in Red Cavalry (1926). By emigrating, my grandfather avoided one war only to be enlisted in another when the U.S. entered World War I in 1917.  

 

[The 1920 Diary is included in The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (trans. Peter Constantine, W.W. Norton & Co., 2002).]

'How Quickly It Would Slip By'

“[S]ome of the memories I can now summon up have a greater intensity than the events themselves seemed to possess at the time, or rather – since memory has a filter of its own, sometimes surprising in what it suppresses or retains, but always significant – some of them stand out in disproportionate clarity to the rest.” 

Earlier in the same paragraph, Iris Origo (1902-88) had been considering Proust and his novel in her Images and Shadows: Part of a Life (1970). The Frenchman, she writes, confirms her conviction that she is “carrying within me (in spite of all the changes that have taken place) the whole of my life.” I’ve always suspected the same, even before I first read Proust more than half a century ago. Since my brother’s death last week, lost memories have announced themselves like bubbles in a simmering kettle of soup. My nephew, clearing out his father’s belongings, found this:

 

It’s the 1965 Grove Press edition of Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, edited by Roger Shattuck, who later published The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (1968), which includes a chapter on Jarry. Abe then sent a photo of the front end paper:

 

I think I gave this to Ken early in the nineteen-eighties but I had forgotten all about it. There’s the crossed-out dedication to the previous owner, but I want to know who gives Jarry to his daughter for Christmas? Then Ken’s remembrance of my gift. He was the last person alive who called me “Pat.” Best of all, the sentiment at the top right: “No longer relevant to me.” That’s as honest a critical judgment as I’ve ever heard. Ken, of course, recognized the allusion I would have intended. The Cleveland band Pere Ubu, lead by David Thomas, took its name from Jarry’s play Ubu Roi.

 

Origo admits she would like more time: “But the time I would really beg for, at any street corner, would be time in the past, time in which to comfort, to complete and to repair—time wasted before I knew how quickly it would slip by.”

'The Culmination of Contemporary Economism'

For half a century my brother earned his living making picture frames, some of which were themselves works of art. In later years he relied more on accounts with hotel chains and the glass office buildings in downtown Cleveland. Frames for these corporate accounts he called “cookie-cutter,” assembled as they often were from prefabricated kits. Profitable but dull, and he raged against them while accepting their checks. For the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame he framed hundreds of photos, documents and ephemera. 

Ken was also an artist manqué – a painter and collagist. His work hangs in our bedroom and office. In the seventies, he began signing all his of serious work on the back, sometimes concealing his name, the date and a brief weather report. (“Sunny, high of 75.”) You can look around online and see samples of his work. It’s often satirical or drily funny. His work reminds me sometimes of Glen Baxter’s, but with a raunchy, occasionally savage streak. My nephew is collecting the paintings, drawings and collages – hundreds of them, sometimes painted on scraps of lumber -- that Ken left in his apartment, shop and elsewhere. He sold a few over the years but refused to “market” himself. Most of his pictures are too good to throw away or stick in a storage unit and wait for someone else to throw away.

 

Ken was always confident of his aesthetic tastes. His favorite artist was probably Albrecht Dürer. He hated the fashion-driven art world. In his own idiosyncratic way he was a Midwestern aesthete.  

 

He was delighted years ago when I introduced him to the great Colombian aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila, known as Don Colacho. Ken would have cheered at this observation: “It has required a titanic effort to make the modern world so ugly.”

And this: “The evolution of works of art into objects of art and of objects of art into investments or into articles for consumption is a modern phenomenon. A process that does not evidence a diffusion of the aesthetic, but rather the culmination of contemporary economism.”

'Beyond the Language of the Living'

“After someone dies I find it hard to delete their contact from my phone. It feels cruel somehow, as if it was a final obliteration.” 

I didn’t know others felt this way, and dismissed it as my indulgence in sentimentality. Rabbi David Wolpe’s admission comes as reassurance. I tend to be tidy and have little tolerance for an accumulation of clutter but I can’t delete my brother’s contact numbers from my phone, nor those of an old Ohio friend who died in Maryland several years ago. The same goes for my pocket address books. I’ve always kept one, starting with my first newspaper job. The one I still occasionally consult is my third and looks like a beat-up checkbook. Taken together they represent pieces of a fragmented autobiography.

 

Among the dead I find phone numbers and addresses for my high-school creative writing teacher, the novelist William Gaddis, the teacher who taught us Afro-American literature, electrical and mechanical engineers at Rice University, a former landlord, the poet Helen Pinkerton, my late father-in-law and mother-in-law, D.G. Myers, several former newspaper colleagues, my youngest son’s first guitar teacher, and more.

 

Each of the dead is a memento mori and often a goad to happy memories. To be reminded unexpectedly of Helen Pinkerton or David Myers is a bittersweet gift. T.S. Eliot writes in “Little Gidding,” the fourth part of The Four Quartets (1943):

 

“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”

'Memories Packed in the Rapid-Access File'

Last Saturday morning, the day my brother would die, the Uber driver who carried me from hotel to hospice in the morning went by the professional name “Lazarus” – an omen I choose to leave unexamined and merely enjoy. Ken would have enjoyed it.

Shortly after his death one of the nurses, referring to his early days in hospice when he was still able to speak, called him a “jokester.” I can’t remember him ever telling a joke. What she meant was that my brother was constitutionally incapable of taking anything too seriously, starting with himself. Even moaning in pain when he lost the power to move and the nurses had to wash and rearrange him in his hospital bed he found amusing. I can hear him saying, “Three women!” Don’t misunderstand: he was seldom goofy or childish. Rather, he relished our ridiculous pomposity. Vanity always cracked him up – an invaluable gift when dealing with humans. I know that some will condemn this capacity as perverse, a refusal to grow up, but most of the funniest people I know are imbued with gravitas. 

The novel I was reading while visiting my brother for the last time was Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Brothers and Sisters (1929). Ken didn’t read much fiction, which is a shame because he would have been attuned to her brand of clinical wit, and she was very good on the savagery of family life. Here’s a characteristic exchange in the novel I was reading:

 

“‘What a blank Christian Stace’s death has left,’ said Sarah.

 

“‘You have the gift of saying these things, Sarah,’ said Julian. ‘I often think it is fortunate that gifts are rare. I am not speaking to wound you. I don’t mean to belittle blanks. I try to be a person to leave a blank. I quite dread to die, because of my blank, the poorness of it; and I know one ought not to dread to die. I know your blank will be better.’”

 

The nastiness of outrageous sentiments is made acceptable when put in the mouths of characters, not the author’s. What I’ll miss most about my brother is his ever-ready wit. Each day I will encounter phrases, sentiments or situations he would have found funny, and my impulse will be to text it to him. One of my readers, along with condolences, sent me a poem by John Updike, “Perfection Wasted,” which closes:

 

“The jokes over the phone. The memories packed

in the rapid-access file. The whole act.

Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;

imitators and descendants aren’t the same.”

 

[Compton-Burnett died on this date, August 27, in 1969 at age eighty-five.]  

'When We Have Excellent Books, They Sell'

“People tell us all the time that civilization is finished, that the world is coming to an end. But then we look at our sales details and we smile.” 

John Byron Kuhner posts a rare dispatch of hope from the world of books, the beating heart of what remains of our civilization. In “Good News From an Independent Bookshop,” published recently in First Things, he recounts his purchase of a bookshop in Steubenville, Ohio, and his surprise at the quality of books his customers buy. One morning only two people visited his shop. One bought a complete Plato, the other a complete Aristotle – two of the basic texts of Western civilization. “I learned then and there,” Kuhner writes, “to never underestimate my customers.” He tells us Steubenville is “an unusual town.”

 

He admits his shop also stocks “piffle”: “But you don’t feel bad about selling Bunnicula when you sell St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul, The Screwtape Letters and Moby-Dick all on the same night.” Kuhner briefly describes the good news: “When we have excellent books, they sell.”

 

My nephew is an enthusiastic, genre-defying reader, a genuine small-d democratic when it comes to his choice of books. On Saturday, while we sat with my brother in hospice awaiting “the distinguished thing,” Abe and I talked about Epictetus and Montaigne in between swapping memories of my brother, his father, and mutually buoying our spirits. “You know what did not sell?” Kuhner asks. “A single one of the Amazon bestselling books of 2024.” Books and life, as well as death, always intersect, if you pay attention.

Kenneth C. Kurp 1955-2024

My brother died Saturday afternoon in the hospice in Cleveland, Ohio where he spent the last two weeks of his life. He was sixty-nine. I was with him as was his son, Abraham Kurp. I watched as his eyes closed and he stopped breathing. There was another sense, too, of a sudden diminishment, a departure leaving only flesh and blood. Abe and I sat with his body, waiting for the funeral home to take away what remained.

'Time Is Tight'

My brother is dying as he lived – stubbornly. He has been in hospice for two weeks and is failing incrementally. On Monday we were swapping memories and he stopped talking on Tuesday, the same day he stopped eating. He lies on his back on the hospice bed, mouth open, eyes staring at the dropped ceiling. He can no longer swallow so he gets morphine syringed under his tongue. Nurses sponge-bathe him twice a day. My nephew and I speculate on how aware he is of his surroundings. We talk to him frequently, hold his hand and sing. I decided to see how he would react to music. 

Ken started clarinet lessons at age six. He was a natural, the sort of guy who could pick up any instrument and make it sound at least tolerable. On drums and backup vocals he once recorded demos with a fifties revival band called The Brylcreems. He eventually accumulated thousands of record albums. I remember in the seventies when he bought the complete Beethoven by mail order. He was a musical omnivore. He had shelves of records by Leon Russell, Howlin’ Wolf and Ry Cooder that I have never seen anywhere else.

 

First I played Glenn Gould’s recording of the Goldberg Variations, the 1955 version, one of our favorite records when we were kids, followed by the live version of “Time Is Tight” by Booker T & the MGs. Then the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony, the “Ode to Joy,” conducted by Von Karajan. My nephew suggested Louis Jordan, so I played “Five Guys Named Moe,” “Beans and Cornbread” and “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie.” Hours of music followed and I wish I could say my brother smiled or swayed, but he gave no visible sign of hearing anything, though it sure lifted our spirits.

'Some Could, Some Could Not, Shake Off Misery'

Last week I wrote a post about the poet Bob Barth, the patrol he led as a 21-year-old Marine Corporal in Vietnam, and the war correspondent who wrote a dispatch about him for a newspaper. Two days later, after learning that the stringer, Albert W. Vinson, soon took his own life, I wrote a second post recounting the wounds he had sustained as a young Marine in the Pacific. Among Bob’s recurrent themes is that all wars are one and all warriors are brothers of a sort. He makes the theme explicit “2^nd Lt. Albert W. Vinson, USMC,” subtitled “Talasea, New Britain 1944”: 

“Those Japanese machine gun rounds

That shattered shoulder, legs, and arms

Killed you as surely as, years later,

The freight train on that lonely night.”

 

The poem reminds me of another written about an earlier war – Thomas Hardy’s “And There Was a Great Calm”  -- composed shortly after the armistice went into effect on November 11, 1918. Soldiers, stunned by the sudden silence, stare at the empty sky where artillery rounds had recently fallen:

 

“Breathless they paused. Out there men raised their glance

To where had stood those poplars lank and lopped,

As they had raised it through the four years’ dance

Of Death in the now familiar flats of France;

And murmured, ‘Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?’”

 

For some, the war never truly ended:

 

“Calm fell. From Heaven distilled a clemency;

There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;

Some could, some could not, shake off misery.”

'There Is No Nothingness'

Once asked about politics in a symposium portentously titled “The Writer’s Situation,” J.V. Cunningham replied: 

“You can write on politics or not. I do not. But is politics meant here? Or is it, rather, ideology? The latter is religious, not political, though religion has awesome political consequences. Politics is negotiation, accommodation, controlled power. It is achieving consensus without agreement, defeating a zoning change, voting for Harry Truman. It is being chairman. It is irrigation and not a flood. It is effective and corrupt in a settled society, the Old Adam. It gets another generation through to the grave with tolerable illusions and half-beliefs. I have finally written on politics.”

 

If you’re unfamiliar with Cunningham’s poems and essays, you might think, “What a sensible fellow. How level-headed and mature his understanding is.” You might even mistake him for Michael Oakeshott. Old Cunningham hands will smile, nod their heads and say, “Cunningham believed in poetry as a form of public utterance. It makes sense he would consider politics a form of public service, not self-indulgence.”  

 

Cunningham is one of poetry’s mavericks, a critic impervious to literary fashion, an anatomist of desire, a Swiftian satirist and an epigrammist in an age of free verse mush:

 

“Deep summer, and time pauses. Sorrow wastes

To a new sorrow. While time heals time hastes.”

 

Few modern poems are as dense without waste as Cunningham’s. They are  philosophically rich and each syllable counts. Consider one of his most beautiful poems, “For a Woman with Child”:

 

“We are ourselves but carriers. Life

Incipient grows to separateness

And is its own meaning. Life is,

And not; there is no nothingness.”

 

This recalls nothing so much as a passage in Guy Davenport’s essay on a very different sort of poet, Ronald Johnson, in The Geography of the Imagination (1981):

 

“Nature has no nothing. To feel that it has is what we call the devil, the enemy. In Blakean words, our predicament is that we can exist and still not be, for being requires an awakeness from the dream of custom and of ourselves. The self is by nature turned outward to connect with the harmony of things. The eyes cannot see themselves, but something other. The strange and paradoxical rule of nature is that we are fullest in our being by forgetting our being. To love nothing is to be nothing, to give is to have.”

 

Cunningham was born on August 22, 1911 and died in 1985 at age seventy-three.

 

[Cunningham’s responses to the questionnaire quoted above can be found in the August 1970 issue of New American Review. The books to own are The Poems of J. V. Cunningham (ed. Timothy Steele, 1997) and The Collected Essays of J.V. Cunningham (1976). Wiseblood Books has announced it will publish The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham in November.]

'His Own Exclusive Object'

I’ve accumulated some of the accoutrements of age – bifocals, cane, hearing aids. None embarrasses me and all make life less annoying. I’ve never been seriously ill. I take my handful of vitamins and meds in the morning. I no longer drink and never smoked. Among the last things I worry about is my health. The subject is nearly as tiresome as politics. 

My brother is dying in hospice. He’s now riddled with cancer. The oncologists tell me it’s the liver that will kill him. His skin is yellow and he’s more bones than flesh. He moans a lot and everything hurts. I spend eight hours a day with him here in Cleveland. We haven’t lived in the same city for almost half a century. I’m not squeamish and I find caregiving a natural thing to do, though I’m exhausted by the end of the day. In his lucid moments we talk not about cancer but about random memories of childhood. On Tuesday he remembered Mike, the dog we got in 1964. Memories flooded from both of us until Ken abruptly – what? Fell asleep? Lost consciousness? Flipped some previously unknown switch? Later, out of nowhere, he quoted, quite distinctly, Richard Nixon: “I am not a crook.” He said he saw “scenes from Watergate” on the wall in his room.

 

I’ve been in the presence of two people as they died – one abruptly and violently, the other gently, almost invisibly, in a hospital. As a cop reporter I saw more than enough carnage – suicides, homicides, multiple-fatality traffic wrecks. As I walk the halls of the hospice, I can’t help but look in the open doors. Mostly old people sunk into their beds, some moaning. In the late afternoon by the rear entrance, a dozen men in wheelchairs sit around, almost silently, smoking cigarettes.

 

In “The Convalescent” (The Last Essays of Elia, 1833), Charles Lamb says something foolish and something wise. First, the foolish:

 

“If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick bed. How the patient lords it there; what caprices he acts without control! how king-like he sways his pillow- tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples.”

 

Lamb never visited a hospice or what passed for such in his day. There’s no lording in what I’ve seen. And then the wise, from the perspective of a certain sub-category of patients:

 

“How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man’s self to himself! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty. . . . He has nothing to think of but how to get well. What passes out of doors, or within them, so he hear not the jarring of them, affects him not.”

 

Except that the people in hospice don’t get well.

'A Chap Who Doesn't Care Much About Anything'

Below the masthead of the August 19, 2024 issue of The Daily Chronicle is a brief, boxed announcement: 

“Today is National Orangutan Day. The apes are the largest tree-dwelling animals on Earth. They spend 90 percent of their time in trees, even sleeping in leafy nests. No wonder their names means ‘man of the trees.’”

 

From one brief item I learned two interesting things – the orangutan’s rank among tree-dwellers and the etymology of his name (OED: from the Malay for “person of the forest”). Plenty would deny such tidbits were newsworthy but I would argue that knowledge of the natural world and language are infinitely more interesting and important than our embarrassing presidential race. We too are primates.

 

You can’t subscribe to The Daily Chronicle but you can get it for free and delivered to your room if you happen to be a patient in the hospice where my brother is staying in Cleveland. First thing in the morning, along with breakfast on a tray, a nursing assistant delivers it to your bed. Three pages printed on both sides and stapled together contain such features as an exploration of the “little ice age” of 1680-1730 that coincided with the Salem witch trials, and an “On This Date” rollcall that includes the birth in 1839 of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, the great French pioneer of photography.

 

The “Quote of the Day” comes from the late Johnny Nash (1940-2020), who had a hit in 1972 that I remember well -- “I Can See Clearly Now.” Nash says, “Reggae represented to me a layer of rhythm that was really infectious. I could lay on top of the rhythms and do my ballads.” People who know they are soon to die could do a lot worse for a soundtrack. The “Joke of the Day” is admittedly feeble: “How much does it cost to swim with sharks?” “An arm and a leg.”

 

How devoted is the readership? I can’t say. My brother gave it a perfunctory look. I saw a man, legs missing above the knees, seated in a wheelchair in the lobby, looking at The Daily Chronicle. Again, no comment.   

 

The First Amendment guarantees us freedom of speech. It also guarantees freedom from speech. We can ignore pretty much anything we please and read The Daily Chronicle. A senior reporter in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1938) tells the permanently baffled William Boot: “News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read.”

'The World's an End'

In recent years John Dryden has become one of my reliable poets. He impresses me as a sane adult, with equal emphasis on both of those words. No dabbling in drugs and madness. I brought a volume of his poems with me to Cleveland where I’m visiting my brother in hospice. No Coleridge or Blake on a trip like this.

 

Dryden included “Palamon and Arcite” in Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700). It’s an adaptation of The Knight’s Tale by Chaucer, who in turn adapted it from Boccaccio. It’s a good story of love, friendship and rivalry. This passage near the end of the poem seemed addressed to me:

 

“Since every man who lives is born to die,

And none can boast sincere felicity,

With equal mind, what happens, let us bear,

Nor joy, nor grieve too much for things beyond our care.

Like pilgrims to the appointed place we tend;

The world’s an inn, and death the journey's end.”

 

Dryden was born on August 19, 1631 and died in 1700 at age sixty-eight. The Australian poet James McAuley’s “A Letter To John Dryden” is another reliable work:

 

“The great Unculture that you feared might be

‘Drawn to the dregs of a democracy’

Is full upon us; here it sours and thickens

Till every work of art and honour sickens.

You chose for your attempt a kind of verse

Well-bred and easy, energetic, terse;

Reason might walk in it, or boldly fence,

And all was done with spirit and with sense.

But who cares now for reason?”

'I Hope This Explanation Is Wrong'

One of life’s unsolved puzzles, especially for readers and writers: How can certain arrangements of words encountered in childhood or youth, and revisited regularly for a lifetime, still inspire delight, while others, in effect, evaporate before we hear them? In the latter category fall most talk of politics, routine idle bombast (which I associate with the guy sitting at the end of the bar) and virtually all complaints on any subject. 

While rereading Cymbeline for the nth time I’ve reencountered one of the loveliest poems in the language, a funeral song, a mere six lines long, thirty-seven words, from a tragedy masquerading as a comedy, or is it the other way around? The song goes on for three more stanzas but I think of the first as a self-contained poetic unit. Here is Cymbeline, Act IV, Scene 2, lines 258-263:

 

“Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun.

Nor the furious winter’s rages,

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”

 

Lovely, yet I’m unable to tell you precisely what it means, which confirms T.S. Eliot’s observation in his 1929 essay “Dante”: “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” Hugh Kenner in The Pound Era (1971) confidently explains:

 

“’Golden lads’: fine words to caress our post-Symbolist sensibilities. English lads, perhaps, with yellow hair; ‘golden,’ because once precious when they lived; ‘golden,’ touched with the nobility and permanence of gold (that royal metal, colored like a cold sun, in which wages are paid), as now, gone home, they receive the wages of immortality; ‘golden,’ in contrast to ‘dust’: a contrast of color, a contrast of substantiality, a contrast of two immemorial symbols, at once Christian and pagan: the dust to which all sons of Adam return, the gold by which human vitality braves time . . .”

 

After presenting the evidence he has mustered, Kenner dismisses it: “Yet a good guess at how he [Shakespeare] found it [‘golden’] is feasible, for in the mid- 20th century a visitor to Shakespeare’s Warwickshire met a countryman blowing the grey head off a dandelion: ‘We call these golden boy chimney-sweepers when they go to seed.’”

 

Perhaps. Shakespeare certainly knew his wildflowers and their folklore. In his notes, Kenner identifies the visitor as William Arrowsmith, the scholar-poet-translator, who reported the story to Guy Davenport, who reported it to Kenner.

 

The English Literary scholar A.D. Nuttall in Shakespeare the Thinker (2007) tells us he loves the poem, and permits himself a digression from the scholarly to the personal:

 

“I first heard these lines when I was about eight years old. They ravished me at once and have haunted me ever since. I knew nothing about Shakespeare. I suppose that if today someone were to ask me, ‘What is the finest lyric poem in the English language?’ I would point to this. And yet I do not understand the lines. Why ‘chimney-sweepers?’ It has been suggested that this is an old-fashioned word for dandelions. I hope this explanation is wrong.”

 

I remain an agnostic, uncertain whose explanation is correct, though I’m rooting for Nuttall. If it amounts to more than a mere decoding of signs on a page, reading is a species of communion with the world, permitting us to enter conversations that started centuries ago. Another voice in that conversation is Dr. Johnson, who had harsh things to say about Cymbeline but glossed the final couplet of the funeral song like this:

 

“All human excellence is equally subject to the stroke of death.”

'What She or He Ought to Know'

In a typically mordant essay, “A Great Fog Over the Past,” Peter Hitchens cites “Spanish Waters,” a poem by John Masefield, one of the first poets I claimed as my own when a boy, years before Eliot and Yeats. The poem’s “decrepit beggar,” as Hitchens puts it, “knows where the buried treasure is but cannot hope to reach it before he dies in destitution.” I hope I'm not being too reductive but the beggar’s fate recalls my brother’s, alone and sick in a hospice in Cleveland, relieved only by frequent doses of synthetic opiates. I’m flying back there on Sunday. Until rereading Masefield’s poem, the only literary counterparts to Ken’s situation I could recall were some of Samuel Beckett’s characters, minus most of the humor.     

“It’s not the way to end it all. I'm old, and nearly blind,

And an old man's past's a strange thing, for it never leaves his mind.”

 

There’s more to Hitchens’ essay than Masefield’s metaphors. Hitchens unapologetically mourns the loss of the past and the shoddy goods that have succeeded it. His musing should not be mistaken for self-indulgent nostalgia: “This would be a wonderful opportunity to muse on the disappearance of paraffin stoves, steamrollers, signal boxes, and collar studs, but it is language, popular culture, and knowledge that I am more worried by.”

 

Among the things forgotten and perhaps lost are the works of Arthur Koestler. He was a giant, especially for Darkness at Noon (1940), a rare work of literature that changed the world. It’s his fictional account of the Great Purge conducted by Stalin and his thugs. Hitchens ties together his theme of willful memory loss at the end of his essay:

 

“. . . I think Koestler is increasingly forgotten because there has never been a time when the past has been such an unmapped mystery to the young and to the middle-aged. Hardly anyone now knows what she or he ought to know, ought to have read, ought to have seen. Around 1989, a great fog descended over the past, not just of human action, but of human thought. From Darkness at Noon, we have come to a world where a thick smog of unknowing lies all around us from first light till sunset. Yet we think we see clearly.”

'Not Merely Mental Stenography'

“Allow me a small confession: It has been some time since I have truly enjoyed an essay in a literary magazine. There are too many essays, and vanishingly few good essayists. There seems to be real confusion about whether style can conceal a fundamental incuriosity, whether sufficiently inventive prose can paper over the refusal to think. (It can’t.)” 

In newspaper lingo, this is what a former editor of mine called “a reader-grabbing lede.” To begin with, it’s a subject I have a stake in, as reader and writer. If coerced to name my favorite literary form, the one I most enjoy reading and writing, I would name the form without form, the essay. Most that I encounter today in magazines and elsewhere are grindingly predictable, often with titles or headlines that give it all away. No need to read any further. But bumper stickers are not essays. Neither are sincerity and stridency.

 

The author of the passage quoted above is Matt Dinan, who teaches in the Great Books Program at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Speaking of titles, I would have expected of Dinan’s -- “Be Mean: The Case for Truth” --  a self-sermon and sanctimonious virtue-signaling. It’s quite the opposite:

 

“Even accomplished writers don’t seem to recognize what is interesting about their own thoughts and experiences. A good essay is not merely mental stenography. And what is more tedious than reading yet another essay that, after lengthy perseveration, locates one more reason for endorsing the conventional view? How often are you actually surprised by something you read—even by yet another hairsplitting ‘case against’ something perfectly worthy or good?”

 

No form allows so much opportunity for the sheer adventure of writing. Sure, you can formulate a thesis (aka “rant”) and try to substantiate it, though my favorite essays are not of the persuasive variety. Charm, learning, a good ear and a sense of humor, moral discernment and some understanding of the complexities of human nature are the essayist’s prerequisites. Also, an interesting mind, and a love of and respect for words.    

 

It’s not all dreariness. We have a few good essayists still at work – preeminently, Joseph Epstein, as well as Cynthia Ozick, Arthur Krystal, Theodore Dalrymple, Peter Hitchens, Eric Ormsby, Robert Alter and others I’m probably forgetting. And in recent decades we’ve lost some of our best essay practitioners – Guy Davenport, J.V. Cunningham, Simon Leys, Aldo Buzzi, Whitney Balliett, Dr. Oliver Sacks, Hubert Butler and the two V.S.’s, Naipaul and Pritchett.

 

Reading Dr. Johnson again in preparation for reading Shakespeare again (the late comedies), I found a passage in his “Preface to Shakespeare” that rather surprisingly applies to what we look for in good essays:

 

“Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous or critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.”

'Arid Interrogation'

As boys, in our imaginations we tested ourselves. Would we prove courageous in combat? Our fathers had, so we believed, during World War II. Could we withstand torture? These virtues, touched with Hollywood melodrama, seemed essential aspects of maturity. We wanted to be adults and part of that was being brave. We never tested ourselves against likelier threats -- heart disease, bipolar disorder, cancer.

In March 1985, Philip Larkin, the death-haunted poet, wrote in a letter to a friend: “For my own part, I fully expect to be on the operating table before you—they are longing to get at my oesophagus [sic], which has misbehaved for years but isn’t in any sense serious as I understand it.” That month, a doctor in Hull had diagnosed him with “acute depression and hypochondria” and concluded the poet suffered from “a cancer phobia and fear of dying” – none of which is news to his readers. The doctor ordered a barium-meal x-ray which revealed a tumor in his esophagus – the same as my brother’s first diagnosis a month ago. Ken started smoking cigarettes at age twelve, and now the cancer has metastasized to his liver, lungs and cerebellum. When Larkin's tumor was removed on June 11, another malignancy was discovered, this one too advanced for surgery.

 

While in the hospital’s intensive care unit, a friend smuggled in a bottle of whiskey. He drank most of it, nearly died and had to be resuscitated. Another friend reported that Larkin admitted he had been “a callous bastard over other people’s illnesses” – an admission most of us can make. In July he wrote a friend that he was “very depressed – never be the same again, old age here, death round the corner etc.” Released from the hospital, he became housebound. He died early on the morning on December 2, 1985, four months after his sixty-third birthday. The nurse present at Larkin’s death reported his final words were “I am going to the inevitable.” For a man like Larkin, there is no hope for consolation.  Eight years earlier, in one of the last century’s greatest poems, Larkin had written:

 

“Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,  

Making all thought impossible but how  

And where and when I shall myself die.  

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.”

 

[Most details in this post are drawn from James Booth’s Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (Bloomsbury Press, 2014).]

'Each Sweaty Midnight I’m a Lifer'

Think of this as an unexpected coda to Monday’s post, “A Recon Patrol Is a Small Unit,” in which I asked readers to report anything they knew about the war correspondent Albert W. Vinson. He was author of a dispatch recounting a 1968 reconnaissance patrol in Vietnam led by the future poet R.L. Barth, whose father had served as a Marine in the Pacific during World War II, as did Vinson. After the story was published, Vinson and Bob’s father started a correspondence. Bob, who had often wondered what had happened to Vinson, wrote to me: 

“Mr. Vinson had been badly wounded and had a left arm that hung uselessly at his side, and to this day I marvel at his tenacity and sheer guts to be slogging around in Vietnam, looking for stories.”

 

A longtime reader of this blog in Ohio found several references to Vinson online, including a September 5, 1944 Sheboygan Press story about Vinson being wounded the previous March and his return to the U.S., datelined “U.S. Naval Hospital, Oakland, Calif.” It begins:

 

“Critically wounded by Jap machine gun bullets while leading a column in an attack on Talasea, New Britain, last March, marine 2^nd Lt. Albert W. Vinson, 33, has been returned here for treatment. Lt. Vinson’s mother lives in Milwaukee; his wife and children live in Sheboygan.”

 

The story quotes Vinson: “‘The first burst from the machine gun caught me in both arms. I got up and ran back to the tree. Just as I reached it, another burst got me in the leg and shoulder.’”

     

Twenty-seven years later, on Page 1 of the September 25, 1971 edition of The Waukesha County Freeman (less than three years after Vinson wrote the story about Bob's patrol) is a story headlined “Suicide Ruled in Train Death.” The lede:

 

“A man who was killed when he threw himself in front of a Milwaukee Road freight train at Okauchee on Friday morning has been identified as Albert W. Vinson, Jr., 60, of 2365 Woodland Park Drive, Delafield.”

 

The coroner ruled the death a suicide:

 

“A train crewman said Vinson walked out on the track as the eastbound freight approached and put up his hands. He had been hiding in bushes on the south side of the tracks near the abandoned Okauchee station.

 

“Welch said Vinson was a disabled Marine Corp [sic] veteran from World War II and had been living on his disability pay. He and his wife were planning to move to an apartment in Milwaukee, where Vinson was born, Welch said.

 

“Welch said Mrs. Vinson told him also her husband had been in Vietnam as a war correspondent.”

 

Bob includes an epigram in Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems (Broadstone Books, 2021):

 

“I swore I’d only be a three year cypher

But learn each sweaty midnight I’m a lifer.”

'It Is Pure Absence, No Place, Nowhere, Not'

I remember in high school reading Louis Fischer’s The Life of Lenin (1964), though all I retain of the book is the account of Lenin’s autopsy, following his death at age fifty-two from atherosclerosis. When tapped with tweezers, his cerebral arteries pinged like stone. They were calcified but in his short life Lenin had been granted sufficient time to write some 10-million words and murder more than 8-million of his countrymen -- a piker compared to Stalin, of course.

Dying and death are democratic, the true levelers sought by revolutionaries everywhere. No respecter of demographics, death makes no distinctions. You want egalitarianism? Die. In contrast to Lenin, think of Yvor Winters – poet, critic, teacher, husband, father. In 1964 at age sixty-four he was diagnosed with cancer of the throat. In a letter to Allen Tate the following year he writes:

 

“. . . I haven’t much time left. I am trying to finish a book [Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English, 1967], which will be my last criticism. Last May I had an operation for cancer of the tongue. Too much pipe smoking. . . . No more tobacco, no more liquor. I drink Knox’s Gelatin. I have one more year to teach, and I shall be glad to be done with it.”

 

Winters retired from Stanford in 1966 after teaching there for thirty-two years. That November he underwent a second surgery. He writes to Gus Blaisdell a month later:

 

“It was cancer but the pathologist found it to be strictly in one spot. There will be no radiation treatment, at least for now. My surgeon says that in a couple of years it will probably be possible to control this sort of things with pills.

 

“The surgery was what is popularly known as massive surgery. Most of the muscle up the right side of my jaw and my right collarbone was removed, with most of everything else within the triangle. . . . No pain worth mentioning, because all the nerves were removed.”

 

Two months before his death on January 28, 1968, Winters writes to Blaisdell: “With the glasses, I can sit up and read for short periods; sitting up increases pain without giving me the exercise I need; the pain blinds me, glasses or not.”

 

Among Winters’ students at Stanford was the poet Charles Gullans (1929-93), who was also killed by cancer. In his final collection, Letter from Los Angeles (John Daniel & Co., 1990), he includes “The House of Exile”:

 

“Death is no riddle, not a mere unknown;

It is unknowable--like Nothing, None.

It is pure absence, no place, nowhere, not,

Negative absolute, the unlived through.

It is pure evil, the unspecified,

Unspecifiable in any way

By figure, trope or crude analogy.

Using the oldest magic that we know,

We give death vesture, habit, and a name.

We give it entrance with a golden bough

Or stony lintel and a keep of thorns.

We give it locus and mythography

With skies as blue as  and banal as our own,

And people its dim land with dimmer shades

Forever silent on their distant shore;

Or call it some abstraction of the mind,

Repose, or contemplation, or the good.

In  truth, it is imploded space, a name

Which has no definition and no face.”

 

[See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (ed. R.L. Barth, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 2000).]

'A Recon Patrol Is a Small Unit'

 “A 21-year old Marine Corporal leading his first patrol — a 10-man Reconnaissance Team — kept a cool head in a tight situation.” 

Long before he was a poet and publisher, R.L. Barth in 1968-69 was a Marine serving as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in Vietnam. Bob recently found the 1,100-word dispatch written about him and his men by a stringer; that is, a freelance journalist writing for various publications. The stringer was Albert W. Vinson and his story was published on the Week End Feature Page of the Cincinnati Post & Times Star on Saturday, November 16, 1968. Vinson’s dispatch carries the dateline:

 

“10 November, 1968 [five days after Richard Nixon was elected president]

Camp Reasoner, Headquarters

of 1st Reconnaissance Battalion,

1st Marine Division — Da Nang”

 

Barth was from Erlanger, Ky., across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Ohio. The story made him briefly a hometown hero. Bob remembers: “Fortunately, I wouldn’t return home until mid-March [1969], when all the hullaballoo had died down. (I was told that between my parents, my various aunts and uncles, and my grandparents, the newsstands were wiped out of that issue.)”

 

Vinson’s prose can get a little fulsome, hardly unusual among journalists, but he's a dutiful chronicler. He credits Bob with having “a frontiersman’s sense of smell for danger and [he] knows how to cope with it.” But the story is compelling:

 

“On October 28th, their first day out, the team was inserted by helicopter in a zone just below a ridge in Antenna Valley, a few thousand meters south of An Hoa. By sundown they had reached a high point on another ridge where they set in for the night. Two days later in the early afternoon they had located the landing zone from which they were scheduled to be extracted.”

 

The Marines heard voices and single rifle shots not fired in their direction, and assumed the NVA were hunting or “horsing around.” The following morning, Barth called for artillery on the enemy position. Vinson quotes Bob:

 

“‘I felt the landing zone wasn’t safe anymore. So we started moving northeast through the brush. Rain was pelting down so hard that it drowned out the noise we made breaking through the bamboo and vine thickets. I didn’t want the men following the trail because of the possibility of detection and booby traps.”

 

They happened on a large tunnel opening. A Marine entered and found it was empty but large enough to hold twenty men. “The [Marines] had only gone another 15 or 20 meters when they sighted about 15 NVA soldiers in and around three bamboo shelters with ponchos slung over the top. A blackboard with Vietnamese chalked on it indicated a possible tactical briefing. Two AK-47 rifles were leaning up against one of the bamboo huts.”

 

Ernie Pyle-style, Vinson includes the names, ages and hometowns of all the men in Barth’s patrol. Barth decides not to open fire because he senses the Marines are heavily outnumbered. Bob tells Vinson:

 

“We called on the radio for an aerial observer plane to come over. It came in a hurry and fired its 20 millimeter guns at the NVA and dropped a white phosphorous marker to show the jet bombers where to strike. The Phantoms raced in and dropped 250- and 500-pound bombs. They had to come in close. We laid down to avoid any possibility of getting hit by shrapnel.”

 

After the airstrike, with surviving NVA following them, the Marines moved quickly, avoiding booby-traps, to the new extraction zone. “This was on a ridge amid elephant grass and brush,” Vinson writes. “They set up for the night. Voices and movement were heard until dawn when for some unexplainable reason the NVA left the area.”

 

Vinson concludes his dispatch by assessing the Marines’ action: “The mission of the reconnaissance patrol had been accomplished; detection of enemy’s presence, determination of size and whereabouts. Because a recon patrol is a small unit, the men try to avoid a firefight when necessarily taking considerable risks to gain information.

 

“The performance of this patrol had been outstanding because of the leadership, water and food conservation and security measures carried out.”

 

Bob has been working on a three-poem suite he calls “unambiguously autobiographical,” tentatively titled “In the Mountains,” subtitled “in the vicinity of Antenna Valley, RVN / 31 x-1 xi 1968.” The third poem in the sequence, “Morning,” can serve as a sort of coda to Vinson’s dispatch:

 

“‘Wedding Ring, Wedding Ring: choppers are inbound;

ETA fifteen minutes. Over.’ ‘Roger;

This is the actual; do not send a team

To follow up or to assess bomb damage

Or try to take a body count. Last night,

The Charlies probed us and now, I’m convinced,

They’ll lie in ambush, waiting your mistake.*

You understand? Over.’ ‘Team boarded. Out.’

 

“Damn it, stupidity still rules the rear,

So hastily I write a note to pass

To their team leader; ten men disembark.

I count my team as they move up the ramp,

And then embark myself, happy to board

And leave our last night to dark memory.

Returned, we hump the last hill to HQ

And two warm beers; I head for my debriefing.’

 

“*Historical note: the second team was in fact ambushed, and we had to saddle up and return as part of the reaction force to extract the WIA.”

 

[If anyone out there knows anything about Albert W. Vinson, please let me know.]