'Our Spruce Manor Way of Life'

I’ve learned that a next-door neighbor from my childhood has died at age ninety-eight: Gert Pirko. Like us, she and her husband and three kids moved into the neighborhood in the summer of 1955. Parma Heights was a working-class suburb on the West Side of Cleveland. There’s a photo somewhere of the middle child Karen and I standing in the backyard of their house, holding hands, the grass nearly as tall as our three-year-old selves.

 Our doors were seldom locked. We could enter their house without knocking. I remember borrowing a quart of milk from Mrs. Pirko, the whole glass bottle. Ken, the oldest kid, collected hot rod magazines and I heard “Telstar” for the first time when he played the 45 for me in the basement. Johnny was the youngest.  He and I once walked to Kroger's, selected a bottle of catsup and a box of Cheerios, and blithely walked out the door. The manager stopped us and called Mrs. Pirko, who came to get us in her Chevy. Most women in the neighborhood didn’t drive. The Pirkos moved to Illinois in 1964 and they still show up in my dreams.

 

The indefatigable Isaac Waisberg, proprietor of IWP Books, has just posted Phyllis McGinley’s 1951 poetry collection, A Short Walk from the Station (along with three earlier McGinley volumes). Many of her poems are set in Spruce Manor, a fictional suburb not unlike Larchmont, near New York City where she and her family lived. It joins such mythical literary locales as Winesburg, Ohio, and Spoon River, Illinois. The book’s ten-page prose introduction, “Suburbia, Of Thee I Sing!”, is less a defense than a celebration of life in the suburbs, already seventy-five years ago a punching bag for the snobbery of hipsters and litterateurs. McGinley refutes most of the clichés associated with life in the suburbs:  

 

“I think that someday people will look back on our little intervals here, on our Spruce Manor way of life, as we now look back on the Currier and Ives kind of living, with nostalgia and respect. In a world of terrible extremes, it will stand out as the safe, important medium.”

 

In his review of the book, Jacques Barzun called McGinley “a feminine Horace.” I love the fiction of John Cheever and Richard Yates but there’s another way to think about suburbia and its inhabitants, like Gertude Pirko. Two of McGinley’s poems that might have been drawn from my life:

 

“Local Newspaper,” because once I delivered three newspapers – two dailies and a weekly:

 

“Headlines, a little smudged, spell out the stories

That stir the Friday village to its roots:

town council meets for may, miss babcock marries,

shore club to ban bikini bathing suits.

While elsewhere thunders roll or atoms shiver

 ultimate tyrants into dust are hurled,

Weekly small boys on bicycles deliver

News to our doors of this more innocent world –

A capsule universe of church bazaars

Where even the cross-stitched aprons sell on chances,

Of brush fires, births, receptions, soda bars,

Memorial Day parades, and high-school dances,

And (though on various brinks the planet teeters)

Of fierce disputes concerned with parking meters.”

 

And a remembrance of a much-cherished sound and sight, “Good Humor Man”:

 

“Listen! It is the summer’s self that ambles

Through the green lanes with such a coaxing tongue.

Not birds or daisy fields were ever symbols

More proper to the time than this bell rung

With casual insistence – no, not swallow

Circling the roof or bee in hollyhock.

His is the season’s voice, and children follow,

Panting, from every doorway down the block.

So, long ago, in some such shrill procession

Perhaps the Hamelin children gave pursuit

To one who wore a red-and-yellow fashion

Instead of white, but made upon his flute

The selfsame promise plain to every comer:

Unending sweets, imperishable summer.”

'Me Thinks It Is No News'

In his final book, Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (1967), the dying Yvor Winters briefly mentions the allegorically named poet Philip Pain: “Of Pain nothing is known beyond what we learn from his Daily Meditations. It was begun in July of 1666 and was published in Massachusetts in 1668, and was written ‘By Pain: Who, lately, suffering Shipwrack, was drowned.’” “Meditation 8”: 

“Scarce do I pass a day, but that I hear

Some one or other’s dead; and to my ear

Me thinks it is no news: but Oh! did I

Think deeply on it, what it is to die,

My Pulses all would bear, I should not be

Drown’d in this Deluge of Securitie.”

 

Winters admired the poem enough to include it in Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969), the posthumously published collection he co-edited with Kenneth Fields. We know little about Pain with much certainty, even his nationality and place and date of birth (usually given as “c. 1647-c. 1667”). In 1936, the Henry E. Huntington Library published a 36-page facsimile edition with an introduction by Leon Howard, the Melville scholar. Howard calls Pain a “lost” author. He is unable to substantiate claims that his little book, Daily Meditations, is the first original American verse published in the English Colonies. Here is “Meditation 54”:

 

“The sons of men are prone to forget Death,

And put it farre away from them, till breath

Begins to tell them they must to the grave,

And then, Oh what would they give but to have

 

“One year of respite? Help me, Lord, to know

As I move here, so my time moves also.”

 

Winters writes: “He was obviously influenced by George Herbert, and there are traces of other metaphysical influences. The poems are very devout and fairly well executed . . . [“Meditation 8”] conveys a profound insight into the human predicament, whether Christian or other, and it should be retained in our literature.”

 

Pain’s poems remind me of the work of another death-haunted poet, Stevie Smith. Both emphasize the evanescence of life. Here is “Some Are Born” (The Frog Prince and Other Poems, 1966):

 

“Some are born to peace and joy

And some are born to sorrow

But only for a day as we

Shall not be here tomorrow.”

 

In an almost too-clever epigram from her first collection, A Good Time Was Had by All (1937), Smith writes:

 

“All things pass

Love and mankind is grass.”

From the King James Bible, 1 Peter 1:24: “For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.”

'Curiosity Matters More Than Any Syllabus'

I can think of many reasons someone might wish to assemble a reading list and share it with others. Most obviously, teachers drawing up a syllabus for students. I remember taking a class in “The Modern Japanese Novel” and getting the list of seven books by writers I had never heard of (except for Yukio Mishima, for extra-literary reasons), including one who would become a favorite: Natsume Sōseki. 

And never underestimate the compulsion to show off. Our age grows more post-literate by the hour but in certain circles there remains a cachet attached to reading, especially “hard books,” so-called classics or the literary hit du jour. You can get a lot of attention in the small world of readers with a solemn suggestion to snuggle up with Finnegans Wake.

 

Finally, there’s the simple wish to share the wealth with others, especially young readers. This can be an act of generosity. I still periodically reread Tristram Shandy thanks to one of my professors and her enthusiasm for Sterne more than half a century ago. In the April issue of New English Review, G. Murphy Donovan publishes “A Reading List for a Curious Mind”:

 

“Not long ago I had a conversation with the son of a longtime friend about books—what to read, where to begin, and how someone builds a library. It is the sort of question that deserves more than an off-the-cuff answer, so afterward I promised him I would put together a short reading list.”

 

You’ll find no surprises on Donovan’s list and a couple of clams (jazz slang for wrong notes). He acknowledges that six of his ten titles are novels, suggesting that the supremacy of long fiction since the eighteenth century remains in place.

 

Another reason someone might share a reading list is to elicit objections to his selections. That’s inevitable, so let’s get it out of the way: Dune is sub-literary junk, topical pulp fiction. Vladimir Nabokov denounced Catch-22 as “anti-American” and “seditious.” He left out “sophomoric.” One Hundred Years of Solitude, written by Fidel’s pal, is among the most overrated books of the twentieth century. Tedious refried Faulkner. I applaud Donovan’s choice of poets – Homer, Dante, Dickinson.

 

Do reading lists work? Do they get non-readers to read? Impossible to say. I do know that children who see their parents reading are likelier to become enthusiastic readers, though my own experience, in part, refutes that claim. My parents were not readers and we had few books in the house. Donovan closes with a reality-based endorsement of autodidacticism:

  

“If you want an education, find something that genuinely interests you and pursue it relentlessly. No school will do that work for you.

 

“Reading widely helps, but curiosity matters more than any syllabus. A good book does not give you answers so much as it teaches you how to ask better questions.”

'Either Very Gravely Gay or Very Gaily Grave'

“Lend me—lend me some disguise; / I will tell prodigious lies; / All who care for what I say / Shall be April Fools to-day!” 

This sounds like our understanding of April Fools’ Day as kids. Low-cost, nothing elaborate, just walk up behind a guy and scream “Your pants are on fire!” and hilarity ensues. April Fools' Day came with a relaxation of conventional manners. You could be a jerk and possibly get away with it. Sixty-five years too late, I pity our poor teachers.

 

The author of the lines at the top is Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-39), an English writer of vers de société or what later was called light verse – poems accessible and often amusing. Philip Larkin was an admirer and Yvor Winters suspected Praed (pronounced prayed) had an influence on the young E.A. Robinson. I first heard of Praed from Larkin in his address to the Antiquarian Bookfair in 1972:

 

“Within reach of my working chair I have reference books on the right, and twelve poets on the left: Hardy, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Barnes, Praed, Betjeman, Whitman, Frost and Owen. True, I reach to the right more often than to the left, but the twelve are there as exemplars. All in all, therefore, I should miss my books. I like to think I could do without them -- I like to think I could do without anything -- but indubitably I should miss them.”

 

In his poem “April Fools,” Praed assumes foolishness is ubiquitous. We want to be lied to, so long as the lies substantiate our precious illusions. Though he served in Parliament, Praed rarely addressed politics. The seventh stanza nicely captures politics in the twenty-first century:

 

“And to the world I publish gaily,

That all things are improving daily;

That suns grow warmer, streamlets clearer,

And faith more warm, and love sincerer;

That children grow extremely clever,

That sin is seldom known, or never;

That gas, and steam, and education,

Are killing sorrow and starvation!

Pleasant visions!—but alas,

How those pleasant visions pass!

If you care for what I say,

You’re an April Fool to-day!”

 

I won’t proselytize for Praed. By today’s standards his work is old-fashioned – rhyming, metrically strict. But his poems have a charm about them, an obvious willingness to please readers. In an untitled poem Praed composed his apologia:

 

“These gifts shall be unfading signs

That, in his early days,

Some beaming eyes could read his lines,

Some beauteous lips could praise;

Fair Lady, from the cup of bliss

He wants and wishes only this!

 

“For he was born a wayward boy,

To laugh when hopes deceive him,

To grasp at every fleeting joy,

And jest at all that leave him,

To love a quirk, and loathe a quarrel,

And never care a straw for laurel.

 

“And thus, the creature of a day,

And rather fool than knave,

And either very gravely gay

Or very gaily grave,

He cares for nought but wit and wine,

And flatteries,—such as this of thine!”

 

[The Larkin passage can be found in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (1983).]

'Make Them Into a Single Poet'

“He knows that every man who has some music in his soul can write poetry ten or twelve times in the natural course of his life, if the stars are propitious, but he does not propose to abuse that modest privilege.”

 

That sounds about right – ten or twelve times. Writing poems for most of us is a young man’s indulgence. They arrive with puberty, like pimples. Then we slowly come to our senses and, chastened by embarrassment, give it up and get a real job. Some sad souls never learn.

 

Borges is writing in his 1951 essay “The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald,” about the English poet best known not for his own work but for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which he translated from the Persian in 1859. I remember carrying a pamphlet of the poem with me in junior high school as a sort of romance and/or poetry talisman. Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) was a Persian astronomer and mathematician, as well as a poet, and was made immortal in English by Fitzgerald. Borges writes:

 

“Seven centuries go by with their enlightenments and agonies and transformations, and in England a man is born, FitzGerald, less intellectual than Omar, but perhaps more sensitive and sadder. FitzGerald knows that his true fate is literature, and he practices it with indolence and tenacity. He reads and rereads the Quixote, which seems to him almost the best of all books (but he does not wish to be unjust to Shakespeare and ‘dear old Virgil’), and his love extends to the dictionary in which he looks for words.”

 

In his first edition, Fitzgerald translated Quatrain XI like this:

 

“Herewith a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,

A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness—

And Wilderness is Paradise enow.”

 

Here is the revised stanza from 1859, the better-known version I memorized as a kid:

 

“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness—

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”

 

I didn’t know then that enow means “enough.” These lines seemed like the height of guilt-free hedonism – another yearning we give up with puberty. Like so many writers in the English tradition, Fitzgerald is an eccentric, a sport of nature whose existence could never have been predicted. He is a memorably witty letter writer. Borges again:

 

“Around 1854 he is lent a manuscript collection of Omar’s compositions, arranged according to the alphabetical order of the rhymes; FitzGerald turns a few into Latin and glimpses the possibility of weaving them into a continuous and organic book that would begin with images of morning, the rose, and the nightingale, and end with those of night and the tomb. To this improbable and even unbelievable proposition, FitzGerald devotes his life, that of an indolent, solitary, maniacal man.”

 

Here is Borges distilling the case of Edward Fitzgerald:

 

“All collaboration is mysterious. That of the Englishman and the Persian was even more so, for the two were quite different, and perhaps in life might not have been friends; death and vicissitudes and time led one to know the other and make them into a single poet.”

 

Fitzgerald was born on this date, March 31, in 1809, and died in 1883 at age seventy-four.

 

[Cited above is Eliot Weinberger’s translation of the Borges essay in Selected Non-Fictions, 1999.]

'Perhaps Even Pleasure in Difference'

“The voice of his poems, though sometimes marred by an affectation of toughness, is severe, sardonic, and bruising.” 

Who might be the subject of this evaluation? Hardly a recipe for poetry awards and grants today. Jonathan Swift would be a respectable guess. No political pieties, sensitive introspection or lines that read like flaccid prose. Irving Howe is speaking of his friend and fellow faculty member at Brandeis, J.V. Cunningham. In A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (1982), Howe devotes two out of his 382 pages to Cunningham but concludes by calling him “the one colleague whom I regarded as my teacher.” I have a copy of Cunningham’s Tradition and Poetic Structure (1960) inscribed “For Irving, Aug. 29, 1960, J.V.C.”

Attentively reading Cunningham’s poetry and prose could constitute a first-rate education, one largely absent from today’s universities. Howe writes:

 

“Prickly, contentious, rudely charming, he was a determined plebian. If I had a New York dress presser for a father, he had a Montana carpenter, and we both felt warmth for the unions to which our fathers had belonged, both despised the genteel pretensions of many academics. Cunningham was not an easy man to be near. Inner torments could make him savage (as they could make me sullen). The way to preserve a friendship with him was to keep a certain distance.”

 

This rings true to life. Nor will readers of Cunningham’s stringently witty poetry, written in the classical plain style reminiscent of Ben Jonson, be surprised by Howe’s characterization. Here’s an untitled poem from Trivial, Vulgar, and Exalted (1959):

 

“I had gone broke, and got set to come back,

And lost, on a hot day and a fast track,

On a long shot at long odds, a black mare

By Hatred out of Envy by Despair.”

 

Cunningham published no mediocre poems. I rank him among the finest American poets, with Dickinson, Robinson, Eliot, Frost and Wilbur. Howe describes him as “an intellectual opponent of romanticism [who] struggled in his poetry, as in his life, with an ineradicably romantic temperament.” This is shrewd criticism and character analysis, and Howe goes on to praise the example Cunningham set for him as a critic, teacher, scholar and human being:

 

“Between Cunningham and me there was an enormous gap in experience, temperament, ideas. Yet we worked easily together, amused and pleased that we could. Being professional himself, he honored me with the presumption that I too could become professional. I learned, by being with him, the value of scraping against a mind utterly unlike one’s own, so that finally there could emerge between our two minds a conditional peace, perhaps even pleasure in difference.” 

 

I find it difficult to choose a favorite poem by Cunningham but I’m partial to To What Strangers, What Welcome (1964), subtitled A Sequence of Short Poems. In his essay “Several Kinds of Short Poem” the poet, who grew up in Montana, writes:

 

“The poems would deal with the American West, that vast spiritual region from Great Falls, Montana, to El Paso, Texas; from Fort Riley, Kansas, to the sinks of Kansas; and with the California Coast, another and perhaps less spiritual region. And the poems would relate some sort of illicit and finally terminated love affair. And there would be a fusion of the feeling in the personal relationship and the feeling for the West and the Coast.”

 

The sequence consists of fifteen poems. It’s not a travelogue but an elliptical narrative which he sketches in the essay like this: “A traveler drives west; he falls in love; he comes home.” The fractured story is grim and occasionally squalid, more film noir than happy romance, as in the sixth poem:

 

“It was in Vegas. Celibate and able

I left the silver dollars on the table

And tried the show. The black-out, baggy pants,

Of course, and then this answer to romance:

Her ass twitching as if it had the fits,

Her gold crotch grinding, her athletic tits,

One clock, the other counter clockwise twirling.

It was enough to stop a man from girling.”

 

It’s Cunningham’s correlation of the vast, uninhabited landscape and the narrator’s fraught emotional life that makes To What Strangers, What Welcome so compelling. Here is the first poem in the sequence, summarized by Timothy Steele as an “intimation of an as-yet-unmet lover”:

 

“I drive Westward. Tumble and loco weed

Persist. And in the vacancies of need,

The leisure of desire, whirlwinds a face

As luminous as love, lost as this place.”

 

Cunningham was born on August 23, 1911, and died on this date, March 30, in 1985.

 

[The books to get are The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, ed. Timothy Steele, 1997) and The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham, Wiseblood Books, 2024). Also, see the class notes kept by the late D.G. Myers when he was a student of Cunningham.]

'To Sparkle'

Almost fourteen years ago a friend gave us two anonymous bulbs about the size and color of a Bosc pear. I planted them in the front garden between the pine and the lantana and waited. One disappeared, never to bloom. The other, like crocuses in the North, is our reliable harbinger of spring: 

It’s an amaryllis, with a blossom the color of a pomegranate. The name derives from a shepherdess in Virgil’s Eclogues, from the Greek amarysso, “to sparkle,” though my first thought is always of Marian the Librarian’s instructions to her piano student in The Music Man: “Now don’t dawdle, Amaryllis.” At a more elevated level I remember Milton’s lines in “Lycidas”:

 

“To sport with Amaryllis in the shade

Or with the tangles Neaera’s hair?”

 

So each year around this time I read Milton’s poem again, just as I reread the Christmas chapters in Pickwick Papers each December and the description of a seder in Isaac Rosenfeld’s novel Passage from Home (1946) around Passover. I confess I don’t much care for the color of the flower. It’s too emphatic, almost gaudy. I’m more of a pastel partisan. What I admire is the flower’s reliability, self-reliance (no human care required) and simplicity of design: two leaves, stem, flower. More recently I found a reference to the flower in Tennyson’s “The Daisy,” set in Italy:

 

“What slender campanili grew

By bays, the peacock’s neck in hue;

Where, here and there, on sandy beaches

A milky-bell’d amaryllis blew.”