'A Certain Saving Humor'

“Except for a certain saving humor, I should indeed have been a full monster.” 

One definition of a friend is someone with whom you can share any joke or other comic effort without fear of offending him. It may not be funny – the only pertinent criterion for judging humorousness – but it’s not hateful (a word thrown around promiscuously these days). Friends understand us. They don’t necessarily approve but neither do they throw a tantrum, get uppity and admonish us.

 

The line at the top is by the poet Louise Bogan, writing a letter on January 28, 1954, to another poet, May Sarton. Bogan struggled with severe depression for more than forty years and was hospitalized for it several times. Bogan is one of our finest American poets, and that she was able to write so well under such conditions is heroic. The book to read is Elizabeth Frank’s biography Louise Bogan: A Portrait (1986).

 

What most interests me about Bogan’s sentence is “a certain saving humor.” Never known as a humorist, Bogan was highly intelligent, thoughtful and witty. With close friends she could be herself. Bogan seems to be confirming a theory I’ve pondered for most of my life – that a well-exercised sense of humor is often symptomatic of mental health, if not always sanity.

 

I’ve been reading X.J. Kennedy again, including “More Foolish Things Remind Me of You,” published in the July/August 2006 “Humor Issue” of Poetry. It’s a laugh-out-loud poem (This is a test!), especially these lines: “Lines sliced to little bits by deconstruction, / Loose gobs of fat removed by liposuction.”

 

You may have noticed the subtitle: “With apologies to Eric Maschwitz.” He was the lyricist for the 1935 standard “These Foolish Things” under the pseudonym “Holt Marvell.” I suggest listening to at least one of these recordings of the song before reading Kenney’s parody, so you get the melody in your head: Nat “King” Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra.