'The Oxford Book of Depressing Verse'

“Some day I shall compile an Oxford Book of Depressing Verse, which shall contain nothing but the most magnificent expressions of melancholy and despair.” 

I’ve never spent much time reading Aldous Huxley – Brave New World in junior-high school, Crome Yellow a little later, then, inevitably, The Doors of Perception, when it was a cult book for many of my generation. I remember almost nothing about any of them and recall his fiction as idea-driven, often a giveaway for a stillborn story. In On the Ivory Stages (Mirbeau, 2024), Theodore Dalrymple says of The Olive Tree and Other Essays (1936): “Huxley was a wonderful essayist: amusing, erudite and opinionated (who wants to read an essayist who is always fair and judicious?).”

 

Thanks to Dalrymple, I’ve been reading Huxley’s first collection, On the Margin: Notes and Essays (1923), and may re-evaluate at least a portion of his body of work. I had never suspected Huxley of having a sense of humor. The passage above is from the essay “How the Days Draw In!”:

 

“Of late I have found myself almost incapable of enjoying any poetry whose inspiration is not despair or melancholy. Why, I hardly know. Perhaps it is due to the chronic horror of the political situation. For heaven knows, that is quite sufficient to account for a taste for melancholy verse. The subject of any European government to-day feels all the sensations of Gulliver in the paws of the Queen of Brobdingnag’s monkey—the sensations of some small and helpless being at the mercy of something monstrous and irresponsible and idiotic.”

 

Amusing and timely. Even better, he plans to include in his anthology one of my favorite poets, championed by Yvor Winters and Thom Gunn: “A duly adequate amount of space, for example, will be allotted to that all but great poet, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke [1554-1628]. For dark magnificence there are not many things that can rival that summing up against life and human destiny at the end of his ‘Mustapha’:

 

“Oh, 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,

Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?

 

“Is it the mark or majesty of power

To make offences that it may forgive?

Nature herself doth her own self deflower

To hate those errors she herself doth give....

If nature did not take delight in blood,

She would have made more easy ways to good.”

 

Huxley adds: “Milton aimed at justifying the ways of God to man; Fulke Greville gloomily denounces them.” He then quotes an excerpt from Greville’s Alaham: A Tragedy. The next candidate for inclusion in Huxley’s anthology is a seventeenth-century Frenchman unknown to me, Jean Ogier de Gombauld, followed by these familiar lines:

 

“The flesh is bruckle, the fiend is slee:

Timor mortis conturbat me:—”

 

The Latin, “fear of death disturbs me,” is probably best known from “Lament for the Makers” by the Scottish poet William Dunbar (c. 1460-c. 1530).

'You Want to Be Immortal? Disappear.'

What has disappeared? Ambrose Bierce, Weldon Kees, Jimmy Hoffa. Aristotle’s second book of Poetics, three-decker novels, rhupunts. Typewriters, payphones, civility. In his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940; trans. James E. Irby, 1961), Jorge Luis Borges describes a fanciful world of radically subjective idealism, as premised by Bishop Berkeley. “Things become duplicated in Tlön,” he writes; “they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death.” The Louisiana poet Gail White in “The Fascination of What Disappears” examines our preoccupation with the vanished: 

“There must be something in us that accounts

for this endless fascination with Amelia

Earhart, the Titanic, or George Mallory                                                         

on Everest. Perhaps we still believe

that we might find out more about what happened:

islanders on a solitary shelf

of land, brought up on stories of a woman

who fell from the sky in a silver bird, became

their queen (or else perhaps was eaten,

but they saved the shoes). We dream of finding one

more cache of jewelry from the Titanic,

or Mallory’s frozen corpse, long overlooked.

Why write a hundred sonnets every year?

You want to be immortal? Disappear.”

 

There’s a poignance built into disappearance. Perhaps at several removes it reminds us of our mortality.

'It Shows Unmistakably What You Are'

Too often style is judged filigree applied after the house is built. It’s cosmetic, inessential to the building’s structural integrity. Can a poor or indifferent stylist be judged a good or great writer? An obvious test-case is Theodore Dreiser. His Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy are powerful stories clumsily told. I can’t imagine rereading either novel but scenes stick with me after decades, which can’t be said about hundreds of other novels I’ve read. 

“Not to detect a man’s style,” Michael Oakeshott writes, “is to have missed three-quarters of his actions and utterances; and not to have acquired a style is to have shut oneself off from the ability to convey any but the crudest meanings.”

 

I’m reminded of journalists I’ve known, and many pulp writers, for whom words seem like an annoyance. They have to be arranged in some sort of order, but what an impertinence. A reader is almost tempted to judge the morals of so crude a writer. It feels like a defect of character.

 

Then there’s the writer who is all style, without discernable substance. One thinks of William H. Gass. The Anglo-Russian novelist William Gerhardie writes in Memoirs of a Polyglot (1931): “A writer’s style is the measure of his personality, and cannot be acquired consciously. It shows unmistakably what you are: gives you away for what you are.” Some stylists – Jonathan Swift comes to mind -- can be recognized from a single sentence in a blindfold test.  

 

[The Oakeshott passage comes from “Learning and Teaching” (The Voice of Liberal Learning, 1989).]

'All He'd Read and Learned'

Eccentricity in books is a tricky quality. It can be charming and inspire lifelong devotion. Take Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, a book I discovered in my freshman year. I redundantly keep three copies on the shelves nearest my desk. Tristram Shandy is another endlessly readable eccentricity. Among the less successful are Ronald Firbank’s novels, which I have tried hard to love for many years but always find tedious. Daniel Mark Epstein has written a poem, "A Dream," about acquiring a copy of the most eccentric and readable work of literary – not criticism, not scholarship, perhaps love letter – I know, Ford Madox Ford’s The March of Literature (1938): 

“Someone learned of my collector’s interest

In the finer points of this autographed edition,

The March of Literature: From Confucius’

Day to Our Own. I read it first at twenty-one,

Then passed it on to one friend, then another,

Several copies lost and found in bookstores

Now abandoned to the online trade.

I wanted a clean one with the author’s name

Written in his graceful hand, a book he’d held

As he held the pen that wrote the heavy book

That sums up all he’d read and learned

In a lifelong lover’s quarrel with literature,

As much as any man could ever know

In one life of four thousand years of books

In ten languages, works he knew by heart.”

 

I read it at nineteen or twenty after reading for the first time The Good Soldier for a class.  In his introduction to The March of Literature, Ford describes himself as “an old man mad about writing,” and the book as “an attempt to induce a larger and always larger number of my fellows to taste the pleasure that comes from always more and more reading.” In a volume of more than eight-hundred pages you expect lapses, omissions and misguided judgments. I find it easy to forgive Ford, for reasons obvious in the sampler that follows:

 

A third of the way through the book, in the middle of a digression on the English border ballads, Ford inserts a three-page digression-within-a-digression based on his Great War experience: “The writer happens to have been present at what you might call a poplar recension of folksong during several weeks in the fall of 1916. His regiment having spent a disproportionate time in the trenches during the First Battle of the Somme, it was given a long fatigue to do at a long distance from the trenches, so that they might at once rest their weary bones and get some exercise.”

 

Here Ford writes of his friend and collaborator Joseph Conrad’s short story “Youth”: “The language is again so low-keyed, so of the vernacular, so just, so fluid that when you read you have again no sense of reading.”

 

Here is Ford’s moving tribute to Dr. Johnson, a man with whom he must have felt substantial literary and personal kinship: “But ten years’ rest and the getting into his head of a conversational rhythm and a vocabulary comprehensible to most of the cultivated men of his day had on Johnson the effect of evolving a style that was at once sufficiently learned to save his face and sufficiently actual to let us read his Lives of the Poets with pleasure even in these anti-Latinistic days. It is a work that, had there been no Boswell, must have been a resounding monument to this great man. As it is, it stands almost forgotten like an Aztec temple lost in South American [sic] undergrowths. It is a great pity.”

 

Ford nicely characterizes the best of eighteenth-century English prose: “In Gibbon we come upon a figure very different in timber from any of the other eighteenth century littérateurs, save only Richardson – and Johnson, if you can persuade yourself to think of him as a writer and not merely as a dancing bear, growling numbers in and out.”

 

Ford suggests we look at works of literature on both the macro and micro scales, comparing the latter to music: “It is to be remembered that a passage of good prose is a work of art absolute in itself and with no more dependence on its contents than is a fugue of Bach, a minuet of Mozart, or the writing for piano of Debussy.” Ford then quotes a passage about storks, of all things, from Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, the paragraph here marked with the number three. Ford writes: “And I am prepared to leave it to the taste of my readers who may decide each for himself whether a passage of flawless prose gains or loses when the subject treated is one of universal interest.”

 

The March of Literature is no dry textbook. It’s inimitably Ford’s work, as eccentrically personal as DNA. It ought to be academic but reads like inspired conversation.

'This Small Piece of Eden'

It was April or early May and the snow was going or gone. A low wall of fieldstones surrounded the cemetery in Schoharie County, N.Y. – one of those artfully assembled walls that last for centuries in the Northeast. Jack Flavin writes of them in his poem “In a Country Cemetery”: 

“The patient art (that conceals art) of the country

mason who built this wall is a silent rebuke

to some of the monuments, the wilde enormities, it contains.

The granite courses are set into the bank

along a slight declivity, and the rings

for chaining and winching the stone from the quarry uproad

by sledge and ox are still set in the tops.”

In the cemetery I visited more than thirty years ago, the epitaphs on the earliest markers had been erased by time and acid rain, and some were tilted by the freeze-buckled earth. The lambs carved on the stones of children were worn headless. The grass, mostly red and white clover, hadn’t yet been mowed and was thick with phlox. Birds sang and the air was fresh. Life felt bountiful in the presence of so many dead. Flavin uses a passage from Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydrotaphia: Urne-Buriall (1658) as the epigraph to his poem: “Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us. A small flame sufficeth.” Flavin concludes:

“At the wall’s end, the road dwindles in perspective

and takes an ess turn to follow the river’s

meandering. Across the road, wild roses,

phlox and cinquefoil are in their June abundance.

My dog sits beside me, tranquil and regardant

on the cool stone, as we listen to the colloquy

of birds, considering this small piece of Eden.”

I seek out cemeteries; in particular, the remote, rural, often untended sort, though a sprawling urban cemetery, vast enough to have neighborhoods and thoroughfares, offers pleasures of another sort. As Theordore Dalrymple wrote in his essay with a title borrowed from Dylan Thomas, “Death Shall Have No Dominon”: “. . . cemeteries are for me like bookshops; I find it difficult to resist the temptation to enter them and linger awhile.”

'The Dead Are Speaking'

On July 30, 1937, the NKVD issued Order No. 00447, signed by Stalin and NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov, which mandated the round-up of “ex-kulaks” and other “anti-Soviet elements,” including former officials of the Tsarist regime and former members of political parties other than the Communist Party. Local police officials competed to exceed the official quotas. This was the formal start of “The Great Terror,” as identified by Robert Conquest. By November 1938, roughly 1.3 million had been arrested, of whom at least 700,000 were executed. The rest were sent to the Gulag. What can be stated with reasonable confidence is that Stalin eventually murdered as many as 60 million people. 

The statistics leave one numb and uncomprehending. The recent vogue for socialism and like-minded tyrannies in the U.S. recalls an observation in the second volume of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974), one of the essential books of the last century: “No one should lightly dismiss our experience, as complacent foreigners do, cherishing the hope that within them—who are so clever and cultured—things will be different.” No human, she reminds us, is immune to the seductions of evil. The Russian poet Lev Ozerov (1914-96) writes in a 1962 poem translated by Robert Chandler:

 

“The dead are speaking. Without full stops.

Or commas. And almost without words.

From camps. From isolation cells.

From buildings as they blaze.

The dead are speaking. A letter. A will.

Diaries. Exercise books from school.

On rough pages of uneven brick—

the cursive of a hurrying hand.

With slivers of tin on a bed-board,

with shards of glass on a wall

or a thin stream of blood on a barrack floor,

life signed off as best it could.”

 

[Ozerov’s poem is collected in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (eds. Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, 2015.]

'The Herb of Memory'

“In time we bow / To the necessity and claim profound / Returns in memory.”

The spice cupboard was a disorganized mess. Looking for tarragon turned into an expedition. I wiped the shelf where seasonings had spilled and what did I smell? Cloves. Then it was 1961 and I was greeting my maternal grandmother at the front door. Her fur coat was cold. With the hug I reached for her purse of black patent leather and she let it slip from her shoulder. I opened it and inside was the usual pack of Cloves gum. I took a stick and gave another to my brother. Neither of us was ever much of a gum-chewer but the ritual had to be observed.

 

This memory of a memory was inspired by Suzanne Doyle’s poem “My Grandmother’s Visit.” Like her, I was fond of my grandmother, a rare gentle spirit in our family. Memory, of course, has a dual nature. How happy I am to see her again so vividly, if briefly, but then she’s gone. My grandmother shared birth and death years with Marianne Moore – 1887-1972 – and resembled her, an old-fashioned American beauty. Reading Moore is another reliable memory-trigger, as in these lines from her poem “Rosemary”:

 

“The herb of memory,

imitating the blue robe of Mary,

is not too legendary

 

“to flower both as symbol and as pungency.”