'Year Chases Year, Decay Pursues Decay'

Nominally a translation from the Latin of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire, “The Vanity of Human Wishes” is an autonomous poem in English, endlessly rereadable and fortifying for readers. Dr. Johnson completed his greatest poem on this date, November 25, in 1748, and sold the copyright to the English bookseller Robert Dodsley for fifteen guineas. At the age of thirty-nine, he was assembling his Dictionary (eventually published in 1755), and in little more than four months would publish the first of his 207 Rambler essays. 

Johnson told his friend George Steevens that he wrote the first seventy lines of “Vanity” “in the course of one morning,” having already composed them in his mind. In his 1977 biography of Johnson, Walter Jackson Bate writes: ‘That so concentrated a poem could be written with such speed indicates how much a part of the inner life it expresses.” In other words, Johnson was not so much composing as transcribing. Bate continues:

 

“The result is a poem that (as was once said of Burke) dazzles the strong and educated intellect far more than the feeble, and sways intelligent and cultivated readers as a demagogue.”

 

As a consideration of human nature, “Vanity” is realistically harsh and humbling. As a portrait of us it is unflattering. Reading it again with an open mind, one repeatedly comes to passages that confirm our moral conclusions about ourselves and others. We can trace the lineage of the poem to Ecclesiastes 1:2, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity,” a phrase distilling Johnson’s central lifelong theme. In his Dictionary, he defines vanity as “emptiness, arrogance, falsehood.” For vain he gives “fruitless, meanly proud, idle.” Asked for a synonym today, many would respond with “egotism,” “self-centeredness,” “pride.” Only the last avoids the modern clinical taint and retains the older, moral/spiritual sense.

 

“Year chases Year, Decay pursues Decay,

Still drops some Joy from with’ring Life away;  

New Forms arise, and diff’rent Views engage,   

Superfluous lags the Vet’ran on the Stage,

Till pitying Nature signs the last Release,           

And bids afflicted Worth retire to Peace.”

'Incipient Opportunity'

My sons are living in Westchester County, Maryland and Peru. All are employed and self-reliant and have successfully enacted a young man’s timeless ritual: leaving home. I left home at seventeen, never to return except for brief visits. I haven’t lived in Cleveland, my birthplace, since 1977 or Ohio since 1983. The contrast with my late brother is striking. He lived within a ten-mile radius his entire life.  Then I think of my paternal grandfather, born in Poland in 1896, shipping early in the new century to the U.S., naturalized as an American citizen in 1920, working for more than thirty years as an ironworker in Cleveland. 

Conversely, I know men, some in early middle age, who still live in their parents’ homes, often in the basement or boyhood bedroom. I can’t imagine doing that. No doubt there are legitimate economic or medical explanations in some cases but I would have felt humiliated, a failure. As a kid, what I most wanted was to be a grownup, independent and self-reliant. 

 

On this date, November 24, in 1965, Philip Larkin, as a break from working on one of his masterpieces, “High Windows,” completed the poem “How Distant”:

 

“How distant, the departure of young men

Down valleys, or watching

The green shore past the salt-white cordage

Rising and falling.

 

“Cattlemen, or carpenters, or keen

Simply to get away

From married villages before morning,

Melodeons play

 

“On tiny decks past fraying cliffs of water

Or late at night

Sweet under the differently-swung stars,

When the chance sight

 

“Of a girl doing her laundry in the steerage

Ramifies endlessly.

This is being young,

Assumption of the startled century

 

“Like new store clothes,

The huge decisions printed out by feet

Inventing where they tread,

The random windows conjuring a street.”

 

In the English context, young men throughout the century left villages and farms to seek work in the cities. The migration took place all over the industrialized world—getting away from the “married villages.” This hints at muted autobiography from the eternal bachelor Larkin. As Larkin’s biographer James Booth puts it, “incipient opportunity.”

'Good for More Than One of Us That He Was Here'

Edwin Arlington Robinson was nineteen in 1890 when he met Emma Shepherd, who was four years his senior. Like a million other men, he was smitten and naïve, hopeless in the ways of courtship and romance. Shepherd was a renowned beauty, sensitive and thoughtful. Robinson wrote in “The Night Before” (The Torrent and the Night Before, 1896):

 

“I loved that woman, —

Not for her face, but for something fairer,

Something diviner, I thought, than beauty:

I loved the spirit — the human something

That seemed to chime with my own condition,

And make soul-music when we were together . . .”

 

Interesting precursor to what became known in the sixties as “soul music.” Shepherd and the poet became close friends and remained so, even after she married Robinson’s brother Herman, who became an alcoholic and estranged from Shepherd and their children. He died from tuberculosis, impoverished, in 1909. Shepherd believed Robinson wrote “Richard Cory” about his brother.

 

Robinson is one of the masters of the sonnet. Among his finest is “A Man in Our Town” (Dionysus in Doubt, 1925):

“We pitied him as one too much at ease

With Nemesis and impending indigence;

We sought him always in extremities;

And while ways more like ours had more to please

Our common code than his improvidence,

There lurked alive in our experience

His homely genius for emergencies.

 

 “He was not one for men to marvel at,

And yet there was another neighborhood

When he was gone, and many a thrifty tear.

There was an increase in a man like that;

And though he be forgotten, it was good

For more than one of us that he was here.”

 

In his notes to The Poetry of E.A. Robinson (Modern Library, 1999), Robert Mezey tells us Shepherd and her daughter Ruth, after the poet’s death in 1935, put together a commentary on the poems. As best I can tell, this document has never been published, though Mezey had access to the manuscript. He quotes Shepherd, who describes the sonnet as a “beautiful tribute to his brother Dean. Even after he was so completely subjected to the fetters of opium that he no longer practiced his profession, or operated his drug store, he was called back to the Savings Bank to help balance their accounts, and called to the medical emergencies of neighbors.”

 

The poet’s eldest brother, Dean, was a pharmacist who became a morphine addict and took his own life with an overdose in 1899. Shepherd’s autobiographical understanding is no doubt accurate but there’s more to the sonnet than that. All of us have known people like “the man in our town,” confounding mixtures of good and evil, virtues and selfishness, loveable and heartbreaking.

'But O the Heavy Change, Now Thou Art Gone'

No public event has shaken me so lastingly as the assassination of President Kennedy. I’m not speaking sentimentally, mourning the glory that was Camelot. JFK was a mediocre president, at best, and not a good man. 

I had turned eleven a month before his murder. The killing taught me that everyone was vulnerable, even the most powerful and protected man in the world. I don’t mean that in the personal sense. I haven’t spent the last sixty-two years trembling with paranoia. I’m talking about history. No one is immune to its machinations. Few things last.

 

The way I learned of the assassination seems significant. Ron Ornsby and I were in the same sixth-grade class and had walked to our Safety Patrol post, carrying our flags and wearing Sam Browne belts. A driver stopped to tell us the president had been shot. Soon after, another driver stopped to say Kennedy had been touring a nut house in Texas when one of the nuts shot him. How odd that a surreally attenuated rumor should ring with poetic truth. When I walked in the back door at home, I could see the silhouette of my mother crying in front of the television. For the next three days we were forbidden to play outside and spent most of the time watching the news from Dallas and Washington, D.C. In memory, it’s all in black and white.

 

R.L. Barth has written a new sequence of poems, “Aspects of Vietnam,” with an epigraph from The Great Gatsby: “borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The first poem in the series, “The Fall of Camelot,” also has an epigraph: “Beware angering the goddess”:

 

“Did you anticipate the fallout, John,

When Diem and Nhu were murdered in Saigon?

In Dallas almost three weeks later, Jack,

Nemesis tracked you down and paid you back.”

 

Twenty years ago I interviewed a computer scientist at Rice University who was dying of cancer and, coincidentally, was named Kennedy. Once handsome and quite the lady’s man, he was now a baggy suit on a rack of bones. He had been an undergraduate at Rice, and on the day of the president’s assassination he was seated in an English literature class when news of the killing was announced. The professor had been lecturing on Milton. Unlike other professors, he didn’t cancel his class and, instead, read “Lycidas” aloud to his students. More than forty years later, the computer scientist recited for me, from memory:      

 

“But O the heavy change, now thou art gone,

Now thou art gone and never must return!”

 

He had tears in his eyes as he spoke the words, and three months later he was dead.

'He Will Return Deeply Dyed the True Tint'

“Metaphors will, I know, ultimately be my ruin, but in the meantime I hope I make myself reasonably plain.” 

I think of metaphors less as literary devices than a mode of thought. To describe something to another person, especially something novel or inexplicable, we liken it to something familiar. My mind has always worked by association. One thing reminds me automatically of another, so metaphors tend to appear without effort. There’s a mystery here. I’ve learned to trust, in most cases, the instantaneous appearance of a metaphor.

 

In Thursday’s post I likened encountering an interesting bit of trivia to “finding a gold coin on an empty beach.” The sense is plain but a reader objects to the metaphor as being “too cute,” “a stretch.” Perhaps. I intended it to be vivid and slightly absurd, which brings up another aspect of metaphor-making: the potential for humor. Metaphors can be amusing while doing the more sober job of making something clear to a reader. So many of the metaphors we hear in conversation and see in print – “black as night,” “sharp as a tack” – are tediously lazy clichés. Accuracy with a hint of comedy or irony is a pleasing combination.

The admission at the top is from Augustine Birrell’s review of Leslie Stephen’s three-volume Hours in a Library (1874-79), collected in his Men, Women, and Books (1910). Birrell is unusual in several ways. He was a first-rate reviewer with a strong sense of style, but most of his professional life was devoted to being the British chief secretary for Ireland (1907–16) – a combination unimaginable today. We don’t think of politicians as even being literate today. Here are the metaphor-rich sentences preceding the one quoted at the top:

 

“The author of ‘Hours in a Library’ belongs, it is hardly necessary to say, to the class of writers who use their steam for the purpose of going straight ahead. He is always greatly concerned with his subject. If he is out fox-hunting, he comes home with the brush, and not with a spray of blackberries; but if, on the other hand, he goes out blackberrying, he will return deeply dyed the true tint, and not dragging behind him a languishing coil of seaweed.”

'Anthologies of Miscellaneous Literary Passages'

What the sophisticated and cloddish alike dismiss as “trivia” is often the spice that keeps life’s banquet palatable. One revels in knowing G.K. Chesterton’s wife’s maiden name, the color of Franz Kafka’s eyes and the nature of Goldbach’s Conjecture. I’ll never earn a dime knowing these things and they will never grant me longevity or cure my arthritis but knowing them comforts me. When I begin to understand something I can place it in context and relate it to other bits of knowledge. Trivia may be interesting for its own sake, like finding a gold coin on an empty beach, but even a jury-rigged system of taxonomy permits us to fit it into our knowledge of the world and fend off chaos for another day. Guy Davenport once told an interviewer: 

“My range of interests may be accounted for by my being 75. It’s really a very narrow range. There ought to be a psychology that studies indifference, the ‘flat affect’ of non-response. Response is, beyond the usual culturally-trained and biological reactions to the things of the world, the result of education carried on by curiosity.”

 

Let’s consider a writer much admired by Davenport, the English clergyman, conversationalist and wit Sydney Smith (1771-1845). In 1804-06, Smith delivered a series of lectures at the Royal Institution later published as Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy. In it he writes: “Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.”

 

That stands as good, superficially perplexing advice. I haven’t read Smith’s lectures but I found Daniel George Bunting’s reference to them in Lonely Pleasures (Jonathan Cape, 1954). Writing under the pen name Daniel George (1890-1967), he was an English poet, critic and industrious anthologist whom I learned of from yet another writer, Aaron James, in an essay devoted to him last year in The Lamp. James focuses on George’s 1938 anthology, All in a Maze, and puts it in context:

 

“Anthologies of miscellaneous literary passages experienced a kind of vogue in the middle decades of the twentieth century, stemming ultimately from the Renaissance traditions of the commonplace book or the florilegium; surviving commonplace books by writers such as Virginia Woolf and W. H. Auden show that writers of the era still found it practically useful to compile short passages from other authors for their personal reference. In the age before Google, reference books of this sort were an essential aid to research in literature, with scholars relying on books of quotations, concordances, and thematically ordered collections of extracts to supplement their memories of a large body of literature.”

 

My university library has the two books by George mentioned above in its collection. Lonely Pleasures (a readily misunderstood title) comes with a parodic index, as explained by James:

 

“[A] collection of essays and book reviews, features a formidable mock index, a parody of scholarly precision (‘Acton, Lord, and atomic power, 255 . . . Adam, his eldest daughter’s hat exhibited, 85 . . . Eliot, T. S., his feet among those I have sat at, 14 . . . and the bottoms of his trousers, 257 . . .’) But to understand the point of the satire we must recall that, in the days before computers, the mock index of Lonely Pleasures would have been done by hand, and would have been just as time-consuming and painstaking to produce as the index of a scholarly work of history.”

 

George is a sort of quiet humorist who takes books seriously – a species long extinct. He seems to have read everything and is not the sort of pompous reader who arranges the books he reads like trophies on the mantel piece. I owe much of my education to anthologies, especially when I was young, and George enables me to carry on that tradition. In a piece from 1947 on Christmas books, collected in Lonely Pleasures, he writes:

 

“For as long as I can remember I have been given books for Christmas. Some I still treasure – a Barnaby Rudge presented to me when I was about nine, and Johnson’s Lives of the Poets when I was twelve. Johnson began, I remember, with the life of Cowley in which he referred to Dr. Sprat, ‘an author whose pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language have deservedly set him high in the ranks of literature’. At twelve I tended to confuse Dr. Sprat with his namesake who could eat no fat, and I am still not quite able to take him seriously. In any event I was probably too young for Johnson; the book remained unread for three years.”

'The Magic of Association'

I found a series of digital photographs my brother had sent me years ago. There was no context, not even people, just scenes from the yard outside the house where we lived as kids, mostly flowers and trees. The first was a closeup of lapis lazuli-blue morning glories growing up the wrought-iron railing my father had built on the front porch. That’s where I first sowed the seeds in the early sixties, training the vines up the railing, a tradition my brother later continued. I instantly found myself in memory back in 1962 or so, where I saw the pew-like wooden bench on the porch, the mailbox with the raiseable metal flag painted red, and the silver maples in the neighbor’s front yard – all long gone. This internal scene was almost spookily photographic.

I’m assuming the American poet James Russell Lowell (1819-91) is largely forgotten today, except perhaps for his work as an abolitionist and a line in “The Vision of Sir Launfal”: “What is so rare as a day in June?” In his day, Lowell was an influential critic, essayist and editor of The Atlantic Monthly. A collection of his prose, The Function of the Poet, was published posthumously in 1920. In the 1855 title essay Lowell writes:

 

“The square root of -x is nothing in comparison with the chance-caught smell of a single flower which by the magic of association recreates for us the unquestioning day of childhood.”

 

The scent of Lowell’s flower sounds like Proust’s madeleine. The photo of a flower did the same thing for me.