'Born Under One Law, to Another Bound'

In his Notebooks, 1922-86 (Imprint Academic, 2014), Michael Oakeshott poses an interesting comparison: “An odd contrast, more or less contemporaries, Tolstoy & Amiel. (I recollect that I came across them both at the same time, when I was about 17½, & both have remained with me.)” 

“Amiel” was Henri Frédéric Amiel (1821-81) a Swiss academic, a lonely, timid figure who found little solace in life. He never married, never had children. The book we know him for, his Journal Intime, was published the year after his death, and Mrs. Humphry Ward’s two-volume English translation appeared in 1885. Amiel distrusted the temptation to indulge in self-pity, unlike Tolstoy, who invented a vast self-mythology to protect and justify himself. And yet, Tolstoy was a genius, perhaps the only novelist (with Proust?) we can rank with Dante and Shakespeare, while Amiel was an interesting, poignant, essentially minor figure in the history of ideas. Oakeshott continues:

 

"Tolstoy (except in regard to whom he would marry; when he dithered) never had any difficulty in deciding. His only difficulty was his aptitude for making half a dozen ‘irrevocable’ & contradictory decisions in as many days.”

 

Tolstoy reminds us of a force of nature, a hurricane; Amiel, a warm afternoon in spring. Tolstoy’s marriage was grand opera, an endless comic drama. “Amiel could never decide anything,” Oakeshott continues. “But he managed to live in indecision, to make it a way of life. (Keats had something about this [‘negative capability’].)” As Keats puts it: “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

 

Both writers were fascinated with themselves, though Amiel, not Tolstoy was gifted with self-knowledge. “On the other hand,” Oakeshott writes, “Tolstoy, by a wonderful intuition, knew an enormous amount about other people; &, Amiel – some people (women) believed that they had never been so profoundly understood, but I doubt if he ever understood anyone but himself.”    

 

Tolstoy and Amiel form an interesting template for all of humanity. Their contradictions, within themselves and between them, stand as a ready tool for understanding the impossibility of understanding ourselves and others. They remain, like us, unresolvable contradictions, humanity in essence. Those looking for consistency in human behavior are doomed to frustration or self-deception. We are walking contradictions. The Elizabethan poet and dramatist Fulke Greville puts it like this in his closet drama Mustapha:

 

“O wearisome condition of humanity!

Born under one law, to another bound;

Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity;

Created sick, commanded to be sound.

What meaneth nature by these diverse laws?”

 

Greville has been championed by Yvor Winters and Thom Gunn, both mature poets who understood human contradiction. He was born on October 3, 1554, and died on this date, September 30, in 1628 at age seventy-three. He is  perhaps the greatest of under-appreciated English poets.

'Fluid As Mood and Ponderous As Grief'

Winter 2001-02. Upstate New York. Much snow, few thaws. We discarded our Christmas tree at the curb and awaited pickup by the city. Passing plows buried the castoff repeatedly and I added to the heap by shoveling out the driveway. By early spring, the tree was frozen under ten or twelve feet of ice and snow. My middle son was then about eighteen months old, and I had promised him we would dig snow tunnels. We used garden trowels to carve out a passage wide enough for him to disappear, and uncovered the perfectly preserved Christmas tree – in March or April, I think. The needles were still green and not falling off. Michael, bundled in a puffy red ski jacket, snow pants and blue stocking cap, was dizzy and red-faced with excitement and the cold. In family lore, that became, like a folk or fairy tale, “The Year We Celebrated Christmas Twice.” It all came back with Maryann Corbett’s “Ice Dam” in the December 2020 issue of Anglican Theological Review: 

“The airiness of snow’s accumulation

in powdery upheapings on the roof

swansdown-swaddled us through a muffled winter.

Only now, in the first whispers of March,

does the truth dribble down walls on the upstairs porch

with the full weight of what was always water,

fluid as mood and ponderous as grief,

an oozing, seeping, weepy accusation.

Now the recriminations; now we search

for scapegoats (insulation? fan? blocked gutter?)

but find there is no bargain-rate salvation.

This costs. Somebody has to risk his life.

The checkbook bleeds again. Abashed and bitter,

we beat our breasts for what was left undone.”

 

In the North, ice and snow are beautiful and dangerous, as well as memory-encouraging. When digging out the Christmas tree with Michael, I self-consciously told myself to preserve this memory, to keep it intact and unchanging like the tree. And so I have.

 

In an interview, Nabokov once described himself as “a one-man multitude,” which might serve to characterize any good writer. He imaginatively projects himself into a thousand characters, the past and future, alternative universes. In one of his finest stories, “A Guide to Berlin” (Russian, 1925; English, 1976), he speculates about the creation of memories and the possibility of willing ourselves into the memories of others. The narrator says of a little boy he sees eating soup in the kitchen of a café: “How can I demonstrate to him that I have glimpsed somebody’s future recollection?”

'Cordial Old Man!'

“Landor, like Lamb, was just strange enough to accommodate Hazlitt’s own oddness, and the two became friends, regardless of Hazlitt’s criticism.”

 

Few writers can be judged genuinely eccentric or "difficult" based solely on the writing they leave us. Literary history tends to whitewash peculiarities or romanticize them, and the virtues of the work blind us to the human weirdness. We turn to their contemporaries for uncensored insights.

 

Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867), best remembered for his diary, was one of those elusive figures known for knowing others, a catalyst who triggered chemical reactions between more prominent writers. Robinson took Walter Savage Landor to meet Charles Lamb in Enfield on September 28, 1832. This was risky. Landor was a hot-headed man, easily offended, who loved to argue and hold a grudge. He was visiting his home country from Fiesole, a village near Florence, Italy, where he had been living since 1821. Lamb was usually benign, depending on how much alcohol he had consumed. Carlyle judged him “in some considerable degree insane. . . . Poor England where such a despicable abortion is named genius!”

 

The passage quoted at the top is from Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb (Yale University Press, 2022) by Eric G. Wilson, who writes: “One of the few bright spots in Lamb’s final years was meeting Walter Savage Landor.” Wilson tells us Hazlitt, another hothead, had met Landor in Italy in 1825 and praised Imaginary Conversations, even though he judged the work “spoiled and rendered abortive throughout by an utter want to temper, of self-knowledge and decorum.” Wilson writes of Landor: “[U]nlike Hazlitt, who alienated friends at an alarming rate, the eccentrically irascible Landor was highly regarded.”

 

Landor visited Lamb for one hour. He was charmed by Lamb’s sister Mary and, Wilson writes, “pleased with Lamb’s conversation, though Charles, according to Robinson, was not ‘at his ease,’ and ‘nothing in the conversation [was] recollectable.’” Landor, surprisingly, felt otherwise, and wrote these lines:

 

“Once, and once only, have I seen thy face,

Elia! once only has thy tripping tongue

Run o’r my breast, yet never has been left

Impression on it stronger or more sweet.

Cordial old man! what youth was in thy years,

What wisdom in thy levity, what truth

In every utterance of that purest soul!

Few are the spirits of the glorified

I’d spring to earlier at the gate of Heaven.”

 

In an 1834 letter to Lady Blessington, Landor wrote that Lamb “met me as if I had been a friend of twenty years’ standing; indeed he told me I had been so, and showed me some things I had written much longer ago and had utterly forgotten.” John Foster in his 1869 biography of Landor writes: “The hour he passed with Lamb was one of unalloyed enjoyment.”

 

Lamb would die two years later. Landor lived until 1864.

'The Word Dear Alone Hangs on the Upper Verge'

“The major writers in whose shadows I grow my mushrooms are Osip Mandelstam, Donald Barthelme, Robert Walser, and Walter Savage Landor.”  

Writers are not always reliable interpreters of their own work, or even willing or able to identify their influences. The impact might be subconscious. Sometimes, naming influences is a protective act. There’s strength in numbers, yes, but also in quality. In the interview quoted above, Guy Davenport offers an unlikely assortment, from a master like Mandelstam to a bric-a-brac-monger like Barthelme. Guy was passionately curious, learned and generous with what he knew, so we pay addition when he lauds a writer’s work.

 

Of few writers can we say to a novice: You can’t go wrong; start anywhere and enjoy yourself. Even Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus. In my experience, even after almost half a century, I reliably enjoy and learn something from Guy’s work, no matter how remote it may seem from my interests. On my shelves sit twenty-five volumes of his work. In his essay “Ernst Mach Max Ernest” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), Guy names writers with “the styles I find most useful to study”: Hugh Kenner, Mandelstam, Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, Pound and Charles Doughty. He says of them: “All of these are writers who do not waste a word, who condense, pare down, and proceed with daring synapses.” Again, one can quibble. Pound? Really? But it was Guy who introduced me to Doughty, author of Travels in Arabia Deserta, an essential book in my library.

 

The most intriguing name cited by Guy is Landor. I know of no other allusion to the author of Imaginary Conversations in his work. Landor as shadow for Guy’s own work makes sense. He was a classicist, like Guy, and wrote much of his poetry in Latin. Here is “Memory,” a poem I hadn’t encountered before, one I think Guy might have appreciated:

 

“The mother of the Muses, we are taught,

Is Memory: she has left me; they remain,

And shake my shoulder, urging me to sing

About the summer days, my loves of old.

Alas! alas! is all I can reply.

Memory has left with me that name alone,

Harmonious name, which other bards may sing,

But her bright image in my darkest hour

Comes back, in vain comes back, called or uncalled.

Forgotten are the names of visitors

Ready to press my hand but yesterday;

Forgotten are the names of earlier friends

Whose genial converse and glad countenance

Are fresh as ever to mine ear and eye;

To these, when I have written, and besought

Remembrance of me, the word Dear alone

Hangs on the upper verge, and waits in vain.

A blessing wert thou, O oblivion,

If thy stream carried only weeds away,

But vernal and autumnal flowers alike

It hurries down to wither on the strand.”

 

Guy leaves no clues as to why he prizes Landor. Perhaps he numbered him among “earlier friends / Whose genial converse and glad countenance / Are fresh as ever to mine ear and eye . . .”

ADDENDUM, 10-1-25: Dave Lull, as usual, completed my homework for me, and found additional references to Landor in Guy Davenport’s work.

 

Da Vinci’s Bicycle, p. 115

“When I first knew him, years before, at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, he was not yet the immensely old man that I would eventually have to remember, old as Titian, old as Walter Savage Landor, glaring and silent, standing in gondolas in Venice like some ineffably old Chinese.”

 

The Geography of the Imagination, p. 112

“Occasionally a Landor or a Hazlitt has helped us to see the breathing Englishman, hazel-eyed, superbly deep but always clear of thought, with the heart of man helplessly naked to his gaze. But the student begins to think of him very soon as an institution vaguely religious, vaguely pedagogical, inscrutable, endless of corridor, governed by generations of quarreling wardens. The institution endows chairs, gives assistant professors grants for studies of kingship, Tudor allusions, image clusters, stage history. As if all this grind and cough had never existed, Zukofsky has written a book about a poet whose precision of word and eye can be talked about endlessly.”

 

Thasos and Ohio: Poems and Translations 1950-1980, p. 86

“Mulberries, cedars, and fig-trees

In a Warwick garden, ᾧ δαμάλης ἔρως,

Landor with a yellow-stippled trout,

πλέξαντες μηροῖς πέρι μηρούς . . .”

 

p. 88

“Calvert defined Blake, read Landor

And Chapman, engraved a tough line

Fine as Bewick’s. (Knowledge rusts

If the mind can’t love . . .”

 

12 Stories, p. 236

“A witty Frenchman has said that I am a writer who disappears while arriving. I would like to misunderstand him that I come too late as a Modernist and too early for the dissonances that go by the name of Postmodernism. All writers being creatures of language and the past, I look back (however inaccurately) to Lucian reading his dialogues in Greek to Roman consular families in Gaul, to Ausonius trying to see the Garonne in the Moselle, to Walter Savage Landor writing his imaginary conversations in Fiesole.”

 

The Cardiff Team: Ten Stories, p. 161 

“. . . kindly angels might lead her through a study of Braque. I love her for that, love that in her. They've discovered that there are stars older than the universe. So much to learn, so much to take in. I've been reading an English writer of the last century, name of Landor, and found a passage about a young Greek of the fifth century, Hegemon, age fifteen, whose curls are pressed down by the famous saloniste Aspasia, with her finger, to see them spring up again. He bit her finger for the liberty she had taken, and said he must kiss it to make it well, and perhaps kiss her elsewhere, here and there, to prevent the spreading of the venom. Playing Eros, he was.”

'An Ambition to Copiousness and Eloquence'

“We think too much of death and not nearly enough of dying. There is a reason for that. Dying is a mental discipline, which entails many hours of training in (among other things) the renunciation of fantasies that death will be anything other than it is—the cessation of consciousness—and the bitter facing up to the reality of that fact.” 

Only slowly have I come to accept Montaigne’s life-lesson, urged along by my friend D.G. Myers and his example. When I was young, like many of us, death seemed – though mercifully deferred -- a betrayal, an outrageous bait-and-switch. Preoccupation with dying got in the way of living. As family and friends died – sometimes swiftly, seemingly without warning, sometimes after protracted suffering – I paid attention, pondering the lessons they shared with me. The writer cited above is not Montaigne but my friend David Myers, who died eleven years ago today, on September 26, 2014. I knew him for a mere six years as proprietor of A Commonplace Blog. By profession he was a literary critic and scholar, and a university professor, though I thought of him more as a teacher in the broader sense, a reb. His blog remains in place, not erased like so many others. Explore the intellectual treasures it contains. David was always generous with his learning.

 

We shared literary loves – Nabokov, Ronald Knox, J.V. Cunningham, Whittaker Chambers, Janet Lewis, L.E. Sissman, Isaac Bashevis Singer and A.J. Liebling, among others. That brought us together. But David was not interested in collecting trophies or showing off his merit badges. He was admirably indifferent to fashion, to the bookish vogue du jour. He was an Orthodox Jew, committed to his faith, no dilettante. He could be provocative, combative with fools, and he loved a good fight. Sometimes he served as my pit bull, defending me without asking. His analytical skills far outweighed my own. He insisted I was a critic, a contention I always denied. I’m merely a reader who likes to write about what he has read. In a post he calls a “statement of principles,” David adapts Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between foxes and hedgehogs, and includes me and himself among the foxes:

 

“These are writers united not by doctrine or ideological commitment, but by an ambition to copiousness and eloquence—and the secret handshake that passes between those who have spent a life among books. They are proud to be foxes. They don’t avoid hedgehogs; they just don’t want to be one. They are happy knowing many small tricks. Or, rather, such knowledge brings them great happiness.”

 

That’s a radical promise, one seldom voiced today. But David earned (I first wrote “learned”) his wisdom the old-fashioned way, from life as he lived it. Being a realist is not fashionable stance today. On this, his yahrzeit, David writes of the dying:

 

“To tell them that their suffering will be relieved by death—here, let me help you die—is a lie told for the benefit of the liar, because the dead do not know relief. They don’t know anything. They are dead. The relief is sought by those who must watch the dying suffer, and they will be the only ones to feel the relief. Relief of suffering, like funeral services, belong to living. The dead are excluded from them.”

'Sapient; Judging Rightly; Having Much Knowledge'

“Let me know what English books you read for your entertainment. You can never be wise unless you love reading.” 

I have known many intelligent men and women, including, of course, many of the readers of this blog. They have been variously well-read, articulate and intellectually incisive. They make for good company because they are seldom strident or humorless. They are averse to cant and unlikely to rely on clichés and fashionable notions. They tend to possess a certain sense of humility, not taking themselves too seriously. Intelligence alone is not wisdom, and neither is knowing a lot of “stuff.” Some of us naturally collect trivia the way pariah dogs collect fleas. Think of true intelligence as mental/emotional nimbleness – a precursor to wisdom. A wise man has learned to apply what he knows to himself and the world around him.

 

The passage at the top is from the September 25, 1770, letter Dr. Johnson writes to his manservant Francis Barber – “Frank” – who served Johnson from 1752 until the writer’s death in 1784. Barber was born a slave on a Jamaican sugarcane plantation in 1742 or 1743. Johnson loved Frank and was always solicitous of him, as the passage suggests. Boswell relied on Frank for information while writing his Life of Johnson.

 

In his Dictionary, Johnson offers five definitions for wise, on the basis of which we can judge Johnson a wise man. First: “sapient; judging rightly; having much knowledge.” That’s indisputable. Johnson knew at least a little about everything, even biology and electricity. Second: “judicious; prudent; practically knowing.” That’s what separates intelligence from wisdom. Third: “skilful; dexterous.” A man may be a genius when it comes to repairing cars. That alone doesn’t make him wise. Fourth: “skilled in hidden arts: a sense somewhat ironical.” No application to Johnson, who was a practical man. Fifth: “grave; becoming a wise man.” Typical but not essential. I think Max Beerbohm was a wise man. So was Whittaker Chambers. A poorly read man, even one who is illiterate, can still possess wisdom.

Johnson writes in the January 19, 1760, issue The Idler: "Every man wishes to be wise; and they who cannot be wise are almost always cunning."

'That Sheer Spiritual Tackiness'

An old acquaintance, Mikhail Iossel, has sent me a copy of his latest book, Sentence (Linda Leith Publishing, 2025), a volume that lives up to its title. Each of its thirty-eight stories is a single sentence, ranging in length from ten words to nineteen pages. Of necessity, most of the stories are exercises in free association, a creative deployment of and and other connectives, and a memory-driven linkage of memoir and commentary. He has plenty to remember: Mikhail was born in Leningrad (formerly Petrograd, now St. Petersburg again) in the Soviet Union, emigrated to the U.S. in 1986 and taught himself English. His obsessive concern is language – what he and the rest of us have lost and gained. 

Chapter 15, the punningly titled “Posh Lust,” celebrates one of the book's tutelary spirits, Vladimir Nabokov, a fellow multi-lingual man. In his charmingly eccentric critical biography Nikolai Gogol (New Directions, 1944), Nabokov introduces to English speakers the Russian word poshlust. He detested mawkish sentiment, the cloying sincerity of fake art, and defined it as “not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.” He compactly defines poshlust as “smug philistinism.” It is the impulse that drives most art, literary and otherwise, as well as our politics, today. Cheap, strident sincerity. Mikhail writes:

 

“. . . brutal honesty and triumphant poshlust (that sheer spiritual tackiness whose elusive nature of a randomly semi-invisible and unpredictably shape-shifting Russian butterfly the matchless classifier Vladimir Nabokov, whose birthday happens to be today, along with that of his extreme antipode and altogether an uncommonly evil man Vladimir Lenin, had attempted repeatedly and largely unsuccessfully, alas, to pin down, referring to it by turns as ‘corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases . . .’”

 

It's tough deciding where to start quoting Mikhail and where to stop.

 

“‘. . . imitations of imitations, bogus profundities,’ and, of course, famously, as ‘posh-lust’ — indeed, that sublimated overpowering noxious, sickeningly narcissistic and self-destructive, ugly lust for the vapid poshness of unbridled mass attention and adoration, or even mass hatred, for that matter, it doesn’t matter, so long as one remains firmly lodged in the roiling center of popular attention and keeps being talked about, talked about, at any cost, regardless of what it takes,  how many people may get hurt in the process) . . .”

 

You can probably sense where this is going – “Trump’s posh lust for life.”

'Pleasant-Sounding, Flowing, Musical'

A phrase returned to me unexpectedly and has nagged for several days: “Mellifluous Meliority.” It was the name of a store in the late sixties or early seventies, somewhere in North Central Ohio, possibly in Kent. Perhaps a record store or headshop. I knew it only from a radio commercial on an “underground” station in Cleveland, but the words stuck. I remember the commercial was spoken by a man with a working-class English accent, recalling Stanley Holloway. 

That’s the way memory works, arbitrarily, often frustratingly, like a photograph or musical phrase without context. Mellifluous is an adjective rooted in the Latin for “honey” and “to flow,” and is used figuratively to mean, according to the OED, “of speech, words, music, etc.: sweet, honeyed; pleasant-sounding, flowing, musical.” You’ll find it in Shakespeare and Milton, and Boswell uses it in his Life of Johnson: “We talked of a work much in vogue at that time, written in a very mellifluous style, but which, under pretext of another subject, contained much artful infidelity.”

 

It's March 20, 1776, and Boswell and Johnson are in Oxford discussing Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789. Boswell continues on Gibbon, known for the beauty of his prose and his anti-clericalism:

 

“I said it was not fair to attack us so unexpectedly; he should have warned us of our danger, before we entered his garden of flowery eloquence, by advertising ‘Spring-guns and men-traps set here’. The authour had been an Oxonian, and was remembered there for having ‘turned Papist’. I observed, that as he had changed several times - from Church of England to the Church of Rome, -- from the Church of Rome to infidelity, -- I did not despair yet of seeing him a methodist preacher. JOHNSON. (laughing), ‘It is said, that his range has been more extensive, and that he has once been Mahometan. However, now that he has published his infidelity, he will probably persist in it.’”

 

The OED defines the noun meliority as “the quality or condition of being better; superiority.” It also derives from the Latin (melior = “better”). Johnson’s own Dictionary (1755) defines it as “state of being better. A word very elegant, but not used.” The OED agrees and labels the word “obsolete.” Now it’s the name of a skin-care product. A search uncovers no mention of Mellifluous Meliority in the time and place I remember. Does it ring anyone’s bell? Does anyone recall a shop selling the better sort of sweet sounds?

ADDENDUM: As usual, Dave Lull solved this minor mystery and confirmed my challenged memory. He dug up an ad for Mellifluous Meliority in the Shaker Heights High School newspaper, dated December 18, 1970:

'Let the Mind Take Its Photograph'

Twenty-one years ago, as the plane descended into Houston, even before we touched down, I shed my first stereotype about the state. I suppose I expected cacti, sand and tumble weeds, based on a steady diet of Western movies since childhood. Instead, the landscape seemed upholstered in greenery. Plenty of concrete, of course, but I didn’t see that until later. Skyscrapers seemed surrounded by forest, like a vision out of a J.G. Ballard novel. Our new house was located in Oak Forest, named for the city's dominant tree – live oak (a tree I knew only from Whitman), water oak, Shumard oak, willow oak, bur oak and a dozen other species.

Missing were the maples, a Northern-dominant tree. Two weeks ago while driving through a park in Cleveland, I saw the leaves on stray maples already turning yellow and orange. Drought, heat and disease can make that happen prematurely. Today is the autumnal equinox but you wouldn’t know it here in Houston. The oaks over the next few months will get a little duller in color, without a mass dropping of leaves. Arboreally speaking, autumn is a dull affair in Texas. I drove past my childhood home in suburban Cleveland. The line of silver maples along the right side of the front yard are long gone. All that remains is a showoff sugar maple, soon to turn gaudily orange and yellow. 

The Welsh poet-priest R.S. Thomas has a poem titled “A Day in Autumn”:

 

“It will not always be like this,

The air windless, a few last

Leaves adding their decoration

To the trees’ shoulders, braiding the cuffs

Of the boughs with gold; a bird preening

 

“In the lawn’s mirror. Having looked up

From the day’s chores, pause a minute,

Let the mind take its photograph

Of the bright scene, something to wear

Against the heart in the long cold.”

 

“The long cold” and geography, in my case. I’m a thousand miles away from the remembered trees of autumn.

'Though One Need Not Yet Quite Define Peru'

Readers of English-language poetry asked to produce an allusion to the word Peru would likely come up with the opening couplet in “The Vanity of Human Wishes”(1749), Dr. Johnson’s adaptation of Juvenal's Tenth Satire:

 

“Let Observation with extensive View,    

Survey Mankind, from China to Peru . . .”

 

Why Peru? Johnson recognized a perfect rhyme (and iamb) when he heard one. Coupled with China, the South American country suggests universality spanning the globe. His theme is the vanity of all humans, not the English alone. In a less well-known poem, “Song,” Johnson writes to similar effect:

 

“Not all the gems on India’s shore,

Not all Peru’s unbounded store,

Not all the power, nor all the fame,

That heroes, kings, or poets claim;

Nor knowledge which the learn’d approve,

To form one wish my soul can move.”

 

Europeans first reached what is now Peru around 1524. Within a decade they had conquered the Incan Empire. To eighteenth-century English readers, Peru would have suggested exotic remoteness somewhere across the ocean, a place inhabited by the descendants of Indians and Spaniards. It remains a far-away place even to me, a country I have never visited and know best from the novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, though my wife was born in Lima and my youngest son is posted there with the Peace Corps. I’m more familiar with the birthplace of Cole Porter in Indiana, which is pronounced PEE-roo, with the stress on the first syllable, making it a trochee.

Herbert Morris titled his second poetry collection Peru (1983), though it contains no poem with that as a title. Rather, here are the eleventh and twelfth of sixteen six-line stanzas in “How to Improve Your Personality”:

 

“. . . speak of the tours conducted through the mind

 of those who wait, of those who cannot wait

 because they do not know what they should wait for,

 of those who will not see Peru again,

 though one need not yet quite define Peru,

 say what it may be to be late, too late

 

“come, at last, to the strangeness closing in,

whether it be darkness or education,

embark on longing as though it were music,

implying what can only be implied,

the matter of the air burdened with roses,

the grammar of the wrist, the ankle’s syntax.”

 

Morris is difficult to quote without losing the larger meaning. He writes dramatic monologues in blank verse. His first six stanzas are one long sentence. The poem deals with a suburban American family with three daughters. I won’t try to paraphrase it, though it’s clear that Morris’ Peru is less a country than a concept, a metaphysical will-o’-the-wisp, forever lost.

'Away Melancholy'

We heard a thump on the front window and found a female ruby-throated hummingbird on the ground. She appeared to be alive, merely stunned by her collision with the glass. Her wings and distended tongue twitched. I placed her in the palm of my hand and took her picture.

 

She weighed about four grams, less than one ounce. The iridescence of her feathers was almost gaudy, like a Mardi Gras costume. We are seldom able to observe a hummingbird closely for more than fractions of a second, except in photos. The moment seemed privileged. After half a minute or so she lifted from my hand, wings beating at least fifty times per second, and flew to the shingles on the roof. Momentarily she rested, then disappeared.

 

Flights of Enchantment: That’s how Nigel Andrew subtitles his wonderful recent book The Butterfly and that’s how briefly holding a hummingbird left me feeling – enchanted, while admiring her as an engineering feat. Close contact with a creature so remarkable is already good fortune. My youngest son is with the Peace Corps in Peru. He told his host parents, a middle-aged couple in suburban Lima, about my encounter. They were happy for me. In their country, according to folklore, holding a hummingbird bestows good luck, a belief traced to the Incas. Nige writes:

 

“Perception is a creative act. Being inescapably human, we cannot help but project human meaning and significance onto what we see, to interpret it into something we can assimilate. We are not passive receivers of data but, rather, transformers, actively making sense—or sometimes nonsense—of what we are perceiving. We seek out shape, pattern, meaning, we want to fit whatever is there into our human world; what other world can we truly know? This leaves all nature wide open to our interpretation and our humanizing, assimilating impulse.”

 

My close encounter with the ruby-throat left me feeling lighter, more buoyant for the remainder of the day. Stevie Smith would have understood:

 

“Are not the trees green,

The earth as green?

Does not the wind blow,

Fire leap and the rivers flow? 

Away melancholy.”

 

Smith was born on this date, September 20, in 1902 and died in 1971 at age sixty-eight.

'The Occasions When We Are Set Free'

In his essay “Work and Play,” Michael Oakeshott offers a careful definition of the latter diversion: 

“[A] game appears as a ‘free’ activity. It may have rules of its own, and it may be played with energy and require effort, but it is emancipated from the seriousness, the purposefulness, and the alleged ‘importance’ of ‘work’ and the satisfaction of wants.”

 

Children, of course, play in this sense naturally and unself-consciously. You sometimes hear play described by grownups as “children’s work,” though I’m not sure I buy that. It sounds like an adult’s retroactive attempt to make play pay off with a defined reward. One mustn’t be frivolous. A kid who thought that way, who actually had a goal when deciding to play, would likely be a boring child.

 

No one familiar with the life and work of Dr. Johnson would accuse him of frivolousness. In 1764, at the age of fifty-four, he accepted an invitation from Bennet Langton to visit his family home in Lincolnshire. Langton, with Johnson, was among the founding members of The Club, the London dining and social organization whose other members included Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith and Joshua Reynolds. In his biography of Johnson, W. Jackson Bate sets the scene:

 

“For whatever reason, Langton never told it to Boswell, though he passed on so much other information to him. Perhaps he simply thought Boswell would not have understood it. But he always remembered it, and as an elderly man told the story to a friend of his son when they were out walking and came to the top of a very steep hill. Back in 1764 Johnson and the Langtons had also walked to the top of this hill, and Johnson, delighted by its steepness, said he wanted to ‘take a roll down.’ They tried to stop him. But he said he ‘had not had a roll for a long time,’ and taking out of his pockets his keys, a pencil, a purse, and other objects, lay down parallel at the edge of the hill, and rolled down its full length, ‘turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom.’”

 

Those who pigeonhole Johnson as a Tory stick-in-the-mud have little sense of the whole man. He contained multitudes. Among writers, who might have joined him and taken “a roll down?” Charles Lamb, perhaps. Max Beerbohm? Even Thoreau might have had a go. I was a dedicated hill-roller as a kid even after I was stung by a bee in a hillside patch of clover. Oakeshott writes:

 

“‘Play,’ in short, stands for something that is neither ‘work’ nor ‘rest.’ It is an activity, but not an activity that seeks the satisfaction of wants. For this reason, Aristotle called it ‘non-laborious activity’—activity that nevertheless is not ‘work.’ It is a ‘leisure’ activity, not only because it belongs to the occasions when we are set free (or set ourselves free) from ‘work,’ but because it is performed in a ‘leisurely’ manner. A ‘leisurely’ manner does not mean merely ‘slowly’; it means, ‘without the anxieties and absence of cessation that belong to the satisfaction of wants.’”

 

Which, of course, recalls the spectacle of adults working hard at play.

 

[“Work and Play” was written by Oakeshott around 1960, published in First Things in 1995 and collected in What Is History? and Other Essays (Imprint Academic, 2004). Time to reread Joseph Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948).]

'We Must Have Within Us That Spirit of Quiet'

“I am afraid my subject is rather an exciting one; and as I don’t like excitement I shall approach it in a gentle, timid, round-about way. I am all for a quiet life. That is a deplorable confession, I suppose.” 

Some of us thrive on adrenaline, the rush of current events, melodramatic entanglements and a Wagnerian soundtrack. Others by nature are spectators, content to watch and listen and let others carry on as they wish. I rank myself among the latter. When young, I would have found such an identification shameful. Life is meant to be swashbuckling. One embodies a “can-do,” “change-the-world” spirit. A life spent pondering is not worth enduring. These are a young man’s delusions.

 

The tone of muted irony in the passage quoted above is the give-away. Max Beerbohm was constitutionally incapable of being strident. The words are drawn from his September 18, 1942, broadcast on the BBC, “Advertisements,” collected in Mainly on the Air (1946; rev. 1957). The worst of the Blitz in London was over and the V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks would come in the future. Having returned to England from Italy at the start of the war, Beerbohm broadcast talks and readings on the BBC. After Churchill, this neo-Victorian was the nation’s most popular broadcaster, with millions of listeners.  Of his radio talks Rebecca West wrote: “I felt that I was listening to the voice of the last civilized man on earth. Max’s broadcasts justify the entire invention of broadcasting.”

 

The sensibility described by Beerbohm is today dismissed as apathy, an indifference to the world. Rather, it suggests an acceptance of one’s limitations. What can one realistically accomplish? Little beyond our tiny concentric world. Many of our troubles today are encapsulated in a single word: “activist,” and not only in the political sense. Useful synonyms include “busybody” and “scold.” The best we can hope for is a revision in our own behavior, a little more kindness and tolerance. Writers work best when they accept their limits and leave the world-changing to others. Michael Oakeshott wrote in a 1922 notebook: “To produce great literature we must have within us that spirit of quiet, that ‘central peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.’" Oakeshott quotes Wordsworth's “The Excursion.”

 

In his biography of Beerbohm, N. John Hall writes of the essayist/broadcaster: “His tone is fatherly, or rather grandfatherly; he champions the good old days. Occasionally he can sound a bit of a crank, an old man lamenting change and new machinery. But even when he is complaining, his mood is soft, modest; and so he gets away with it.”

 

[The Oakeshott passage is taken from Notebooks, 1922-86 (Imprint Academic, 2014).]

'With You in Shame or Fame They Dwell'

Among the more conventionally rousing poems Herman Melville collected in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) is “The Victor of Antietam,” a celebration of Union Gen. George B. McClellan. Here is the seventh of its eight stanzas: 

“Your medalled soldiers love you well,

        McClellan:

Name your name, their true hearts swell;

With you they shook dread Stonewall’s spell,

With you they braved the blended yell

Of rebel and maligner fell;

With you in shame or fame they dwell,

        McClellan:

Antietam-braves a brave can tell.”

 

President Lincoln was less enthusiastic. He issued his Emancipation Proclamation five days after the Battle of Antietam, fought in Maryland on September 17, 1862, and six weeks later removed McClellan, an emancipation opponent, from his command. McClellan’s forces had halted Gen. Robert E. Lee’s first attempted incursion into the North at a horrifying cost. Antietam remains the single bloodiest day in American military history. More than 23,000 men were killed, wounded or went missing. All of the dead, Union and Confederate, were Americans. Only in death is there reconciliation. Melville fervently supported the Union cause, but melancholy permeates his Civil War poems.

 

In March 1986 I was driving from Washington, D.C., where I had visited a friend, to my home in upstate New York, when I decided to visit the battlefield at Antietam. It was late afternoon, the sun was already setting, and my car was the only one parked in the visitors’ lot. The only other person present was a park ranger in uniform, complete with campaign hat. I explained my interest and he offered to take me on an abbreviated tour of the battlefield, including the “Bloody Angle” or "Bloody Lane," a sunken road where four hours of intense combat resulted in 5,600 casualties. The ranger’s commentary was conversational, not canned or academic. He knew the history and explained it to me clearly. The ranger was black.

 

Visitors often note the quiet of battlefields, what Allen C. Guelzo in Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), calls “the silent witness of places like Gettysburg,” whether Omaha Beach or Antietam. Chatter seems indecent but conscious memory remains a sacred obligation. The ranger’s tone was respectful.

 

I inherited my copy of Battle-Pieces from my late friend Helen Pinkerton (1927-2017), the poet and scholar of Melville and the Civil War. Here’s something Helen, author of Melville’s Confidence Men and American Politics in the 1850s (Archon Books, 1987) and Crimson Confederates: Harvard Men Who Fought for the South (University of Tennessee Press, 2009), wrote to me in an email in 2011:

 

“Melville’s mind I found almost endlessly fascinating, and reading about the period made it even more so. Today, we think we have political problems. We should try dealing with an issue of the magnitude of slavery. Melville grew intellectually enormously in pondering the problem. He also grew into a philosophical pessimist about human nature and a political conservative, which the current PC Melvillians refuse to recognize.”

 

By coincidence, today is Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, in observance of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention signing the document in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution were ratified in the wake of the Civil War.              

 

[Among the wounded at Antietam was Sgt. Oliver Hardy, who enlisted at age nineteen in the 16th Georgia Infantry and took part in sixteen engagements. His son, also named Oliver Hardy, was born in 1892 and in 1927 would team up with Stan Laurel.]

'He Never Reached the Equanimity of Age'

A useful way to categorize writers is the degree to which they write like and for adolescents, as not fully mature adults. I’m extrapolating from an exchange of comments and emails I had last week with Rabbi David Wolpe. I had written something disparaging about Dylan Thomas and his well-known villanelle. The rabbi replied: “To be fair to Thomas[,] raging was the attitude of a young man and since he never lived to be an old one, having drunk himself early into the grave, he never reached the equanimity of age.” 

All true, though I told him he was more forgiving than I and sent him a link to Catherine Davis’ villanelle “After a Time,” which may be her response to Thomas’ poem. The rabbi admired Davis' poem and added:

 

“I feel like there is a whole category of fundamentally adolescent writers -- Vonnegut, Salinger, certainly Kerouac, Thomas, (a little bit [Milan] Kundera though above those) but Thomas does have the excuse of never seeing full adulthood.”

 

This instantly made sense and helped me understand the enduring appeal of certain writers whose reputations and popularity exceed their accomplishments. Vonnegut always seemed to be a “YA” writer – a slight, shallow, occasionally amusing storyteller, never outgrowing the demands of his chosen genre, science fiction. I do enjoy the film version of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, a comedy with pretensions to being an “antiwar manifesto.” It’s no surprise that Vonnegut came to prominence in the sixties, with the triumphant rise of literature-as-propaganda, neo-romanticism and juvenilia. We might think of him as the anti-George Eliot. Kerouac, like other seriously alcoholic writers, is unreadable. His prose reeks of vodka.

 

One is reminded of the embarrassingly bad and popular Richard Brautigan. American literature seems especially rich in such writers. Other once-revered names sharing at least some of these qualities are Jack London, Carl Sandburg, Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway (apart from the brilliance of his early short stories), Charles Bukowski, Joseph Heller, John Steinbeck. Alcoholism may have a role in their willful immaturity. It takes American writers a long time to grow up, and some never succeed.

'A Careful Reading of the Present Volume'

In a file cabinet is a stack of old pocket-size address books, most of them dating from my years as a newspaper reporter. When I would go to work for another paper, usually in a new city, I would buy a new book and start accumulating new names, addresses and telephone numbers. Now they read like collections of obituaries. Many of my former contacts, personal and professional, are dead. In one of the address books I find the contact information for the novelist Williamu Gaddis (d. 1998), whom I met and interviewed several times. Here is the home number of the late George Smith (d. 2014), mayor in the early eighties of Bellevue, Ohio, and a notably nice guy. Arousing fewer pleasant memories are the phone numbers of several former girlfriends. 

“The plot, in spite of whatever virtues may accrue to it from the acid delineation of the characters and the vivid action pictures, is the weakest part of the work. It lacks coherence. It lacks stability.”

 

That’s how a literary critic might evaluate my moribund address books, as if they were some postmodern mutation of the novel. It’s how Robert Benchley reviewed the New York City telephone directory in “The Most Popular Book of the Month” (Of All Things, 1921). Benchley plays it straight, with hardly an exaggeration:

 

“There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not. Both classes are extremely unpleasant to meet socially, leaving practically no one in the world whom one cares very much to know. This feeling is made poignant, to the point of becoming an obsession, by a careful reading of the present volume.”

 

Benchley was one of the first “grownup” writers I read, in such collections as Chips Off the Old Benchley (1949). Then I preferred him to such fellow New Yorker colleagues as Thurber, Perelman and Parker. In another piece from Of All Things, “The Scientific Scenario,” Benchley purports to find movies too “low-brow.” His solution:

 

“I would suggest as a book, from which a pretty little scenario might be made, ‘The Education of Henry Adams.’ This volume has had a remarkable success during the past year among the highly educated classes. Public library records show that more people have lied about having read it than any other book in a decade. It contains five hundred pages of mental masochism, in which the author tortures himself for not getting anywhere in his brain processes. He just simply can’t seem to get any further than the evolution of an elementary Dynamic Theory of History or a dilettante dabbling with a Law of Acceleration. And he came of a bright family, too.”

Of course, Benchley himself appeared in the movies, most memorably in “The Treasurer’s Report” (1928).

Benchley was born on this day, September 15, in 1889, and died in 1945 at age fifty-six.