'May the Days Be Worthy of Your Wonder'

The young couple across the cul-de-sac from us have just had their third child, a son this time. The neighborhood has always been rich in children. When we moved in fourteen years ago, sixteen kids lived here in the street’s nine houses. Twelve of them were boys. Now there are seventeen kids, even with our three sons living in Maryland, Peru and Westchester County. None of the current crop appears to be a delinquent. They’re noisy, of course, and forever riding bicycles and scooters. One kid even has an e-bike. I had forgotten that children always run if they have a choice in the matter, and yelling is the language they speak. 

We hear the fertility rate in the United States – the number of children born to women of childbearing years – reached a record low in 2024 and dropped even lower last year. I don’t claim to understand the economics or sociology of this trend. It just seems sad. Children are difficult and exhausting but they make everything worthwhile. When you have a child, you’re forced to relinquish your fiercely held self-centeredness and live for another being. You have something you would gladly give up your own life to keep safe.

 

Yvor Winters and his wife, the poet/novelist Janet Lewis, had a son and a daughter. Winters concludes his poem “A Prayer for My Son” with these lines:

 

“Eternal Spirit, you

Who guided Socrates,

Pity this small and new

Bright soul on hands and knees.”

 

Daniel Mark Epstein published another blessing poem, “Caesarean,” in the Winter 1998 issue of The American Scholar. Note the final three lines:

 

“Startled from ancient sleep in a dark house

By crashing walls, harsh torches, strangers

Dragging him naked through his mother's blood,

No hero would stand up to the invaders

With such intrinsic dignity as you showed

This morning, the first day of your life.

At the shock of air you cried out loud

In sight of a new world and a world lost.

Then you were quiet, curious, engrossed,

Blue eyes half-open bearing a ripple of light

From that primordial ocean cast asunder.

May your vision never weary of the sight

Of this strange country and our stranger ways;

And may the days be worthy of your wonder.” 

'Mere Gall Is No Better Than Mere Sugar'

“The attendants at literary tea-parties are not, as a rule, readers of books. Reviews of books are more to their taste.”

In my younger years I was an occasional attendee at such gatherings, though most were less tea-parties than beer-and-a-bump soirées. Sometimes a writer was present. I remember Jerzy Kosinski and Anthony Burgess out-drinking everyone and remaining at least technically conscious. But Max Beerbohm identifies the essential quality of such shindigs: book chat, ass-kissing, and more talk of publishers, agents and critics than of actual books. I outgrew my taste for literary stargazing pretty quickly.

Beerbohm is reviewing Maxim Gorki’s play “The Lower Depths” in the December 5, 1903 issue of the Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art. Russian literature was in vogue at this time in English society. Constance Garnett was translating Tolstoy, Goncharov, Turgenev and Chekhov, among others. Before taking on the Gorki production, Beerbohm indicts the fashionable crowd:

“Last week I wrote harshly about the English people’s contempt for the things of the mind. But I think I prefer that stolid contempt to the gushing superficial curiosity evinced in certain little private circles. The attitude which may be called ‘the literary tea-party attitude’ seems to me of all attitudes the most dreadful.”

Beerbohm’s experience is true to my own. He recalls “those brief and frantic little conversations into which the guests at literary tea-parties plunge as though they had something worth saying and as though there were something worth hearing” I remember. The rage du jour was Gorki. When young I read his strident stories and plays and remember mercifully little about them. So it is with Beerbohm and his demolition of “The Lower Depths”:

“There must be some kind of artistic unity—unity either of story or of idea. There must be a story, though it need not be stuck to like grim death; or there must be, with similar reservation, an idea. Gorki has neither asset. . . . Enough that he gives us, honestly and fearlessly, ‘a slice of life’? Enough, certainly, if he did anything of the kind. But he doesn’t. ‘The Lower Depths’ is no ‘slice.’ It is chunks, hunks, shreds and gobbets, clawed off anyhow, chucked at us anyhow.”

Beerbohm’s indictment remains pertinent, for ours is an age in which propaganda often supplants the artistically rendered in any form. He dismisses the imitative fallacy:

“We are not at all squeamish. But we demand of the playwright who deals with ugly things, just as we demand of the playwright who deals with pretty things, something more than the sight of his subject-matter. Mere gall is no better than mere sugar. It is worse. Mere sugar is not disgusting. Nor is gall disgusting if it be rightly prepared. In other words, horrible subject-matter ceases to be horrible when it is treated by a fine artist.”

I think first of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Gorky later became one of Stalin’s toadies. In a note to his edition of The Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973) Simon Karlinsky writes:

“Gorky’s anti-intellectualism became more pronounced in subsequent years. One of its ugliest manifestations is described in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, in which we find Gorky using his august position in the post-revolutionary literary life to deprive the freezing and starved poet Osip Mandelstam of the pair of trousers he needed to survive through the winter. ‘The trousers themselves were a small matter,’ wrote Mandelstam’s widow, ‘but they spoke eloquently of Gorky’s hostility to a literary trend that was foreign to him.'”

Elsewhere in Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam reports that when informed of the poet Nikolay Gumilyov’s pending execution in 1921, Gorky did nothing. With Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilyov was founder of the poetic movement called Acmeism. In 1932, Gorky was decorated with the Order of Lenin, as were, later, Fidel Castro, Erich Honecker, Enver Hoxha, Josip Broz Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Nelson Mandela, Nikita Khrushchev and Stalin.

'A Plaything Lent Me for the Present'

A pleasing and serendipitous convergence: I was listening again to the Sinatra/Jobim recordings from 1967, including their arrangement of “Baubles, Bangles, & Beads,” from Kismet. I always associate “baubles” with Alexander Pope, especially “The Rape of the Lock.” Later I was reading William Cowper’s “Yardley Oak,” one of the great tree poems in English, and encountered these lines: 

“Thou wast a bauble once, a cup and ball

Which babes might play with; and the thievish jay,

Seeking her food, with ease might have purloin’d

The auburn nut that held thee, swallowing down

Thy yet close-folded latitude of boughs

And all thine embryo vastness at a gulp.”

 

That’s Cowper addressing an acorn. (See “Acorn, Yom Kippur” by Howard Nemerov.) Looking further I found a letter Cowper wrote to his friend the Rev. John Newton on May 3, 1780. Cowper expresses gratitude with a cascade of metaphors. He has entered one of his manic phases:

 

“I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and viewed without a reference to their author, what is the earth—what are the planets—what is the sun itself but a bauble? Better for a man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be able to say, ‘The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!’ Their eyes have never been opened to see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they are closed for ever. They think a fine estate, a large conservatory, a hothouse rich as a West Indian garden, things of consequence; visit them with pleasure, and muse upon them with ten times more.”

 

The OED define bauble as “a small ornament, piece of jewellery, decorative accessory, etc., that is showy or attractive but typically inexpensive or of little value; a trinket, a knick-knack.” In other words, a showy trifle or geegaw, a shiny tchotchke that might attract a magpie or a child. Cowper continues:

 

"I am pleased with a frame of four lights, doubtful whether the few pines it contains will ever be worth a farthing; amuse myself with a greenhouse which Lord Bute’s gardener could take upon his back, and walk away with; and when I have paid it the accustomed visit, and watered it, and given it air, I say to myself: ‘This is not mine, it is a plaything lent me for the present; I must leave it soon.’”

 

A bauble for Cowper is a pretext for a sermon on humility.

'They Don’t Have Sense Enough to See Our Flaws'

He was friendly, the sort of guy who welcomed strangers of almost any species. Though a little slow, mentally speaking, he usually got our jokes. His instinctive reaction to you was something like: “Hi! Would you like a cup of coffee?” He was trusting and affectionate. We tried to learn something from his temperament. 

Luke was roughly fifteen when he died on Monday. We had him for thirteen years. A friend had rescued him and already had another dog so she offered him to us. He had already been named "Luke" so I thought of him as Luke the Drifter, one of Hank Williams’ recording pseudonyms.

                                                                     

I was not a dog person but Luke converted me, especially because he got along so well with our cats. What always irritated me about dogs was their eagerness to please, a quality I confused with sycophancy. Cats are independent. They don’t give a shit, which makes sense to me. They’re less likely to be disappointed. As R.S. Gwynn puts it in the final words of his villanelle “Why They Love Us” (No Word of Farewell: Selected Poems 1970–2000, 2001):

“They don’t have sense enough to see our flaws.

Thank god for that. A big round of applause

 

“For what can sniff your ass and still love you.

Dogs love us uncomplainingly because

They don’t have sense enough to see our flaws.”

'Having Such an Enjoyable Time All the Time'

I keep happening on books and poems I think my late brother might have enjoyed. Ken was not a dedicated reader but his tastes tended to be fierce and impulsive. He once sent an overheated email urging me to read this new writer he had discovered. This guy was good and funny and seemed to have few illusions, and that was how my brother fancied himself: Samuel Beckett. The book was How It Is (1961; trans. 1964), which I had first read around 1974. I would never have told him that. I was always pleased when he found, on his own, a book that excited him. 

He read a lot of art history, with for many years a tight focus on Albrecht Dürer, his favorite painter. We both loved Alec Wilder’s American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950 (1972). I remember him reading a biography of Paul Robeson. One of the few poets I know he read closely was Zbigniew Herbert, whom he considered a humorist. He once told me he had been reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson for the first time, at age fifty-four, and said, “There’s this nice edition, and you talk about it a lot and so do some of the people on your blog, so I thought it was just time to read it.” Ken was partial to The Facts on File Visual Dictionary (1986) and reference books in general. The last book I’m certain he read or at least looked at was one his son brought to him in the hospital: Cleveland Calamities, a history of disasters in our native city.

 

I wish I had suggested Ken read Stevie Smith. He would have “got” Smith, I think, as many do not. The humor, especially about death, coupled with her drawings, would have amused him. Of course, everyone loves “Not Waving but Drowning” (1957) but Ken would have appreciated “The Death Sentence” from Harold’s Leap (1950):

"Cold as No Plea,

 Yet wild with all negation,

 Weeping I come

 To my heart's destination,

 To my last bed

 Between th’ unhallowed boards –

The Law allows it

 And the Court awards.”

 

In “What Poems Are Made Of,” an essay collected in Me Again: Uncollected Writings (1982), Smith writes: “Why are so many of my poems about death, if I am having such an enjoyable time all the time?"

'I Can Taste the Language'

The Scottish Poetry Library in 2006 asked American poet August Kleinzahler to name some of his “old favourite” books. This is how he replied: “Old favorites, gee . . . Moby-Dick, Isaac Babel’s stories. I could go on. I seem to respond to closely written texts, sentence by sentence, where I can taste the language, experience the musculature of the syntax.” 

Nicely put. How telling that a poet’s first choices are prose writers, though not, fortunately, writers of “poetic prose” from the tribe of Thomas Wolfe. I share Kleinzahler’s taste, though not exclusively. In the wrong hands, “closely written texts” can turn into purple prose or high-compression avant-garde inertia, with words so dense they emit no light, like a black hole. My preference is always for language that is rhythmically organized, balancing the explicit with the denotative, unafraid to share some of its music – formal beauty tempered by a commonsensical regard for the reader. Good prose is such a pleasure.

 

In the September 7, 1935, issue of The Saturday Review of Literature, Walter de la Mare published “The Art That Nature Makes,” in which he writes:

 

“Words are not merely fixed symbols with an absolute meaning and innumerable personal connotations; they consist also of sounds; and of sounds made by the most complex and direct of all instruments—the human voice. Which of the two is the more natural, speech or singing, I cannot say; but the one can be of at least as delicate, supple, and mutable a melody and charm as the other.”

 

I would argue that the same applies to prose. Most of us, of course, read prose silently. I propose an experiment: try reading a favorite writer aloud, fiction and nonfiction, Nabokov and an essay by Hazlitt. Pay attention to the flow and the logic. Do they stumble? Do they commit what jazz musicians call a “clam,” a wrong note? Read with someone else present and watch their reaction. De la mare writes:

 

“Needless to say we may value poetry [and prose] more for its ideas, its philosophy, its message, its edification than for the delight which the mere music of its language may bestow. But that music absent, poetry, in the generally accepted meaning of the word, is absent, whatever else may remain. Like all immediate appeals to our senses, mind, and being, it is a secret language, but one with scores of dialects.”

'Untrue For Ever'

Valentine’s Day invites declarations of love and their opposite. As Dylan, the reliable author of anti-love songs puts it, “You've got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend.” Some find the day’s institutional sentiments insufferable, or at least worthy of mockery. Charles Lamb, that lifelong bachelor, writes in "Valentine’s Day”: 

“[T]his is the day on which those charming little missives, ycleped Valentines, cross and intercross each other at every street and turning. The weary and all for-spent twopenny postman sinks beneath a load of delicate embarrassments, not his own.”

Questioning the heart as the seat of love, Lamb writes: “[W]e might easily imagine, upon some other system which might have prevailed for any thing which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, ‘Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal;’ or pputting a delicate question, ‘Amanda, have you a midriff to bestow?’”

Lamb was an unrequited admirer of the actress and singer Frances “Fanny” Kelly. He even wrote her a sonnet, “To Miss Kelly.” Having seen her the night before on stage, Lamb writes to her on July 20, 1819, saying her performance “has given rise to a train of thinking, which I cannot suppress”:

 

“Would to God you were released from this way of life; that you could bring your mind to consent to take your lot with us, and throw off for ever the whole burden of your Profession. I neither expect or wish you to take notice of this which I am writing, in your present over occupied & hurried state.—But to think of it at your leisure. I have quite income enough, if that were all, to justify for me making such a proposal, with what I may call even a handsome provision for my survivor.”

 

Lamb approaches “stalker” status. Has anyone ever proposed marriage so obliquely? And is he asking Kelly to marry “us” – that is, Lamb and his matricidal sister Mary? And what happened to his sense of comedy? It gets worse: “I am not so foolish as not to know that I am a most unworthy match for such a one as you, but you have for years been a principal object in my mind. In many a sweet assumed character I have learned to love you, but simply as F. M. Kelly I love you betterm than them all.” Our eloquent Elia – he would soon write his first essay under that pseudonym – is tongue-tied.

 

Reading this letter, I’m embarrassed for Lamb but sympathetic. Anyone who has been romantically rebuffed can’t help but feel for the guy. At the time, he was forty-three and Kelly was twenty-eight. As insurance, he writes: “It is impossible I should feel injured or aggrieved by your telling me at once, that the proposal does not suit you.” Kelly’s reply, a masterpiece of tact and diplomacy written the same day, is a single sentence:  

 “An early & deeply rooted attachment has fixed my heart on one from whom no worldly prospect can well induce me to withdraw it but while I thus frankly & decidedly decline your proposal, believe me, I am not insensible to the high honour which the preference of such a mind as yours confers upon me—let me, however, hope that all thought upon this subject will end with this letter, & that you will henceforth encourage no other sentiment towards me than esteem in my private character and a continuance of that approbation of my humble talents which you have already expressed so much & so often to my advantage and gratification.”

 

Kelly signs off as “Your obliged friend.” Within hours, Lamb replies to her reply, having regained some of his sense of humor:   

 

“Your injunctions shall be obeyed to a tittle. I feel myself in a lackadaisacal no-how-ish kind of a humour. I believe it is the rain, or something. I had thought to have written seriously, but I fancy I succeed best in epistles of mere fun; puns & that nonsense.”

 

Lamb died unmarried and perhaps celibate in 1834. Mary, who also never married, outlived him by thirteen years. Kelly died unmarried in 1882 at the age of ninety-two. My favorite anti-love poem was published by A.E. Housman, another bachelor, in More Poems (1936):

 

“Stone, steel, dominions pass,

  Faith, too, no wonder;

So leave alone the grass

  That I am under.

 

“All knots that lovers tie

  Are tied to sever;

Here shall your sweetheart lie,

  Untrue for ever.”