'As Though Nothing But Joy Came After!'

At the back of the first American edition of his Great War memoir Undertones of War (1929), Edmund Blunden appends a selection of thirty-one poems he titles, with perhaps mock-formality, “A Supplement of Poetical Interpretations and Variations.” Often the poems describe not combat but intervals between engagements and knowledge that the respite will be brief. As always, Blunden observes the pastures, livestock and orchards of the French countryside, and the ravages they have sustained in the fighting. Here is “At Senlis Once”: 

“O how comely it was and how reviving,

When with clay and with death no longer striving

Down firm roads we came to houses

With women chattering and green grass thriving.

 

“Now though rains in a cataract descended,

We could glow, with our tribulation ended--

Count not days, the present only

Was thought of, how could it ever be expended?

 

“Clad so cleanly, this remnant of poor wretches

Picked up life like the hens in orchard ditches,

Gazed on the mill-sails, heard the church-bell,

Found an honest glass all manner of riches.

 

“How they crowded the barn with lusty laughter,

Hailed the pierrots and shook each shadowy rafter,

Even could ridicule their own sufferings,

Sang as though nothing but joy came after!”

 

Senlis is a village about thirty miles northeast of Paris. It had been captured by the Germans in September 1914, and marked the limit of their advance on the French capital. In the prose portion of Undertones of War, Blunden writes of his unit’s approach to the village in 1916:

 

“[M]y own unwelcome but persistent retrospect was the shell hole there used by us as a latrine, with those two flattened German bodies in it, tallow-faced and dirty-stubbled, one spectacled, with fingers hooking the handle of a bomb; and others had much worse to remember. We were merry when at length the relief was sent in and we went along the road in pale daylight to Senlis, a village six or seven miles behind the line.”

 

Blunden follows this with a brief reprieve from war: church bells, beer and chocolate, and soldiers admiring “with determination” the French girls who sold it to them. The “prime gift of eccentric heaven” was an invitation to a divisional concert party. Without transition, Blunden continues:

 

“Soon enough, from the huts in the orchard, from the mud-walled barns by the church, from the blankets in the straw or the mahogany beds with the mountainous straw mattresses, we were marching eastward again, and with little to recommend our future to us.”

 

A frequent complaint from the men: where are we going? Blunden and the others follow orders with little knowledge of their destination or purpose.

Today is Veterans Day in the U.S., the 108^th anniversary of the Armistice. An estimated 9.7 million military personnel died in four years of fighting. Starting in the early 1980s and for the next thirty years or so, R.L. Barth would write at least one epigram each Veterans Day. They now number more than one hundred. In 1968-69 he was a Marine serving as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in Vietnam. Here is one of his epigrams, untitled:

 

“'Why not adjust? Forget this? Let it be?

Because it’s truth. Because it’s history.”

 

And this is “Epitaph”:

 

“Tell them quite simply that we died

Thirsty, betrayed, and terrified."

 

Bob wrote to me this week: “My favorite WWI poet is and always has been Sassoon. However, the WWI poet I feel closest to is Blunden. Why? Take whichever of these reasons you prefer: he is the one poet who could never let go of the war, or he is the one poet the war would never let go.” Bob honors a kinship with soldier-poets who wrote of wars fought before he was born. Take “A Letter to the Dead”:

 

“The outpost trench is deep with mud tonight.

Cold with the mountain winds and two week’s rain,

I watch the concertina. The starlight-

Scope hums, and rats assault the bunkers again.

 

“You watch with me: Owen, Blunden, Sassoon.

Through sentry duty, everything you meant

Thickens to fear of nights without a moon.

War’s war. We are, my friends, no different.”

 

According to the U.S. Marine Corps History Division: “The Vietnam War was costly to the U.S. Marine Corps. From 1965 to 1975, nearly 500,000 Marines served in Southeast Asia. Of these, more than 13,000 were killed and 88,000 wounded, nearly a third of all American causalities sustained during the war.”

'War Is an Ancient Imposter'

“It was a sunny morning, that of July 1, 1916. The right notes for it would have been the singing of blackbirds and the ringing of the blacksmith’s anvil.” 

Without his experience during the Great War, Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) might have become a nature poet. He loved John Clare’s poetry (he named two of his children John and Clare) and Gilbert White. He was a nineteenth-century man in many ways, born to write pastorals. Instead, as his friend Siegfried Sassoon said, Blunden was the Great War poet most obsessed with his memories of the Western Front. The passage above begins his essay “The Somme Still Flows,” written in 1929 and collected in The Mind’s Eye (Jonathan Cape, 1934). He continues:

 

“But, as the world soon knew, the music of the sunny morning was the guns. They had never spoken before with so huge a voice. Their sound crossed the sea. In Southdown villages the school-children sat wondering at that incessant drumming and the rattling of the windows. That night an even greater anxiety than usual forbade wives and mothers to sleep. The Battle of the Somme had begun.”

 

Just as many say the true Sixties started November 22, 1963, with the murder of President Kennedy, so my private calendar suggests the abattoir that would become the twentieth century started on July 1, 1916. The 141-day Battle of the Somme would result in more than one million casualties (killed, wounded, missing).

 

In 1915, a year after the start of the war, Blunden was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the British Army’s Roy Sussex Regiment. Soon after he was sent to France and posted to its 11^th Battalion, part of the 116^th Brigade of the 39^th Division. Once he was gassed but otherwise never wounded during his almost two years on the Western Front.

 

“Villages, wiped out in a few hours, earned reputations for hopeless horror when our men rose in the daylight from their already destroyed positions and moved to capture them. Some of them they did capture. Few who survived long enough under German guns and machine-guns to enter the trenches opposite could have retained any illusions.”

 

Blunden is seldom graphic in his descriptions of men wounded or killed. He refers to the battle as “a slow slaughtering process.” Blunden closes his essay like this:

 

“War had been ‘found out’, overwhelmingly found out. War is an ancient imposter, but none of his masks and smiles and gallant trumpets can any longer delude us; he leads the way through the cornfields to the cemetery of all that is best. The best is, indeed, his special prey. What men did in the Battle of the Somme, day after day, and month after month, will never be excelled in honour, unselfishness, and love; except by those who come after and resolve that their experience shall never again fall to the lot of human beings.”

'But You Call This Instinct'

Tucked into a brief section at the back of The Poems of Edmund Blunden (Cobden-Sanderson, 1930) titled “Occasional Pieces” is “Under a Thousand Words,” a poem that seems at first to have little to do with Blunden’s service in the Great War. At age nineteen, Blunden was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Sussex Regiment. He served for almost two years on the Western Front, took part in the engagements at Ypres and the Somme, and was awarded the Military Cross. 

“‘A thousand words on Courage.’—This request

Dropped on me like a bomb on a sandbag shelter,

And after much vague mental repetition

Ranging from La Boisselle to Lord Macaulay,

And metaphysical cross-examination

On memories of conspicuous gallant conduct,

I gave it up.

That afternoon our boat

Touched on a mud-flat, which we chose to cross.

And as we waddled through it, a three-inch crab

Disputed progress; one of his arms was gone;

The other he held ready like a boxer.

And backed and sidled to our every movement.

His one arm ready; and to command full view

Of the two monsters who had crossed the frontier.

He strained his body backward, and stood titled,

Parrying every stroke we acted at him.

Eyeing us, holding the line.

‘But you call this Instinct.’”

 

During the week of Veterans Day (November 11), high-minded editors often call for comparably high-minded, embarrassingly idealistic think pieces on Patriotism and Courage – stuff to inspire the folks on the home front. In my experience, veterans snort at such concocted marzipan. Blunden is mostly polite about it. One clue as to his true subject (this is not a nature poem) is the reference to La Boiselle, a village in France contested during the opening days of the Battle of the Somme. On the first day, July 1, 1916, British forces alone suffered more than 57,000 casualties, including more than 19,000 killed. Andrew Roberts writes in Elegy: The First Day on the Somme (Head of Zeus, 2015):

 

“It has been calculated that it would take three and a half days for the 888,246 British  and Commonwealth troops who died in the First World War to march past the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London, even at four men abreast.”

[I read Elegy. It is excellent.]

'His Discreet Irony'

An old friend tells me he’s reading Sir Thomas Browne for the first time – Religio Medici (1643) – and having a wonderful time. If you like your first taste of Browne, you’re likely to stick around for the full banquet. His prose is rich and nutritious. I’m pleased that another writer I admire agrees. Rose Macaulay is best known, if known at all, for her novels but in 1931 she published an excellent little book, Some Religious Elements in English Literature (Hogarth Press). She writes of Browne: 

“This charming doctor, distinguished among writers of the day by not being a clergyman, produced, in the most exquisite and splendid prose of the century, the best and most agreeable confession of the Anglican religion ever, before or since, published.”

 

Browne is not writing a straightforward tract in Religio Medici, so don’t be frightened. He perfected the digression in English. There’s something almost childlike about his sense of curiosity. Everything seems to interest him. As Guy Davenport put it, “Curiosity, I’m convinced, is intelligence.” Macaulay celebrates “the delicate, amused, philosophically ironic mind of the most charming writer of his time.” Here is a passage from Religio Medici, an extended analogy, I found quoted recently in a non-literary, musical context:

 

“[T]here is a musick where ever there is a harmony, order, or proportion: and thus far we may maintain the music of the Sphears; for those well-ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony. Whatsoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony; which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all Church-Musick. For my self, not only for my obedience, but my particular Genius, I do embrace it: for even that vulgar and Tavern-Musick, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the First Composer.”

 

Though Browne was a scientist, according to the learning of his day, no one reads Browne looking for information about astronomy or the biosciences. As Macaulay writes:

 

“Sir Thomas is an odd mixture of the wild beliefs of his age, in astrology, witches, demoniacal possession, and so on (and though as to all these things we can never take him at his face value, for his discreet irony lies sometimes very deeply hid in the suave turn of a phrase, he is by no means playing at witch-belief), and of a sane and advanced modernism as regards, for instance, the nature of dreams, and hell.”

 

In other words, Browne must be judged as a writer, not as a theologian or scientist. He not only loved words, he invented many of them for English speakers. Among the writers most often cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, Browne ranks seventieth. He is cited 775 times for the first usage of words, and not all are obscure or strictly medical or scientific. Browne gave us, among other things: approximate, carnivorous, coma, computer, electricity, exhaustion, generator, gymnastic, hallucination, holocaust, jocularity, literary, locomotion, prairie, precocious, pubescent, therapeutic, suicide, ulterior, ultimate and veterinarian.

'A Future Close Enough to Smell'

One of my favorite contemporary poets is Deborah Warren, who lives in Massachusetts. She’s smart, technically adroit, has a musical ear and a sense of humor – rare qualities among poets today. Some of her poems stick with me, memorability being a prerequisite of first-rate verse. My mind is associative. One thing leads to another, not always for conscious or logical reasons, though sometimes the linkage is obvious, as with her poem “Down-to-Earth”: 

“In the field the coyote yip-yips imminent danger;

the dog in the kitchen rumbles a basso growl;

the field sends back a shrill elastic baying;

the kitchen gives a soprano howl.

 

“These two aren’t discussing climate change,

war, flu, layoffs; in this dialogue

a well-informed coyote’s not relaying

to a pessimistic dog

 

“grounds for worry—national cases of mange,

the mountain lion population swelling,

a cougar-sighting fifteen miles away—

only a future close enough to smell.”

 

I had been thinking, rather absently, about my brief spell of working as a copy editor at the newspaper in Schenectady, N.Y. This meant knocking off at midnight. The newspaper’s office stands on a bluff above the Mohawk River. When I pulled out onto Maxon Road and headed home, pairs of piercing white lights stared at me, from the pavement and among the trees and tall grass at the side of the road. My previous experience with coyotes was confined to Western movies. The lights stood, unmoving, and I always stopped driving to watch. Furtively, without hurry, they disappeared. Usually, I encountered several more down the black road.

 

Though it occurred in a city, a thoroughly urban environment, where Thomas Edison founded the General Electric Co., this experience ranks high in my encounters with the natural world – up there with a monarch butterfly landing on my shoulder and a squirrel who climbed up my arm when I leaned over to offer him a peanut.

'Hope, Indeed, Is Very Fallacious'

Some years ago I was diagnosed with a condition called MGUS (pronounced EM-gus) -- monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance. It’s a symptom-less and in most cases benign disorder, but it can be a precursor to multiple myeloma. It means I see the oncologist once a year, pee in a cup and have six vials of blood drawn. Cancer has consumed a larger portion of my consciousness since it killed my brother two years ago. 

On Thursday, I saw a new doctor, a young woman who worked hard to cheer me up, even though I wasn’t feeling particularly dispirited. In fact, her bubbly approach was annoying but I kept it to myself. Near the end she enthused, like a slightly demented cheerleader, “There’s always hope!” Tell that to my brother.

 

I’m of at least two minds when it comes to hope. On one side, there’s the famous list prepared by the great Soviet writer Varlam Shalamov, “What I Saw and Learned in the Kolyma Camps,” after he survived seventeen years in Stalin’s camps. Here is number eighteen: “I learned why a man lives neither on hope — there are no hopes at all, nor on will — what will?, but only on the instinct of self-preservation, the same as a tree, a rock, an animal.”

 

Similarly, here is a portion of a 1984 interview the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert gave to two of his American translators, John and Bogdana Carpenter, in the wake of Jarugelski’s neo-Stalinist crackdown and the rise of Solidarity:

 

Q: “What is the main reason why you write?”

 

A: “Writing—and in this I disagree with everybody—must teach men soberness: to be awake. [Spoken in English.] To make people sober. It does not mean, not to try. But with a small internal correction. I reject optimism despite all the theologians. Despair is a fruitful feeling. It is a cleanser, from desire, from hope. ‘Hope is the mother of the stupid.’ [This is a Polish proverb.] I don't like hope.”

 

Shalamov and Herbert survived Communism. You could say their experiences were too extreme, not typical of humanity’s lot. That’s one way to ignore human nature and its results in the twentieth century.

 

On the other hand, there’s Dr. Johnson, many years before the rise of totalitarianism, writing in the November 6, 1750, issue of The Rambler:

 

“Hope, is indeed, very fallacious, and promises what it seldom gives; but its promises are more valuable than the gifts of fortune, and it seldom frustrates us without assuring us of recompensing the delay by a greater bounty.”

 

My MGUS remains stable: no cancer.

'Spirit, Mettle; Courage, Pluck'

“It happened to me last year to lose my home with all contents in a night of that phenomenon that we oddly called blitz, though why we should use the German for lightning for attack by bombs I do not know, unless to appease by euphemism, like calling the Furies Eumenides.” 

Perhaps it’s that Churchillian orneriness of the people of England during World War II. More than bravery it’s defiance, a quality summed up in such words as spunk and grit – tough little monosyllables, hard as rocks. The writer is Rose Macaulay (1881-1958), the perennially forgotten and quite wonderful novelist (The Towers of Trebizond) and superb writer of nonfiction. I’ve written before about her essay “Book-Building after a Blitz,” published in the June 6, 1942 issue of the Saturday Review of Literature.

 

Macaulay had returned to London on May 13, 1941, to find that her flat in Marylebone and its contents had been destroyed during a German bombing raid three nights earlier. The Blitz started on September 7, 1940. For fifty-six of the following fifty-seven days, the Luftwaffe bombed the city. The day-and-night raids lasted until May 11, 1941. Some 37,000 civilians would eventually be killed in Great Britain.

 

Macaulay writes without self-pity or any suggestion of having been singled out for misfortune. She recounts the titles of books lost with sadness but also with a sort of actuarial coolness. She knows what she has lost and will never recover, and writing about it is an act of homage to her books, some of which were originally her father’s. Her literary taste is impeccable, and her library is one any respectable reader or writer would envy. Among her “indispensables” are Browne, Burton, Boswell, Johnson and Gibbon – the cream of English prose.

 

Now I’ve learned a happy coda of sorts. In his essay “The Pleasures of Rose Macaulay,” J. V. Guerinot writes

 

“When her library was totally destroyed in the bombing of London, the first volumes she replaced were the OED. There are those who like their novelists (and such novelists greatly abound) shirts off, muscles rippling, and those who think that the only muscles a novelist may hint at possessing are those needed to take down the wanted volume of the OED from its accustomed shelf.”

 

Our glory as a species is language and the OED is the crown. Its first editor, James Murray (1837-1915), once said when addressing the Philological Society: “I feel that in many respects I and my assistants are simply pioneers, pushing our way experimentally through an untrodden forest, where no white man's axe has been before us.” I highly recommend Caught in the Web of Words: James A.H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (1977), written by his granddaughter, K.M. Elizabeth Murray.

 

Some of us don’t merely consult the OED. We read it. Take those words mentioned above. Spunk: “Spirit, mettle; courage, pluck.” Grit: “Strength of character; courage and resolve; endurance, stamina.”

[Guerinot’s essay is published in the Spring 1987 issue of Twentieth Century Literature.]

'A Dull and Childish Ignorance'

“I have a dreamy way of withdrawing into myself, and, besides, a dull and childish ignorance of many common things.” 

Among the most rewarding gifts of concentrated reading is encountering thoughts we previously assumed were held only by ourselves. This happens most often with writers aware of their own inadequacies. Think of Samuel Johnson and Proust but think especially of Montaigne. Reading his essays is like reading our better selves, but never forgetting our most fallible moments.

 

The line quoted above is taken from a late essay with an unpromising title, “Of three kinds of association.” In it he confirms my “ignorance of many common things.” My list comes readily to mind – foreign languages, sports, Chinese history, automobiles and machines generally (especially computers), politics, gambling, most contemporary pop culture. By this point in my life, I expect to remain “dull and childish” in my ignorance of such things. Montaigne writes:

 

"Life is an uneven, irregular, and multiform movement. We are not friends, and still less masters, we are slaves, if we follow ourselves incessantly and are so caught in our inclinations that we cannot depart from them or twist them about.”

 

The first time I encountered the word “multiform” was many years ago in John Berryman’s poem “Canto Amor” (1947): “Love is multiform.” Montaigne would agree, but the observation doesn’t go far enough. Purity of anything is rare. In the human realm all things are various, shifting, protean. Our natures are watery. Love lives next door to hate. Part of the reason we “follow ourselves incessantly” is that it offers a sense of security, something solid regardless of its truth. I’m reminded of an admirably concise line in Yeats’ poem “Remorse for Intemperate Speech”: “Great hatred, little room.” Yeats is writing of Ireland. He might be writing of human behavior generally. Donald Frame writes in his biography of Montaigne:

 

“His task is to see and describe himself as accurately as he can. His ideas may not be true; his account of them must be. What he aims to make known, he says, is not things but himself; not the measure of things but the measure of his sight. The only certainty he guarantees is ‘to make known what I think, and to what point, at this moment, extends the knowledge I have of what I am treating.’ Hence he speaks out freely even outside his competence. ‘For likewise these are my humors and opinions; I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed.’”

 

How unlike so many of us, who assume what we believe, our precious opinions, are Gospel. In his conclusion Montaigne offers some hard-earned advice:

 

“The mind is exercised in books, but the body, whose care I have not forgotten either, remains meanwhile inactive, droops and grieves. I know of no excess more harmful to me, or more to be avoided in my declining years.”

 

[The Montaigne passages are from the translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957).]

'The World and All Her Train Were Hurl’d'

How often have you encountered a poem or other piece of writing that not only provoked astonishment on first reading but continues to do so after many years? I mean astonishment, not mere surprise or critical approval. I can think of a few passages in Shakespeare and Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation. There’s another, not so well known, that I first read in 1975, that somehow hasn’t grown tired or used-up or otherwise lost its capacity to inspire awe: “The World” by Henry Vaughan. The first line grabbed me: “I saw Eternity the other night.” That’s like saying, “I ran into God down at the bowling alley.” The colloquial-sounding “the other night” cinches it. 

Joseph Bottum has written appreciatively of another poem by Vaughan, “They Are All Gone into the World of Light.” His reading is inspired:

 

“In grief the absent are more real than the present world, and that’s where ‘They are all Gone into the World of Light’ begins: the light the dead have in memory brighter than the dark world in which the bereaved walk. For that matter, human epistemology is compromised and weak. But by building on that idea of light, Vaughan moves us toward a presaged Heaven and the hints in life that the dead still live.”

 

Vaughan’s lines are often a comfort but don’t read like a panacea. Neither does he preach. He reports:

 

“I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm, as it was bright;

And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,

Driv’n by the spheres

Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world

And all her train were hurl’d.”

 

I think of the Einstein rings photographed by the Hubble space telescope.

'Lighter Than a Hummingbird's Feather'

Czesław Miłosz wrote “In Warsaw” in 1945, shortly after the end of World War II:

“I did not want to love so.

That was not my design.

I did not want to pity so.

That was not my design.

My pen is lighter

Than a hummingbird's feather. This burden

Is too much for it to bear.

How can I live in this country

Where the foot knocks against

The unburied bones of kin?”

Few Americans have earned the right to speak so intimately and with such authority of war and its impact on writers and others. Most of us know war from newspapers and books. Boys enjoy playing Army. I remember visiting Gettysburg for the first time with my family when I was ten. My brother and I ran around as though the battlefield were a theme park or “interactive” museum. I’m certain we gave no thought to the 51,000 American casualties suffered in three days in 1863.

 

Not long ago I read a poem about an atrocity in Latin America written by an American: pure propaganda, composed at a safe distance. Political posturing. A poet who wants to be recognized as a moral exemplar. Utterly unconvincing as a moral document. Unlike Miłosz’s poem, there was something morbid about the American’s, as though the poet were relishing a chance to write about an act of depravity. Miłosz concludes his poem:

 

“It's madness to live without joy

And to repeat to the dead

Whose part was to be gladness

Of action in thought and in the

Only two salvaged words:

Truth and justice.”

 

In a 2009 interview, another Polish poet, the late Adam Zagajewski, said of “In Warsaw”: “Milosz avoids mournful ritual and says that living without happiness is madness. The charm of the world is the poet's obligation. When we stop naming the world, it disowns us and then we are only left with empty rhetoric, a hollow sound. A sense of humour must be combined with the sense of happiness that Milosz vindicates. A great poem is a model for life which influences our experience, albeit delicately.”

'The Circle Is Complete'

Perhaps it’s age but I find growing satisfaction in resolution. I like stories that conclude satisfyingly, often ending where they started, with the distance covered in between being the important part. I feel the same way about most music. You can keep the dissonance, chords that leave you hanging. I’ve grown more aware of cycles. Not cosmic. More prosaic than that – the migration of birds, the hustle of squirrels in the fall, kids returning to school. There’s a Scriptural subtext to Bill Coyle’s “Autumn” (The God of This World to His Prophet, 2006): 

“Harvest time. The circle is complete.

Time to crush the ripened fruit for wine.

Time to grind the gathered grain for bread.

 

“Tru to form, the geese pass overhead,

Giving us the ‘V for Victory’ sign

Even as they beat their long retreat.”

 

When he was seven years old (he is now thirty-nine), I took my oldest son to a nature preserve near Albany, N.Y., where the rangers were leading a twilight walk into the marshes to witness the spectacle of frog courtship. The frogs were Hyla crucifer, peepers the size of postage stamps with a pattern of ill-defined crosses on their backs. In April, males serenade females – a more reliable gauge of spring’s imminence than the return of the robins. At that latitude, spring returns incrementally.

 

We carried flashlights, fifteen or twenty of us, and approached the booming in the night. Though tiny, peepers en masse, thousands of them, are almost deafening. Even when we shined our lights on them, to watch their throats balloon as they called, they ignored us. Everyone laughed, out of amusement and astonishment.

 

Then another, more raucous sound began, impossibly, to drown out the peepers. It was past sunset, black without the flashlights. Directly overhead, flying no more than 25 feet off the ground, a flock of Canada geese honked like drunken saxophonists. In the dark, I felt privileged, disoriented and a little scared (the combined volume of frogs and birds was overwhelming). The darkness and the noise created an illusion of closeness, as though we were indoors, and again everyone, kids and grownups, laughed.

 

In Walden, Thoreau described “the circling groping clangor of some solitary goose.” Multiply that by dozens, and add the steady basso of the peepers. His journal is filled with references to frogs, including the genus Hyla, but he made relatively few observations of geese. Concord, Mass., is at the same latitude as Albany. On April 30, 1852, he followed the sound of the peepers and noted:

 

“It seemed to be a note of alarm. I caught one – It proved to be two coupled. They remained together in my hand. This sound has connexion with their loves probably.”

 

The bachelor Thoreau on the sex life of amphibians: “their loves probably.”

'A Very Peculiar Sorrow Attacks Me'

The feuilleton is an attractively flexible form, part journalism, part essay, that has seldom successfully crossed the Atlantic. The name is derived from the French feuillet, meaning the leaf of a book. Though spawned in France, the feuilleton achieved mastery among German-language writers, specifically Austrian, more specifically Viennese, even more specifically Jewish. Among its most accomplished practitioners are Alfred Polgar, Karl Kraus, Peter Altenberg and Egon Friedell. 

Clive James described the feuilleton as “a demanding genre that reached a high state of development in Vienna.” A minor literary critic named Hitler snuffed out the tradition, which has never fully recovered. Another practitioner, better known in the Anglophone world (thanks largely to the translations of Michael Hofmann), is the great novelist Joseph Roth, author of The Radetzky March (1932).

 

On October 31, 1926, in the Frankfurter Zeitung, Roth published “How does it look in the Russian street?” (trans. Zachary Suri), a feuilleton based on his recent visit to the Soviet Union. Historians will make much of the date, as 1926 is the year Stalin consolidated his power. He had achieved “Socialism in One Country.” The Revolution was nearly a decade old. Unlike many Western visitors to the Soviet Union – Lincoln Steffens, Theodore Dreiser, H.G. Wells, among others – Roth was not seduced by the charms of the Workers’ Paradise. His tone is resolutely unpolitical. He sees people, not politics:

 

“. . . I find the Russian street gray. The masses that people it are gray. It engulfs the red of the scarves, of the banners, of the insignia, and the golden reflection of the church roofs. They are a truly poor and haphazardly dressed people. A great earnestness wafts from them, overpowering in its soberness, pathetic in its poverty.”

 

What Roth misses is the spontaneity of life in a free country. In the Soviet Union he observes little joy, much humorlessness, little sense of life lived for its own sake, few children or animals, no evidence of celebratory improvisation. He concludes:

 

“I confess, ashamed, that in these streets, sometimes a very peculiar sorrow attacks me. In the middle of my admiration for a world which out of its own force—with more ecstasy than material, without money and without friends—prints newspapers, writes books, builds machines and factories, digs canals, after they just barely buried their dead—in the middle of this admiration, a homesickness seizes me for our frivolity and our damnability, a yearning for the aroma of civilization, a sweet aching for our scientifically-already-extinguished decadence. A childish, stupid, but fervent wish to see once again a fashion show at Molyneux, a lovely evening gown on a silly girl, a number of ‘Sourire,’ and the whole downfall of the occident: probably this is a bourgeois atavism.”

'Anything But Superficial'

Charles Lamb in a letter to his childhood friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge on October 30, 1809: 

“I have put up shelves. You never saw a book-case in more true harmony with the contents, than what I’ve nailed up in a room, which, though new, has more aptitudes for growing old than you shall often see—as one sometimes gets a friend in the middle of life, who becomes an old friend in a short time. My rooms are luxurious; one is for prints and one for Books; a Summer and Winter parlour.”

 

First, savor Lamb’s metaphor about friendship. He’s right. Most date from childhood or early adulthood. One of life’s great rewards is a friend made later in life – so unexpected and likelier to be based in something substantial and lasting, not mere proximity.

 

In 1823, Leigh Hunt published “My Books” in The Examiner. He describes Lamb’s (“C.L.”’s) books: “I believe I did mention his book-room to C. L., and I think he told me that he often sat there when alone. It would be hard not to believe him. His library, though not abounding in Greek or Latin (which are the only things to help some persons to an idea of literature), is anything but superficial.” Hunt goes on to log a tempting assortment of authors:

 

“It looks like what it is, a selection made at precious intervals from the book-stalls,—now a Chaucer at nine and twopence, now a Montaigne or a Sir Thomas Browne at two shillings, now a Jeremy Taylor, a Spinoza, an old English Dramatist, Prior, and Sir Philip Sidney, and the books are “neat as imported.” The very perusal of the backs is a “discipline of humanity.” There Mr. Southey takes his place again with an old Radical friend: there Jeremy Collier is at peace with Dryden: there the lion, Martin Luther, lies down with the Quaker lamb, Sewell . . .”

 

Lamb’s tastes were admirably excellent and eclectic. He was a dedicated habitué of London’s book-stalls. My experience is confined to les bouquinistes along the Seine in Paris. The idea of books exposed to sunlight and rain makes me nervous. Lamb had no such misgivings. His Dickensian celebration of London’s charms and of urban living in general, in the letter he wrote to Thomas Manning on November 28, 1800, includes the book-stalls:

 

“Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, shops sparkling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat sempstresses, ladies cheapening, gentlemen behind counters lying, authors in the street with spectacles, George Dyers (you may know them by their gait), lamps lit at night, pastry-cooks' and silversmiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic watchman at night, with bucks reeling home drunk; if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of ‘Fire!’ and ‘Stop, thief!’ inns of court, with their learned air, and halls, and butteries, just like Cambridge colleges; old book-stalls, ‘Jeremy Taylors,’ ‘Burtons on Melancholy,’ and ‘Religio Medicis’ on every stall. These are thy pleasures, O London with-the-many-sins! O City abounding in--, for these may Keswick and her giant brood go hang!”

'Be Faithful Go'

J.J. Kimche writes in his most recent edition of The Jew from Nowhere, “Who Shall Sway Over the Trees?”: 

“One of the abiding oddities of my seven years in the United States has been the extraordinary disparity between the calibre of the American people and that of their political representatives. Every day, I encounter Americans who are serious, competent, conscientious and, above all, comparatively normal. I’m talking about the sort of chaps who go about their business calmly, hold the elevator for strangers, and demonstrate a reassuring capacity for rational thought and civil disagreement. Yet, through some mysterious political alchemy, scarcely any of these admirable creatures ever find their way onto a ballot.”

 

Kimche confirms one of my long-held convictions: we seldom elect people to public office who are worthy of us. Years ago I interviewed the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, who told me he loved and respected our country but we had no talent for electing good presidents. Subsequent years haven’t altered the accuracy of his observation, which he delivered apologetically. Which reminds of one of the last century’s great moral testaments: Zbigniew Herbert’s 1974 poem “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” (trans. Bogdana and John Carpenter, Mr. Cogito, 1993), which includes these lines:  

 

“be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous

in the final account only this is important”

 

And these:

 

“and do not forgive truly it is not in your power

to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

 

“beware however of unnecessary pride

keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror

repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I”

 

And in conclusion:

 

“and they will reward you with what they have at hand

with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

 

“go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls

to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland

the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

 

“Be faithful Go”

 

In his reverence for honor and conscience, Herbert reminds me of another Polish-born writer, Joseph Conrad, in Nostromo: “Government in general, any government anywhere, is a thing of exquisite comicality to a discerning mind.”

 

Herbert was born on this date, October 29, in 1924, and died in 1998 at age seventy-three.

'I Don't Look for Novelty'

"Literature is insight and synthesis, which means that poetry, ultimately, is heroic. Naked, weak, hungry, trembling, endangered by all the elements, all the beasts and demons, the cave men performed that act of heroism for consolation, in the deepest sense of the word. And at that time there in Lubyanka this seemed to me the essence of literature and the source of its legitimacy in the world. Consolation for a weak, naked cave man.” 

Aleksander Wat (1900-67), a poet who wrote middling avant-garde poems in Polish, also “spoke” one of the last century’s essential books (along with Solzhenitsyn’s, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s, Whittaker Chambers’ and Vasily Grossman’s): My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, edited and translated into English in 1988 by Richard Lourie from transcripts of conversations Wat had late in life with Czesław Miłosz. He wrote as a witness.

 

On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, sixteen days after Nazi Germany had invaded the country from the west. The invasions had been secretly agreed upon less than a month earlier with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The battle was over, Poland subdued, by October 6. The Soviets were driven out of Poland by the Germans in the summer of 1941, and the Germans were driven out in turn by the Red Army three years later. Wat would spend two years in Soviet prisons and camps, including the notorious Lubyanka in Moscow.

 

Good news: New York Review Books is soon to publish the coded diary kept by Wat, decrypted by his wife, Ola Watowa (1903-91), and translated by Alissa Valles, who has already given us Zbigniew Herbert, Józef Czapski and Ryszard Krynicki. Book Post has published an excerpt. Following a stroke in 1953, Wat suffered from chronic pain, often cited as his cause of death by suicide in 1967. Wat writes:

 

“The only thing that gives me a sense of safety, is when a new life situation, an accidental configuration of things, persons, words, gestures, recognizes itself in identical images and comparisons of what has already been. This is the one thing I need, I of all people, once an adventuristic ex-avant-gardist: to know, touch, feel that what is has already been, that what I am experiencing in this moment has already been experienced and survived, that therefore it is within human power, and therefore within my power, to survive it.”

 

And this: “Because of today’s rules in poetry, today’s lack of rules, today’s elements—how else? I’m not a scribe or an antiquarian—I don’t look for novelty but rather for the continuous authentication of new arrangements of things, words, rhythms that have already been experienced many times. Nihil novi is not my philosophy, it is my shield, for in the new there is a terrifying meaning, in new nonexistence, since the “new,” insofar as it is new, has arisen from nothing.” 

 

Wat's fluency, the articulation of his memories and intellectual linkages, his gift for sheer storytelling, are phenomenal for a man in his sixties in chronically ill health, ravaged by the century he endured. In section XV of The Triumph of Love (1998), Geoffrey Hill writes:

 

"Flamen I draw darkly out of flame.

Lumen is a measure of light.

Lumens are not luminaries. A great

Polish luminary of our time is the obscure

Aleksander Wat."

 

Wat illuminates our dark age with luminous words.

'Pass Judgment on Only What He Understands'

“Anyone who says the artist’s field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. . . . You are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.” 

What little I’ve ever known and understood seems to be dissolving. I can still name all the presidents, in order, and the capitals of every state. But I haven’t a clue as to AI, the midterm elections or what to do about Russia. There was a time when, if I had no intelligent answers to such questions, I would have bluffed my way through them. Answering questions was not a quest for truth but an exercise in ego-massaging.

 

The passage above is taken from the letter Anton Chekhov wrote to his friend and editor Alexi Suvorin on October 27, 1888. Suvorin had an earnest streak. Like many people today, his choice of politics seemed to be performative. He conformed to the fashions of his set. Chekhov writes:

 

“I sometime preach heresies, but haven’t once gone so far as to deny that problematic questions have a place in art. In conversations with my fellow writers I always insist that it is not the artist’s job to try to answer narrowly specialized questions. It is bad for the artist to take on something he doesn’t understand. . . . The artist must pass judgment only on what he understands; his range is as limited as that of any other specialist . . .”

 

I’ve never read a work of literature, whether novel or poem, looking for answers, though they have occasionally been supplied without me seeking them.

 

[Chekhov’s quotes are taken from Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (trans. Simon Karlinsky and Michael Henry Heim, 1973).]

'The Breezy Wight Who Cannot See'

I often think about the continuity of personality. Not in the abstract sense, as an academic exercise in human psychology. Rather, as an aspect of your life and mine. Are we the same people we were at age twelve or twenty? Is that a metaphysical question? Is it trivial?

At the trivial level of DNA, of course. Our genetic inheritance is always with us. But why is it, when I look back at my younger self, I am puzzled and sometimes ashamed? Why the hell did I do that? What did I hope to accomplish? How could I be so thoughtless? At the time, I would have congratulated myself on making enlightened decisions. I read Freud and Proust. I knew something about people and their behavior. That twenty-year-old kid seems foreign to me, and yet I recognize him. I hurt people and congratulated myself on my precious moral principles. 

In 1914, the year he turned seventy-four, Thomas Hardy published Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces. Among the poems collected in the volume is “Seventy-Four and Twenty”:

 

“Here goes a man of seventy-four,

Who sees not what life means for him,

And here another in years a score

Who reads its very figure and trim.

 

“The one who shall walk to-day with me

Is not the youth who gazes far,

But the breezy wight who cannot see

What Earth's ingrained conditions are.”

 

I turn seventy-four today and feel like an unlikely mashup of Hardy’s two subjects. I’m often as blind and oblivious as the old man and occasionally able to “read” life’s “very figure and trim.” I can soothe myself with words like this – “That’s just human” – which smells rankly like bullshit. In another poem from the volume, “Regret Me Not,” Hardy writes:

 

“I did not know

   That heydays fade and go,

But deemed that what was would be always so.”