'Chekhov Saved Me But Also Ruined Me'

Recently I woke from a dream adapted from Nostromo and directed by Joseph Conrad. Something about Martin Decoud in the lifeboat, weighted down with silver ingots. The dream, typically, was fragmentary and out of focus. This is only the second time I can remember having a dream lifted from a work of fiction. The other involved Leopold Bloom embracing Rudy, his dead infant son. Do I find profound significance in these nighttime theatricals? That both involve death? Not really. They tell me that fiction, like one’s "real" life, is raw material for the subconscious, and perhaps that I know these novels nearly as well as my own life. There’s a touch of pride in knowing Conrad and Joyce are among the greatest writers, longtime favorites, and that Joyce Carol Oates hasn’t infected my subconscious. 

In her latest post at The Little White Attic, “My Personal Library,” Di Nguyen examines the books she owns – a common practice among serious readers -- and writes:

 

“Sometimes I try to find some pattern behind the writers who speak the most to me, but can’t find any. I like both sane writers (Jane Austen, Chekhov, Tolstoy) and mad writers (Emily Bronte, Melville, Akutagawa); both warm writers (Chekhov, Molière, Dickens) and cold writers (Jane Austen, Flannery O’Connor, Muriel Spark). I think I like writers preoccupied with the subject of death, but Jane Austen leaves it offstage. I think I like writers with a sense of humour, but does Tolstoy make anyone laugh? (Maybe twice in War and Peace). I think I like writers who see some goodness and nobility in humanity and don’t just depict us all as base and bestial, but why do I like Flannery O’Connor?”

 

These are the sort of questions I ask myself. Like Di, I see no pattern. This says something about me but also about the great library of fiction, the way it reflects, after sufficient reading, the infinite complexity of human beings, our capacity for humility and love, duplicity and evil, our essentially contradictory nature. Di writes:

 

“[D]uring that difficult period of my life, I found solace in Chekhov and found myself moving away from Austen—she didn’t write about the subjects that were preoccupying me. But now looking back, I can’t help wondering if I was making a mess of things because I absorbed Chekhov’s pessimism and accepted that human relationships were messy and my life was over and there’s no happiness on earth. I was going through volumes and volumes of Chekhov—how many stories did I read? Chekhov saved me but also ruined me.”

 

In a letter to his sister, shortly before committing suicide, Martin Decoud writes: “[A]ll this is life, must be life, since it is so much like a dream.”

'The Summer Has Begun to Pass Away'

 Anton Chekhov wrote nothing in the summer of 1888 but thought about writing a novel. He stayed at the villa of his editor and friend Aleksi Suvorin in Feodosia, in Crimea on the Black Sea. He was leading a “vile, lotus-eating life,” as he says in a letter to his family written July 23-24: 

“The days pass in an endlessly replete stream, the cup of life overflows . . . Lounging about on the beach, Chartreuse, punch, fireworks, bathing, good cheer at supper, trips, songs – all such pleasures make the days go by so quickly that you hardly notice them; time flies while the drowsy head nods off to the sound of the waves and refuses to get down to work.”

 

Despite his inactivity, earlier that year he had written “The Steppe.” Soon he would write “A Dreary Story” and “Gusev.” The novel was never written but Chekhov was on the cusp of his greatest period.

 

Every year as Northerners we are surprised by summer’s passing, as though it were a fluke. We go on sensing within us the cycle of the seasons. Saturday morning here in Houston the temperature dipped to sixty-one degrees, the first time that cool this season. It felt almost chilly but I left my jacket at home. Howard Nemerov published “Summer’s Elegy” in The Blue Swallows (1967):

 

“Day after day, day after still day,

The summer has begun to pass away.

Starlings at twilight fly clustered and call,

And branches bend, and leaves begin to fall.

The meadow and the orchard grass are mown,

And the meadowlark’s house is cut down.

 

“The little lantern bugs have doused their fires,

The swallows sit in rows along the wires.

Berry and grape appear among the flowers

Tangled against the wall in secret bowers,

And cricket now begins to hum the hours

Remaining to the passion’s slow procession

Down from the high place and the golden session

Wherein the sun was sacrificed for us.

A failing light, no longer numinous,

Now frames the long and solemn afternoons

Where butterflies regret their closed cocoons.

We reach the place unripe, and made to know

As with a sudden knowledge that we go

Away forever, all hope of return

Cut off, hearing the crackle of the burn-

ing blade behind us, and the terminal sound

Of apples dropping on the dry ground”

 

That year, 1967, I was almost fifteen and I accompanied my father when he installed the wrought-iron railing and fence he had made for a wealthy family in Bratenahl, a tiny village northeast of Cleveland on Lake Erie. The lady was friendly and served us lunch. She invited me afterwards into the backyard which was almost filled with a small apple orchard. She gave me a burlap sack and said I could fill it with apples. I had picked crabapples before. They were wormy and indigestible, and we used them in apple fights. Picking large, unblemished apples was a novelty and is forever associated with the passing of summer and the arrival of autumn: “the terminal sound / Of apples dropping on the dry ground.”

'These Remarks Are Heretical'

Like Edward Gibbon, Yvor Winters tucks some of his best stuff into footnotes. Take this provocation from “English Literature in the Sixteenth Century,” published in the Summer 1955 issue of The Hudson Review and collected in The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises (Swallow Press, 1957): 

“At this point, I would like to interject one word of warning to the professors. Poets are not fools (I mean good poets); they are capable of perceiving in their early twenties facts which professors may or may not manage to perceive in their sixties or seventies. I am not trying to be insulting (the technical term, I think, is ‘arrogant’); I am trying rather to state an important truth which is overlooked for the greater part in the academic world. There is likely to be over long periods what one might call an underground or unpublicized, tradition of the best writing, which one can discover only if one has the perception to trace the tradition from poem to poem. I am fully aware that these remarks are heretical.”

 

Winters’ essay is a review of three academic volumes including English Literature in the Sixteenth Century by C. S. Lewis. The footnote was added to the book and doesn’t appear in the journal article. As always, Winters focuses his attention on individual poems not individual poets. He uses the occasion to celebrate the “plain style” of poetry, as he does in his poem “Time and the Garden”:

 

“I would expand to greatness. No one hears,

And I am still retarded in duress!

And this is like that other restlessness

To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned,

One which the tougher poets have discerned—

Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,

Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,

And spaced by many years, each line an act

Through which few labor, which no men retract.”

 

The plain style is the most exclusive in the history of English literature, shunned by or unknown to most contemporary poets. A convenient example is the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature who, strictly speaking, is not a poet at all but an assembler of au courant bric-a-brac. Readers of Winters’ final book, Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (1967), will recognize the poems Winters names, including George Herbert’s “Church Monuments,” Henry Vaughan’s “To His Books” and Fulke Greville’s “The world that all containes.”

 

The footnote quoted above has proved prophetic. Most of our best poets are part of an “underground.” Not in the self-congratulatory, politicized Sixties sense but apart from the big publishers and name-brand critics. They often rely on Twitter, Substack, various blogs, small publishers and self-publication. Winters closes his review like this:

 

“[O]ne reads and reads and reads, and one does one’s best to remember. It is a messy business, any way one takes it; but it is also fascinating.” 

 

Winters was born on this date, October 17, in 1900 and died in 1968 (annus horribilis) at age sixty-seven.

'The Dead World's Much Too Crowded'

“I know, for both of us, the dead world’s much too crowded.” 

Live long enough and all, reluctantly, must agree. Most of our relatives and oldest friends are dead – the unhappy price paid for longevity. As Dr. Johnson describes grief in The Idler (January 27, 1759):

 

“The loss of a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavour was tended, is a state of dreary desolation, in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horror. The blameless life, the artless tenderness, the pious simplicity, the modest resignation, the patient sickness, and the quiet death, are remembered only to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, to deepen sorrow for what cannot be recalled.”

 

The line at the top is from “Letter to Horace After Reading Ode i.24” by a poet new to me, Tamara Nicholl-Smith, published in Modern Age. The poem is dedicated to David Solomon. She addresses the Roman poet as she might a friend:

 

“Horace, I must confess, you’ve managed to surprise

Me. I had thought there were too many centuries

Between us—that your verse would sound like dusty, sighs;

Nothing that would please.”

 

Nicholl-Smith endorses a notion commonly dismissed: a writer born millennia ago can still speak to us, often more potently than contemporaries. “Despite our progress, pain is pain. / And Death, in any age, won’t give back what he reaps.” The next line in the fourth stanza, “Our loss remains his gain,” sounds like an echo from Bob Dylan’s "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest": “My loss will be your gain.”

 

Horace’s Ode i.24 is dedicated to Virgil. David Ferry’s translation (Of No Country I Know, 1999) begins: “How should this grief be properly put into words?” It concludes:

 

“It is hard. But all of this must be endured,

And by endurance what can never be changed

Will be at last made easier in the heart.”

'I Would Have Been Enchanted'

We think Titus Lucretius Carus died on this date, October 15, in 55 B.C. at roughly age forty-four. We know he wrote the philosophical poem De rerum natura, usually translated On the Nature of Things. Though read less often than other Roman poets, Lucretius can be traced in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, George Santayana, Wallace Stevens and Guy Davenport. 

I’ve stumbled on him again while reading The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology, edited by Primo Levi and published in Italy in 1981. The collection is an inspired hodgepodge Levi describes as “a harvesting, retrospectively and in good faith, which could bring to light the possible traces of what has been read on what has been written.” Included by Levi are selections from Sir William Bragg’s Lucretian-titled Concerning the Nature of Things (1925).

 

In his introduction, the translator, Peter Forbes, writes: “It is Lucretius who provides the link between Levi’s scientific, moral and aesthetic worldviews.” Levi worked for decades as an industrial chemist and credited his reading of Bragg’s book at age sixteen with inspiring his choice of careers. Bragg had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915 for development of the first X-ray spectrometer. In his introduction to the excerpt from Bragg’s book, Levi says the physicist “belonged to an epoch in which a pioneering genius could still do brilliant work in isolation.” The same, of course, was true for Levi. 

 

He titles his selection from Lucretius “The Poet-Researcher” (as translated from the Latin by Sir Ronald Melville), and says in his introduction: 

 

“If I had read Lucretius in high school I would have been enchanted, but he is not willingly read in school, officially because he is too difficult, actually because there has always been a whiff of impiety about his verses. For this reason, at the end of antiquity a cloak of silence was wrapped around him and today almost nothing is known of this extraordinary man. Consciously or not, for a long time he was regarded as dangerous, because he sought a purely rational explanation of nature, had faith in the evidence of his own senses, wanted to liberate man from suffering and fear, rebelled against all superstition, and described earthly love in lucid poetry.” 

 

In his introduction, Forbes revels, as does Levi, in Lucretius’ proto-scientific thinking and the sheer pleasure he took in it: 

 

“In Lucretius the world of sensation is a joy: it sings with the sights and sounds and feel of the world, with the spirit of healthy animals enjoying their animality. There is a wonderful Italian tradition of science writing that derives from Lucretius. Galileo is its greatest figure as a scientist, and Italo Calvino, Levi’s contemporary and friend is another exponent. In Levi’s case, his philosophy was put to the starkest test in Auschwitz. The result is as if Lucretius had endured Dante’s hell and emerged, a survivor, tempered by the experience.” 

 

What I most enjoy in Lucretius is the mingling of scientific observation and speculation, and a zest for the pure physicality of the universe. The examples he cites are vivid and humble. This comes from the C.H. Sisson translation, De Rerum Natura: The Poem of Nature (1976): 

 

“In any building, if the basic measure is wrong 

And there is error in judging the perpendicular 

Or the level somewhere is even the slightest bit wrong, 

Everything will be out of true and lopsided, 

Crooked, sloping, leaning this way or that; 

It will threaten to fall and some of it actually will fall 

And all on account of the first erroneous measurements: 

So your reasoning about things is always bound to be false 

If it is based on sense you cannot rely on.”

'He Lessens the Gayety of Life'

I’ll spare you the joke the phlebotomist told me while drawing blood from my arm. Given the circumstance I mustered a polite titter in response. I had already diagnosed him as a member of that blight on humanity, the would-be comedian, the sort of guy – almost always male – who wishes to be thought a funny fellow, a jokester, a real card (“he has to be dealt with” – heh-heh). To make sure you recognize his wit, he helpfully laughs at his own joke. The condition’s etiology remains a mystery but I blame misguided parents who laughed at Junior’s jokes regardless of their witlessness. In her essay “The Mission of Humour” (Americans and Others, 1912), Agnes Repplier left-handedly defends the humorless man: 

“Charles Lamb said it was no misfortune for a man to have a sulky temper. It was his friends who were unfortunate. And so with the man who has no sense of humour. He gets along very well without it. He is not aware that anything is lacking. He is not mourning his lot. What loss there is, his friends and neighbours bear.”

 

Repplier refers to section XVI of Lamb’s “Popular Fallacies,” “That a Sulky Temper Is a Misfortune.” She continues:

 

“A man destitute of humour is apt to be a formidable person, not subject to sudden deviations from his chosen path, and incapable of frittering away his elementary forces by pottering over both sides of a question. He is often to be respected, sometimes to be feared, and always—if possible—to be avoided. His are the qualities which distance enables us to recognize and value at their worth. He fills his place in the scheme of creation; but it is for us to see that his place is not next to ours at table, where his unresponsiveness narrows the conversational area, and dulls the contagious ardour of speech. He may add to the wisdom of the ages, but he lessens the gayety of life.”

'No Gold This Go-Round'

This is the time of year I feel a pang for the Northern autumn. The temperature in Houston, as I write on Monday, is eighty-six degrees. The trees are as green today as they were last month and last April. Butterflies still flit in the garden, as do anoles, green and brown. Years have a circadian rhythm as do our days. Mine is definitely Northern, Ohio by way of upstate New York, and my clock is always off.

Our front yard was the deepest on the street, lined on the right with four silver maples, with a sugar maple nearest the street. All are long gone, but starting in September when I was a kid all were blazing yellow with the occasional dash of red. I remember writing a paper in which I described maples as “sugar factories.” Few maples grow in Texas. In her poem “Suburban Samsara,” Maryann Corbett, who lives in Minnesota, writes of the cycle of seasonal change and the larger cycles of life. Here is the second stanza:

“Arid, this summer. | After, when air

chilled, and the days | damped down, cheerless,

small color came: | the crabbed rust-brown,

the dull, dry green. | No gold this go-round,

wealth we waited for. | Only the work—

the raking, bent, | the wrenched back.”

Yes, hours of raking, in our yard and the neighbors’. Samsara is the Sanskrit word for the cycle of life, death and rebirth, common to Buddhism and Hinduism. Every autumn, this native Northerner recalls a sentence from The American Scene (1906) by Henry James:

“[T]he way the colour begins in those days to be dabbed, the way, here and there, for a start, a solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy-ball, with the whole family gathered round to admire her before she goes.”