'Congealed Violence'

"If architecture is frozen music (and I think it is), then fortifications are congealed violence. That is to say they are the best sort of violence, silent, thoughtful, passive, only to be unleashed by an aggressive enemy. I rather like them. They are, in a way, a form of just war. There is much to be learned from them.” 

In “A Piffling Show,” a blog post on The Lamp website, Peter Hitchens uses Goethe’s well-known description of architecture to recall his own childhood fascination with “Palmerston’s Follies,” the Victorian-era fortifications built near his home in Portsmouth, England. “[T]he fear they embodied,” he writes, “and the strength of the power they were built to resist, were thrilling.”

 

Boys love “playing army,” a harmless opportunity to run around and bloodlessly defeat the enemy – in my younger years, Germans and “Japs.” Children inherit the mythology of their fathers’ wars. In suburban Cleveland, we had no military fortifications. No one, I assume, thought Parma Heights worth defending. A former chicken coop belonging to my long-dead paternal grandmother stood down the hill behind our house. It was always known as “the shanty,” and we used it as a sort of Alamo – one set of boys outside throwing rocks, crabapples and Osage oranges (“monkey balls”) and another inside, trying not to get brained.

 

Hitchens’ essay reminded me of August 1963. While on a family vacation, my brother and I visited Gettysburg a month after the battle’s centenary with one goal in mind: to locate Devil’s Den, famously photographed by Timothy O’Sullivan with a dead Confederate sniper and his rifle conveniently lying in front of a stone wall – what passed for a fortification. We had seen the photograph, known as “Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter,” in a magazine, probably National Geographic. I was almost eleven, Ken was eight. Nothing else mattered, not even the scene of Pickett’s charge, as recalled by William Faulkner in Intruder in the Dust: “For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863 . . .” Of course, we were staunch Union sympathizers.

 

We searched all afternoon in the August heat for that scene without success. We looked for that wall of stones between two boulders. We were disappointed but not as seriously as we would have been had we known that the photo was staged by O’Sullivan. The same corpse was photographed at several sites around the battlefield. The rifle is not one used by sharpshooters and it appears in photographs taken at other locations. Scholars debate the identity of the dead soldier but he remains anonymous.

'His Passage Paid Home Free'

Late in 2024 I was browsing in old issues of The American Scholar from the era when Joseph Epstein was the editor. In the Winter 1986 issue I found a poem by Edward Case titled “As Grammarians”:

 

“This life which is a sentence

Is also a declaration.

We make the sense of it

In our own terms.

As grammarians

We assert our meaning,

In what we decline,

In what we affirm,

In the conjugation of love,

In the predicates

And imperatives

And ambiguities

Of prosaic choice

We essay briefly

To define ourselves

Before the stop.”

 

Why had I never heard of Case? Long before 1986, free verse had taken over like an alien species of weed and virtually snuffed out the formal natives. Case’s poem was witty – a series of near-puns playing off, Elizabethan-style, the implications of “grammar.” And yet there was nothing archaic about the language and nothing slangy. Not a syllable is out of place. No filler and nothing to excess. It left me wanting to read more by this guy. Why had I never heard of Case? Here is the tagline accompanying the poem:

   

“Edward Case’s work has appeared in various journals, including the New Criterion, the Wall Street Journal, and Modern Age. This poem was taken from a collection of recent work that he was preparing for publication at the time of his death last summer.”

 

I was shocked and saddened. Case had never published a collection of his poetry “Before the stop.” I found a scattering of his other poems, several as accomplished as “As Grammarians.” So I wrote about him, hoping to read more of his work and learn what had happened to this gifted unknown poet. I soon heard from James Case, the late poet’s son, a recently retired architect living in New Jersey. “He was one of the most gifted people I’ve ever known,” he wrote. We subsequently spoke many times and exchanged emails as he resolved to publish that “collection of recent work.”

 

In a resolute act of filial devotion, James has worked for the last year and a half editing, introducing, annotating, designing and publishing The Business Of The Dancer (Kaseowitz Publishing, 2026).  Full disclosure: I proof-read the book several times at James’ request and tried to answer his questions when I felt competent to do so. It’s very much, however, a one-man job. In his introduction to the collection of seventy-five poems, James writes:

 

“Edward Case’s poetry is formal, often employing rhyme and meter. The poems are efficient, with no excess. While accessible, they exhibit nuanced complexity, with words often bearing multiple meanings. The tone is philosophical, with observations on life, mortality, politics, love, nature, and the nature of things. Serious but not without wit, the poems are the work of a well-read, broad intellect.”

 

Edward Case, born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, had been reviewing books since the nineteen-fifties. At the same time he was a businessman, owning a company that manufactured gasket pumps. He held ten patents. He befriended Hilton Kramer. He wrote for the Wall Street Journal and National Review and exchanged letters with the English novelist Joyce Cary. After Cary’s death in 1957, Case published an essay about his work in the Spring 1959 issue of Modern Age, in which he wrote:

 

“And then he died, and after the obituaries were written the makers of literary opinion continued to write about lesser artists, and there was no sign to indicate that anyone understood that one of the greatest creators in the history of the novel had finished his work.”

 

Case died of leukemia on July 10, 1985, at age sixty-two. Here is a brief sampler of poems from The Business Of The Dancer beginning with the early “Now I Have Died a Little”:

 

“Now I have died a little.

I am a little old.

Though not for coffin ready,

Nor stone-weighed cold.

Now I have died a little,

And my dying is this:

What I cannot do, I see,

And what I shall miss.”

 

“Hasidim”:

 

“To be closer

They keep their distance.

As shadows defining light

They wear black space formally,

Like the discreet livery

Of proud servants:

Black hats, the plane width of distance

And black coats the hiding lengths

In which they stoop.

They stare inward

Like blind astronomers.

Beneath the effacing beards

Countenance is immaterial.

Hair, pious, templed,

Argues intricately

For the guarded head

Covered against the glittering, temporal,

Perilous dust.

Beauty, which is of things, is dark.

The fire which sustains the world

Hides in a spark.”

 

“Minor Poet” (reminiscent of Samuel Menashe’s work):

 

“Saved by a line

Before he sank

Into the nameless sea:

His sentence stayed,

His passage paid

Home free.”

 

And here is “1914,” one of four poems by Case published in the October 1985 issue of The New Criterion:

 

“The pearly throat of that peacock age was torn

In summer and its shriek yet grows, screaming

Unheard in all our days and deeds, like static

From a falling star, unseeming as the dust

Of space, yet crying murder as it bleeds.

So the voiceless moon imparting gravity

To frivolous tides roils the world unseen

But never hides its light nor ever slows.

 

“Slain then the nightingale and the steed,

The garden wall then fallen, the enchanted

Wood a tiring room for weary death

And summer’s lawn sown to widows’ weed.

For winter came in August killing fruit and seed.

In that broken season forever died the rose.”

 

[The Business Of The Dancer is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org.] 

'Rest and Have Ease'

William Wordsworth in anyone’s book is a major poet but I seldom read him any longer because I find much of his work dull as dishwater. There was a time when that sentiment could have consigned me to non-personhood in certain literary circles. His contemporary Walter Savage Landor is rightly judged a minor poet but I return with pleasure to his epigrams. Am I confused? Cutely paradoxical? Can we make such distinctions? The American poet Robert B. Shaw addresses these questions in “The Puzzle of Minor Poetry”: 

“Like many others, over the years I have been often bemused, and sometimes rankled, by the terms ‘minor poet’ and ‘minor poetry.’ The adjective ‘minor’ seems at once vague and peremptory. Vague: The suggestion is that such poetry is called minor because something is wrong with it, but since there are many ways in which poems can go wrong, this is not helpfully descriptive. Peremptory: The implication is that such poetry will not repay our expenditure of time and attention like the work of a major poet will—and yet anyone who reads poetry with more than cursory attention can attest that this is not the case.”

 

Shaw’s honesty is refreshing. He confirms my experience. I first encountered many, perhaps most, of the poets I enjoy and admire (and many whom I learned to ignore) in anthologies. Shaw argues the case for a writer whose work I hardly know, Ralph Hodgson (1871-1962), judging him a good minor poet, worthy of the reader’s attention:

 

“He is known exclusively for the handful of his poems that for much of the twentieth century appeared in anthologies. He is undoubtedly a minor poet, yet his work is more complex than his ‘anthology poems’ would suggest.”

 

A genre of essays I especially appreciate are those dedicated to obscure, neglected or utterly forgotten writers. Alexander Smith (1830-67), the Scottish essayist, is a good example. So are American essayist Agnes Repplier (1855-1950) and American poet Catherine Davis (1924-2002). No one would canonize these writers but to ignore them is foolish and to deny oneself honest pleasure. Too often, “major status” is the work of marketing or fashion, not a critical sense.

 

To put alongside Shaw’s Hodgson I would propose another minor English poet, Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940). His poems are wispy, often nostalgic and reminiscent of Walter de la Mare’s. Here is “In the Street of Lost Time” (The Unknown Goddess, 1925):

 

“Rest and have ease;

here are no more voyages;

fold, fold your narrow, pale hands;

and under the veil of night lie,

 

“as I have seen you

Lie in your deep hair;

but patiently now that new loves,

new days have gone their ways.”

'I Shall at Least Discover the Coast'

 Knuff, looby, lubber, clotpoll, chucklehead, chuff, bedpresser, fopdoodle, pricklouse, pickthank, jackalent, dandiprant, jobbernowl, mooncalf, et al. 

English, like Yiddish, is blessedly rich in insults, nouns applied to those we deem dangerously (or pitifully) stupid, lazy or inept. Few such words endure for long. My spell-check software fails to recognize seven of the fourteen words cited above. Invective seems less imaginative and entertaining today, relying as it does on a small cache of predictable monosyllables. W.C. Fields in The Bank Dick (1940), in the role of Egbert Sousé (“Sousé – accent grave over the ‘e’”), uses some of the words above carrying the Johnsonian imprimatur when giving advice to his future son-in-law, Og Oggilby (“Sounds like a bubble in a bathtub”): “Don’t be a luddy-duddy! Don’t be a mooncalf! Don’t be a jabbernowl! You’re not those, are you?”

 

Johnson scholar Jack Lynch tells us 663 dictionaries of English already existed when Johnson published A Dictionary of the English Language on April 15, 1755, despite its mistaken reputation as the first in the language. What distinguishes Johnson’s Dictionary from others is its comprehensiveness, the vast number of citations (turning the book into an anthology of English literature), and the nine years of labor a single man put into creating it. Johnson is stereotyped as a finicky, moralizing prude, yet we find in his Dictionary such impolite words as fart (“wind from behind”) and turd (“excrement”). Boswell reports Johnson saying: “The difference between coarse and refined abuse is as the difference between being bruised by a club, and wounded by a poisoned arrow.”

 

Johnson defines 41,712 words. That first edition was published in two folio-sized volumes, each containing more than 1,100 pages and weighing more than twenty pounds. For this reader, language is the chief glory of the human species. That’s why I think of Johnson’s Dictionary not as an old reference book but as a celebration and a grandly ambitious undertaking. Johnson writes in “The Plan of an English Dictionary” (1747), addressed to Lord Chesterfield:

   

“When I survey the plan which I have laid before you, I cannot, my Lord, but confess, that I am frighted at its extent, and, like the soldiers of Cæsar, look on Britain as a new world, which it is almost madness to invade. But I hope, that though I should not complete the conquest, I shall at least discover the coast, civilize part of the inhabitants, and make it easy for some other adventurer to proceed farther, to reduce them wholly to subjection, and settle them under laws.”

 

Half a century ago I read in Time magazine that Dr. Oliver Sacks, whose Awakenings (1973) I had already read, would read the Oxford English Dictionary while in bed at night. The anecdote charmed me because I too read dictionaries, though not at that time the OED. We’ve learned since his death in 2015 that Sacks may have embellished some of his stories. I can’t say. But here is what he wrote in On the Move: A Life (2015):

     

“I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but can spread my wings with essays. Fifty pounds came with the Theodore Williams prize—£50! I had never had so much money at once. This time I went not to the White Horse but to Blackwell’s bookshop (next door to the pub) and bought, for £44, the twelve volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, for me the most coveted and desirable book in the world. I was to read the entire dictionary through when I went on to medical school, and I still like to take a volume off the shelf, now and then, for bedtime reading.”

'None of the Miseries Foretold for the Retired'

A reader asks what I make of retirement after fifteen jobless months. I’m mildly surprised by what little difference it makes. I started working at age twelve and without trying developed a reliable work ethic. Twenty-five years as a newspaper reporter, almost twenty years as a science writer for universities. No regrets, I learned a lot and met a lot of interesting people but I don’t miss it. I heard stories about guys who retired and promptly had heart attacks. I’ve never had a gift for boredom, real or feigned. 

On average I now drive twice a week, at least once to visit the Fondren Library at Rice University. I never liked driving so that’s a gift. I sleep in a little later. I’m learning to take my time in the morning. I enjoy my coffee. I answer emails at leisure. I read, usually seated by the front window so I can observe the garden and its visitors. I’ve never been able to believe in the future so I dwell in the present, which is more real, and the past, which is more interesting.

 

Consider “Sleep, Loss” (In Code, 2020) by Maryann Corbett, who likewise has experienced “none of the miseries foretold / for the retired”:

 

“Once past the pang of handing in her keys,

she met none of the miseries foretold

for the retired. Those bus-stop waits in the cold

were well lost, and she slept the sleep of peace

alarmless. What dawned slowly was a dulled

or loosened hold on morning’s luxuries—

the moon, a sliced pearl set in lapis skies

diamonded by one planet, with the gold-

red band of sunrise chasing her.

And she thought

then of an older loss: when her last child

had learned to sleep till daylight, and her lulled

limbs fled communion with the monk, the night-

watcher, the graveyard shift, as she became

an outcast from the house of two a.m.”

'To Take the Bad Taste Out of My Mouth'

“We live in a fanatical age, an age of propaganda, when everybody wants the support of the whole herd in order to be quite at peace in his own conscience.” 

George Santayana is writing to his friend and future literary executor Daniel Cory on April 13, 1938. It’s the age of Hitler and Stalin, Mussolini and Franco. Santayana is seventy-four and in a few years will move into a convent run by the Little Company of Mary sisters in Rome. He already lives as a monastic atheist, withdrawn from most worldly affairs. He reads and writes and has few material demands. Here is the next and final sentence in his letter to Cory: “I am reading the Upanishads, St. Augustine’s Confessions, and Spinoza’s Politics, to take the bad taste out of my mouth.”

 

The flip side of the sentence at the top, as true today as it was in 1938 -- the year of the Anschluss, Munich, the continuance of Stalin’s great purge and Kristallnacht – is that strays from the herd face suspicion and rancorous contempt. Independence of thought has grown scarce. In 1936, Michael Oakeshottt wrote in his notebook: “Politics are an inferior form of human activity.”

 

[For the Oakeshott see Notebooks, 1922-86 (Imprint Academic, 2014).]

'That We May Look Unflinchingly on Death'

My wife vows never to shop again at our neighborhood grocery, less than a mile from our house. I agree that a semi-Third World atmosphere pervades the place. Once I found a puddle of urine on the floor in produce. I watched a woman stuff a bottle of wine into her yoga pants. The customer ahead of me in the checkout line screamed when the guy packing her bag dropped a cantaloupe on the eggs she had just paid for. Twice I’ve witnessed fist fights in the aisles. 

I’m certain plenty of people in the world would marvel at our grocery shelves. So much bounty, so much redundancy and waste. I remember as a kid seeing photos of empty shelves in Soviet stores, with a babushkaed woman staring forlornly. Cold war propaganda? Of course. But accurate, not staged.

 

When I go grocery shopping I assume the role of anthropologist. Much of today’s world is a foreign country to me. I see stuff my parents wouldn’t recognize as food – sushi, plantain, kale, pico de gallo, canned menudo. The last item my father might actually have enjoyed. Like Mr. Bloom he “ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.”

 

In “Grace to Be Said at the Supermarket” (The Blue Swallows, 1967), Howard Nemerov treats the modern American grocery as an exercise in mathematics, divine grace and the denial of mortality:

 

“This God of ours, the Great Geometer,

Does something for us here, where He hath put

(if you want to put it that way) things in shape,

Compressing the little lambs into orderly cubes,

Making the roast a decent cylinder,

Fairing the tin ellipsoid of a ham,

Getting the luncheon meat anonymous

In squares and oblongs with all the edges bevelled

Or rounded (streamlined, maybe, for greater speed).

 

“Praise Him, He hath conferred aesthetic distance

Upon our appetites, and on the bloody

Mess of our birthright, our unseemly need,

Imposed significant form. Through Him the brutes

Enter the pure Euclidean kingdom of number,

Free of their bulging and blood-swollen lives

They come to us holy, in cellophane

Transparencies, in the mystical body,

That we may look unflinchingly on death

As the greatest good, like a philosopher should.”