'Fury at Death and Its Imbecile Trick'

In the early evening of January 22, 1900, Jules Renard learns that his older brother, Maurice, who works for the State Railways, has fainted and cannot be revived. Their father had similar spells and Renard thinks, “I’ll bring him round, give him a good shake, tell him when you’re unwell you must go to bed.” A fat man “wearing his legionnaire pin” (Renard is a man for details), tells him: “‘Your poor brother is very low.’ Then, in my ear so that Marinette [Renard’s wife] will not hear: ‘Dead.’ The word means nothing.” 

My reaction while watching my brother die in hospice. You don’t forget seventy years of coexistence. As I wrote at the time: “I watched as his eyes closed and he stopped breathing. There was another sense, too, of a sudden diminishment, a departure leaving only flesh and blood.” Briefly, I waited for him to wake up, to issue another wisecrack. Renard goes to see his brother:

 

“Here he is, stretched out on a pale green sofa, mouth open, one knee raised, his head resting on a telephone directory, in the attitude of a man who is tired. He reminds me of my father. On the floor, water stains, a rag.”

 

I remember the cracks in the linoleum beside Ken’s bed, the spot where a urine stain had been mopped, sunlight after I had opened the curtains, the absence of any smell despite the presence of so much sickness and death.

 

“He is dead,” Renard writes, “but it will not sink in. Marinette cries a little, cannot breathe, asks where is the doctor. . . . He had complained several times of the heat, of stomach cramps. . . . Not a word was spoken. In two or three minutes it was all over.”

 

My brother had been unconscious for four days. Death was a shock but no surprise.

 

“I sit down,” Renard writes, “and manage a few tears. Marinette embraces me, and I read in her eyes the fear that, a couple of years hence, it will be my turn.

 

“All I feel is a kind of fury at death and its imbecile trick.”

 

My reaction was a little different. I felt as though an injustice had been committed – a child’s response. Ken was almost three years younger than me. I should have gone first.  

 

“Marinette and I sit with him until four in the morning. From time to time I lift the handkerchief. I look at his slightly open mouth. He is going to breathe in. He does not breathe in.”

 

My nephew and I sat with the body, waiting for the guy from the funeral home.

 

Jules Renard would die on this date, May 22, in 1910 – a grim year for literature. Also dead were Tolstoy, Mark Twain, William James and O. Henry.

 

[The Renard quotes come from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'Abundant, if Somewhat Precious Wit'

In Wednesday’s post I quoted an 1895 profile of Max Beerbohm in which the anonymous writer referred to Beerbohm’s reputed “passion for paradox and marivaudage.” This was the first time I had ever published a word with a definition unknown to me: marivaudage. I couldn’t even guess its meaning. I checked the OED but left it undefined because I was curious to see the reaction of readers, most of whom I assumed would likewise be ignorant of its meaning. As Nige put it in a comment: “Marivaudage! There’s a wonderful word, and new to me.” 

When I encounter a previously unknown word I normally take a guess based on context then consult the dictionary. Marivaudage left me baffled. The OED: “Exaggerated sentiment expressed in affected language, after the style of Marivaux; a verbose and affected style.” Another perplexity: I recognized the name “Marivaux” but had never read any of his work and wasn’t even certain when he was alive. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688-1763) was a French playwright and novelist, who appears never to have had much of a reputation in the English-speaking world.

 

The dictionary’s first citation, from a letter by Horace Walpole, dates from two years after Marivaux’s death: “an established term for being prolix and tiresome” – certainly not terms one would use to describe Beerbohm’s prose. Next, from 1882, is a passage from George Saintsbury’s Short History of French Literature:

 

“All the work of Marivaux, dramatic and non-dramatic, is pervaded more or less by a peculiarity which at the time received the name of Marivaudage. This peculiarity exists partly in the sentiment, and partly in the phraseology. The former is characteristic of the eighteenth century, disguising a considerable affectation under a mask of simplicity, and the latter (sparkling with abundant, if somewhat precious wit) is ingeniously constructed to suit it and carry it off.”

 

A very mixed review. The final citation is drawn from Frederic Raphael’s Byron, a 1982 biography of the poet: “Their romance dwindled into a matter more of ardent marivaudage than of passionate demonstration.”

 

Again, unjust when applied to Beerbohm but useful when considering thousands of insufferably precious rom-coms.

'Style Should Be Oscillant'

The Sketch was an illustrated weekly journal in England published from 1893 to 1959. It doted on high society, royalty, gossip and the arts. The January 2, 1895, issue included an anonymous profile titled “A Few Words with Mr. Max Beerbohm,” accompanied by a photograph of Beerbohm as a boy wearing a sailor suit and a bowl haircut.  He was twenty-two at the time of the article and was still a year away from publishing his first book, The Works of Max Beerbohm. The article begins: 

“Mr. Max Beerbohm left Oxford only last term to plunge into the delights of literature in London. In that short space of time, by his curious contributions to The Yellow Book, he has gained a more than merely esoteric fame. Indeed, he may be said to occupy in literature somewhat the same position as does Mr. Aubrey Beardsley in art.”

  

The writer visits Beerbohm’s home on Hyde Park Place in London and speaks with him in the room where “[Alexander William] Kinglake wrote his famous history of the Crimean War.” Beerbohm, he tells us, has “a passion for paradox and marivaudage – in fact, for all unusual things.”

 

Beerbohm mentions his essay “King George the Fourth” and says: “To treat history as a means of showing one’s cleverness may be rough on history, but it has been done by the best historians, from Herodotus to Froude and myself. Some of my ‘George’ was false, and much was flippant: but why should a writer sit down to the systematically serious, or else conscientiously comic. Style should be oscillant.”

 

The writer asks, “‘Oscillant’? Is that one of your queer words, of which we have heard so much? Do you intend to abandon them, as an affectation?”

 

Beerbohm replies: “Certainly not. They are not affected. At times there is no word in the English dictionary by which I can express my shade of meaning. I try to think of a French, or Latin, or Greek one. If I can’t, then I invent a word—such as ‘pop-limbo’ or ‘bauble-tit’ – often a compound of some well-known English word with an affix or prefix to point its significance. Sometimes I invent a word merely because the cadence of the sentence demands it.”

 

Already we hear hints of the mature Beerbohm, the poker-faced voice of nuanced irony. Seasoned readers covet a small class of writers with whom we share a significant portion of our sensibility. This is not a qualitative judgment. It’s an emotional/aesthetic sympathy. One reads them with the sense that the writer understands the reader, and vice versa. Such is Beerbohm for me. As he writes in “A.V. Laider," “Our mutual aloofness was a positive bond between us.”

 

Beerbohm died seventy years ago today, on May 20, 1956, at age eighty-three.

'Having the Nature or Form of Flowers'

Occasionally I encounter a word so lyrical or amusingly grotesque in its pronunciation or specialized in meaning that I add it to the word museum I carry around in my head. There’s little likelihood I’ll ever use such words in speech or print. I value clarity in language and using them would amount to showing off and confusing people. 

Reading the prose of Sir Thomas Browne yet again reliably contributes another exhibit to the cache. In this case, flosculous, found in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), a volume usually known as Vulgar Errors. To my ear, flosculous sounds vaguely medical, perhaps describing a rare disorder of the kidney. All wrong. Here is the definition given by Dr. Johnson, in his Dictionary: “composed of flowers; having the nature or form of flowers.”

 

Here is one of Browne’s uses: “The outward part is a thick and carnous covering, and the second a dry and flosculous coat [of the nutmeg], commonly called Mace.” And the other: “Putting the dried Flowers of the Vine into new Wine to give it a flosculous race or spirit.” The most peculiar use comes in Chapter XXVI, “Of Sperma-Ceti, and the Sperma-Ceti Whale,” in which Browne describes whale oil:

 

“It flameth white and candent like Camphire, but dissolveth not in aqua fortis, like it. Some lumps containing about two ounces, kept ever since in water, afford a fresh, and flosculous smell.”

 

Presumably, that means a sweet smell, a floral scent, not what one expects from Moby-Dick. Flosculous hasn't been used since the 18th century. The first definition in the OED is “of, relating to, or of the nature of flowers; having the scent or fragrance of flowers.” Among the formally scientific definitions is “composed of floscules or florets.”

 

Browne is the seventy-third most frequently cited source in the OED, with more than 4,100 quotations. He is credited with coining nearly 800 words and establishing the modern usage of more than 1,600 others. In his Life of Browne (1756), Dr. Johnson defends Browne’s rococo word-horde:

 

“His style is, indeed, a tissue of many languages; a mixture of heterogeneous words, brought together from distant regions, with terms originally appropriated to one art, and drawn by violence into the service of another. He must, however, be confessed to have augmented our philosophical diction; and in defence of his uncommon words and expressions, we must consider, that he had uncommon sentiments, and was not content to express in many words that idea for which any language could supply a single term.”

'Failed in Life and Love'

“Usually he took for his subjects those who failed in life and love. He wrote about the derelict and downtrodden, the old and bereft. Who wanted to read about successful alderman, anyway?”

As a newspaper reporter, “celebrities” never interested me, the politicians and captains of industry hungry for headlines. Too often they sought the “glamour” a reporter might supply them, even in the provincial pages of a smalltown newspaper in the Midwest. Smugness and entitlement are repellant. At the same time I resisted romanticizing the plight of the outsiders, the ready-made poignancy that comes with poverty and failure. It was impossible to avoid both types, of course. The best I could do was maintain an uneasy neutrality, sticking as close as possible to the facts, sorting them out and resisting the effortless clichés. 

The comment at the top is by Scott Donaldson in his biography of Edwin Arlington Robinson, and I think it accounts for my love for the best of Robinson’s poems. He usually resists the romanticizing impulse, the easy route of making losers heroic. His emotional capacity is enormous but carefully regulated. He doesn’t gush. Take his sonnet “Reuben Bright” (The Children of the Night, 1897):

 

“Because he was a butcher and thereby

Did earn an honest living (and did right),

I would not have you think that Reuben Bright

Was any more a brute than you or I;

For when they told him that his wife must die,

He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,

And cried like a great baby half that night,

And made the women cry to see him cry.

 

“And after she was dead, and he had paid

The singers and the sexton and the rest,

He packed a lot of things that she had made

Most mournfully away in an old chest

Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs

In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.”

 

In other hands, the conclusion might have been insufferably cheesy. The poem consists of two carefully structured sentences, loosely defined as before and after. The second flows so smoothly, in the simplest of language, that we think: Where is he going with this? A “Richard Cory”-like punchline would have been a cheap disappointment. Instead, Robinson gives us an entirely unexpected coda to a life. He makes a simple, obscure man noble in his grief.

 

Jules Renard and Robinson share similar sensibilities. Both stood on the outside, looking in. Both possessed healthy capacities for humor and irony. Neither was a rabble-rouser. Renard puts it like this in his journal on May 1, 1902: “Fame. A reputation is made with cement, mortar and liberal quantities of vulgarity.”

'Almost Great'

Henry Oliver poses an interesting question: “What should be on a list of almost Great Books?” Consider it less a critical exercise than a parlor game. Think of the books you have admired and enjoyed, and perhaps reread, that lie beyond the canonical borders, the Dante/Shakespeare/Tolstoy axis. Oliver considers his own list “personal and partial,” as it should be. Here’s my Top Ten (+ two), listed as the titles occurred to me: 

Henry Mayhew: London Labour and the London Poor (1851)

 

Whittaker Chambers: Witness (1952)

 

Anton Chekhov: Sakhalin Island (1895)

 

Charles Montagu Doughty: Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888)

 

A.J. Liebling: Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1962)

 

Walter Savage Landor: Imaginary Conversations (1824-29)

 

Ronald Knox: Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (1950)

 

The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham (2024)

 

Guy Davenport: The Geography of the Imagination (1981)

 

Jonathan Swift: A Journal to Stella (1766)

 

Michael Oakeshott: Rationalism in Politics (1962)

 

James Boswell: The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785)

 

Walter de la Mare: Memoirs of a Midget (1921)

'An Unknown, Powerful, and Awful Truth'

“It is extraordinary how jargon intimidates; how prone we are to dismiss as irrelevant or dated that which comes unpackaged in the cellophane of current phraseology and images, and has nevertheless to represent those of a totally different era.” 

Another symptom of “presentism”: unwillingness to acquire at least a working knowledge of a new language by a writer from the past. “Acquire” is misleading. It’s not like learning Russian as an adult. “Adapt to” or “become comfortable with” are closer. A lazy reader will object to anything he is unable to instantaneously comprehend. More than fifty years ago one of my English professors complained that most of her students were unable to read anything written before Hemingway’s arrival. This came in the context of reading Tristram Shandy, which several classmates were complaining about.

 

The passage quoted above was written by the American poet Josephine Jacobsen (1908-2003) in "The Masks of Walter de la Mare," published in the Fall 1978 issue of The Sewanee Review. I take her observation personally because for many years I ignored the work of de la Mare in poetry and prose largely because of the language and his interest in the mutedly uncanny. His sentences often seemed fey, fuzzy and whimsical. After all, he wrote for kids, didn’t he? I wanted hard, flinty language. Jacobsen concentrates on de la Mare’s stories, which I now acknowledge as among my favorites:

 

“What is De la Mare's primary -- and forever relevant -- premise?” she asks. “It is the premise of strangeness, and of its creature, the stranger. That stranger is the one who is suddenly caught peering at us as we pass in a dim room before an unexpected mirror.”

 

De la Mare treats strangeness realistically. That’s not a gratuitously cute paradox. His world is strange and his people are sensitive to it. It’s not like the gorefests in contemporary horror movies. I don't ever recall encountering overt violence in a de la Mare story. It’s a matter of atmosphere, of quietly puzzling, barely perceived events. Often the main character is more confused than frightened. His stories seldom feel like genre-based slumming. Jacobsen articulates this quality:

 

“De la Mare has essayed the difficult task of catching that strangeness, of examining it in its effects, of relating it to what we know and what we do not. He has done it in ghost stories (if something as ambiguous as the ghostly element in these tales can be so crudely classified); by a lovely and acid sort of fairy tale; but more often and more characteristically by his stories of those who dwell on the edge--that line which divides (or does not) reality and appearance, life and death, which he has taken for his precarious foothold.”

 

De la Mare’s language delicately delineates events our rational minds ignore or safely categorize as “odd” and then forget. Jacobsen writes:

 

“It is the truly vital, the greatly endowed with life, who are most acutely aware of death, as witness the graves, plumes, hearses, and skulls of the Elizabethans; and the bland timidity of the dreadful vocabulary tailored for Our Senior Citizens, with its Rest Homes, Golden Age Clubs, Loved Ones, and Memorial Parks. De la Mare's world -- far from being that of the sugar-spun pixies with which his nonreaders often tend to associate him [that was me] -- is one of a grim and terrifying beauty, mined by abysses, peopled with the sleepwalkers of a trustful materialism, the constant borderline of the assaults of an unknown, powerful, and awful truth.”

 

[See the late Jane Greer’s 2023 essay “‘A poet, dangerous and steep’: reintroducing Josephine Jacobsen.”]