'An Interzone Between Prose and Poetry'

Among Clive James’ books, perhaps the least read is Gate of Lilacs (Picador, 2016), a book of poems mostly about Marcel Proust and James’ imminent death (he would die in 2019). The poet taught himself French by reading Proust and a dictionary across many decades. Proust and his masterwork were essential to my education as well. I first read the Scott-Moncrieff translation, Remembrance of Things Past, over the summer of 1971 while managing a miniature golf course – a silly setting Proust would have appreciated. Ten years later, when I was working as a newspaper reporter, I read Terence Kilmartin’s newly revised edition of In Search of Lost Time. While reading Proust I remember thinking all the rest of literature was somehow second-rate, even Shakespeare. That left me feeling rather guilty and somehow disloyal. In his postscript James writes: 

“Proust was a very clever man, and had nothing to do with his day except observe, study and write. His powers of observation were as acute as Dante’s, Shakespeare’s or Goethe’s, but we might say the same of Lucretius, or of Homer when he registered in a set of syllables the quivering of a bowstring: when Conrad said that the writer’s aim was ‘above all, to make you see’, he forgot to say that the ability to observe is the writer’s first qualification.”

 

That’s what I remember: Proust’s powers of concentration, the way he could observe a scene and analyze it for many pages without being tedious. James takes up one of his favorite themes: the relationship of prose to poetry:

 

“Perhaps it merely blurs categories to say that the expression of a thought in prose can have a poetry of its own, but in fact poets have always been attracted to the mere sound of phrases lying loose. Tell a poet that Kepler, with his newly improved refracting telescope, observed SN 1604 in Serpentarius and you might get no reaction. But tell the same poet that Kepler studied the geometry of lunar shadows and he might make a note, because the phrase sounds good. There is an interzone between prose and poetry: a porous border where the discursive expression of a thought is rhythmic or resonant enough to take off on its own and enter the area where words and phrases, seemingly in search of one another, combine into a meaning beyond analysis.”

 

The accompanying poems are not merely discursive. James often returns to his illness and mortality. In the section titled, after Prospero, “I’ll Drown My Books,” James writes:

 

“And soon

All that I love will leave me, as I go

First into silence, then the fire, and then

The harbour water, in which there will be

At last no room to breathe, no time to think:

No time to think even of you, Marcel.”

 

If you have ever contemplated reading Proust but have been daunted by its length or reputation, let me recommend Gate of Lilacs as an excellent orexigenic – an appetite stimulant. I’m taking a dose of it myself for a third reading.

'An Art of Measured Speech'

Can a congenital pessimist reject the notion of an imminent apocalypse, a collapse of all that Western Civilization has accomplished? Sure, I can. I dislike fashionable doom-saying at least as much as blinkered, kneejerk optimism. Not everyone out there is a mindless nihilist, a lazy critic of all that is best in our species. I’m reminded of the late Terry Teachout calling himself (and H.L. Mencken) an “ebullient pessimist.” We have attained too much wisdom and aesthetic accomplishment to let it rot or be torn down from within. It’s easier to criticize, say, Aristotle or Shakespeare, if you haven’t read them and incorporated the way they look at the world into your life. 

I’m thinking of writers like James Joyce, who could hardly make a move without evoking Aquinas or Flaubert, or George Santayana, who wrote with Democritus and Spinoza at his shoulder. At the conclusion of Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (1990), his three-hundred-page historical and aesthetic defense of formal verse and review of free verse, Timothy Steele writes:

 

“What is most essential to human life and to its continuance remains a love of nature, an enthusiasm for justice, a readiness of good humor, a spontaneous susceptibility to beauty and joy, an interest in our past, a hope for our future and above all, a desire that others should have the opportunity and encouragement to share in those qualities. An art of measured speech nourishes these qualities in a way no other pursuit can.”

 

Steele is no stiff-necked reactionary. One page earlier he writes:

 

“The poetry of the past can elevate and console us. But it cannot do this as fully and richly as poetry of the present. Only the poetry of the present speaks of our life and time. And though the poetry of Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson can connect us with the past, only the poetry of our time can connect us with the future and give us the indispensable hope that something that we say will matter to our descendants and will enable them to live more intelligently and happily than otherwise they might. Only the poetry of our time can offer the prospect that, after we and those we love have returned to dust, some reader somewhere will be moved by lines that bear witness to us and will commit our words to heart and mind that we may live again.”

'Give One Thing More, a Gratefull Heart'

I spent Thursday morning in the hospital having a nuclear stress test performed. It’s a painless, time-consuming procedure made pleasant by the nurses and techs who worked on me. By my count they represented five countries of origin, not including my cardiologist, who is from India. My blood pressure has been distressingly low and the doctor urged me to use more salt after I’ve spent a lifetime hearing the opposite advice. He also fetched a can of Coke, the high-test stuff, something I haven’t drunk since I was a kid. He thought the caffeine would help, considering I had been fasting and didn’t consume my usual two cups of coffee first thing in the morning. 

To pass the time and fortify my heart (the purpose of the test was to clear me for multiple surgeries) I brought along the pocket-size Oxford World’s Classic edition of The Poems of George Herbert, Such a companionable poet. See “Gratefulnesse,” which begins:

 

“Thou that hast giv’n so much to me,

Give one thing more, a gratefull heart.

See how thy beggar works on thee

                                              By art.”

'I’m Still Alive; the Gods May Be Confused'

I don’t remember old people complaining about being old when I was a kid. It might have been joked about in passing but I recall little indulgence in self-pity. My maternal step-grandfather was a joker who loved his beer and, after retiring as a house painter, volunteered as a school crossing guard. He was one of the funniest people I knew when growing up. He was not a blood relative but we called him Uncle Kelly. When he talked about serving in the Army during World War I, he recalled having a turnip fight with other doughboys in some French field. The same went for my mother’s mother. In 1962, at age seventy-four, she suffered a stroke that left her left side paralyzed. She lived with us for several months. No complaining. She was a gentle soul, rare in my family. 

Now it’s common to hear my contemporaries, men and women, bitch about having reached their seventies. At the same time they want to extend their longevity, seemingly forever. I sense a generational shift toward self- centeredness, less acceptance of aging and its accompanying losses and gains. Catharine Savage Brosman was born in 1934 and is still writing. Last year in the Alabama Literary Review she published “The Body’s Past Its Prime”

 

“My youth was orderly, and I was green,

reserved, and bent on cultivating mind—

thank God; my figure, habits all were lean,

my appetites appropriate, refined.

 

“Time was abundant. One did not misspend

it, though; for ‘recreation,’ there were rules,

for play and married love, the proper end

of girlhood. Those ignoring them were fools.

 

“I’m still alive; the gods may be confused.

Or I. And now I’m squandering my old age—

these added years a favor, but unused,

my superannuated charms offstage,

 

“while there’s no need for prudence; no one cares

or notices; all conduct is the same,

all preferences; no one says affairs

or trysts. One’s liver is, perhaps, to blame

 

“for caution; any other pretext, trite.

Today, though, someone texts me from Saigon.

(He worked there once.) He’s thinking of me. Might

he come to see me? As in antiphon,

 

“I answered, ‘Yes! Of course!’ My old heart raced.

Conditions set, however; I can’t yield

too much. His company won’t go to waste;

yet I am wary. Let’s define the field.

 

“The body’s past its prime, eyes faulty, skin

discolored, muscles slack. No shorts, sarong;

no negligee for hours of yang and yin,

sweet commerce, book talk. It cannot last long.”

 

The tone is wistful, not complaining. There’s sadness, yes. Some things we’ll never recover, but that has always been the case. “I’m still alive; the gods may be confused.”

'Distress With Which We Cannot Sympathise'

I recently learned that an acquaintance had lost his job and my reflexive reaction was to laugh. The people I was with were offended. How could I be amused by another person’s misfortune? Easy, I thought but didn’t say. Our newly jobless friend had been earning an enormous annual salary, more than I made in my three or four best years. But that wasn’t what triggered my laughter. Rather, it was his spendthrift ways. He’s the sort of guy who will penny-pinch and complain about the small, essential expenses and spend extravagantly on wine and resort vacations. He’s always griping about money. My laughter was karmic. I laughed because I sensed he was getting his just comeuppance. Happy ending? He quickly got another lucrative job. 

In his lecture “On Wit and Humour” (1818), William Hazlitt roots laughter in incongruity, “the disconnecting one idea from another, or the jostling of one feeling against another.” The unexpected makes us laugh. The simplest, flattest most commonplace statement or action can spur laughter if we are not anticipating it. My big-spender acquaintance overnight became unemployed. That’s funny. Hazlitt writes:

 

“[A] rich source of the ludicrous is distress with which we cannot sympathise from its absurdity or insignificance. Women laugh at their lovers. We laugh at a damned author, in spite of our teeth, and though he may be our friend. ‘There is something in the misfortunes of our best friends that pleases us.’”

 

Hazlitt is quoting a universal truth formulated by Francois de La Rochefoucauld in his Réflexions ou Maximes Morales (1665). Laughter is more than jolliness or good humor. It can be subversive of politeness, respectability, even conventional morality. Dr. Johnson writes on May 26, 1759 in The Idler: “Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.” Laughter can explode like a bomb of bad manners. “Merriment is always the effect of a sudden impression,” Johnson writes. “The jest which is expected is already destroyed.” Hazlitt was a brilliant prose stylist, one of the finest in English, but not a particularly funny guy.

'My Sneaking Preference'

Irresistible title: “Books That Have Hindered Me.” The opening of Agnes Repplier’s essay is a fair sample of her prose and her genteelly caustic sensibility:

 

“So many grateful and impetuous spirits have recently come forward to tell to an approving world how they have been benefited by their early reading and by their wisely chosen favorites in literature that the trustful listener begins to think, against his own rueful experience, that all books must be pleasant and profitable companions.”

 

I’m reminded of the silly ritual of politicians naming their favorite or most influential books. We don’t, of course, believe a word of it. Some years ago, when Hillary Clinton named Little Women and said, “Like many women of my generation who read this novel growing up, I really felt like I lived in Jo’s family. This book was one of the first literary explorations of how women balance the demands of their daily lives, from raising families to pursuing outside goals. The book was written more than a century ago, but its message resonates today,” we’re left with the certainty that she has never read Alcott’s book or read it only at the command of her handlers’ playbook. Her husband named Marcus Aurelius (who wrote in Book VII of the Meditations: “Be thou erect, or be made erect.”)

 

Repplier’s essay was published in the July 1889 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, which also includes work by Henry James and Sarah Orne Jewett. I’m not certain any book has ever “hindered” me but I can think of several that I read only under duress – namely, textbooks and Norton anthologies. I’m a great believer in independent reading guided only by curiosity and respect for literary tradition. My seventh-grade English textbook (1964-65), I remember, might have been published in 1889. It was heavy with sub-literary Americana: Edward Evertt Hale’s “The Man Without a Country” and too many poems by William Cullen Bryant. In college I resented the warehousing of literature represented by the Norton behemoths. Repplier respects those readers who “are disposed, with an untimely levity, to confess that they have read for amusement rather than for self-instruction, and that they have not found it so easily attainable.”

 

Still pervasive among Americans is a neo-Puritanical impulse to read, or at least claim to read, books of “self-improvement,” pleasure be damned. Repplier writes of a preachy-sounding children’s novel previously unknown to me, The History of Sandford and Merton (1783-89) by Thomas Day. “Altogether,” she writes, “Sandford and Merton affected me the wrong way; and, for the first time, my soul revolted from the pretentious virtues of honest poverty. It is to the malign influence of that tale that I owe my sneaking preference for the drones and butterflies of earth.” Repplier then launches into a delightful apologia of inarguable common sense:

 

“I do not now believe that all men are born equal; I do not love universal suffrage; I mistrust all popular agitators, all intrusive legislation, all philanthropic fads, all self-styled friends of the people. I cannot even sympathize with the noble theory that every man and woman should do their share of the world’s work; I would gladly shirk my own if I could. And this lamentable, unworthy view of life and its responsibilities is due to the subtle poison instilled into my youthful mind by the too strenuous counter-teaching of Sandford and Merton.”

'Yielding to the Change Assigned'

I think of Edwin Arlington Robinson as an autumnal poet, just as certain others are vernal. Even when the ostensible subject is elsewhere, the fall shows up in his work as setting or mood. His was a sensibility sensitive to time’s passage, endings, sundown, the imminence of winter and death. But he’s seldom morbid or maudlin. The title character in “Mr.Flood’s Party” says to himself one night: “‘Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon / Again, and we may not have many more . . .’” 

On October 5, 1893, at age twenty-three, in a letter to his friend Harry de Forest Smith, before he had written the poetry we remember him for, Robinson writes: “It is a warm and magnificent day after a long cold rain, and I naturally think of the spot where the ashes of our old fires, with a few shrivelled corn-husks, are all there is to tell of the many jolly symposiums we held there only few weeks ago. It beats the devil how time creeps away with those skinny shanks of his.”

 

October, of course, is the true Poetry Month, not the imposter April. The month’s poetic bounty is humbling. Apart from the excellence of most, it would be difficult to generalize about the nature of these October poets. Cummings’ work has a spring-like character, though Keats is an autumn man. Robinson was born in December, which further discredits astrological typecasting. Here is his sonnet “The Sheaves,” which always reminds me of the old gospel hymn “Bringing in the Sheaves”:

 

“Where long the shadows of the wind had rolled,

Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;

And as by some vast magic undivined

The world was turning slowly into gold.

Like nothing that was ever bought or sold

It waited there, the body and the mind;

And with a mighty meaning of a kind

That tells the more the more it is not told.

 

“So in a land where all days are not fair,

Fair days went on till on another day

A thousand golden sheaves were lying there,

Shining and still, but not for long to stay—

As if a thousand girls with golden hair

Might rise from where they slept and go away.”