'His Discreet Irony'

An old friend tells me he’s reading Sir Thomas Browne for the first time – Religio Medici (1643) – and having a wonderful time. If you like your first taste of Browne, you’re likely to stick around for the full banquet. His prose is rich and nutritious. I’m pleased that another writer I admire agrees. Rose Macaulay is best known, if known at all, for her novels but in 1931 she published an excellent little book, Some Religious Elements in English Literature (Hogarth Press). She writes of Browne: 

“This charming doctor, distinguished among writers of the day by not being a clergyman, produced, in the most exquisite and splendid prose of the century, the best and most agreeable confession of the Anglican religion ever, before or since, published.”

 

Browne is not writing a straightforward tract in Religio Medici, so don’t be frightened. He perfected the digression in English. There’s something almost childlike about his sense of curiosity. Everything seems to interest him. As Guy Davenport put it, “Curiosity, I’m convinced, is intelligence.” Macaulay celebrates “the delicate, amused, philosophically ironic mind of the most charming writer of his time.” Here is a passage from Religio Medici, an extended analogy, I found quoted recently in a non-literary, musical context:

 

“[T]here is a musick where ever there is a harmony, order, or proportion: and thus far we may maintain the music of the Sphears; for those well-ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony. Whatsoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony; which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all Church-Musick. For my self, not only for my obedience, but my particular Genius, I do embrace it: for even that vulgar and Tavern-Musick, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the First Composer.”

 

Though Browne was a scientist, according to the learning of his day, no one reads Browne looking for information about astronomy or the biosciences. As Macaulay writes:

 

“Sir Thomas is an odd mixture of the wild beliefs of his age, in astrology, witches, demoniacal possession, and so on (and though as to all these things we can never take him at his face value, for his discreet irony lies sometimes very deeply hid in the suave turn of a phrase, he is by no means playing at witch-belief), and of a sane and advanced modernism as regards, for instance, the nature of dreams, and hell.”

 

In other words, Browne must be judged as a writer, not as a theologian or scientist. He not only loved words, he invented many of them for English speakers. Among the writers most often cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, Browne ranks seventieth. He is cited 775 times for the first usage of words, and not all are obscure or strictly medical or scientific. Browne gave us, among other things: approximate, carnivorous, coma, computer, electricity, exhaustion, generator, gymnastic, hallucination, holocaust, jocularity, literary, locomotion, prairie, precocious, pubescent, therapeutic, suicide, ulterior, ultimate and veterinarian.

'A Future Close Enough to Smell'

One of my favorite contemporary poets is Deborah Warren, who lives in Massachusetts. She’s smart, technically adroit, has a musical ear and a sense of humor – rare qualities among poets today. Some of her poems stick with me, memorability being a prerequisite of first-rate verse. My mind is associative. One thing leads to another, not always for conscious or logical reasons, though sometimes the linkage is obvious, as with her poem “Down-to-Earth”: 

“In the field the coyote yip-yips imminent danger;

the dog in the kitchen rumbles a basso growl;

the field sends back a shrill elastic baying;

the kitchen gives a soprano howl.

 

“These two aren’t discussing climate change,

war, flu, layoffs; in this dialogue

a well-informed coyote’s not relaying

to a pessimistic dog

 

“grounds for worry—national cases of mange,

the mountain lion population swelling,

a cougar-sighting fifteen miles away—

only a future close enough to smell.”

 

I had been thinking, rather absently, about my brief spell of working as a copy editor at the newspaper in Schenectady, N.Y. This meant knocking off at midnight. The newspaper’s office stands on a bluff above the Mohawk River. When I pulled out onto Maxon Road and headed home, pairs of piercing white lights stared at me, from the pavement and among the trees and tall grass at the side of the road. My previous experience with coyotes was confined to Western movies. The lights stood, unmoving, and I always stopped driving to watch. Furtively, without hurry, they disappeared. Usually, I encountered several more down the black road.

 

Though it occurred in a city, a thoroughly urban environment, where Thomas Edison founded the General Electric Co., this experience ranks high in my encounters with the natural world – up there with a monarch butterfly landing on my shoulder and a squirrel who climbed up my arm when I leaned over to offer him a peanut.

'Hope, Indeed, Is Very Fallacious'

Some years ago I was diagnosed with a condition called MGUS (pronounced EM-gus) -- monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance. It’s a symptom-less and in most cases benign disorder, but it can be a precursor to multiple myeloma. It means I see the oncologist once a year, pee in a cup and have six vials of blood drawn. Cancer has consumed a larger portion of my consciousness since it killed my brother two years ago. 

On Thursday, I saw a new doctor, a young woman who worked hard to cheer me up, even though I wasn’t feeling particularly dispirited. In fact, her bubbly approach was annoying but I kept it to myself. Near the end she enthused, like a slightly demented cheerleader, “There’s always hope!” Tell that to my brother.

 

I’m of at least two minds when it comes to hope. On one side, there’s the famous list prepared by the great Soviet writer Varlam Shalamov, “What I Saw and Learned in the Kolyma Camps,” after he survived seventeen years in Stalin’s camps. Here is number eighteen: “I learned why a man lives neither on hope — there are no hopes at all, nor on will — what will?, but only on the instinct of self-preservation, the same as a tree, a rock, an animal.”

 

Similarly, here is a portion of a 1984 interview the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert gave to two of his American translators, John and Bogdana Carpenter, in the wake of Jarugelski’s neo-Stalinist crackdown and the rise of Solidarity:

 

Q: “What is the main reason why you write?”

 

A: “Writing—and in this I disagree with everybody—must teach men soberness: to be awake. [Spoken in English.] To make people sober. It does not mean, not to try. But with a small internal correction. I reject optimism despite all the theologians. Despair is a fruitful feeling. It is a cleanser, from desire, from hope. ‘Hope is the mother of the stupid.’ [This is a Polish proverb.] I don't like hope.”

 

Shalamov and Herbert survived Communism. You could say their experiences were too extreme, not typical of humanity’s lot. That’s one way to ignore human nature and its results in the twentieth century.

 

On the other hand, there’s Dr. Johnson, many years before the rise of totalitarianism, writing in the November 6, 1750, issue of The Rambler:

 

“Hope, is indeed, very fallacious, and promises what it seldom gives; but its promises are more valuable than the gifts of fortune, and it seldom frustrates us without assuring us of recompensing the delay by a greater bounty.”

 

My MGUS remains stable: no cancer.

'Spirit, Mettle; Courage, Pluck'

“It happened to me last year to lose my home with all contents in a night of that phenomenon that we oddly called blitz, though why we should use the German for lightning for attack by bombs I do not know, unless to appease by euphemism, like calling the Furies Eumenides.” 

Perhaps it’s that Churchillian orneriness of the people of England during World War II. More than bravery it’s defiance, a quality summed up in such words as spunk and grit – tough little monosyllables, hard as rocks. The writer is Rose Macaulay (1881-1958), the perennially forgotten and quite wonderful novelist (The Towers of Trebizond) and superb writer of nonfiction. I’ve written before about her essay “Book-Building after a Blitz,” published in the June 6, 1942 issue of the Saturday Review of Literature.

 

Macaulay had returned to London on May 13, 1941, to find that her flat in Marylebone and its contents had been destroyed during a German bombing raid three nights earlier. The Blitz started on September 7, 1940. For fifty-six of the following fifty-seven days, the Luftwaffe bombed the city. The day-and-night raids lasted until May 11, 1941. Some 37,000 civilians would eventually be killed in Great Britain.

 

Macaulay writes without self-pity or any suggestion of having been singled out for misfortune. She recounts the titles of books lost with sadness but also with a sort of actuarial coolness. She knows what she has lost and will never recover, and writing about it is an act of homage to her books, some of which were originally her father’s. Her literary taste is impeccable, and her library is one any respectable reader or writer would envy. Among her “indispensables” are Browne, Burton, Boswell, Johnson and Gibbon – the cream of English prose.

 

Now I’ve learned a happy coda of sorts. In his essay “The Pleasures of Rose Macaulay,” J. V. Guerinot writes

 

“When her library was totally destroyed in the bombing of London, the first volumes she replaced were the OED. There are those who like their novelists (and such novelists greatly abound) shirts off, muscles rippling, and those who think that the only muscles a novelist may hint at possessing are those needed to take down the wanted volume of the OED from its accustomed shelf.”

 

Our glory as a species is language and the OED is the crown. Its first editor, James Murray (1837-1915), once said when addressing the Philological Society: “I feel that in many respects I and my assistants are simply pioneers, pushing our way experimentally through an untrodden forest, where no white man's axe has been before us.” I highly recommend Caught in the Web of Words: James A.H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (1977), written by his granddaughter, K.M. Elizabeth Murray.

 

Some of us don’t merely consult the OED. We read it. Take those words mentioned above. Spunk: “Spirit, mettle; courage, pluck.” Grit: “Strength of character; courage and resolve; endurance, stamina.”

[Guerinot’s essay is published in the Spring 1987 issue of Twentieth Century Literature.]

'A Dull and Childish Ignorance'

“I have a dreamy way of withdrawing into myself, and, besides, a dull and childish ignorance of many common things.” 

Among the most rewarding gifts of concentrated reading is encountering thoughts we previously assumed were held only by ourselves. This happens most often with writers aware of their own inadequacies. Think of Samuel Johnson and Proust but think especially of Montaigne. Reading his essays is like reading our better selves, but never forgetting our most fallible moments.

 

The line quoted above is taken from a late essay with an unpromising title, “Of three kinds of association.” In it he confirms my “ignorance of many common things.” My list comes readily to mind – foreign languages, sports, Chinese history, automobiles and machines generally (especially computers), politics, gambling, most contemporary pop culture. By this point in my life, I expect to remain “dull and childish” in my ignorance of such things. Montaigne writes:

 

"Life is an uneven, irregular, and multiform movement. We are not friends, and still less masters, we are slaves, if we follow ourselves incessantly and are so caught in our inclinations that we cannot depart from them or twist them about.”

 

The first time I encountered the word “multiform” was many years ago in John Berryman’s poem “Canto Amor” (1947): “Love is multiform.” Montaigne would agree, but the observation doesn’t go far enough. Purity of anything is rare. In the human realm all things are various, shifting, protean. Our natures are watery. Love lives next door to hate. Part of the reason we “follow ourselves incessantly” is that it offers a sense of security, something solid regardless of its truth. I’m reminded of an admirably concise line in Yeats’ poem “Remorse for Intemperate Speech”: “Great hatred, little room.” Yeats is writing of Ireland. He might be writing of human behavior generally. Donald Frame writes in his biography of Montaigne:

 

“His task is to see and describe himself as accurately as he can. His ideas may not be true; his account of them must be. What he aims to make known, he says, is not things but himself; not the measure of things but the measure of his sight. The only certainty he guarantees is ‘to make known what I think, and to what point, at this moment, extends the knowledge I have of what I am treating.’ Hence he speaks out freely even outside his competence. ‘For likewise these are my humors and opinions; I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed.’”

 

How unlike so many of us, who assume what we believe, our precious opinions, are Gospel. In his conclusion Montaigne offers some hard-earned advice:

 

“The mind is exercised in books, but the body, whose care I have not forgotten either, remains meanwhile inactive, droops and grieves. I know of no excess more harmful to me, or more to be avoided in my declining years.”

 

[The Montaigne passages are from the translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957).]

'The World and All Her Train Were Hurl’d'

How often have you encountered a poem or other piece of writing that not only provoked astonishment on first reading but continues to do so after many years? I mean astonishment, not mere surprise or critical approval. I can think of a few passages in Shakespeare and Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation. There’s another, not so well known, that I first read in 1975, that somehow hasn’t grown tired or used-up or otherwise lost its capacity to inspire awe: “The World” by Henry Vaughan. The first line grabbed me: “I saw Eternity the other night.” That’s like saying, “I ran into God down at the bowling alley.” The colloquial-sounding “the other night” cinches it. 

Joseph Bottum has written appreciatively of another poem by Vaughan, “They Are All Gone into the World of Light.” His reading is inspired:

 

“In grief the absent are more real than the present world, and that’s where ‘They are all Gone into the World of Light’ begins: the light the dead have in memory brighter than the dark world in which the bereaved walk. For that matter, human epistemology is compromised and weak. But by building on that idea of light, Vaughan moves us toward a presaged Heaven and the hints in life that the dead still live.”

 

Vaughan’s lines are often a comfort but don’t read like a panacea. Neither does he preach. He reports:

 

“I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm, as it was bright;

And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,

Driv’n by the spheres

Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world

And all her train were hurl’d.”

 

I think of the Einstein rings photographed by the Hubble space telescope.

'Lighter Than a Hummingbird's Feather'

Czesław Miłosz wrote “In Warsaw” in 1945, shortly after the end of World War II:

“I did not want to love so.

That was not my design.

I did not want to pity so.

That was not my design.

My pen is lighter

Than a hummingbird's feather. This burden

Is too much for it to bear.

How can I live in this country

Where the foot knocks against

The unburied bones of kin?”

Few Americans have earned the right to speak so intimately and with such authority of war and its impact on writers and others. Most of us know war from newspapers and books. Boys enjoy playing Army. I remember visiting Gettysburg for the first time with my family when I was ten. My brother and I ran around as though the battlefield were a theme park or “interactive” museum. I’m certain we gave no thought to the 51,000 American casualties suffered in three days in 1863.

 

Not long ago I read a poem about an atrocity in Latin America written by an American: pure propaganda, composed at a safe distance. Political posturing. A poet who wants to be recognized as a moral exemplar. Utterly unconvincing as a moral document. Unlike Miłosz’s poem, there was something morbid about the American’s, as though the poet were relishing a chance to write about an act of depravity. Miłosz concludes his poem:

 

“It's madness to live without joy

And to repeat to the dead

Whose part was to be gladness

Of action in thought and in the

Only two salvaged words:

Truth and justice.”

 

In a 2009 interview, another Polish poet, the late Adam Zagajewski, said of “In Warsaw”: “Milosz avoids mournful ritual and says that living without happiness is madness. The charm of the world is the poet's obligation. When we stop naming the world, it disowns us and then we are only left with empty rhetoric, a hollow sound. A sense of humour must be combined with the sense of happiness that Milosz vindicates. A great poem is a model for life which influences our experience, albeit delicately.”