'The Pictures and the Books That Here Surround Me''

Some five years before his death from cancer, Clive James published the poem “Change of Domicile” in one of the lesser-known literary magazines – the British Medical Journal’s Supportive and Palliative Care, the September 2014 issue. Coincidentally, that’s the month my friend D.G. Myers died from cancer. The poem begins: 

“Installed in my last house, I face the thought

That fairly soon there will be one house more,

Lacking the pictures and the books that here

Surround me with abundant evidence

I spent a lifetime pampering my mind.”

 

Sensitive readers, of course, will be offended: how morbid. Others will be riled by even a hypothetical account of an afterlife. James’ poem reminds me of the parlor game my brother and I played in hospice, shortly before cancer killed him. One of the things I miss most about him is his sense of humor. All our lives we carried on as though anything can be funny and be made fun of. That doesn’t mean we broadcasted. Gentle souls are so easily distressed. Our premise, one pondered by Egypt’s pharaohs, was simple: assuming we survive after death, what do we bring? Another way of looking at it is to ask what we would miss if we didn’t bring it. We limited the choice to inanimate objects. I’ll skip the more salacious stuff. Ken’s immediate answer was music. He was a musician and once owned enough record albums to fill half a garage – Beethoven, Schoenberg, Johnny Cash, Louis Jordan, Leon Russell, you name it — all favorites.

 

Not surprisingly, I said books, my constant companions in this life. Among the assorted torments of Hell would be the strict absence of volumes. Or an infinity of books, all written by Joyce Carol Oates.

 

In a 1997 essay, “Nearing Ninety,” William Maxwell expressed his only regret associated with death: “[W]hen people are dead they don’t read books. This I find unbearable. No Tolstoy, no Chekhov, no Elizabeth Bowen, no Keats, no Rilke.” The last book he read, in the final months of his life, was War and Peace. When he had read a third of the book his eyesight began to fail, and the novelist Annabel Davis-Goff read the remainder of Tolstoy’s novel to him aloud.  She recounts the experience in an essay collected in A William Maxwell Portrait (2004): 

 

“Reading War and Peace with Bill allowed me a rare and privileged view of how a great writer reads. I had, I suppose, known that anyone who writes above a certain level must read differently from most of us. Nabokov, in the introduction to his Lectures on Literature, asks what a reader needs in order to read a book properly. . . . His four correct answers: imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense.”

'When the Heart is Full . . .'

“You say truly, that death is only terrible to us as it separates us from those we love, but I really think those have the worst of it who are left by us, if we are true friends. I have felt more (I fancy) in the loss of Mr. Gay, than I shall suffer in the thought of going away myself into a state that can feel none of this sort of losses.” 

If Alexander Pope is read today, he’s read as a manufacturer of elegantly barbed witticisms, a crafter of technically perfect verse. What is The Dunciad but an assault on his sorry contemporaries, exemplars of “Dulness”? Pope himself  wrote “The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth."

 

Pope writes above in a letter to Swift on April 2, 1733. John Gay, the poet and playwright, had died less than four months earlier. The letter continues:

 

“I wished vehemently to have seen [Gay] in a condition of living independent, and to have lived in perfect indolence the rest of our days together, the two most idle, most innocent, undesigning poets of our age. I now as vehemently wish you and I might walk into the grave together, by as slow steps as you please, but contentedly and cheerfully: whether that ever can be, or in what country, I know no more, than into what country we shall walk out of the grave.”

 

Pope would live another eleven years; Swift, another twelve. As a boy, tuberculosis of the spine left Pope stunted and in pain. He never grew taller than four feet, six inches. If his physical suffering accounts for his satirical gift, it also helps explain his love for and dependence on Swift and his other friends. They “help me thro’ this long Disease, my Life.” He also faced the English laws banning Roman Catholics from teaching, attending university, voting and holding public office. Pope to Swift on September 15, 1734:

 

“I have ever thought you as sensible as any man I knew . . . When the heart is full, it is angry at all words that cannot come up to it; and you are now the man in all the world I am most troubled to write to, for you are the friend I have left whom I am most grieved about. Death has not done worse to me in separating poor Gay, or any other, than disease and absence in dividing us. I am afraid to know how you do, since most accounts I have give me pain for you . . .”

 

My niece tells me she is reading Pope’s poetry and asked what I thought of him. In my private pantheon he is one of the supreme English poets and terribly unfashionable. Our age could use him. Hannah gave me a little hope.

Compatible Voices

Andrew Taylor on Charles Montagu Doughty, author of Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888):

 

“He appealed instinctively to the past, against what he saw as the corruption of language, manners and morality of his own time, but Travels in Arabia Deserta is not backward-looking for its own sake. The achievement of the book lies in the way that language, style, rhythm and structure are all directed towards the end of accuracy in presenting landscape, characters, mood and atmosphere.”

  

Timothy Fuller in his introduction to Michael Oakeshott on the Human Condition (Liberty Fund, 2024): 

 

“He had minimal regard for any features of modern life. The computer did not exist for him. He thought most modern inventions had done the human race little good. He wrote everything by hand. From his cottage one looked out on the country of Hardy. One felt oneself transported back before World War I, even to the nineteenth century, to a world where one might meet Jude the Obscure coming down the path. This is exactly how Oakeshott wanted to feel. Life was, to him, sweeter then.” 

 

The Taylor passage is taken from his God’s Fugitive: The Life of C.M. Doughty (Dorset Press, 1999). 

 

During an electrical storm Wednesday morning we lost our internet connection and it hasn’t been restored. Possibly tonight. Please ignore the irregularities. Blogger is even more intractable on a smartphone.

'All of Time is Cut in Two—Before and After'

Rhina Espaillat writes the sonnet “How Like a Winter . . .” (And After All: Poems, 2018) in response to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17: 

“So Shakespeare describes absence. Yes—but no,

since every winter ends, gentling to spring’s

tentative yellows, then the green and blue

and bolder tones of flowering summer. So

has this winter passed, as do all things—

except the final absence. Without you,

for instance, all of time is cut in two—

before and after—seasons all the same,

despite the beckoning lushness of the new,

the living, rich in fur and fins and wings,

intent on resurrection. But they go,

our absent loves, and leave us stranded here,

parted from all the changes of the year

as by an endless fall of pallid snow.”

 

Turning gentle into a verb is a nice touch. Shakespeare’s poem, known as the last of the “procreation” sonnets, follows. The speaker fears that if he celebrates the “heavenly touches” of the “Fair Youth,” his comeliness, future readers will assume he is exaggerating or lying:

 

“Who will believe my verse in time to come,

If it were fill’d with your most high deserts?

Though yet Heaven knows it is but as a tomb

Which hides your life and shows not half your parts.

If I could write the beauty of your eyes,

And in fresh numbers number all your graces,

The age to come would say, ‘This poet lies,

Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces.’

So should my papers yellow’d with their age,

Be scorn’d like old men of less truth than tongue,

And your true rights be term’d a poet’s rage

And stretched metre of an antique song:

   But were some child of yours alive that time,

   You should live twice,– in it and in my rhyme.”

 

Every writer asks, Will I be read in the future, after I am gone? How will I be read? Most writing, of course, is quickly forgotten, often during the writer’s lifetime. We remember Shakespeare’s “Fair Youth” though his identity remains uncertain – a nice irony, given Shakespeare’s stated intention. He lives on, but anonymously. The final two lines are stirring: “But were some child of yours alive that time, / You should live twice,– in it and in my rhyme.” All of us hope to live on through our children, if only in memory. Espaillat reminds me of John Shade’s investigation into the afterlife, prompted by the death of his daughter Hazel, in the poem that lends its title to Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire:

 

“I'm reasonably sure that we survive

And that my darling somewhere is alive . . .”

 

As Espaillat puts it, in regard to "the final absence": “But they go, / our absent loves, and leave us stranded here."

'Alone in a Room with the English Language'

“One of the offices of poetry: to use shapely speech to express the radicals of existence in all their ambiguity.” 

“Shapely speech” is nicely put. Guys I knew, when being polite, might describe a girl as “shapely.” You know what that means. It means pleasing. What about “the radicals of existence”? I don’t know what that means. “Radicals” intended etymologically, meaning “roots”? As in chemistry or politics? All of the above? A similar “office” applies to prose as well, though “office” sounds a little high-falutin’.  

 

“To answer idiosyncratically, privately, to a public world given over to falsehood, fake facts, scuzzy rumor, casual murderousness, comedic denials, manic impromptu wind-tunnel ideologies. To answer palsied language with vital language, plasticity, gaiety of invention and fabulation, against opportunistic mendacity.”

 

The ethics of writing. As John Berryman puts it in his biography of Stephen Crane: “Crane was a writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right.” An honest writer comes equipped with a bullshit detector that he applies first to himself, then others. Lies enter language by way of politics, fashion, self-aggrandizement and any effort to seek approval. The hardest part of writing is keeping it vital while remaining faithful to the truth.  

 

“If poetry can’t, or chooses not to, reveal what it feels like to live as a sentient being in a perilous enchanted world, then maybe it can (and deserves to) die. Or that mission will be replaced by a spectacular dumb show loaded with content, whipped up drama, and ‘language.’ It will be a polymer mold of what once was primary material. What can replace the completeness and immediacy of feeling that the sounds of words whip up or lay down?”

 

W.S. Di Piero might be describing prose or poetry assembled by artificial intelligence. What I’ve read or seen of it, even when it’s a competent copy of a human creation, feels hollow, dead inside. Something is missing, something vital and as personal as DNA or the individual human sensibility. Something “sentient,” to use Di Piero’s word. Algorithms write like backward children eager to please teacher.

 

[The quoted passages, a single continuous entry, is drawn from Di Piero’s Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness: A Poet’s Notebooks (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017).]

''T is But the Graves That Stay'

“Above the town of Frankfort, on the top of the steep bluff of the Kentucky River, is a burial-place where lie the bones of many heroes, sons the Commonwealth has lovingly gathered in one fold. It is a beautiful site for this simple Valhalla, with its wide outlook over the noble vale it crowns, to my eyes wondrously enriched by the sense of a people’s care for the fame of its illustrious dead.” 

Each Memorial Day we walked to my grade school to watch the parade. Standing at the curb we waited for the marching bands, the dignitaries, pretty girls riding in convertibles, the veterans of three or four wars. The city handed out American flags on sticks and we waved them as the brass-heavy bands played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” We followed the parade for half a mile to the Parma Heights Cemetery where my mother is now buried. Prayers, solemn speeches, the firing of bolt-action rifles in a three-gun salute. I was a dim kid and understood nothing I was seeing. Americans have always gathered to honor their war dead, even today.

 

The passage at the top is taken from The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1909). If Shaler (1841-1906) is remembered at all it is as a geologist and paleontologist. When the Civil War started, Shaler (1841-1906) was a student of the great Swiss-born zoologist Louis Agassiz in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. A year away from graduating, Shaler resolved to continue his studies while preparing for war. He joined the university’s drill club, studied infantry tactics, read Jomini’s Traité de grande tactique and each weekend visited Fort Independence in Boston Harbor to learn about artillery.

 

After graduating summa cum laude in 1862, Shaler returned to his native Kentucky, where he was commissioned to raise the Fifth Kentucky Battery on the Union side, despite coming from a slave-owning family. He detested the Republican Party and many of his Kentucky friends had already joined the Confederate cause, but Shaler believed in the Union, which he called “a most useful convenience for uniting like states for protection and interchange.”

 

Shaler served for two years until illness forced his resignation. For almost forty years he taught at Harvard, and late in life wrote the poems collected in From Old Fields: Poems of the Civil War. Shaler’s wife published the book posthumously. In 2004, R.L. Barth edited and introduced The Selected Civil War Poems of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (Scienter Press). Bob is a poet, publisher, Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, and fellow Kentuckian. In his introduction he writes:

 

“Shaler was a Civil War combat veteran; he thought long and hard about combat, war, and soldiering; although a poetic amateur, he had certain poetic skills, chief among them narrative power, an ability to write fluid blank verse, and an eye for telling details, sharply perceived and rendered.”

 

Barth says Shaler’s best poems are “shrewdly observed and profoundly moving.” As the volume’s final selection, Bob includes “The Burial Place,” a poem that echoes the passage at the top taken from Shaler’s Autobiography. It begins:

 

“A hill-top that looked far above the throng

Of brother hills, and into widening vales

Wherein the brooks slip onward to the sea.

A place for castle in old war-torn lands

When might was master: here, the silent hold

Where sleep the dead in earth that looks to sky

For the brave trust in all that dwelleth there.”

 

Visiting the cemetery are an old man and a boy, “in ancient quest / Of place for one more grave . . .” The Civil War and its dead are alluded to obliquely:

 

“’T is not yet two-score years, yet ’t is as far

As Trojan legend to the youth who hears

How o’er this earth of peace tramped demon war,

Treading its hills and vales with feet that scorched

Their goodly life out; how of all that dwelt

Out to the rim of sight, peace stayed alone

With those who abided here in God’s strong arms,

Unheeding Satan’s deeds.”

 

Shaler concludes his poem with a line as final as an epitaph: “’T is but the graves that stay.”

As a coda, here is Bob’s “Meditations After Battle,” collected in Deeply Dug In (University of New Mexico Press, 2003). The first part is preceded by half of a Virgilian tag from Book I, line 462, of the Aeneid: “sunt lacrimae rerum . . .”:

 

“And all around, the dead! So many dead!

So many ways to die it hurt the heart

To look and feel sun burning overhead.

We stacked the bodies on scorched grass, apart.”

 

Before the second part of the poem is the rest of Virgil’s line: “et mentem mortalia tangunt”:

 

“Death was the context and the only fact.

Amidst the stench, I almost could believe

There was a world of light where, if souls lacked

Broken bodies awhile, they would retrieve

Them, mended; where no one need longer grieve.”

 

The complete line from the Aeneid can be translated “There are tears for things and mortal things touch the mind.”

'The Conception of Life As an Enchanted State'

On summer mornings in the mid-nineteen-sixties, I would follow the path behind our house through a growth of poplars and sassafras to the place where the white oaks and tulip trees took over. The path ended at the top of the hill where we went sledding in winter. Most mornings in that small clearing, weather permitting, I would find a Mourning Cloak, the most beautiful of butterflies, warming itself in what Nabokov in Ada calls a “dapple of drifting sunlight.” I was then collecting butterflies, which meant killing them with a pinch to the thorax, a practice that shames me today. Yet, as an adolescent, I fancied a fraternal bond with that Mourning Cloak. It was always the same individual in my imagination, not a generic “specimen.” 

In England, the Mourning Cloak (Nymphalis antiopa) is called the Camberwell Beauty, and Nigel Andrew recalls his first encounter:

 

“As a boy, I used to dream of seeing a Camberwell Beauty (from time to time I still do), but I had to wait until many years later, when, on a visit to Canada, I had my own ‘grand surprise’ [a folk name for the butterfly in England]. . . . The beautiful creature was understandably torpid, and very nearly—wonder of wonders—walked onto my outstretched finger: four feet were on before it changed its mind and, summoning its energy, flew off.”

 

Anyone ever enchanted by the sight of a butterfly, whether a lepidopterist or casual amateur, is likely to have such memories. The insect’s beauty is intensified by its gratuitousness. Nige offers all the solid evolutionary evidence for their aesthetic excess but remains true to the title of his new book, The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment (Saraband). Nige is a veteran of the Golden Age of Blogging, and a rare blogger who can write. His book combines memoir, field guide and philosophical meditation. He even argues that observing butterflies is good for you, a goad to mindfulness. His subtitle is intended literally. More than any other animals, even birds, butterflies inspire wonder.

Nige reviews the history of butterfly/human relations in England, which started with indifference, turned into a popular hobby, proceeded to obsessive collecting that vastly reduced the populations of some species, and finally evolved into serious science coupled with delight. He writes:

 

“Even in this time of rapid scientific advance, enlightenment could not be wholly disentangled from enchantment. If pure scientific curiosity drove the specialists’ activities, the allure of butterflies for most people was more emotionally grounded and more strongly aesthetic."  

 

As a gifted reader, Nige laces his text with allusions to, among others, John Clare, Kingsley Amis, Darwin, Sigfried Sassoon, Simone Weil (!), Sir Thomas Browne, Kay Ryan, Walt Whitman and, most often, the lepidopterist/novelist Nabokov. His most surprising find is a passage by Joseph Conrad from the preface to The Shadow-Line (1916), used as an epigraph to the book:

 

“The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is; marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state.”

Reading The Butterfly is pure pleasure. You need not be a biologist or nature mystic to enjoy it. “To get involved in watching butterflies,” he writes in a late chapter, “The Mindful Present: Seeing and Being,” “is to enter a new world, one that is rich, vibrant, abundant with life and color and energy—and in which we figure only as marginal, fleeting presences, potential threats but of no other interest. This parallel world goes on, with or without us.”

 

Nige’s first book, another paean to England and its traditions, was The Mother of Beauty (Thorntree Press, 2019), devoted to the country’s church monuments.

'Your Point Is to Be Incomplete, Fugitive, Incidental.”

“And I very much like your love of pleasure, and your humour and malice: it is so delightful to live in a world that is full of pictures, and incidental divertissements, and amiable absurdities. Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.” 

Any sensibility able to produce such admirable thoughts I diagnose as sane. The writer is George Santayana in a May 24, 1918, letter to Logan Pearsall Smith. The Spaniard has just read Smith’s Trivia (1917). The book’s preface, in its entirety, gives a fair taste of the contents:

 

“‘You must beware of thinking too much about Style,’ said my kindly adviser, ‘or you will become like those fastidious people who polish and polish until there is nothing left.’

 

“‘Then there really are such people?’ I asked, lost in the thought of how much I should like to meet them. But the well-informed lady could give me no precise information about them.

 

“I often hear of them in this tantalizing manner, and perhaps one day I shall get to know them. They sound delightful.”

 

As was Smith, who joins that small coterie of “minor” writers often more essential to me than some of the majors: Walter Savage Landor, Charles Montagu Doughty, Max Beerbohm, Maurice Baring, Walter de la Mare. Each qualifies as a sui generis thinker and stylist. Each ranks pleasure high among his responsibilities to readers. Life is too fleeting to squander it on, say, Noam Chomsky and Joyce Carol Oates.

 

I first learned of Smith (1865-1946), an American-born English essayist and critic, through his correspondence with Henry James. Later I read his best-known work, All Trivia (1933), which collects four earlier volumes published between 1902 and 1933 and includes this announcement across from the copyright page:

 

“These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a large Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that sub-order of the Animal Kingdom which includes also the Orang-outang, the tusked Gorilla, and the gentle Chimpanzee.”

 

To speak of “best-known” in regard to anything Smith ever wrote recalls Dr. Johnson’s observation that a second marriage is “a triumph of hope over experience.” In our day, Smith and other “minor” (a patronizing word that shouldn’t be used qualitatively) writers of the past are stubbornly unfashionable, not forgotten but unknown, like those cold little planets said to be lurking beyond the orbit of Pluto. There’s a poignancy in their fate. They worked hard and often honorably. They can still give us pleasure if we make the effort to recover them. Of course, all writers are fated to slip into oblivion – if they are fortunate, only after they are dead. Santayana writes of Trivia, which had been called “immoral” by the poet Robert Bridges, then poet laureate of the United Kingdom: 

 

“[I]t is not immoral at all unless you take it to be complete and ultimate, which of course is the last thing you would think of pretending. Your point is to be incomplete, fugitive, incidental.”

 

Precisely the qualities in which Smith reveled. He prized precisely who he was and wrote like no other writer, as in “Humiliation”:

 

“‘My own view is,’ I began, but no one listened. At the next pause, ‘I always say,’ I remarked, but again the loud talk went on. Someone told a story. When the laughter had ended, ‘I often think—'; but looking round the table I could catch no friendly or attentive eye. It was humiliating, but more humiliating the thought that Sophocles and Goethe would have always commanded attention, while the lack of it would not have troubled Spinoza or Abraham Lincoln.”

 

[Aaron James produced a fine appreciation of Smith “the Belletrist” in The Lamp.]

'He’s Not the Only One'

My newly graduated youngest son is visiting Thailand with friends from his alma mater, Rice University. Most of the photos he has sent document meals eaten and temples visited, but among them is this, my favorite image: 

The smiling head of the Buddha sunk among the tangled roots of a banyan tree. The place is Wat Mahathat in Ayutthaya, former capital of Siam and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991. Founded in 1350, the city was destroyed by the Burmese in 1767 and today is known as Thailand’s Angkor Wat. It was abandoned until the 1950s.

 

I had seen the banyan/Buddha image once before, in black and white, accompanying a series of poems by the late Kenneth Fields, collectively titled “One Love,” a sort of travelogue documenting a visit to Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. Fields was a student of Yvor Winters at Stanford University, and co-edited with him a poetry collection, Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969). Fields doesn’t mention the Buddha head explicitly:

 

“Sacred figures draped in yellow

Bas-reliefs crumbling away

Wat overgrown returning to earth”

 

Fields’ memories rhyme with my own:

 

“Rolling through these jungles

News footage in my head

I don’t have to spell it out”

 

And this:

 

“I feared seeing it as a boy

Then thought I never would

Mekong

The wake of empires

Spreading out”

 

Fields reanimates the Imagist impulse:

 

“Magnificent ruins,

Forest and culture

In symbiotic rush”

 

Fields visited Cambodia in 2009, during the trial of former Khmer Rouge prison camp commander Kang Kek Iew, known as “Comrade Duch”:

 

“Duch is on trial today.

Head of Tuol Sleng, S-21. Old

Party pols are trembling

He’s not the only one”

 

From the beautiful landscape and temples, Fields moves on to recent history and genocide:

 

“Decimated

An entire country

Many times over

Some for wearing glasses”

 

Fields concludes the poem:

 

“The world is dark

With us. Even

Electricity darkens.

Only a few—

Honored in crumbling ruins

Built by darkeners darkened

In their turn—

Only a wild heedlessness

A spare carefulness for those we love

Suffice”

'For I Have Renounced Happiness'

“Happiness is the search for happiness.” 

I’m not so sure. My understanding is that there are no happy lives, only happy moments. Those moments seem to be the byproduct of right living. A life dedicated fulltime to achieving happiness is likely to be filled with respites of pleasure, long stretches of disappointment and much unhappiness for others, like second-hand smoke. Some people, like spoiled children, confuse happiness with getting their own way. Most of us will never learn what’s best for us and others. You can see the very human fallacy built into that effort: demands can only grow more insistent.

 

In an 1895 entry in The Journal of Jules Renard (ed. and trans. By Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, 1964,) Renard writes: “I desire nothing from the past. I do not count on the future. The present is enough for me. I am a happy man, for I have renounced happiness.” Hard to say just how tongue-in-cheek that passage is intended. Renard was a master ironist. He always impresses me as a realist, a rejector of pie-in-the-sky grandiosities. Bogan writes in her preface:

 

“Renard’s passion for factual truth and stylistic exactitude, once formed, remained central to his work throughout his career. This preoccupation never hardened into obsession; one of the great pleasures of reading Renard is the certainty, soon felt by the reader, that nothing is being put down in meanness or malice.”

 

Renard died on this date, May 22, in 1910, exactly one year after writing the aphorism-like entry at the top in his journal. He was forty-six years old.

 

[The quote at the top comes from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'Books Which Can Be Read Again and Again'

“The great bulk of the world’s prose fiction, contemporary and past, does not wear well. Almost all of it is soon forgotten and of those books which survive the wear of time, only a few withstand the effects of time on the reader himself. Out of all the novels ever written there is only about a ten-foot shelf of books which can be read again and again in later life . . .” 

More like eight and a half feet of slender, small-print editions, along the lines of Everyman’s Library. Excellence among human creations is rare; in literature, especially prose fiction, it can be measured by the micron on that mythical shelf. And don’t get me started on poetry.

 

The lawgiver here is Kenneth Rexroth (1905-82), a middling poet, essayist, journalist and literary raconteur. In the Sixties he published a series of brief essays called “Classics Revisited.” Among them was one devoted to Ford Madox Ford’s World War I tetralogy Parade’s End, published sequentially between 1924 and 1928. Rexroth defends the ability of readers to experience and find rewarding literature produced in other times and places – a rebuttal to presentism and academic sectarianism:

 

“Any cultivated person should be able to accept temporarily the cosmology and religion of Dante or Homer. The emotional attitudes and the responses to people and to the crises of life in most fiction come to seem childish as we ourselves experience the real thing. Books written far away and long ago in quite different cultures with different goods and goals in life, about people utterly unlike ourselves, may yet remain utterly convincing — The Tale of Genji, The Satyricon, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Burnt Njal, remain true to our understanding of the ways of man to man the more experienced we grow. Of only a few novels in the twentieth century is this true. Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End is one of those books.”

 

For once, I agree with Rexroth. Ford’s novel is one of those books you read and at the same time look forward to rereading. Of how many twentieth-century novels can that be said? Think of Conrad, Kipling, Cather, Proust, Joyce, Svevo, Lampedusa, Nabokov. It’s notable that Rexroth includes relatively few Americans on his list, some of whom are rather dubious – Prescott, Poe, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Parkman, Stowe, Douglass, Twain, Henry Adams, William Carlos Williams. No American fiction from the twentieth century. That tends to confirm my impression that England produced more excellent, rereadable fiction in the last century than the United States – Ford, of course, and Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Henry Green, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Kingsley Amis.

 

Assembling such lists is an entertaining parlor game, made to challenge and inform readers. It’s not a “canon” or literacy test. Snobs need not play. Rexroth concludes his Ford essay like this:

 

“The result is a little as though Burnt Njal had been rewritten by the author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. There is the same deadly impetus, the inertia of doom, riding on hate, that drives through the greatest of the sagas. There is the same tireless weaving and reweaving of the tiniest threads of the consequences of grasping and malevolence, the chittering of the looms of corruption, that sickens the heart in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The reader of either novel, or the saga, emerges wrung dry. The difference in Ford’s book is compassion. The poetry is in the pity, as Wilfred Owen said of the same war."

 

[Rexroth wrote eighty-nine “Classics Revisited” essays for Saturday Review between 1965 and 1969. Sixty were reprinted as Classics Revisited (1968). The other twenty-nine were included in The Elastic Retort (1973). After his death, More Classics Revisited (1989), containing those twenty-nine essays plus other book reviews and introductions, was published. Rexroth wrote another essay on Ford.]

'He Wanted Only Time'

My brother’s yahrzeit – the first anniversary of his death last summer – is approaching. His death was the most intimate I have experienced. I spent most of the last two weeks of his life with him, in hospital and hospice, and observed the moment of his death. 

Ken could be difficult. He was contrary and often bitter. We several times went years without speaking, and our relations were often a test of character. He brought out some of my own bitterness, but also our blackest senses of humor. 

He started smoking cigarettes at age twelve, never seriously gave them up, and they killed him at age sixty-nine. In hospice I offered to buy him a carton of Raleighs (our mother’s brand: “Save the coupons!”) and that was the last time I saw him laugh. We were brothers and blood won in the end.  

Thanks to Mike Juster I’ve learned of the poet Jean L. Kreiling who has just published a seven-poem sonnet sequence, “My Brother’s Last Year,” in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal. In the first sonnet she writes:

 

“But he retains his reason and his wit,

so much so that it seems clear he’ll survive;

they say he won’t.”

 

Kreiling’s poems are a detailed account of the mundane things surrounding dying and death. I remember in the hospital my brother was still reading books, able to hold his granddaughter and talk about Montaigne. His mind was intact, which, despite all the evidence, suggested he would eventually get out of bed and return to his life. As Kreiling puts it, “He’s still him.” By the time he entered hospice he could no longer speak or, apparently, listen. His son and I sang to him but I don’t think he heard.

 

Survivors savor their survival. We can’t help it. The life instinct is powerful. Kreiling tells us: “To grow old is a gift.” She writes:

 

“This may assuage

my sense there’s nothing I can do, although

a visit’s nearly nothing. Yes, I care;

that’s what my presence demonstrates, I know,

but it will make him strain for things now rare

or difficult: the teasing repartee,

a walk outdoors, shared meals and memories.

He reassures me that he feels okay,

though I watch him declining, by degrees.”

 

The death of a loved makes us pause to assess the state of our own values. We ask, “What is Important?” Kreiling’s final sonnet:

 

“Not long before the end, he made it clear:

there was so little that he wanted — just 

to stay with those he loved, not disappear

into the latter part of dust to dust.

So many of us want so much: we crave

the shiny toy, the extra buck, and more

when less would do — stuff that will never save

our souls or bodies. I knew that before

my brother’s diagnosis, and today

I can’t claim to have unlearned pointless greed.

I find, though, that it’s easier to weigh

the worth of things desired, to measure need,

to understand there isn’t much I lack.

He wanted only time. I want him back.”

'There Is Only Man'

“You either fell under his spell and loved the wild ride of his prose, or you shunned or ignored it.”

 

Infatuation of the literary sort is likely possible only among the young. That’s my experience. I have discovered good writers in recent decades – Yvor Winters, C.H. Sisson – but the attraction was more balanced. I could see their weaknesses while continuing to read and admire them. While still in my teens and twenties, I would fall hard for certain writers and almost subconsciously rationalize their failings. I think of Thomas Pynchon and Sherwood Anderson, an unlikely pair. But my hardest fall was for Edward Dahlberg, a writer unknown to most readers.

 

Dahlberg (1900-77), an American, defied categories and most literary expectations. Between 1929 and 1934 he published three novels usually labeled “proletarian.” If that had been all he published, I would never have fallen for him. He knew all the Modernists in Paris, including Joyce and Ford Madox Ford. By 1941, when he published Do These Bones Live (retitled Can These Bones Live when republished in 1960), Dahlberg had transformed himself into -- what? In the words of Jules Chametzky, a writer of “[a] wildly baroque, some would say ornate and affected high style.” Dahlberg wrote prose in the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, John Donne and Robert Burton, writers I was reading around the same time.

 

I wrote my name and the date of purchase in my copy of Can These Bones Live: “8-6-75.” Much of the text is underlined and annotated. Here’s a typical marked passage, from a chapter titled “Randolph Bourne: In the Saddle of Rosinante”: “All dogmas lead men to the Abyss; doctrine is the enemy of vision and the denial of the past.” By Dahlberg’s customary standards, that’s both thoughtful and moderate. He could be a real crank, like one of his heroes, Henry David Thoreau, of whom he writes:

 

“Great lives are moral allegories and so soon become deniable myths because we cannot believe that such good men could have existed in such an evil world.”

 

The guy who first introduced me to Dahlberg, in 1974, was Mike Phillips. Eighteen years ago I wrote a post on this blog asking if anyone knew Phillips or his whereabouts. So far, silence. I’ve read most of Dahlberg’s published work. Especially good is his 1964 autobiography, filtered through the unhappy life of his mother, Because I Was Flesh. Dahlberg’s essential theme was himself. The memoir works because the focus is shifted to his mother. I’ve shed my infatuation and can value him for his best work. Here is another underlined passage accompanied by my half-century-old exclamation point: “There are no abstract truths—no Mass Man, no proletariat. There is only Man.”  

 

[The two quotes, including the one at the top, are taken from Jules Chametzky’s Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers: a Cultural Memoir (2012).]

'Poetry That Nobody Nowadays Reads'

Once I patronized a library book sale where volumes were sold not by age, condition, whether paperback or hard cover, and certainly not by literary worth but by weight. On the table by the exit was a scale, the flat-topped sort associated with butcher shops. The arrangement was a gimmick the librarians found endlessly amusing, with much joking about “adding another pork chop.” Most of the books on sale, as usual, were self-help and popular fiction, and I found nothing to buy, which disappointed me because I would have enjoyed owning a volume valued in so egalitarian a fashion.

Late in life, Flann O’Brien (aka Myles na Gopaleen) wrote the column “Bones of Contention” for The Nationalist and Leinster Times in Ireland, using yet another pseudonym, George Knowall. Earlier he had written the better-known and generally funnier column “Cruiskeen Lawn” for The Irish Times. O’Brien (1911-66) is one of the funniest writers in the language (see At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, et al.). In 2012, the Lilliput Press published Myles Away from Dublin, a selection of the later columns. Here is one titled “Weighty Volume”:

“At this sixpenny barrow I bought the autobiography, in two volumes, of Henry Taylor. When I got the books home, I weighed them on my wife’s balance in the kitchen and they weigh four and a quarter pounds. I have never heard of Henry Taylor but the books were published in 1885 Longmans, Green and Co. I have not read Mr Taylor’s account of himself but a furtive glance at one volume gives me the suspicion that this man was a poet, or thought he was. A frontpiece portrait shows him looking very old and sporting an enormous white wig. Why did he waste so much valuable time growing so very old and writing that poetry that nobody nowadays reads and probably never read?

“The subtitle of the first volume intrigues me. Just this modest phrase – ‘Vol. I: 1800-1844’. Forty-four years of abject futility, squeezed into one volume, weighing over two pounds avoirdupois.”

Yes, Henry Taylor (1800-86) was a genuine poet, dramatist and a clerk in England’s Colonial Office, and like O’Brien/Knowall I’ve never read a word of his work. O’Brien was a master of the blackest of Irish black humor and wrote authoritatively of “abject futility.”

'A Negligible or Negative Return'

A reader is pressing Ezra Pound on me again. This happens semi-annually, like visits to the dentist. I find few writers as distasteful as Pound. My reasons are simple and not at all original. He was rabidly, tediously anti-Semitic and he betrayed his country.

Earlier this year I borrowed Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War II (ed. Leonard W. Doob, 1978) from the library. I had been aware of the book for a long time but never looked into it. I got morbidly curious and found Pound’s wartime broadcasts even more vile than expected, but also tiresome. We’ve all encountered people maddened with hatred and we avoid them, at least in part out of fear. Such characters are unpredictable. We don’t know when their words will turn into actions. By being broadcast, Pound’s words are action. I browsed among his transcripts but couldn't finish reading even one. Raving by definition is tiresome, unlikely to interest anyone other than the raver.

My Pound-advocating reader, as others have done previously, urges me to ignore the political and racial idiocies and focus on Pound as poet. That strategy doesn’t help his case. I recognize the poetic worth of stray lines and phrases in the Cantos and elsewhere. A copy of the Cantos sits on a nearby shelf and critics I admire – Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport – virtually beatify Pound among twentieth-century poets. I don’t get it. Trying to understand Pound’s chaotic writing isn’t worth the effort. His mandarin contempt for common readers and other poets has had a devastating impact on the art for more than a century. The late Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll, in an interview published in 2004 in The Poetry Ireland Review, speaks for me:

“[W]illful obscurity I disdain, not least because it arrogantly assumes rights to so much of the reader's meagre life-span, demanding absurdly large investments of time for what is usually a negligible or negative return.

“One reason why much of the greatest poetry is so uncannily and transparently clear (and I don't mean facile) is because it is a record of those rare, transfixing moments when some normally opaque corner of existence is unveiled and we are granted a fleeting glimpse into ‘the heart of things.’ Poetry draws on depths of emotion and reserves of wisdom that are plumbed by instinctive, almost primitive, means – the opposite of conscious ‘cleverality.’”