'Amused Sympathetic Affection'

“He was not at all put off by the spectacle of human imperfection.”

 

That’s what keeps us amused, right? As a species we’re an inconsistent mess. We’re angry when we don’t get our way and when we get it we’re disappointed. That’s the engine that drives human affairs, our rapacious vanity and intolerance. Above, Lord David Cecil is writing of his friend the critic Desmond MacCarthy (1877-1952) in the preface to the latter’s posthumously published Humanities (1954).

 

I happened to be reading MacCarthy (an old-fashioned lover of books, prose and ideas) again when someone sent me a compilation video of various young Americans calling, in unambiguous language, for the murder of their fellow imperfect humans (a redundancy) – that is, people with whom they disagree. It was shocking to see such lip-smacking relish for homicide. They reminded me of the nihilists in late-nineteenth-century Russia, when murder became fashionable and members of the middle class and students endorsed and practiced killing. As Gary Saul Morson, the historian of that time and place, puts it in Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (2023):

 

“For those addicted to the thrill of danger and the intensity of the moment, familiar violence soon becomes routine and ceases to have the desired effect. As with addictive drugs, larger and larger doses are needed. The war on boredom grows boring; repeated violence soon seems almost peaceful; and the struggle against everydayness turns into an everyday affair that one must struggle against.”

 

Times change. Human nature doesn't. Good writers are more scarce and less valued. Cecil goes on to describe MacCarthy as grownup blessed with a sense of humility:

 

“The worried, undignified animal called man, bustling about with his unwieldy bundle of inconsistent hopes and fears, virtues and weaknesses, stirred in him the amused sympathetic affection of one who feels himself akin to him and, therefore, has no reason to look on him with dislike or contempt. Or even disrespect: there was nothing of the sentimental cynic about Desmond MacCarthy.”

 

Consider how MacCarthy treats Sydney Smith (1771-1845), Anglican minister, advocate for Roman Catholic rights and one of the greatest wits in the English tradition. MacCarthy finds much to admire and much to dismiss in Smith:

 

“Like many of the great wits, like Voltaire himself, he was a champion of bourgeois sense and rational philistinism. Like Voltaire he was intensely social and only lived intensely when he was busy or in company; like the greater man he was an admirable friend. He could hardly have been more benevolent, but he was also kinder than that prophet of eighteenth century bourgeois morality. It did not make him chuckle to give pain, though he loved a scrap. He was good-natured – in fact an English Voltaire. Not such a good writer – Heavens no! But still he could say with truth, 'I never wrote anything very dull in my life.'”

 

[Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books has republished Humanities and five other titles by MacCarthy.]

'Look for the Ridiculous in Everything'

“Thirty years old today, and all around me I feel the waters of melancholy recede.

“Thirty years old! Now I’m convinced I shall not escape death.”

 

Two statements written by the same man on the same day and, according to popular understanding, utterly contradictory. Awareness of our mortality makes us pensive if not clinically depressed. But that doesn’t take into account the roughhewn, commonsensical genius of Jules Renard. He is writing in his Journal on February 22, 1894, with a peasant’s pragmatism and the gift of dry irony. He has just turned age thirty and two-thirds of his life has already passed; though, of course, he doesn't know that. On February 22, 1904, he writes:

 

“Forty years old! For the sage, death is perhaps merely the passage from one day to the next. He dies as others turn forty.”

 

Renard here is cagier. Does he deem himself a sage? He seems never have taken himself too seriously – a rare and essential virtue. He never whines. Here, just two years later:

 

“Forty-two years old. What have I done? Next to nothing, and now I do nothing at all.

 

“I have less talent, money health, fewer readers, fewer friends, but more resignation.

 

“Death appears to me as a wide lake that I am approaching, whose outlines I begin to make out.

 

“Am I any better a person? Not much. I have less energy to do wrong.”

 

A minor sinner’s self-assessment. Not bad enough to be evil nor good enough to be a saint. Pride in both directions kept within uneasy boundaries. The entry for February 22, 1908:

 

“Forty-four is when you begin to give up hope of doubling before quitting.

 

“I feel old, but would not wish to be younger by as much as five minutes.”

 

Signs of genuine, hard-earned maturity. The opposite of Yeats and his monkey glands or the male Boomer with a gray ponytail and Grateful Dead tattoos. Finally, the Journal entry from February 22, 1910:

 

“Forty-six today. How much longer do I have? Until the autumn?”  

 

He didn’t make it. Renard was born on February 22, 1864, and died on May 22, 1910, of arteriosclerosis – a condition readily treatable today -- at age forty-six. As he wrote in his Journal on February 17, 1890, “Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it.”

 

[All quoted passages are taken from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'Whence Comes That Small Continuous Silence?'

“Whence comes that small continuous silence / Haunting the livelong day?—” 

We might think of Walter de la Mare as the poetic opposite of more clamorous poets like Ezra Pound. De la Mare hints, whispers, evokes without naming. The lines above are taken from his six-line poem “Swallows Flown” (Memory and Other Poems, 1938). The birds in the title are not mentioned in the body of the poem, which seems appropriate in a verse about absence:

 

“Whence comes that small continuous silence

Haunting the livelong day?—

This void, where a sweetness, so seldom heeded,

Once ravished my heart away?

As if a loved one, too little valued,

Had vanished—could not stay?”

 

All of us live with absence, whether the result of death, geographical change or the dissolution of friendship. Remove the title and who or what would you conclude is being described in de la Mare’s poem? It’s a sort of Rorschach test for the reader. I might think of our dog, who died this week, or my brother.

 

Swallows arrive in de la Mare’s England in the spring and move on early in the autumn. A little reading suggests the sounds they produce change as the seasons change. Early on we would hear courtship songs followed by the chattering of the newly hatched brood. As they fledge, the sounds diminish and then the swallows leave.

 

I’m reminded of William Maxwell’s 1937 novel They Came Like Swallows, structured around another absence -- the death in the 1918 flu epidemic of the main character’s mother. Bunny is eight, Maxwell was ten when his mother died in the same epidemic. Maxwell takes his title from Yeats’ “Coole Park, 1929” and uses six lines from the third stanza as his novel’s epigraph:   

 

“They came like swallows and like swallows went,

And yet a woman’s powerful character

Could keep a Swallow to its first intent;

And half a dozen in formation there,

That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point,

Found certainty upon the dreaming air . . .”

'May the Days Be Worthy of Your Wonder'

The young couple across the cul-de-sac from us have just had their third child, a son this time. The neighborhood has always been rich in children. When we moved in fourteen years ago, sixteen kids lived here in the street’s nine houses. Twelve of them were boys. Now there are seventeen kids, even with our three sons living in Maryland, Peru and Westchester County. None of the current crop appears to be a delinquent. They’re noisy, of course, and forever riding bicycles and scooters. One kid even has an e-bike. I had forgotten that children always run if they have a choice in the matter, and yelling is the language they speak. 

We hear the fertility rate in the United States – the number of children born to women of childbearing years – reached a record low in 2024 and dropped even lower last year. I don’t claim to understand the economics or sociology of this trend. It just seems sad. Children are difficult and exhausting but they make everything worthwhile. When you have a child, you’re forced to relinquish your fiercely held self-centeredness and live for another being. You have something you would gladly give up your own life to keep safe.

 

Yvor Winters and his wife, the poet/novelist Janet Lewis, had a son and a daughter. Winters concludes his poem “A Prayer for My Son” with these lines:

 

“Eternal Spirit, you

Who guided Socrates,

Pity this small and new

Bright soul on hands and knees.”

 

Daniel Mark Epstein published another blessing poem, “Caesarean,” in the Winter 1998 issue of The American Scholar. Note the final three lines:

 

“Startled from ancient sleep in a dark house

By crashing walls, harsh torches, strangers

Dragging him naked through his mother's blood,

No hero would stand up to the invaders

With such intrinsic dignity as you showed

This morning, the first day of your life.

At the shock of air you cried out loud

In sight of a new world and a world lost.

Then you were quiet, curious, engrossed,

Blue eyes half-open bearing a ripple of light

From that primordial ocean cast asunder.

May your vision never weary of the sight

Of this strange country and our stranger ways;

And may the days be worthy of your wonder.” 

'Mere Gall Is No Better Than Mere Sugar'

“The attendants at literary tea-parties are not, as a rule, readers of books. Reviews of books are more to their taste.”

In my younger years I was an occasional attendee at such gatherings, though most were less tea-parties than beer-and-a-bump soirées. Sometimes a writer was present. I remember Jerzy Kosinski and Anthony Burgess out-drinking everyone and remaining at least technically conscious. But Max Beerbohm identifies the essential quality of such shindigs: book chat, ass-kissing, and more talk of publishers, agents and critics than of actual books. I outgrew my taste for literary stargazing pretty quickly.

Beerbohm is reviewing Maxim Gorki’s play “The Lower Depths” in the December 5, 1903 issue of the Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art. Russian literature was in vogue at this time in English society. Constance Garnett was translating Tolstoy, Goncharov, Turgenev and Chekhov, among others. Before taking on the Gorki production, Beerbohm indicts the fashionable crowd:

“Last week I wrote harshly about the English people’s contempt for the things of the mind. But I think I prefer that stolid contempt to the gushing superficial curiosity evinced in certain little private circles. The attitude which may be called ‘the literary tea-party attitude’ seems to me of all attitudes the most dreadful.”

Beerbohm’s experience is true to my own. He recalls “those brief and frantic little conversations into which the guests at literary tea-parties plunge as though they had something worth saying and as though there were something worth hearing” I remember. The rage du jour was Gorki. When young I read his strident stories and plays and remember mercifully little about them. So it is with Beerbohm and his demolition of “The Lower Depths”:

“There must be some kind of artistic unity—unity either of story or of idea. There must be a story, though it need not be stuck to like grim death; or there must be, with similar reservation, an idea. Gorki has neither asset. . . . Enough that he gives us, honestly and fearlessly, ‘a slice of life’? Enough, certainly, if he did anything of the kind. But he doesn’t. ‘The Lower Depths’ is no ‘slice.’ It is chunks, hunks, shreds and gobbets, clawed off anyhow, chucked at us anyhow.”

Beerbohm’s indictment remains pertinent, for ours is an age in which propaganda often supplants the artistically rendered in any form. He dismisses the imitative fallacy:

“We are not at all squeamish. But we demand of the playwright who deals with ugly things, just as we demand of the playwright who deals with pretty things, something more than the sight of his subject-matter. Mere gall is no better than mere sugar. It is worse. Mere sugar is not disgusting. Nor is gall disgusting if it be rightly prepared. In other words, horrible subject-matter ceases to be horrible when it is treated by a fine artist.”

I think first of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Gorky later became one of Stalin’s toadies. In a note to his edition of The Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973) Simon Karlinsky writes:

“Gorky’s anti-intellectualism became more pronounced in subsequent years. One of its ugliest manifestations is described in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, in which we find Gorky using his august position in the post-revolutionary literary life to deprive the freezing and starved poet Osip Mandelstam of the pair of trousers he needed to survive through the winter. ‘The trousers themselves were a small matter,’ wrote Mandelstam’s widow, ‘but they spoke eloquently of Gorky’s hostility to a literary trend that was foreign to him.'”

Elsewhere in Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam reports that when informed of the poet Nikolay Gumilyov’s pending execution in 1921, Gorky did nothing. With Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilyov was founder of the poetic movement called Acmeism. In 1932, Gorky was decorated with the Order of Lenin, as were, later, Fidel Castro, Erich Honecker, Enver Hoxha, Josip Broz Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Nelson Mandela, Nikita Khrushchev and Stalin.

'A Plaything Lent Me for the Present'

A pleasing and serendipitous convergence: I was listening again to the Sinatra/Jobim recordings from 1967, including their arrangement of “Baubles, Bangles, & Beads,” from Kismet. I always associate “baubles” with Alexander Pope, especially “The Rape of the Lock.” Later I was reading William Cowper’s “Yardley Oak,” one of the great tree poems in English, and encountered these lines: 

“Thou wast a bauble once, a cup and ball

Which babes might play with; and the thievish jay,

Seeking her food, with ease might have purloin’d

The auburn nut that held thee, swallowing down

Thy yet close-folded latitude of boughs

And all thine embryo vastness at a gulp.”

 

That’s Cowper addressing an acorn. (See “Acorn, Yom Kippur” by Howard Nemerov.) Looking further I found a letter Cowper wrote to his friend the Rev. John Newton on May 3, 1780. Cowper expresses gratitude with a cascade of metaphors. He has entered one of his manic phases:

 

“I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and viewed without a reference to their author, what is the earth—what are the planets—what is the sun itself but a bauble? Better for a man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be able to say, ‘The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!’ Their eyes have never been opened to see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they are closed for ever. They think a fine estate, a large conservatory, a hothouse rich as a West Indian garden, things of consequence; visit them with pleasure, and muse upon them with ten times more.”

 

The OED define bauble as “a small ornament, piece of jewellery, decorative accessory, etc., that is showy or attractive but typically inexpensive or of little value; a trinket, a knick-knack.” In other words, a showy trifle or geegaw, a shiny tchotchke that might attract a magpie or a child. Cowper continues:

 

"I am pleased with a frame of four lights, doubtful whether the few pines it contains will ever be worth a farthing; amuse myself with a greenhouse which Lord Bute’s gardener could take upon his back, and walk away with; and when I have paid it the accustomed visit, and watered it, and given it air, I say to myself: ‘This is not mine, it is a plaything lent me for the present; I must leave it soon.’”

 

A bauble for Cowper is a pretext for a sermon on humility.

'They Don’t Have Sense Enough to See Our Flaws'

He was friendly, the sort of guy who welcomed strangers of almost any species. Though a little slow, mentally speaking, he usually got our jokes. His instinctive reaction to you was something like: “Hi! Would you like a cup of coffee?” He was trusting and affectionate. We tried to learn something from his temperament. 

Luke was roughly fifteen when he died on Monday. We had him for thirteen years. A friend had rescued him and already had another dog so she offered him to us. He had already been named "Luke" so I thought of him as Luke the Drifter, one of Hank Williams’ recording pseudonyms.

                                                                     

I was not a dog person but Luke converted me, especially because he got along so well with our cats. What always irritated me about dogs was their eagerness to please, a quality I confused with sycophancy. Cats are independent. They don’t give a shit, which makes sense to me. They’re less likely to be disappointed. As R.S. Gwynn puts it in the final words of his villanelle “Why They Love Us” (No Word of Farewell: Selected Poems 1970–2000, 2001):

“They don’t have sense enough to see our flaws.

Thank god for that. A big round of applause

 

“For what can sniff your ass and still love you.

Dogs love us uncomplainingly because

They don’t have sense enough to see our flaws.”