`Like the Punchline to a Joke'

A friend knocked on my office door and said I might appreciate the story she wanted to tell. Recently she read War and Peace for the first time, in the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volohonsky. Like any thoughtful reader, she asked herself afterwards, “Now what?” So she read Anna Karenina. Then she consulted Lectures on Russian Literature, Nabokov’s posthumously published review of his homeland’s 19th-century writers. In the lecture devoted to Anna Karenina, Melissa was surprised to encounter the name of her former landlady in Ames, Iowa, where she attended Iowa State University. Here’s the pertinent passage:

“Tolstoy stood for the natural life. Nature, alias God, had decreed that the human female should experience more pain in childbirth than, say, a porcupine or a whale. Therefore Tolstoy was violently opposed to the elimination of this pain.

“In Look magazine, a poor relation of Life, of April 8, 1952, there is a series of photos under the heading, `I Photographed My Baby’s Birth.’ A singularly unattractive baby smirks in a corner of the page. Says the caption: Clicking her own camera as she lies on the delivery table, Mrs. A.H. Heusinkveld, a photography writer (whatever that is) of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, records (says the caption) these extraordinary views of the birth of her first baby – from the early labor pains to the baby’s first cry.

“What does she take in the way of pictures? For instance: `Husband [wearing a handpainted philistine tie, with a dejected expression on his simple face] visits wife in the midst of her pains,’ or `Mrs. Heusinkveld shoots Sister Mary who sprays patient with disinfectants.’

“Tolstoy would have violently objected to all this.”

The kitchiness, of course, is funny but what would Nabokov (and Tolstoy) have made of women videotaping childbirth and posting it online? Or half-dressed pregnant celebrities posing for magazine covers? Nabokov obviously relished the vulgarity of documenting intimate moments and publishing the photos in a national magazine – yet another instance of poshlust, the Russian word he defined as “smug philistinism” and “not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.” [See his Gogol and the essay “Philistines and Philistinism,” appended to Lectures on Russian Literature.] What’s different 56 years later is that Mrs. Heusinkveld today would congratulate herself on her candor and courage in transgressing oppressive standards of morality and taste, and a sizeable cadre of voices would second her self-praise. Today, vulgar narcissism is rationalized as virtue. Not to broadcast the birth of one’s child is so bourgeois, so 20th-century.

My friend is a tough-minded Iowan, alert to poshlust in all its shadings. She didn’t meet Mrs. Heusinkveld until almost 30 years after the Look magazine incident. Her son, the boy whose birth she photographed, worked as a handyman on his mother’s rental properties. “She was mean, too, the kind of person who thinks she’s so good and liberal-minded but really she’s mean,” my friend said, confirming all my assumptions.

More important than all of this is that Melissa loved Tolstoy’s great novels, and the love surprised her. “War and Peace is like the punchline to a joke – long and difficult. You wouldn’t think anybody would enjoy it,” she said.

The night before, I had read an essay new to me by Marilynne Robinson, “When I Was a Child,” included in The Brick Reader (edited by Linda Spalding and Michael Ondaatje). The first paragraph seems apropos:

“When I was a child I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists.”

`A Near Spiritual Hunger'

My friend’s widowed mother is in her nineties and lives by herself in Connecticut. Like my friend she is a lifelong inveterate reader and has in recent decades devised a highly focused reading plan. She reads, or rather rereads, the work of Jane Austen, Henry James and Marcel Proust (in French) in perpetual rotation. Her husband was an academic, and so is her son, but she is a dedicated amateur, one who reads out of love and joy. I thought of her while reading My Mentor, a memoir of William Maxwell by Alec Wilkinson, who writes:

“Reading was a near spiritual hunger with him, and he spent the last few years of his life reading hours a day, going back over the books he had loved.”

Knowing this, one wonders how and why people, young and old, spend their days watching television or surfing the more worthless regions of the Internet. Self-respect and a sense of gratitude call us to higher things. Time squandered is an affront to creation, and which promises us more: The American Scene or American Idol? Health and wealth permitting, I foresee old age as the period when I will finally get serious about reading, when I will at last read The Tale of Genji and return gratefully to Gibbon. Edward Hirsch reports Maxwell (who died in 2000, age 91) saying:

“I once said to Joe Mitchell that the only part about dying that I minded was that when you are dead you can’t read Tolstoy.”

Or Chekhov, Shakespeare or Joyce. Or William Maxwell.

The Distillation of Facts

Eric Ormsby and Adam Kirsch are already writing for the New York Sun, and now the newspaper has added Theodore Dalrymple to its first-rate stable of reviewers. Here’s a choice digression from his review of the 614-page Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, by George Makari:

“Here, as an aside, I make a plea for thin rather than for fat books, at least for the general reader. (I accept the value of fat books as repositories.) There is more intellect in the distillation than in the accumulation of facts; for facts, unlike men, are not created equal. We busy human beings need guidance as to their importance and significance; and there are, after all, very few subjects of such intrinsic importance that we need to know every last detail about them.”

Dalrymple is a master of concision, of saying much with modest means.

`What a Queer Spot for a Bookshop!'

Some years ago I saw Steven Millhauser in the public library in the city where both of us lived. I mentioned I was rereading The Old Wives’ Tale, the only one of Arnold Bennett’s many novels I had read but one I recalled with pleasure. Steven grimaced and made it clear he had no use for Bennett. I was surprised. His fiction is certifiably “post-realist” but his tastes are admirably broad. I’ve heard him praise Trollope, Zola and Maupassant, and while I was writing a lengthy paper on Henry James he encouraged me to read “Madame de Mauves.” I finished rereading The Old Wives Tale, enjoying it again, but never pursued Bennett’s 29 other novels.

On Jan. 5, the “Five Best” feature in the Wall Street Journal was assembled by Edward Mendelson, a literature professor at Columbia University and the literary executor of W.H. Auden’s estate. Mendelson selected five works that “explore marriage with uncommon clarity,” and among them he included Bennett’s Riceyman Steps (1923). The only other book on the list I have read is Theodor Fontane’s incomparable Effi Briest, made into a great film in 1974 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Monday evening I started reading one novel but lost interest after four chapters. I put it aside and opened Riceyman Steps. It was already late and I read only 40 pages, but I’m enjoying myself. Henry Earlforward is a bookseller in the Clerkenwell district of London. His shop is located on the title steps, modeled by Bennett on Granville Place, now called Gwynne Place. The area is rundown but not yet a slum. Here’s how Bennett describes the book shop:

“The King’s Cross Road window held only cheap editions, in their paper jackets, of popular modern novels, such as those of Ethel M. Dell, Charles Garvice, Zane Grey, Florence Barclay, Nat Gould, and Gene Stratton Porter. The side-window was set out with old books, first editions, illustrated editions, and complete library editions in calf or morocco of renowned and serious writers, whose works, indispensable to the collections of self-respecting book-gentlemen (as distinguished from bookmen), have passed through decades of criticism into the impregnable paradise of eternal esteem. The side-window was bound to attract the attention of collectors and bibliomaniacs. It seemed strangely, even fatally, out of place in that dingy and sordid neighbourhood where existence was a dangerous and difficult adventure in almost frantic quest of food, drink and shelter, where the familiar and beloved landmarks were public-houses, and where the immense majority of the population read nothing but sporting prognostications and results and, on Sunday mornings, accounts of bloody crimes and juicy sexual irregularities.”

You would never know, reading Bennett’s prose, that Ulysses had been published the previous year. He’s wordy and graceless but possesses a modest gift for detail (“sporting prognostications”) and gentle satire (“as distinguished from bookmen”). Of his six authors of “popular modern novels” I recognize only Zane Grey (Riders of the Purple Sage). Grey and Porter were Americans, the others English. They were the Danielle Steeles and John Greshams of their day, and Bennett’s casual assessment of journalism, circa 1919, remains pertinent. And the mention of “bibliomaniacs” reminds me of another bookshop, Bibliomania, owned by my old friend Bill Healey in Schenectady, N.Y. Bennett continues:

“To the secret race of collectors always ravenously desiring to get something for much less than its real value, the window in Riceyman Steps was irresistible. And all manner of people, including book collectors, passed along King’s Cross Road in the course of a day. And all the collectors upon catching sight of the shop exclaimed in their hearts: `What a queer spot for a bookshop! Bargains. . . .’”

Bookshops have always been magnets for the pretentious and those wishing to appear as something they are not. Even 85 years ago they were ripe for satire. Here’s an exchange between Earlforward and one of his customers, “a short, carefully-dressed man, dapper and alert”:

“`I suppose you haven’t got such a thing as a Shakspere [sic] in stock, I mean a pretty good one?’

“`What sort of Shakspere [sic]? I’ve got a number of Shaksperes [sic].’

“`Well, I don’t quite know. . . . I’ve been thinking for a long time I ought to have a Shakspere [sic].’

“`Illustrated?’ asked the bookseller, who had now accurately summed up his client as one who might know something of the world, but who was a simpleton in regard to books.’

“`I really haven’t thought.’ The customer gave a slight, good-humoured snigger. `I suppose it would be nice to have pictures to look at.’”

This sort of thing goes on for another three pages, until we learn the customer’s true identity and purpose. Then Bennett reveals something about the character of Earlforward:

“`Afraid your books outside are getting a bit wet,’ he cried from the doorway.

“`Thank you. Thank you,’ said the bookseller mildly and unperturbed, thinking: `He must be a managing and interfering kind of man. Can’t I run my own business?’

“Some booksellers kept waterproof covers for their outside display, but this one did not. He had found in practice that a few drops of rain did no harm to low-priced volumes.”

Those panjandrums of Modernism, Ezra Pound (in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”) and Virginia Woolf (in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”), effectively derailed Bennett’s reputation for right-thinking readers. The loss is ours. He is a greater, more sophisticated artist than his second-hand reputation implies. Consider the following review of Sturge Moore’s Art and Life, written by Bennett in 1910 and collected in The Author’s Craft and Other Critical Writings of Arnold Bennett (1968, edited by Samuel Hynes):

“His value is that he would make the English artist a conscious artist. He does, without once stating it, bring out in the most startling way the contrast between, for example, the English artist and the Continental artist. Read the correspondence of Dickens and Thackeray, and then read the correspondence of Flaubert, and you will see. The latter was continually preoccupied with his craft, the two former scarcely ever – and never in an intelligent fashion. I have been preaching on this theme for years, but I am not aware that anybody has been listening. I was going to say that I was sick of preaching about it, but I am not. I shall continue. . . .”

`The Fragility of Happiness'

I’ve recommended several novels to my boss, as well as the travel books of Patrick Leigh Fermor, and thus far my job is not in jeopardy. She has enjoyed Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald; Loving, by Henry Green; and Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson. On her own she found, with my endorsement, John Updike’s Of the Farm and Stanley Elkin’s Mrs. Ted Bliss. Last week, on a whim, I suggested one of my favorite works of fiction, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), by William Maxwell, a quiet, heartbreaking American master.

The Library of America has just published his Early Novels and Stories, which includes Bright Center of Heaven, They Came Like Swallows, The Folded Leaf, Time Will Darken It (his other undoubted masterpiece) and a selection of stories. Let’s count this as a down payment on redemption after the LoA’s publication in recent years of such trash as Paul Bowles, H.P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. Fourteen months ago I suggested Maxwell’s induction into the same club as Henry James and Willa Cather. The LoA imprimatur coincides nicely with the centenary of Maxwell’s birth, in Lincoln, Ill., on Aug. 16, 1908. He died in 2000, two weeks short of his 92nd birthday. In the fall, the LoA will publish Later Novels and Stories.

In an interview, the editor of the LoA’s Maxwell volumes, Christopher Carduff, rightly identifies the novelist’s principle concern as “the fragility of happiness.” It’s a theme he shares with the writer he most resembles, Anton Chekhov (with a dollop of Washington Square-era Henry James). Carduff confirms this:

“He admired and emulated the Joyce of `The Dead’ but, as an artist and technician, had no use for the Joyce of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. He also had no use for Pound or Stein or Faulkner. He did love Virginia Woolf, but not for her `modernism.’ He loved her for the same reasons that he loved Chekhov and Turgenev, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Elizabeth Bowen, and Bonnard and Vuillard: because she rendered, with great fidelity and artistry, the texture of middle-class family life, and the interactions, both large and small, between men, women, and children within a family. Maxwell wasn’t so much a great modernist as he was a great domestic realist, perhaps the greatest American fiction has yet produced.”

These are grand claims readers can substantiate by reading the novels and stories. I remember discovering Maxwell on my own in the nineteen-seventies and wondering why he wasn’t better known and widely acknowledged as our Chekhov. At the time, I knew no one who had read his work or even recognized his name. Maxwell was for 40 years a fiction editor of The New Yorker, and in that capacity he edited, among others, Cheever, Nabokov, J.F. Powers, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Peter Taylor, Updike and Welty. One of his favorites was Frank O’Connor, the pen name of the Irish story writer Michael O’Donovan. In 1996, Knopf published a volume of the Maxwell-O’Connor letters, The Happiness of Getting it Down Right. The title comes from an essay Maxwell wrote about O’Connor after his death in 1966:

“He did not go in for being an important writer, though he was one; or an important anything. Writing was what mattered to him. The fascination of it. The difficulties. The happiness of getting it down right.”

Obviously, this is Maxwell’s modestly oblique self-revelation. The letters also confirm the Chekhov connection. In 1964, Maxwell wrote to O’Connor’s wife, Harriet, when the couple lived in Dublin, trying to locate Chekhov’s stories as they had been translated by Constance Garnett:

“Does Michael ever haunt second hand book shops? Are there any to haunt? There virtually aren’t any here, any more. And I have been trying to complete my Chekhov. Will youse [sic] keep your eyes open for Vol. IV (The Party, etc.); V (The Wife, etc.); VII (The Bishop, etc.); X (The Horse Stealers); and XII (The Cook’s Wedding, etc.)?”

The postscript to The Happiness of Getting It Down Right includes letters Maxwell and O’Connor’s widow exchanged after the Irish writer’s death. The widow, it seems, gave Maxwell her husband’s Chekhov collections, and his expression of gratitude can make you weep:

“I have been looking at, reading, and thinking about Michael’s volumes of Chekhov. So lived with – turned down corners, turned down sides of the page, coffee stains, whiskey stains, and perhaps tears. It is almost as if you had given me his bathrobe and slippers. I know I don’t deserve to have them, but I will try to deserve to have them.”

Between 1983 and 1987, Ecco Press issued, in 15 paperback volumes, Garnett’s translations of Chekhov’s stories. Each came with a blurb on the back cover, amounting to a miniature essay by a contemporary writer, including Welty, Richard Howard, and Cynthia Ozick. Maxwell supplied the blurb for Vol. X, The Horse-Stealers, one of the volumes he asked O’Connor to scout for:

“It seems to be part of the human condition that a wall of glass separates one life from another. For Chekhov it did not exist. Though no Church has seen fit to canonize him, he was nevertheless a saint. The greatest of his stories are, no matter how many times reread, always an experience that strikes deep into the soul and produces an alteration there. The reader who has lived through `Ward No. 6’ knows forever after that his own sanity is provisional. As for those masterpieces, `The Lady with the Dog,’ `The Horse-Stealers,’ `Sleepy,’ `Gooseberries,’ `About Love,’ `In the Ravine,’ – where else do you see so clearly the difference between light and dark, or how dark darkness can be.”

`I Can't Imagine Life Sans Books'

W.H. Auden wrote the following in 1939, near the start of World War II. It was part of a longer, abandoned work published posthumously as The Prolific and the Devourer:

“My father’s library not only taught me to read, but dictated my choice of reading. It was not the library of a literary man nor of a narrow specialist, but a heterogeneous collection of books on many subjects, and including very few novels. In consequence my reading has always been wide and casual rather than scholarly, and in the main non-literary.”

The father was George Augustus Auden, a physician and scion of a family his son described elsewhere as “phlegmatic, earnest, rather slow, inclined to be miserly, and endowed with excellent health.” We’re relying on Auden’s memory and sense of filial piety, of course, but his father's library, for all its obvious limitations, sounds like excellent preparation for the poet who would write "In Praise of Limestone." It also defines his eccentric book predilections for life. Judging by his collected reviews and essays, Auden was happiest reading poetry, science and theology. He shared a century with Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Faulkner and Beckett but makes little mention of them. The novelist on whom Auden dotes most enthusiastically is Trollope, and his favorite thinker is Kierkegaard. As a reader, he found what he needed, as all of us do.

I happened upon a column I wrote in January 1989 for the newspaper I worked for in upstate New York. It carries the headline, written by a copy editor, "I can't imagine life sans books." My oldest son, now 20 and a junior in college, was then 17 months old. The occasion was a new, much-touted literacy project in New York. I mentioned the importance books already played in my son's young life, and compared it to the relative absence of books in my parents' house. A friend working on his master's degree in social work had recently used me as a case study, and I cited his findings:

"My friend discerned that as a child I gravitated to literature as an antidote to a miserable home life. Books were solace. They were funny and suspenseful and fed my already active fantasy life. After the usual children's books, I consumed shelves of Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells. I collected all of Edgar Rice Burroughs, hardcover and paperback. I wallowed for years in science fiction, at the same time discovering Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Sartre and Kafka."

In the column I mentioned a book I read repeatedly as a kid. All I remembered, oddly, was the story -- no author or title. I described the plot -- an Indian boy in the upper Great Lakes carves a canoe, releases it in Lake Superior, and the toy boat floats to the Atlantic Ocean -- and asked readers to identify it. In the next week or so, in those pre-Internet, pre-email days, I received almost 100 letters (paper, ink, envelope) and innumerable calls at the office telling me the book I sought was Paddle-to-the-Sea, by Holling C. Holling, published in 1941. I bought a copy and introduced it to my son, though it never captured his imagination as it had mine. Here's the third-from-last paragraph in that column written 19 year ago:

"Today, the great writers are my teachers. I can't imagine living my life without the wisdom left by Chekhov, Samuel Johnson, Dickens, Shakespeare, Thoreau and Whitman."

Nothing has changed. If we look long enough, and are willing occasionally to ask for help, we find the books we need.

`I Look Upon Fine Phrases Like a Lover'

On alternate nights before going to sleep, the friend of a friend, a retired English professor, reads one of Shakespeare’s sonnets or a letter by Keats. This impresses me as a sensible regimen. Some readers, reaching for a mystery, might object: “But I don’t want to think before I go to sleep. I want to relax and escape. I want to stop thinking.” Fair enough, but engagement with a literary text, especially a work we know intimately but also know we can never exhaust, is another species of relaxation. The quality Keats and Shakespeare share, besides genius, is an essential strangeness. By this I don’t mean eccentricity. They say things in a manner different from other writers, and in a manner that continues to resonate even after long acquaintance. Their language is simultaneously precise and suggestive. They find expression for thoughts we never suspected were possible. Take the best-known sonnet, No. 73:

“That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.”

What always impresses me is how quietly Shakespeare narrows time, starting with a year and tightening the focus until only ashes remain. The sadness is almost overwhelming, a sense heightened, not diminished, by its proximity to self-pity. A quarter-turn in the wrong direction and it would all melt into bathos. And why “black night?” Why is that not redundant, inserted merely to fill out the meter, but instead so frightening and final? We have a life distilled in 14 lines – perhaps two lives. This confirms the rightness of Keats addressing Shakespeare, in “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” as “Chief Poet!” On Nov. 22, 1817, Keats writes to J.H. Reynolds:

“One of the three books I have with me is Shakespear’s [sic] Poems: I neer found so many beauties in the sonnets – they seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally – in the intensity of working out conceits – Is this to be borne? Hark ye!”

The letters are peppered with Shakespeare. On Aug. 14, 1819, he wrote to Benjamin Bailey:

“I am convinced more and more every day that….a fine writer is the most genuine Being in the World – Shakspeare [sic] and the paradise Lost every day become greater wonders to me – I look upon fine Phrases like a Lover….”

With your permission, Professor, I will adopt your reading plan.

`Harness Jades and Girdle Jaspers'

Most of what little I know about classical Chinese poetry I trace to a slender Penguin paperback I first read about 40 years ago: Poems of the Late T’ang, translated and edited by the late Welsh Sinologist A.C. Graham. [A brief digressive question: How much of my literary education do I owe to Penguins?] Soon I read the translations of Waley, Pound, Rexroth and others, but Graham’s tone of cool wistfulness is the one that has stuck, the one that sounds, rightly or wrongly, “Chinese” in my inner ear. Let’s be grateful to New York Review Books for returning Graham’s 1965 anthology to print. His annotations are spare and useful, and never attempt to usurp the poems. Included is Graham’s essay, “The Translation of Chinese Poetry,” which modestly begins:

“The art of translating Chinese poetry is a by-product of the Imagist movement, first exhibited in Ezra Pound’s Cathay (1915), Arthur Waley’s One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918), and Amy Lowell’s Fir Flower Tablets (1921). Except for Waley, the unique instance of a sinologist who is also a poet, its best practitioners have always been poets or amateurs working on the draft versions of others.”

The T’ang Dynasty dates from 618 to 907 A.D. Graham’s choice of poems by Tu Fu, Meng Chiao, Han Yu, Lu T’ung, Li Ho, Tu Mu and Li Shang-yin is small but delicately selected. Here is “A Withered Tree,” by Han Yu (768-824 A.D.):

“Not a twig or a leaf on the old tree,
Wind and frost harm it no more.
A man could pass through the hole in its belly,
Ants crawl searching under its peeling bark.
Its only lodger, the toadstool which dies in a morning,
The birds no longer visit in the twilight.
But its wood can still spark tinder.
It does not care yet to be only the void at its heart.”

This is precise description worthy of a naturalist like Thoreau, but Graham adds in a note: “The `void at it heart’ is both the hollow inside of the tree and the Buddhist ideal of the mind freed from the illusion of a material body.”

And this, by Tu Mu, is “Pien River Blocked by Ice”:

“For a thousand miles along the river, when the ice begins to close,
Harness jades and girdle jaspers tinkle at the jagged edge.
The drift of life’s no different from the water under the ice
Hurrying Eastward day and night while no one notices.”

I especially like the sound of “Harness jades and girdle jaspers.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines “jasper” as “a kind of precious stone,” more specifically “an opaque cryptocrystalline variety of quartz, of various colours, usually red, yellow, or brown, due mostly to the admixture of iron oxide.” Its etymology may have influenced Graham’s choice of a word a most recent OED citation dating from 1868: Spanish and Italian, by way of Latin, Greek, Herbrew, Assyrian, Persian and Arabic. Poems of the Late T’ang is full of small linguistic treats. As an epigraph, Graham uses a lovely passage from Wei T’ai:

“Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words; this is how poetry enters deeply into us. If the poet presents directly feelings which overwhelm him, and keeps nothing back to linger as an after-taste, he stirs us superficially; he cannot start the feet and the hands waving in time, far less strengthen morality and refine culture, set heaven and earth in motion and call up the spirits!”

In a nutshell, and with infinite variations, this distils Imagism and its Russian cousin, the Acmeism of Mandelstam and Akhmatova.

`Ninth-Rate Philosophy'

“Academic literary study seems these days to be ninth-rate philosophy, or drunken verbiage without the alcohol. I’d rather listen to my local pub bore than to a paper entitled ‘Open Ended: Poetic Closure and the Digital Interface.’”

The voice is unmistakable: Theodore Dalrymple, in his latest “Global Warning” essay in The Spectator. He pleasingly echoes one of his precursors, George Orwell, in the 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”:

“A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

`Self-Critical Rather Than Self-Satisfied'

I once interviewed a self-described “humor educator.” He arrived at my newspaper wearing a suit, tie and red clown nose. Throughout our hour-long talk in a conference room, the nose remained in place. “Laughter is therapeutic,” he reminded me several times. He was earnest and never funny, except inadvertently, and laughed very loudly.

I thought of this fellow the other night as I was reading a novel I’m reviewing. The novelist makes no attempt to be intentionally funny. In fact, humor of the basest sort – fart jokes, that sort of thing – might redeem the dreary proceedings. His story has an italicized, literal-minded quality borrowed, I think, from Hollywood, where several of his earlier books have been turned into films. I thought of my “humor educator” because he, like every character in the novel (including the narrator), showed signs of what the American Psychological Association calls histrionic personality disorder. That my clown-nosed interviewee was a psychologist, I suppose, proves something.

How are we to respond, as critics and readers, to so misguided a book? Not an evil, stupid or even inept book, just blindly, humorlessly wrong-headed. The novelist in question is known for his devotion to “progressive” causes but, for once, it’s not preachy politics that make the book so dull. Rather, it reminds me of The Best Years of Our Lives, the William Wyler film that won eight Oscars in 1947. Who would bad-mouth a movie in which a real-life disabled Army vet, Harold Russell, plays a Navy vet who lost both hands during World War II? When Russell’s character, Homer Parrish, smashes a window with his prosthetic hooks, I cringed and giggled, and still cringe and giggle remembering it. Manny Farber called it “a horse-drawn truckload of liberal schmaltz.”

I resent Wyler heavy-handedly, so to speak, manipulating my emotional responses, and feel the same way about the novelist in question. Merely to criticize well-intentioned sincerity, however, seems a little too easy, especially when one has done it so often before. It can’t be good for us as critics or people to repeatedly feel superior to such stuff, pitying the slobs who enjoy reading it while congratulating our own enlightened tastes.

In his Paris Review interview, Geoffrey Hill said, “The first obligation for any real critic is to be self-critical rather than self-satisfied.” Actually, I think that’s the first obligation for any human being, but I’m uncertain what this means in practice for a critic.

`Of Some Writers'

Chekhov writes in his Notebooks:

“Of some writers each work taken separately is brilliant, but taken as a whole they are indefinite; of others each particular work represents nothing outstanding; but, for all that, taken as a whole they are distinct and brilliant.”

Neither of Chekhov’s categories is an unqualified dismissal. Both sorts of writers have their charms. I take “indefinite” to mean difficult to distinguish or remember in detail, as with the work of prolific writers like Turgenev and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In memory, without the text in hand, I have difficulty telling one story from another in A Sportman’s Notebook and A Crown of Feathers, though I’m left with pleasurable memories of both. The same is true of Dubliners, a vastly greater work, except I can recall “The Dead” in some detail. Not coincidentally, “The Dead” is vastly greater than the other stories in Joyce’s collection, and I’ve read it more often than the others.

How much do we remember of any work of literature? Judging by my current rereading of Shakespeare, very little in detail – some scenes and phrases or lines, the general arc of the story -- but seldom with strict accuracy. The way we remember books has something in common with our recollections of people. We think: “What a nice guy” or “What a jerk.” If we pursue memory further, we’re liable to refine the judgment and recall specifics: “He was always dependable, ready with an encouraging word” or “What a negative guy, always whining,” and so on. Cumulative judgments are based on first impressions and subsequent evidence that confirms, refutes or modifies them. All of this is humbling and causes me to wonder how many complacently cherished critical “opinions” would stand up to serious reevaluation – that is, to honest rereadings of the books in question. This is a Rashomon-like problem, but the varying accounts come not from discrete observers but from versions of ourselves separated in time. Rereading a book fondly recalled can be risky. We may find our fondness inexplicable -- or reassuring. I'm reminded of the opening paragraph of A.J. Liebling's "Sugar Ray and the Milling Cove" (collected in The Sweet Science):

"Part of the pleasure of going to a fight is reading the newspaper next morning to see what the sports writers think happened. This pleasure is prolonged, in the case of a big bout, by the fight films. You can go to them to see what did happen. What you eventually think you remember about the fight will be an amalgam of what you thought you saw there, what you read in the papers you saw, and what you saw in the films."

In Chekhov’s second category I place Sherwood Anderson. No single story even in his masterwork, Winesburg, Ohio, is itself a masterpiece, a label that might accurately apply to one of his later stories, “A Death in the Woods.” Anderson’s effects, in Winesburg, Ohio, are cumulative. None of his novels is an unqualified success, though there’s much to love in Windy McPherson’s Son and Poor White. Winesburg stories like “Hands” and “Paper Pills” are permanent features of my mental landscape. I feel as though I know their characters with greater intimacy than I do some people I see almost daily.

`A Kind of Judgment Day'

A good critic’s foremost prerequisite is the ability to write well. With every ill-written sentence, critics sabotage whatever middling authority they possess. Why trust the judgment of writers unable to join language to thought and feeling with precision, wit and style? Why waste time on lousy prose in the first place, except as a lesson in what to avoid?

The binding of In My Good Books remains an impressively vivid shade of Delft blue, given that Chatto & Windus published it in 1942. The pages have turned buff, not brown, and the judgments they contain have likewise weathered well:

“We turn to literature not only for respite, relaxation or escape from the boredom of reality and the gnaw of suffering, but to get away from uncertainty. And certainty is in the past. There, so it seems to us, things have been settled. There we can see a whole picture. For to see something whole becomes a necessity to people like ourselves whose world has fallen to pieces. Perhaps, we think, the certainty of the past will help our minds to substantiate a faith in the kind of certainty we hope for in the future.”

“People like ourselves” refers specifically to the common readers of England, civilians under Nazi attack, but V.S. Pritchett addresses all who inhabit a world under siege. So much criticism, from newspaper book reviews to academic door stops, attempts to usurp the provinces of philosophy, sociology and political science. We welcome Pritchett’s common-sense reminder of literature’s proper domain: humanity. Often I read reviews and litblogs whose authors give the impression of disliking their fellow humans, and we can already hear them going after Pritchett’s “there…things have been settled,” blithely ignoring his strategic “so it seems to us.” Pritchett’s tone, here and elsewhere, is measured and mature, never snotty or condescending. He’s not showing off but nevertheless impresses us with his reliable assessments, comprehensive reading and animated prose. He relies on sound judgment, not theory.

In My Good Books collects 25 essays (they are more substantial than most reviews) first published in the New Statesman and Nation. All are devoted to writers of the past, with Hardy and Synge the most recent. In his preface, quoted above, Pritchett describes himself as “bookish but uneducated.” He means he never attended a university. Born in 1900, he was apprenticed at 15 in the London leather trade. His mother was illiterate. His father, limned memorably in one of Pritchett’s novels (Mr. Beluncle) and a memoir (A Cab at the Door), was a comically unsuccessful businessman. Pritchett, among the best-read men of the age, a model for book critics, whose short stories are the best written by an Englishman since Kipling, would not be admitted to a creative writing program today and he probably, poor fellow, never read Blanchot. He was a professional amateur who weighed books against life and other books. Whitney Balliett ranked him, with A.J. Liebling, among his “non-musical heroes.” In the preface, Pritchett notes how printers, publishers, bookshops, libraries and readers suffered during the Blitz:

“The wise reader is one who prepares himself for the awful moment, a kind of Judgment Day, when only he and the hundred best authors are left in the world and have somehow to shake down together; when he will, so to speak, be stranded in the highest society.”

He’s no nostalgist wallowing in the after glow. He is shrewd about books and men, past and the present:

“The past is not serene. It is turbulent, upside down and unfinished. When we look into the lives of the authors of the great wise (or unwise) books, when we glance at the erratic outline of their times, we find that those men and those times were as uncertain as we are, and the picture they saw was by no means complete to their eyes. They lived – our hackneyed phrase is repeated throughout the history of literature – in `a period of transition.’ Every one of them had one foot in the old, the other in the new.”

In My Good Books includes pieces on, among others, Gibbon, Constant, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Peacock and Dostoevsky. On the last, as with his other subjects, Pritchett pays us the compliment of familiarity:

“I have been reading Dostoevski again: The Possessed. You know the sensation. You are sitting by the fire reflecting that one of the things which reconciles you to life, even at its most tragic, is the low clear daily monotone of its voice. Suddenly comes a knock at the door, there are cries. A man has been murdered at a house down the street. Dostoevski again.”

And he does something else: He makes a persuasive case for rereading a writer I don't much care for.

`I Mind My Belly Very Studiously'

Finicky eaters and those who claim they forget to eat are never to be trusted. Absent from their bodies, they are a danger to themselves and others. They scorn pleasure, health, common sense and the call of their animal natures. They are vain, niggling and hard. Such fastidiousness at the table amounts to a minor obsession in the thought of Samuel Johnson. Boswell reports him saying:

“Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.”

And his friend Hester Lynch Piozzi, in her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, records a similar thought:

“A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of any thing than he does of his dinner; and if he cannot get that well dressed, he should be suspected of inaccuracy in other things.”

This weekend I watched The Godfather again, for perhaps the 20th time since my father and I saw it at the Yorktown Theater, in Cleveland, in March 1972. Food, its preparation and consumption, runs like a leitmotif through the movie, and Coppola/Puzo give the ultimate word on the subject to reliable, ample-bellied Clemenza:

“Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

John Berryman, R.I.P

John Berryman ended his life 36 years ago, on Jan. 7, 1972. In “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” he wrote:

“Caretaker! take care, for we run in straits.
Daily, by night, we walk naked to storm,
some threat of wholesale loss, to ruinous fear.
Gift us with long cloaks & adrenalin.”

`Articulate Creatures'

It took more than a month but the mailman on Saturday delivered Time's Covenant: Selected Poems, by Eric Ormsby, two weeks earlier than Amazon.ca had promised. I won’t rehash the details but I’m pleased to own a book that has already set up shop in the sustenance and pleasure districts of my mind. As Ormsby writes of a similar reading experience in “Time’s Covenant (2006)”, “The Psalms had colonized my own brain-pan/Eons before.”

His work is rich and calorie-filled in an age of poetry-as-ricecake, and calls us to celebrate the supreme human gift -- language. With few exceptions, the work likeliest to attract us and sustain the attraction is actively written. Great writers are never passive amanuenses, holding buckets and catching what pours from the stream of consciousness. Music and thought shape words. Bill Bryson, in his just-published Shakespeare: The World as a Stage, writes:

“It is often said that what sets Shakespeare apart is his ability to illuminate the workings of the soul and so on, and he does that superbly, goodness knows, but what really characterizes his work -- every bit of it, in poems and plays and even dedications, throughout every portion of his career -- is a positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language. A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains an enchanting work after four hundred years, but few would argue that it cuts to the very heart of human behaviour. What it does do is take, and give, a positive satisfaction in the joyous possibilities of verbal expression.”

Bryson’s brief biography is based on the few unassailable facts we have about Shakespeare’s life. Speculation is blessedly sparse and judicious. What that leaves us is a portrait of a hardworking playwright, a professional rooted in a competitive, unforgiving world. Bryson musters the evidence that Shakespeare wrote with admirable speed, like any pro. For these reasons, the sustained splendor of his words seems even more miraculous. In his essay “Poetry as Isotope” (collected in Facsimiles of Time), Ormsby might be writing about Shakespeare when he revels in our linguistic legacy:

“With all the misuses and the perversions of language to which our tongues are prone, it is still a privilege to be a creature in whose mouth language has grown, and an honor to give utterance in these puffs of air which assume coherence and significance in a receiving ear; to partake of shared speech and discourse and conversation and colloquy. So much so that at times, almost overwhelmed by the sense of this privilege and its signal strangeness, we could imagine that all the bronze and granite columns we raise up to our pride mean less in the end than these momentary monuments of sense we erect not only when we read or write or recite poetry but also when we converse or teach or simply speak. Maybe it is just in the evanescence of our words, in their transient intricacies, that our ultimate dignity as articulate creatures resides.”

`Hard to Set in Motion'

I wake incrementally, as though surprised by morning and uncertain how to proceed. I emulate a friend who slept, undrugged, through a Los Angeles earthquake, only to find mirrors cracked and lamps knocked over in his hotel room when he finally woke. Each morning mirrors my life -- slow to start, late to bloom, a plodder not a sprinter, though the body outdistances mind and mood. Caffeine and sunshine infusions ease some of the daily grimness. Here’s what Alec Guinness says in A Positively Final Appearance (and it was – he died one year after its publication, in 2000, age 86):

“For me there are two salves to apply when I feel spiritually bruised – listening to a Haydn symphony or sonata (his clear common sense always penetrates) and seeking out something in Montaigne’s essays. This morning, in spite of the promise of a bright cloudless day, I woke curmudgeonly and disapproving of the world and most of its inhabitants. Montaigne pulled me up sharply: `What we call wisdom is the moroseness of our humours and our distaste of things as they are now … Age sets more wrinkles on our minds than on our faces.’ I don’t care about the facial blemishes but the wriggly, acid convolutions of the brain must be smoothed away somehow. Two or three days in a Benedictine monastery might do the trick.”

I’ll take Haydn under advisement. A saner choice, certainly, than Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose passing in December belatedly brightened an otherwise drab year. The composer will be remembered for describing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as “the biggest work of art there has ever been.” Not surprisingly, he died of heart failure.

Montaigne’s essays already sit on my night stand, beside the lamp, alarm clock and other useful books. Guinness quotes from “On Vanity,” an inspired choice. Montaigne seems to have shared our slowness to rouse. Later in the essay he writes:

“I am hard to set in motion; but once under way, I go as far as anyone wants. I balk as much at little undertakings as at great ones, and at getting equipped for a day’s trip and a visit to a neighbor as for a real journey.”

`Shakespeare Can Take Care of Himself'

One expects actors, particularly those of the genus Movie Star, to be without eloquence, wit or literary gift. They are like the rest of us, only prettier, and the abundance or absence of acting ability has no bearing on their general lack of charm. Consider Marlon Brando and Sylvester Stallone, respectively. That the late Alec Guinness was thoughtful, courtly and bookish, an attentive reader of Montaigne and Shakespeare, a serious Roman Catholic, and author of three fine memoirs (as well as being my favorite actor) would surely surprise the average Star Wars fan. Of those films and his role as Obi-Wan Kenobe, Guinness writes in A Positively Final Appearance (1999):

“A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned.”

I pulled down A Positively Final Appearance (his other autobiographical volumes are Blessings in Disguise, 1985, and My Name Escapes Me, 1996) because I have been lingering with Hamlet, and I remembered that Guinness, at 22, had played the role of Osric in John Gielgud’s 1936 production. I wondered what the actor might contribute to my understanding and enjoyment. In 1938 he played the prince in an Old Vic production directed by Tyrone Guthrie. The actors performed in modern dress, smoked cigarettes and sipped cocktails -- an annoying gimmick of which Guinness partially approves:

“All these decades later I wish we had been much more daring. The most memorable visual effect in the production was the use of umbrellas in the graveyard scene, which caused adverse comment from those who had never experienced the melancholy of a damp funeral. Now I think that in a production presented in contemporary clothes there could be justification for the insertion of a line or two of current English when the need was felt.”

Guinness goes on to amend the “very like a whale” exchange between Hamlet and Polonius -- “Perchance it is a UFO.” “My Lord, it is a UFO.” -- and adds:

“The thing that worries me about cleverly fooling around with Shakespeare is the false impression likely to be made on the young seeing the plays for the first time….Shakespeare can take care of himself, however jaggedly spoken, but I have doubts about the lesser great.”

I’m reminded of Samuel Beckett’s insistence that his plays be produced without changes to text or staging. This has always seemed reasonable. I associate “modernizing” with vulgar hubris, actors and directors wishing to supplant the playwright’s genius with cheap novelty, thus drawing attention to themselves. Later in the memoir, Guinness remembers the first Hamlet he saw, in Haymarket in 1931, with Godfrey Tearle as the prince:

“His superb voice somehow reminded me of very dark Christmas pudding with a dollop of brandy butter….[The production] was a gloomy affair set in drab curtains and dressed stiffly in what were meant to be stylized tenth-century costumes. They say that the first Hamlet you see is the one that leaves the greatest impression and that you love it for the rest of your life. That wasn’t my experience with Godfrey’s.”

Guinness repeatedly surprises the reader with insights and enthusiasms. He casually mentions that a friend has given him RS. Thomas’ 1995 collection No Truce with the Furies. He copies out “Raptor” “with the intention of learning it. Small hope with my fading memory. Standing on the balcony in my nightshirt the opening lines did come back to me, however.

“`You have made God small,
Setting him astride
A pipette or a retort
Studying the bubbles,’

“then it all escaped me.”

Here’s the rest of the poem:

“absorbed in an experiment
that will come to nothing.

“I think of him rather
as an enormous owl
abroad in the shadows,
brushing me sometimes
with his wing so the blood
in my veins freezes, able

“to find his way from one
soul to another because
he can see in the dark.
I have heard him crooning
to himself, so that almost
I could believe in angels,

“those feathered overtones
in love’s rafters, I have heard
him scream, too, fastening
his talons in his great
adversary, or in some lesser
denizen, maybe, like you or me.”

In the same notebook in which he had copied Thomas’ poem, Guinness finds a favorite line from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici: “We behold him but asquint upon reflex or shadow.” How many professors of English can you name, let alone actors, who have read Thomas and Browne? And just to remind you that the man who played Henry Holland in The Lavender Hill Mob, Professor Marcus in The Ladykillers and everyone in Kind Hearts and Coronets, was supernally funny, I offer this:

“With the exception of The Way of All Flesh, which I could never get on with, I have had a lifelong fondness and admiration for Samuel Butler – or at any rate since The Notebooks and Erewhon came my way when I was about twenty. Who could not love and respect a man who could write: `The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.’ (I am tempted to add, `The first two diminish with age and only the last is rigid.’)”

`They Observe Faraway Worlds'

In Shakespeare, as in life, I’m surrounded by conclusions I fail to draw. I’ve read Hamlet 20 or 25 times, I suppose -- most recently, last week -- but never noticed Claudius is a drunk until Michael Pennington pointed it out in Hamlet: A User’s Guide. This insight proves more useful than endless maunderings about image patterns and gender politics. Perhaps because of his theatrical background, Pennington sees the characters more intensely than those of us bound largely by the text. When Pennington reads the words Hamlet speaks to his mother (a very creepy speech, by the way):

“Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:
Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed…”

he suggests that “bloat” may be an unflattering exaggeration (and a sexual innuendo?), “though he probably shouldn’t be too skinny either; skinny kings don’t inspire confidence.” I’m reminded of the Monty Python bit in which they have a contest to select a suitable nickname for the citizens of Belgium. Third Place: Phlegms. Second Place: Sprouts. And the winner: “Fat Greasy Belgian Bastards.” Pennington writes:

“Alcohol is important to Claudius. He is a man who has murdered to get what he has and prospered without apparent effort: but in fact he is running very fast to keep still, his brain ever more active as he is sucked by his coat-tails into retribution. How does he sustain himself? I think he is a progressive alcoholic who draws creative energy from his habit at the outset; but he is weak over a long distance…”

These words seem especially pertinent as I recently contacted an old acquaintance I haven’t seen in almost 35 years. He was the closet I had to the quintessential “drinking buddy.” We drank together daily, at work, at home and in between, especially in John’s white, destroyer-class Thunderbird, and otherwise had nothing in common. Another old acquaintance told me John recently moved to Houston. I sent him an e-mail, he responded, and we had a long talk on the phone last weekend. John works as a supervisor in a steel plant, and still drinks the rest of the day. I’m amazed and appalled by his stamina. Next year he’ll turn 60. I told him I gave up booze a long time ago, and when I suggested we get together some time for dinner, he was forthright: “Most people change. I don’t change. I’m the same guy you used to know.” It’s not in me to condemn John. His explanation sounded at once apologetic and defiant, and I understand that. So did Zbigniew Herbert in a prose poem, “Drunkards,” as translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter:

“Drunkards are people who drink at one gulp, bottoms up. But they make a face, because at the bottom they see themselves again. Through the neck of the bottle they observe faraway worlds. If they had stronger heads and more taste, they would be astronomers.”

I see in John the drunk as house divided, the grimace of recognition pinpointed by Herbert, that familiar mingling of resignation, grandiosity, defiance and self-reproach -- in short, my own image in a funhouse mirror. Even Claudius is not entirely undeserving of our sympathy. Pennington says he demonstrates “provisional humanity,” though Hamlet calls him a “treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain.” Again, Pennington:

“The poison in the cup and the poison on the untipped sword: how were they ever going to get away with it? It is a piece of recklessness, an addict’s fantasy of short-term gratification.”

My `Sledded Polacks'

My younger sons have lived in Houston long enough to pretend they remember snow. Both sledded in upstate New York when young, but we can document this only by admitting photographs as evidence. On Wednesday they sledded for the first time in four years, on grass, not snow, using cardboard, not American Flyers. We identified the steepest slope in a city park, and the boys experimented with sliding techniques. I warned them, in my stern fatherly fashion, to avoid trees, power poles and the histrionic tai chi practitioner at the bottom of the hill. I sat at the top, on the grass, reading -- not Ethan Frome, but a book recommended to me in an e-mail by Buce at Underbelly:

“I wonder if you have ever seen the commentaries by Michael Pennington. He's a London-based actor and director; he did a scene by scene director's commentary on Hamlet that struck me as the best single thing about H I ever read. My wife gave me two more --Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night, and MSN starts off at the same high level of quality (I look forward perhaps especially to TN because it has never been one of my favorite plays; it will be interesting to see what he sees in it).

“Sadly, these three are the limit. I can only wish he had written 34 more.”

This suggestion come from the man who, when I touted Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare as “the best and most entertaining introductory guide to Shakespeare, after the plays and poems,” countered with Mark Van Doren’s Shakespeare, which I subsequently read. Especially for the inexperienced reader, new to the plays, I bow to Buce’s judgment.

So, on the hill, in the plentiful sunshine, I started reading Pennington’s Hamlet: A User’s Guide (Nick Hern Books, London, 1996), a seductive hybrid of gossip, theatrical pragmatism and deep Shakespearean learning. It opens with an anecdote about the day Pennington, in the company of John Gielgud, on a movie location in Italy, learned of the death of Laurence Olivier:

“Now, when I think of the passing of Olivier…what I hear is the voice of John Gielgud later in the day, talking quietly about his own complex relationship with Olivier and his admiration for him that surpassed all rivalry. Generous, humorous, sad, modest, graceful and undeceived, it was the voice of Hamlet.”

The first production of Hamlet Pennington saw, at 13, was Olivier’s film. The first I saw, at 18, was a stage production with Dame Judith Anderson in the title role, in Toledo, Ohio. Pennington first played Hamlet in 1964, as a student at Cambridge University. Winningly, he says, “I still can’t read Shakespeare in silence,” and I have a tough time, too. Given his experience as actor, director and reader, Pennington makes excellent company. In his introduction, all that I have read thus far, he writes:

“I pause: What can a man say about his own Hamlet? The part is like a pane of clear glass disclosing the actor to ma greedy audience, and playing it changes you for good, and for the better.”

The best anatomy of the Hamlet-type I know is in Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, in which the prince is never mentioned by name. In Hoffer’s vision, bored, rootless, underachieving intellectuals are ripe for trouble, whether in Cambridge or Cairo:

“It seems that frustration stems chiefly from inability to act, and that the most poignantly frustrated are those whose talents and temperament equip them ideally for a life of action but are condemned by circumstances to rust away in idleness.”

How many graduate students does that remind you of? I’m not certain if this is the direction in which Pennington’s book is headed, or whether he even renders a final accounting of Hamlet. I took a strong dislike to the prince from my first reading more than 40 years ago, and still find his bloody self-centeredness, his cruel use of others, offensive. Having just reread the play, however, its relevance to my kids, the great-grandchildren of Polish emigrants, sledding on cardboard, seems obvious. Remember Act I, Scene 1, when Horatio says:

“As thou art to thyself:
Such was the very armour he had on
When he the ambitious Norway combated;
So frown'd he once, when, in an angry parle,
He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.
'Tis strange.”

The Painting in the Tree

On New Year’s Eve, I took my younger sons to a city park near downtown Houston, a deep bowl surrounded by highways and office buildings where the drone of traffic never ceases. The sky was big and blue, the sun brilliant, the wind bracing. After cavorting on the playground we followed the jogging path around the perimeter, past the volleyball courts, until we spied a large, brightly colored object in a post oak, about 15 feet off the ground. It was a painting, canvas tacked across a wooden frame, measuring roughly three feet by two feet. The palette was gaudy and commercial -- magenta, puce and bilious avocado -- and the subjects and treatment were vaguely “psychedelic,” reminiscent of Peter Max’s rubbish -- flowers, clouds, stylized suns. The images were crude but clearly were not the work of a child. My kids wanted to climb the tree and salvage the canvas, and I was content to leave it there, but it prompted questions: Who painted it and why was it in a tree? Was its location an act of theft and vandalism, or conceptual art, which amounts to the same thing? Was some pretentious art student, or his instructor, making a “statement?”

The book I had brought with me to the park was Our Culture, What’s Left of It. In it, Theodore Dalrymple has a lovely essay, “A Lost Art,” in which he contrasts the paintings of Mary Cassatt with the late work of Joan Miró, all to the credit of the former. He writes of Cassatt’s pictures of mothers and children:

“They have that strange elusive quality of a Schubert song or a Vermeer painting, of capturing precisely the bittersweet fleeting moment that makes life, for all its disappointments, travails, and hardships, so worth living. Such moments are melancholy as well as joyful precisely because they are fleeting: transcendently beautiful but so brief as to be immeasurable. When we look at the milkmaid pouring milk in Vermeer's painting in the Rijksmuseum, we see -- as for the first time -- how beautiful is a humble stream of milk that pours from a jug, how supremely elegant is its trajectory, how subtle is the play of light upon it; but we understand simultaneously that the moment cannot last, indeed that part of its beauty is its very transience. Though not for long, perfection is indeed of this world. And this perception reconciles us to our existence, full of ugliness as it might otherwise be. If there are Vermeerian moments in our life—as there will be, if only we pay close enough attention—we shall reach serenity, at least intermittently. And that is enough.”

The notion of art as consolation is today deeply unfashionable, yet what better motive could there be for creation? Consider Geoffrey Hill’s question in The Triumph of Love: “What ought a poem to be?” “Answer, a sad and angry consolation.” Vermeer is an artist who fashioned works of perfect equipoise in a time and place of monstrous events. He was born in Delft during the Thirty Years War, of which its historian, C.V. Wedgwood, writes: “The war solved no problem. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous.” A third of the German population was wiped out. In Vermeer’s hometown in 1654, six years after the war, an arsenal exploded, killing hundreds, including another great Dutch painter, Carel Fabritius. Dull critics have accused Vermeer of ignoring the violent geopolitics of his day, of living and painting in a state of blissful denial.

Vermeer’s scenes of domestic serenity eloquently imply, through absence, the very atrocities they never depict, as though the savagery prompted by the Reformation and Counter Reformation pressed against the kitchen wall, out of sight. Seldom does great art wallow in the explicit. It works by suggestion, implication, hints.

The painting in the tree, with its suggestion of self-conscious primitiveness, remains a mystery. We returned to the park on New Year’s Day, and the boys were disappointed to discover the picture was gone, and I was relieved.

`The Shallows Where the Suckers Moon'

In 1952, A.J. Liebling devoted a book, The Honest Rainmaker, to James A. Macdonald, aka Colonel John R. Stingo, a New York racing writer who worked for the precursor of The National Enquirer. By the time Liebling met him in 1947, the Colonel was a stylish, superannuated con man who had lived for decades in the Dixie Hotel on Forty-Third Street in Manhattan. He was, in short, a hero to Liebling, whose raffish Weltanschauung (a deliciously pretentious Germanism he detested) repudiated his father’s respectable bourgeois values. His adopted father figure, Stingo, took as his nom de plume an old English word meaning “strong ale or beer.” I introduce The Honest Rainmaker because, if you haven’t read it, it’s an excellent way to start the reading year. A funny book that blurs distinctions between journalism and fiction, it’s the least stuffy epistemology you’ll ever laugh through. More importantly, on the first page, Liebling encourages bloggers everywhere:

“The Colonel has always believed that fortune swims, not with the main stream of letters, but in the shallows where the suckers moon.”

We bloggers swim in the literary shallows, an ecosystem we ought to cherish. Though vulnerable to self-importance, especially our own, and to bad writing (ditto), we’re blessed with the gift of independence, free to grow as writers, to learn or hone the craft, and to make asses of ourselves in public. Are we suckers? Only a sucker would do this gratis. At the start of The Rural Life, Verlyn Klinkenborg observes that each new year inspires him to contemplate keeping a journal:

“What drives the impulse toward New Year’s journal keeping is….the shocking realization that the only thing left of the old year is a few tufts of wool caught in the barbed wire. What I want a journal to do could be done just as well by a more aggressive savings plan.”

Klinkenborg goes on to laud the great diary and journal keepers in the English tradition, Pepys and Boswell, for their “dogged absence of self-consciousness”:

“The value of Pepys’s diary and Boswell’s journal is the world they depict and only incidentally the depiction of their authors.”

I don’t think Klinkenborg means that Pepys and Boswell are absent from their proto-blogs, or that we would wish them to be so. Rather, we come to value what they value, what they deemed important in their times and places -- details of food and drink, sex and commerce, medicine and religion. By their choices, they reveal themselves. One of the bittersweet joys of watching old movies, especially from the silent era, are the incidental details captured by the camera behind or off to the side of the action -- billboards, restaurant signs, horse-drawn wagons. So, too, with us. Who knows what our great-grandchildren and their offspring will cherish in some throwaway clause we’ve written? There’s much pleasure to be discovered in inadvertent documentary content. Klinkenborg says that if he were to succumb to journal keeping, “this is what I have in mind. I want to count the crows in the field every afternoon. I want to record the temperatures, high and low, every day and measure the rain and snow. If a flock of turkeys walks into the barnyard, I want to mention the fact,” and so one. And here’s another, related reason to persevere as a blogger, brought to you by Theodore Dalrymple:

“Thanks to the fact that I write, my life is satisfactory. I can inhabit gloom and live in joy. When something unpleasant happens to me, provided only that it is potentially of literary use, my first thought is `How best can I describe this?’ I thereby distance myself from my own displeasure or irritation. As I tell my patients, much to their surprise -- for it is not a fashionable view -- it is far more important to be able to lose yourself than to find yourself.”

The End of Eves

Among dedicated drinkers, New Year’s Eve is known as “Amateur’s Night,” a once-a-year bacchanalia for the out-of- and never-in-practice. It signifies little but a harbinger of hangovers, a pretext for socially sanctioned debauchery -- which isn't always a bad thing. With age, the turning of the year is just another reminder of time’s accelerating rate of evaporation. More so in the North than at these compromised latitudes, the new year signals the start of the long, dark, cold, holiday-free ascent to Spring. One enters a dim cave illuminated briefly and treacherously by the February thaw, followed by the revenge of March. I miss this seasonal predictability, though Verlyn Klinkenborg reminds me of it in The Rural Life, his chronicle of a year on his farm in upstate New York. Here’s part of his entry for January:

“All of the days with eves before them are behind us now for another year. The grand themes -- rebirth and genial carnality -- have come and gone like a Chinook wind, bringing a familiar end-of-year thaw to body and spirit. Now the everyday returns and with it the ordinary kind of week in which Friday doesn’t turn into Sunday -- and Saturday into Sunday -- as it has for two weeks running. It’s time for a week in which each morning throws off a magnetic field all its own, when it’s no trick telling Tuesday from Wednesday just by the sound of the alarm clock or the mood of your spouse.”

Only a middle-aged writer, for whom predictability has displaced novelty as the foremost virtue, could compose or appreciate such a passage. My New Year’s Eves blur into sameness -- passed out in youth, asleep each year since. My only distinctive New Year’s Eve came in 1993, when I visited a friend in Albuquerque. The farthest west I had traveled earlier was South Dakota, and I found the harsh, brown landscape of New Mexico seductive. On New Year’s Eve we drove to Chaco Canyon, once the center of Anasazi life. I have no interest in Native American culture but the quiet beauty of this site, dating from about 900 to 1130 A.D., is stunning. The temperature was in the highs 50s, and the quality of the light evoked a word I had never used before -- “pellucid.” We hiked across the escarpment and ate a lunch of cold tamales above Pueblo Bonita. That night, back in Albuquerque, we attended a conventional New Year’s Eve party and I was, as usual, bored, not up to the obligatory social performance after a visit to the place Edgar Bowers evokes in “Chaco Canyon.” It begins:

“Plato, my lord, might wonder, if he saw,
As we saw, from the cliff, the holy city
Built like a cave, its front shaped to the arc
The East’s bright arrow follows in its flight.”

Chaco Canyon, like the coming year, is a mystery. In the face of mystery, resolutions are a comforting futility. Like the exquisite geometry of Pueblo Bonita, they echo with the vanity of human wishes.

`Some Overlooked But Bracing Truth'

I’ve been quietly reading Shakespeare again, starting with the history plays, now the tragedies, soon the comedies. What I remember and what I’ve forgotten surprise me. Details of plot, even from familiar plays like Richard III, have slipped from memory, while phrases and passages felt vivid, as though I last read them last week. I sense continuity with earlier generations of readers -- not scholars but common readers, who while reading little else but the Bible and Shakespeare permitted these texts to suffuse their lives. They became wisdom books, a sophisticated form of solace and self-help. In Facsimiles of Time, Eric Ormsby includes “The Place of Shakespeare in a House of Pain,” a memoir of growing up in his grandmother’s house in Coral Gables, Fla., in the nineteen-fifties. The grandmother, the alcoholic aunt and a cast of hapless uncles casually quoted and misquoted Shakespeare the way more recent Americans exchange catchphrases from pop music and sitcoms. They

“…had been raised on Shakespeare, not merely to become literate or cultured or well-read, but principally in order to learn how to live. From Shakespeare they learned thrift as well as eloquence; what they knew of love they gleaned from his pages and what they already knew of hatred they found confirmed and given indelible utterance in his verses. Shakespeare taught them to be circumspect, honourable and dignified; he tutored them in the protocols of mourning as of courtship; he was their master in all the niceties of melodious speech. Later, out of her (by then almost entirely oral) knowledge of Shakespeare my grandmother had stitched together a patchwork of maxims, some of which stifled while other warmed. To me, confusedly, it seemed at times as though Shakespeare had pre-imagined our travails and had, rather officiously, provided the very wisdom by which we were expected to surmount them. I think there was almost no occasion on which my grandmother, abetted by her elder daughter, my aunt, and my mother, could not furnish some pungent apothegm excised from `the Bard.’ Sometimes these dicta, with their aura of unassailable authority, stuck in my throat; at other times, they managed to illumine our darkness, as if his words had split open the obdurate husk of dim reality in order to direct one slight but piercing beam onto some overlooked but bracing truth.”

My reading suggests Shakespeare offers something to please every common reader -- violence, sex, wit, consolation, compelling stories, human drama, peerless language. In short, the world or, as Hamlet puts it, “a rhapsody of words.”



.

`And the Children Dance'

A coin dealer in Houston offers one dollar in credit for every “A” a kid gets on his report card. Grades in hand, my 7-year-old and I visited the shop on Thursday. Between his handsome report card and the three dollars left the previous night by the Tooth Fairy, Michael had eight dollars burning a hole in his pocket. While he prospected, I sat on a stool by the counter and talked with the owner, like a tavern patron consulting the bartender.

On a previous visit I had admired a framed photograph of Jimi Hendrix hanging on the wall above the Indian-Head Penny Table. Jeff, the owner -- a bearded man about my age with a deep drawl -- said years before he had swapped some coins for the black-and-white picture of a subdued Hendrix, looking young and vulnerable and without his customary swagger. Jeff was born in Miami, and he told stories about seeing Hendrix, and Jim Morrison and The Doors, in the months preceding their premature deaths. I can’t vouch for their authenticity, but it was pleasant to recall a time when the way a guitarist bent a note seemed like a weighty matter. On the CD player at the back of his shop, Jeff was playing early Traffic. He went on toextol Led Zeppelin, a band which, like The Doors, I always abhorred, but we circled back to Hendrix and agreed Electric Ladyland remains his finest album.

The last thing about the guitarist I had read was “Improvisations for Jimi Hendrix,” a poem by Geoffrey Hill from Without Title. Its epigraph comes from the lyrics to “The Wind Cries Mary,” a cut from Are You Experienced?:

“Somewhere a Queen is weeping
Somewhere a King has no wife”

The poem feels improvisatory, without the heft of Hill’s best work, and I‘m unable to make much of it, though these lines, recalling Hendrix’s guitar-burning stunt, are pleasing:

“The show guitar melts like sealing wax.
It mutes and scalds. Your fingers
burning secrets.

“Your legerdemain.

Extraordinary progressions chart
No standard progress.”

Jeff said he believes Hendrix probably would have given up the show-biz pyrotechnics, literal and otherwise, matured into a pioneering jazz guitarist, and probably gone on to collaborate with Miles Davis. Had he lived, Hendrix would have turned 65 last month. Here’s the conclusion to Hill’s poem:

“Somewhere the slave is master of his desires
And lords it in great music
And the children dance.”

Michael went home with a book of Jefferson nickels and a five-dollar piece from Liberia.

`A Long Conversation'

Forty-three years ago today, after too many decades of overindulgence in food and drink (I write this not as a disapproving neo-Puritan but as an occasional fellow gourmand who loves great prose), A.J. Liebling, whom Garrison Keillor correctly described as “the wittiest American writer who ever lived,” died at the pitiable age of 59 in the intensive care unit of Mount Sinai Hospital, in his beloved native New York City. According to his biographer, Raymond Sokolov, Liebling’s last words were in French and unintelligible. Sokolov writes:

“Jean Stafford [the short story writer and Liebling’s widow], who was with him in the ambulance, thought that in his delirium he was having an imaginary, impassioned conversation with Camus. It must have been the kind of talk he had in mind when, in the very last sentence he ever wrote, he said that reading Camus’s notebooks was `intensely enjoyable for its own sake -- a long conversation with a companion who does not pall.’”

My own long conversation with Joe Liebling started about 30 years ago and has never palled. On my shelves are 17 of his books, two of which are compendiums (from Playboy Press!) containing nine titles between them, plus Sokolov’s life published in 1980. I’ve been a consistent, soft-spoken, unsuccessful proselytizer for Liebling’s work. It shouldn’t be a tough sell. Liebling is reliably funny, his prose is splendid and his subjects include boxing, the press, France, food, and lowlife on three continents. He covered World War II in North Africa and Europe for The New Yorker, and if I were forced to choose I’d say his finest books were Normandy Revisited and Between Meals.

About 15 years ago, the City of Troy, N.Y., invited me to speak on The Sweet Science, Liebling’s great collection of boxing essays, published in 1956. The city had organized a weekend of events to celebrate its place in boxing history, and I had recently reviewed The Neutral Corner, Liebling’s previously uncollected boxing pieces published by North Point Press. Except for what Liebling has taught me, I know almost nothing about boxing. Some 20 people, mostly young men, showed up for the talk, and none had ever heard of Liebling. By the time I finished speaking, the audience had dwindled to three or four. The idea that I could admire a book on a subject of no interest to me left everyone baffled, but we don’t read Liebling for facts but for raffishly colorful style and storytelling. He is a master raconteur for readers blessed with an ear for such things.

A funeral service was held for Liebling on Dec. 30, 1963, and the eulogy was read by his oldest, dearest friend, the other great Joe at The New Yorker, Mitchell. Sokolov reprints it in toto, but here’s an excerpt:

“Shortly after I heard Joe was dead, I went over and looked at his books in a bookcase at home. There were fifteen of them. I looked through The Road Back to Paris and reread `Westbound Tanker,’ which is one of my favorite stories of his, and when I finished it I suddenly recalled, with great pleasure, a conversation I had had some years ago with the proprietor of one of the biggest and oldest stores in the Fourth Avenue secondhand bookstore district. I had been going to this store for years and occasionally talked to the proprietor, who is a very widely read man. One day I mentioned I worked for The New Yorker, and he asked me if I knew A.J. Liebling. I said that I did, and he said that every few days all through the year someone, sometimes a woman, sometimes a young person, sometimes an old person, came in and asked if he had Back Where I Came From or The Telephone Booth Indian or some other book by A.J. Liebling. At that time all of Joe’s early books were out of print. `The moment one of his books turns up,’ the man said, `it goes out immediately to someone on my waiting list.’ The man went on and said that he and other veteran secondhand bookstore dealers felt that this was a certain sign that a book would endure. `Literary critics don’t know which books will last,’ he said, `and literary historians don’t know, and those nine-day immortals up at the Institute of Arts and Letters don‘t know. We are the ones who know. We know which books can be read only once, if that, and we know the ones that can be read and reread and reread.’”

`I Won't Try to Put the Experience Into Words'

An anonymous reader asks an impertinent question: “Why don't you believe?”

Why impertinent? Because it is the obverse of the ultimate question we pose in the privacy of 3 a.m.: “Why do I believe?” and its corollary, “What do I believe?” There’s something indecent about airing intimacies in public, a suggestion of exhibitionism. Besides, I have no satisfactory answer. I remember what Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of his friend Herman Melville in 1856, five years after Moby-Dick:

“He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.”

There’s nothing courageous or noble about me, and I wrestle hourly with pride and presumption, but Hawthorne is otherwise right on the money. The current vogue for vulgar atheism has its counterpart in vulgar religiosity. What they share is self-righteousness, the human curse, and each fuels the other. In general, my sympathies lie with certain believers; if not with the particulars of their faith, with the worthiness of their questions. I think of R.S. Thomas, a priest as well as a poet, and a memorably difficult, even hateful man. In a 1948 essay, “Two Chapels,” he describes an experience he had the previous summer visiting a chapel, Maes-yr-Onnen, in Radnorshire:

“When I had walked around the building and stared in through the windows (there was no one there to unlock the door for me), I stretched myself out on the grass and let my mind wander back into the past. And indeed after a while, I saw the first worshippers coming through the fields -- sober men and women dressed in a sober fashion. I saw them leave the sunlight for the darkness of the chapel and then heard the rustling of the Bible pages and the murmurs of soft voices mingling with the wind. Yes, it was two and a half centuries earlier on a fine August morning. And almost immediately, I saw, I understood. As with St. John the Divine on the island of Patmos I was `in the Spirit’ and I had a vision, in which I could comprehend the breadth and length and depth and height of the mystery of the creation. But I won’t try to put the experience into words. It would be impossible. I will simply say that I realised there was really no such thing as time, no beginning and no end but that everything is a fountain welling up endlessly from immortal God.”

I envy Thomas his experience, as I do Augustine’s and Pascal’s (and a certain Father Roos’, in upstate New York), and it reminds me of moments in Eliot’s Four Quartets:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

I prefer the company of men such as Eliot and Thomas to Dawkins and Co. They are explorers and ask better questions.

`An Unpleasant Whiff of Apprehension'

The ham is sliced and Tupperwared, the wrapping paper recycled. Jigsaw puzzles have been put together, taken apart, reboxed. The cookies are stale. We watched The Christmas Story twice and one-fifth of the 300-cartoon Looney Tunes Golden Collection. Yesterday’s gift-heap has sifted into domestic anonymity. Where did Christmas go?

The Christmas constant is post-Christmas dolor. Once this meant reality’s letdown after months of anticipation. Now? I’m not sure. Time passes audibly at Christmas. Children age, memories form and decay. The gimcrack and the eternal come face to face -- another year evaporated.

W.H. Auden wrote For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio over the terrible winter of 1941-1942. Newly returned to the Church, Auden sought “to redeem from insignificance” the dailiness of daily life and the enfeeblement of Christmas into a mere holiday. He captures our weakness, human failing and inevitable sadness:

"Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes --
Some have got broken -- and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week --
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted -- quite unsuccessfully --
To love all our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But for the time being, here we all are,
Back to the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry
And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it."

A Christmas in Wales

No one wrote more austere, less conventionally festive Christmas poems than R.S. Thomas. If you have read The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas, by Byron Rogers, you know how impossible a man he was, a poet/priest dedicated to upsetting the expectations of everyone, especially family and parishioners, not to mention readers. To read Gwydion Thomas on his father, as reported by Rogers, is chilling. On Christmas Eve, Bryan Appleyard posted one of Thomas’ cheerier Yuletide works, “Song,” from the volume with perhaps the strangest title in modern poetry, H’m (1972). Inspired by Appleyard (who made me laugh out loud by calling Thomas “Laughing Boy”), I went trolling for Christmas poems in Collected Poems: 1945-1990 and Collected Later Poems: 1988-2000, and found another 10, some disguised, all oblique, so I probably missed others. Here they are, starting with “Christmas,” from Pieta (1966):

“There is a morning:
Time brings it nearer.
Brittle with frost
And starlight. The owls sing
In the parishes. The people rise
And walk to the churches’
Stone lanterns, there to kneel
And eat the new bread
Of love, washing it down
With the sharp taste
Of blood they will shed.”

Cheery, eh? All the earmarks of Thomas and his hard faith are present in these 11 lines. Here is “Lost Christmas,” from Young and Old (1972):

“He is alone, it is Christmas.
Up the hill go three trees, the three kings.
There is a star also
Over the dark manger. But where is the child?

“Pity him. He has come far
Like the trees, matching their patience
With hi. But the mind was before
Him on the long road. The manger is empty.”

This is “Hill Christmas,” from Laboratories of the Spirit (1975):

“They came over the snow to the bread’s
purer snow, fumbled it in their huge
hands, put their lips to it
like beasts, stared into the dark chalice
where the wine shone, felt it sharp
on their tongue, shivered as at a sin
remembered, and heard love cry
momentarily in their hearts’ manger.

“They rose and went back to their poor
holdings, naked in the bleak light
of December. Their horizon contracted
to the one small, stone-riddled field
with its tree, where the weather was nailing
the appalled body that had asked to be born.”

And “Carol,” from Later Poems (1983), in which the robin recurs, as in the poem cited by Appleyard:

“What is Christmas without
snow? We need it
as bread of a cold
climate, ermine to trim

“our sins with, a brief
sleeve for charity’s
scarecrow to wear its heart
on, bold as a robin.”

“Nativity,” from Experimenting with an Amen (1986):

“The moon is born
and a child is born,
lying among white clothes
as the moon among clouds.

“They both shine, but
the light from the one
is abroad in the universe
as among broken glass.”

Another “Nativity,” from Mass for Hard Times (1992):

“Christmas Eve! Five
hundred poets waited, pen
poised above paper,
for the poem to arrive,
bells ringing. It was because
the chimney was too small,
because they had ceased
to believe, the poem passed them
by on its way out
into oblivion, leaving
the doorstep bare
of all but the sky-rhyming
child to whom later
on they would teach prose.”

“Christmas Eve,” from No Truce with the Furies (1995):

“Erect capital’s arch;
decorate it with the gilt edge
of the moon. Pave the way to it
with cheques and with credit –

“it is still not high enough
for the child to pass under
who comes to us this midnight
invisible as radiation.”

“Blind Noel,” also from No Truce with the Furies:

“Christmas; the themes are exhausted.
Yet there is always room
On the heart for another
Snowflake to reveal a pattern.

“Love knocks with such frosted fingers.
I look out. In the shadow
Of so vast a God I shiver, unable
To detect the child for the whiteness.”

“The Mass of Christ,” from No Truce with the Furies:

“This day I am with the beasts –
animal Christmas – staring
with brute eyes at the mystery
in the cradle. Emmanuel!
God with men, but not God
with the creatures. Are we in need
of a saviour, when it is not
our fault? Nebuchadnezzar,
the beasts’ Christ, incarnate
as an animal and not
as a human being, but with a human
conscience. What love sentenced
us to murder in order
that we survive? Does God know
what it is to eat his food
off the ground, to draw sustenance
from intestines? We prey
and are preyed on. Such peace
as we know is purchased
only by an interminable
alertness. When winter arrives
we lie out in open country
because we have to, wrapping
our threadbare breath about our
aggrieved bones. Does God die
and still live? We live only
by the perpetual sacrifice
of our kind, ignorant
of love, yet innocent of a love
that has anthropomorphised its creation.”

“Festival,” published posthumously in Residues (2002):

“This Christmas before
an altar of gold
the holly will remind
us how love bleeds,

“the mistletoe remind
how pale and puny
the knuckles of the few
fingers clenched upon faith.”

`An Old and Quaint Christmas Song'

The mousy brown book on a bottom shelf on the third floor of the Fondren Library at Rice University almost eluded me. Before I checked it out, the last stamped due date was Aug. 1, 1987. Pulled from its dusty lodging, bound in vivid oxblood buckram, it revived and appears less mousy. Songs of the Nativity: Being Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern, Several of Which Appear for the First Time in a Collection was edited by William Henry Husk (“Librarian to the Sacred Harmonic Society”) and published in London by John Camden Hotten (“74, Piccadilly”) in 1868. The bookplate at the front shows it was given to the library in memory of Mrs. George Seaman by Beatrice Harrison in December 1951. Someone tucked a small newspaper clipping, browned almost to oxblood, between its pages. Like the book, it’s English in origin (“favour” and “finance of Blackburn Bishopric” on the reverse), and here is the pertinent matter:

“Here (writes a correspondent) is an old and quaint Christmas song which might very well be used to start the fun of the `after dinner proceedings.’ It is a memory-tickler, and though I cannot trace its origin or its tune, its recital would most probably lead to the singing of other roundelays of a similar nature. It is called the `Twelve Days of Christmas’:

“On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me
Twelve bells a-ringing, eleven bulls a-beating,
Ten asses racing, nine ladies dancing,
Eight boys a-singing, seven swans a swimming,
Six geese a-laying, five goldie rings,
Four collie birds, three Breton hens,
Two turtle doves, and the part of a mistletoe bough.”

Who wrote this? Who, in some English Yuletide past, was pleased enough to clip and preserve it? How did the volume and clipping end up shelved in a university library in Houston? And who placed the bit of newspaper between pages 180 and 181, both of which are indelibly stamped with coffee-brown stains in the shape of the newspaper clipping? On page 181 appears Husk’s introduction to “The Twelve Days of Christmas”:

“This piece is found on broadsides printed in Newcastle at various periods during the last hundred and fifty years. On one of these sheets, nearly a century old, it is entitled `An Old English Carol,’ but it can scarcely be said to fall within that description of composition, being rather fitted for use in playing the games of `Forfeits,’ to which purpose it was commonly applied in the metropolis upwards of forty years since. The practice was for one person in the company to recite the first three lines; a second the four following; and so on; the person who failed in repeating her portion correctly being subjected to some trifling forfeit. The lady who was the favoured recipient of the gifts enumerated must have required no small extent of shelf or table room for their accommodation, as at the end of the Christmas festivities she must have found herself in possession of twelve partridges in pear trees, twenty-two turtle-doves, thirty French hens, thirty-six colley [i.e. black] birds, forty gold rings, forty-two laying geese, forty-two swimming swans, forty milk-maids, thirty-six drummers, thirty pipers, twenty-two dancing ladies, and twelve leaping lords; in all three hundred and sixty-four articles, one for each day in the year save one. This piece is now printed for the first time in a collection of carols.”

Writing two years before Dickens’ death, the Librarian to the Sacred Harmonic Society permits an inadvertent peek into the novelist’s domestic world. Husk is a jolly, earnest writer whose enthusiasm for music, Christmas and English folkways almost makes up for his limitations as a prose stylist. Here’s how he chooses to introduce readers to his collection: “Christmas! – What a multitude of associations crowd into the mind at the mere sight or mention of that word!” and so on.

A modern reader is struck by the continuities Husk documents, and by how much a 21st-century American Christmas is 19th-century and English in origin. Fourteen of the songs Husk reproduces I know by heart or nearly so. He includes seven short lyrics published in 1648 by Robert Herrick (of “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” fame), including:

“Come, guard this night the Christmas pie,
That the thief, though ne’er so sly,
With his flesh-hooks don’t come nigh
To catch it

“From him who all alone sits there,
Having his eyes still in his ear,
And a deal of nightly fear,
To watch it.”

Husk then appends a recipe, dating from 1394, during the reign of Richard II, “For to make a moost choyce paste of gamys to be eaten at ye feste of Chrystmasse.” The ingredients include “Pheasant, Hare, and Chicken, or Capon, of each one; with two Partridges, two Pigeons, and two Conies; and smite them in pieces, and pick clean away therefrom all the bones that ye may, and therewith do them into a foyle [crust] of good paste, made craftily in the likeness of a bird’s body, with the livers and hearts, two kidneys of sheep, and forces [forced meat, finely chopped and seasoned] and eyren [eggs] made into balls….” Thus, Yorkshire pie.

Our dual responses to Christmas, reverent and earthy, soulful and corporeal, seem quintessentially human and contradictory. In his wonderful essay on comic English postcards, “The Art of Donald McGill,” in a passage having nothing to do with Christmas, George Orwell diagnoses our bifurcated condition with precision. Read the whole thing but here’s a pertinent excerpt:

“Evidently it corresponds to something enduring in our civilization, not in the sense that either character is to be found in a `pure’ state in real life, but in the sense that the two principles, noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by side in every human being. If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with `voluptuous’ figures. He it is who punctures your fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth.”

Merry Christmas.

`Nicked'

My 7-year-old has read five of the Harry Potter books and is working on his sixth. One of the unforeseen results of his immersion in J.K. Rowling’s world is the acquisition of expressions peculiar to British English. This morning, pleased to be tattling on his 4-year-old brother, Michael announced: “David nicked something from the pantry!”