`Suspended in the Wintry Silence'

With raw curiosity and a nice piece of detective work, my friend Melissa Kean has transformed a former chemical engineering undergraduate into a military hero and a scholar of Anthony Powell and his twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. See her post on Neil F. Brennan, a one-time Rice University undergraduate who perhaps contemplated, late in the Great Depression, a career in the oil industry but went away to war, served as a captain in a tank battalion, earned a Silver Star, followed by a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois, and wrote one of the first monographs on Powell. Brennan died in 2006 at age eighty-two. Even this superficial summary raises questions: Why did he so radically change majors? Did the war have anything to do with his decision? Why Powell? Naturally, we’ll never know the answers, which is often the case with important things.    

I found a little more information online. Brennan was born into a military family in Savannah, Ga. As a tank commander he fought with the 735th Tank Battalion at the Battle of the Bulge, and, along with the Silver Star, received the Distinguished Service Cross and five Battle Stars (Europe). While working on his master’s degree at the University of Chicago, he was awarded the Anne Watkins Fiction Fellowship in 1948. I find no further mention of Brennan writing fiction. He taught for twenty-seven years at Villanova and co-authored a Graham Greene bibliography that remains unpublished.  In 1974, Brennan published Anthony Powell in the ubiquitous Twayne Authors Series, followed by a revised edition in 1995. Brennan’s approach to literature is suggested by this passage from his preface to the first edition:

“This study of Anthony Powell grows out of a ten-year love affair. One of the impulses of love is to share the joy: `Read Powell’s Afternoon Men! It’s minor but it’s splendid!’ When the friend a few weeks later admits only to having `liked’ the novel, or complains that `not much happens’ in it, one truth has to be faced: Anthony Powell is not an easy novelist for Americans to adopt. The apathy cannot be dismissed as a regional eccentricity, either, for readers as solidly American as Peter de Vries hail Powell as great, and English critics as bright as John Wain dismiss The Music of Time as a bore.”

One can’t imagine a single thought expressed in that passage being uttered by an American academic today, from the talk of love to the reference to Peter de Vries. Brennan continues: “The first basis of literary understanding is sympathy. Powell represents a cool, esthetic, and aristocratic culture often misrepresented in this century of the common man. For one thing, it takes for granted a love of beauty.” Here is the final paragraph of the revised edition, in which Brennan addresses the collections of essays and reviews Powell published in the final decade of his life (he died in 2000, age ninety-four):

“The picture of a venerable author in his eighties collecting and arranging the more perishable of his writings recalls a bit the image of a grandparent sorting stray photographs for a last album, with fond and worried thoughts of a grandchild who may someday be mature enough to want to leaf through the dust: This is the way life was, my dear, grotesque and beautiful.”

A life of teaching, writing and scholarship is an unlikely path to fame and fortune. I’m reminded of that passage in the prologue to John Williams’ novel Stoner (1965) describing the life and death of the title character, a professor of English at a provincial university. All that will be remembered of him, the narrator says, is a medieval manuscript donated to the library in his name by his fellow instructors. The prologue concludes:

“An occasional student who comes across the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.”

Brennan published the first edition of his Powell monograph shortly before publication of Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975), the final novel in the Dance sequence, which concludes with Nicholas Jenkins contemplating that “even the formal measure of the Seasons seemed suspended in the wintry silence.”

`It True, Rightful and Final Owner'

“When I look at the thousands of volumes on my shelves, the accumulation of a lifetime, an indivisible unity, I put their inevitable fate out of my mind, and imagine nothing can part us.”

Even those of us dwelling in the higher realms, immune to the mere Māyā of matter, contemplate the fate of our libraries. We live autobiographically through our books, as Theodore Dalrymple’s choice of “indivisible unity” suggests, and we don’t feel the same way about our furniture or neckties. More than an aggregation of paper and ink, our books constitute a surrogate self; sculpted, not merely accreted, a whole reassuringly greater than its parts. Dalrymple continues on the vanity of bookish wishes in The Pleasure of Thinking: A Journey Through the Sideways Leaps of Ideas (Gibson Square Books, 2012):

“Even when I pick up a volume in my possession, three hundred years old, and see inscribed in it the names of its successive owners, I do not conclude that I am but its temporary guardian, and that my guardianship is merely a brief episode in its long history. No, I conclude that, at long last, the book has found its true, rightful and final owner, that I am the goal, the denouement, at which the previous three hundred years has been aiming.”

More rationally (“in my more lucid moments”), Dalrymple recognizes that on his death, his widow will call in a dealer who will offer “yardage” for his library. The vision recalls the Ghost of Christmas Future showing Scrooge how his charwoman will sell his belongings after his death. It amuses Dalrymple and horrifies him: “I prefer to avert my thoughts from the posthumous breakup of my library. To me it seems to possess an obvious organic unity [that word again], that of my whole life, but I cannot expect an outside observer to notice it.” A friend tells him he is usually able to accurately judge the interests, profession and character of a person by examining his library. Dalrymple continues:

“But with me, said my friend, my library offered no clue. Several special sections on Russia, Haiti, Albania, Liberia, Guatemala and Romania, along with criminal trials, poisonings, Doctor Johnson, anti-vaccination literature, bubonic plague, the Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship, opium and Joseph Conrad, among other subjects, which are not large enough to be those of a real scholar, but were too large to be those of the mere general reader, gave no clear clue as to the nature of my interests, character or mental health.”

My library seems less heterogeneous than Dalrymple’s. I think of it in architectural terms, starting with the customary foundation -- Homer, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Melville, Tolstoy and so on -- and branching out into a series of connected annexes and wings: the American Civil War, insects and birds, Guy Davenport, jazz, Yvor Winters and his circle, Dr. Johnson, Henry James, twentieth-century Polish literature, Judaism, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature. I emphasize the connectedness. One could start with any book on my shelves and find his way thematically to any other – or at least I could, because each represents a piece of my sensibility. There’s no filler, no dead spots.

What’s really so awful about the dispersal of a library after its architect is gone, especially if the survivors don’t share the bookish tastes of the departed? Think of it as the literary counterpart of nature's nitrogen cycle. Elsewhere in The Pleasure of Thinking, Dalrymple cites Holbrook Jackson’s The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1950). Near that book’s conclusion, in a chapter titled “On Parting with Books,” Jackson offers solace to those contemplating the question: “Yet many are loth to part from their treasures even at the end, although they know that unless collections were dispersed collections could not be made.” As Dalrymple reminds us: “Booksellers are, in fact, as dependent on death as much as undertakers for their livelihood.”

`Scent of Thyme, the Deep Error of Sage'

Weeds flourish in the drought. So do oak saplings from last season’s acorns. Squirrels grow fat in the loblollies, gorging on pine nuts and dropping scales and stripped cones in the garden where I weed. The first smell I notice in the heat is pine pitch. Then rosemary from our bush, now community property as the neighbors harvest what they need at dinner time. The strongest scent is spearmint, cool and clean in the heat. In his journal entry for Aug. 16, 1856, Thoreau notes:

“What a variety of old garden herbs - mints, etc. - are naturalized along an old settled road, like this to Boston which the British travelled! And then there is the site, apparently, of an old garden by the tanyard, where the spearmint grows so rankly. I am intoxicated with the fragrance. Though I find only one new plant (the cassia), yet old acquaintances grow so rankly, and the spearmint intoxicates me so, that I am bewildered, as it were by a variety of new things. An infinite novelty.”

Thoreau is at his best when enjoying something, not when complaining or pontificating. Nice of him, the eternal know-it-all, to admit to his bewilderment. Good smells always come as novelties, as though for the first time – coffee, fresh bread, spearmint. Odd that Thoreau repeats in the next sentence “rankly” and “intoxicated,” almost an admission of same in so sober a man. He continues:

“All the roadside is the site of an old garden where fragrant herbs have become naturalized, -- hounds-tongue, bergamot, spearmint, elecampane, etc. I see even the tiger lily, with its bulbs, growing by the roadside far from houses (near Leighton’s graveyard). I think I have found many new plants, and am surprised when I can reckon but one. A little distance from my ordinary walk and a little variety in the growth or luxuriance will produce this illusion. By the discovery of one new plant all bounds seem to be infinitely removed.”

The blurring of natural/man-made boundaries is always a thrill, oddly encouraging. A few blocks from where I write, near a city bus shelter, a stalk of corn grows three feet tall in the crack between sidewalk and curb. On the sidewalk in front of a candle shop in Saugerties, N.Y., I once spied a healthy green pot plant growing waist-high, sharing a wooden flowerpot with marigolds. I felt as though I’d been let in on a secret. On the cover of C.H. Sisson’s Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1998) is a watercolor by Stephen Raw of the final stanza of “The Herb-garden” (Exactions, 1980):

“Herb-garden, dream, scent of rosemary,
Scent of thyme, the deep error of sage,
Fennel that falls like a fountain, rue that says nothing,
Blue leaves, in a garden of green.”

`The Spectacle of the Rats and the Owls'

“During the war I saw libraries on fire. The same fire consumed wise and stupid books, good and evil books. I understood then that nihilism is the greatest threat to culture. The nihilism of fire, stupidity, hatred.” 

After reading such a passage, self-congratulation demands that we point to the Nazis, Maoists or Muslim death-cultists, the obvious nihilists safely remote in time and place. Their assault on culture is unambiguous, expressed with fire, but the human capacity for self-delusion is bottomless, and savagery can be masked as sensitivity. The passage above is from Zbigniew Herbert’s “Conversation on Writing Poetry” (trans. Alissa Valles, The Collected Prose 1948-1998, 2010), a self-interview written in 1973. Herbert, a virtuoso of irony, wishes not to be misunderstood. One-half of Herbert, “A.”, “Critics say you are a poet of culture.” The other half, “B.”, replies: “I don’t take that as an insult, although from the lips of people who demand absolute innovation of artists it sounds like a reproach.” B. denies this represents “a flight into the past,” with, I suspect, an emphasis on “flight,” as in fearful escape. “B.” says “we are a link in a great chain of generations.” He continues: 

“People often talk about a `cultural legacy.’ But culture is not inherited mechanically, like a house, let’s say, left by someone’s parents. We have to labor for it in the sweat of our brow, acquire it for ourselves, prove it on ourselves.” 

That final phrase is critical. Detractors will claim our cultural inheritance is imposed on us, against our will, even punitively. Herbert suggests we test it, weigh it, assay it against our values and experience. There’s nothing passive about reading Dante or Melville. Readers are partners who sign the contract drawn up by the writers. To say that “we live in an extraordinary time,” Herbert notes, is no excuse because “every age of humanity has been extraordinary.” He concludes: “It’s also wrong to assume that culture lives and is sustained by itself, stored in libraries and museums. History teaches us that people and their achievements can be almost perfectly destroyed.” 

I remembered Herbert’s essay after reading about Richard Blanco’s performance in Havana on Friday, his logorrhea of ignorant clichés: the sea as “the invisible Berlin Wall,” “we all hold seashells up to our ears,” “gaze into the lucid blue,” et al. ad nauseam. 

The Cuban poet and painter Armando Valladares spent twenty-two years in Castro’s prisons and wrote about his experience in Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag (1985). In the vast literature produced by survivors of Communism, Valladares’ memoir is distinguished by the intensity of its detail – no gassy gazing “into the lucid blue” for him. His precision of observation sometimes suggests a muted political allegory, a prose poem that might have been written by Zbigniew Herbert: 

“At nightfall we always beheld an incredible spectacle, the spectacle of the rats and the owls. Owls are very common in Cuba, and each bird would swallow down several rats every night . . . Every evening the owls with shrieks of jubilee hurtled down on the rats, grabbed them in their claws, and flew back to the roof to pull them apart and eat them. We would watch the hunt from our windows.”

`Seeing Is in Some Respects an Art'

Douglas Dalrymple at Afield Notes shares a pertinent reminder from William Herschel (1738-1822), the German-born British astronomer and composer: “Seeing is in some respects an art, which must be learnt.” Not a surprising observation from the man who discovered the planet Uranus in 1781. For a splendid account of Herschel’s life and work see Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science (2009). In this Age of Distraction, when screen-rapt people walk into traffic, seeing may well be a dying art, like letter writing and growing an edible apple. Herschel’s warning arrived the same day Edward M. Burns wrote to say he is editing the correspondence of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner, and that a small selection of the more than 1,000 letters in their exchange is published in the current issue of The Hopkins Review. Burns is tentatively titling the book Questioning Minds: The Letters of Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport.

The preeminence of vision, of attentive and retentive observation, is everywhere in Davenport’s work, and here it is in a letter he writes to Kenner on March 30, 1970: “Strategy to be recommended to any bright young mind: stray, wander, and meander, and pay attention to what things look like not only from here, but also from there.” That reads like a fine-tuning of Herschel’s admonition – observe, yes, but not from a single, limited perspective (one of the lessons of Cubism). Consider that in the adjacent paragraphs Davenport sorts through Hilaire Belloc, the Abbé Henri Breuil, Picasso, R. Buckminster Fuller and Samuel Beckett. At age forty-two, Davenport was entering his decade mirabilis. In his finest essay, “Finding” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), he recounts his family’s Sundays spent searching for arrowheads near their home in Anderson, S.C. He writes: “Our understanding was that the search was the thing, the pleasure of looking.” Then he adds, sadly, of those denied a fully conscious life:

“It took a while for me to realize that people can grow up without being taught to see, to search surfaces for all the details, to check out a whole landscape for what it has to offer.”

`A Good Reputation with Our Department'

On entering a house or office for the first time, one naturally inspects the bookshelves, hoping to discover evidence of a gifted reader or, failing that, a reader whose taste is so appallingly bad that one can feel guiltlessly righteous in the superiority of his own literary judgments. When I recently visited the office of a faculty member I had not met before, I was greeted by an entire wall filled ceiling to floor with books, technical journals and not one tchotchke. (That absence is noteworthy. Book owners often clutter their shelves with dust-collecting junk, which is like slavering catsup on cassoulet.)

While the professor answered an urgent email, I looked more closely at her impressive-looking library. Her research is multidisciplinary, drawing on mathematics, medicine, and several of the hard and soft sciences, and her books reflect the diversity of her interests. I noted several volumes by a well-known “activist,” a writer much lauded for his bottomless capacity for complaining about something or other. When the professor finished with her chore, she asked if I had found anything of interest on her shelves. Mostly to make conversation I mentioned having interviewed the activist-writer some years ago, and she asked for my impressions. Speaking, for once, tactfully, I replied that he seemed rather impressed with himself and his every utterance. She, drawing on deep reservoirs of diplomacy, ended that portion of our conversation with a noncommittal “hmmmm.” I admired her deft deployment of guile. Theodore Dalrymple in The Pleasure of Thinking: A Journey Through the Sideways Leaps of Ideas (Gibson Square Books, 2012) shares my taste for bookshelf psychologizing:

“I know many people who, when they enter a house for the first time, are inclined (even if they control themselves) to go straight up to the bookshelves to find out what their hosts are made of: for taste is a more reliable guide to character than opinion. I am like this: I control myself, but in a room with a substantial number of books I feel a tension mounting in myself until I have found out what they are. Indeed, I often fake or manufacture a reason for sidling up to them, and examining them out of the corner of my eye. It is astonishing, when one has been around books a long time, how often one recognizes a volume by some very tiny aspect of the appearance of its spine or dust wrapper.”

Dalrymple’s volume, with its rather misleading title, chronicles a life spent acquiring and reading books. Without snobbery, he revels in everything to do with the printed word. He collects and writes about obvious favorites – Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, De Quincey, Arthur Koestler – but devotes entire sub-sections of his library to books beyond conventional literary categories -- crime and medicine in particular (he is a retired prison psychiatrist). There’s little of attention-seeking or delectation about Dalrymple’s book obsession. Books are like tools or medicine, useful and sustaining. As he writes: “I am not so much a collector of books as an accumulator of them.” That’s precisely the distinction I would make.

The manner in which I finally acquired a copy of The Pleasure of Thinking might be of interest to Dalrymple. I ordered it last week through interlibrary loan (ILL) at my university library. On Wednesday I received an email saying it had arrived. When I reported to the circulation desk the librarian told me the book could only be used in the library. I couldn’t borrow it to read at home. The volume came from half a continent away, from the holdings of the Library of Congress. The librarian suggested I try to order the book again, specifying that it be a fully circulating copy, and I did.

Thursday morning I received another email, this one from a woman in the ILL department. According to the OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), she reported, the only library copy available in the U.S. is the restricted one from the Library of Congress. “I would suggest you speak with a Reference Librarian about purchasing, but the cost for a hardcopy [is] USED $862.26, NEW $1992.97,” she wrote, and included the pertinent link to Amazon.com. The price printed on the cover of the book is £12.99 – about $20.28. Then the ILL librarian presented me with an unexpected gift: “I understand you would prefer to take this book out of the library; in this case I'm giving our Circulation staff authorization to give you this book.  You have requested several books through Interlibrary Loan and you have a good reputation with our department and the library, so I do not have any issues with you taking the book out of the library.”

Librarians and other book people can be monsters, like the rest of the species, but I had stumbled upon an angel, and yet another happy example of book-driven serendipity. For Dalrymple, serendipity is the essence of the bookish life, the reason we haunt bookshops, libraries and other peoples’ shelves. It is also precisely the quality most vulnerable to the ease and convenience of the internet. Booksellers tell him young people increasingly visit their shops with a single title in mind. If it’s not in stock, they leave – no browsing, no letting go of the strictly utilitarian, no faith that a better book may be waiting for them. Dalrymple writes:

“They cannot know, then, the pleasures of serendipity, for their view of books is entirely an instrumental one, a means to an end, say the completion of an assignment. They have been brought up in an educational environment in which everything that is taught is of supposed relevance to their lives as they now are, or soon will be; indeed, any lack of such relevance is an alleged explanation of their ill-behaviour or refractoriness in learning. The notion that the irrelevance of subject matter to their current lives might enrich those lives and enlarge their outlook, by increasing what counts as relevant for them, is utterly alien. We live in an age that praises diversity and imposes uniformity.”

`They Correspond to the Rhythm of Things'

It’s a shameful admission but I’ve taken to talking to myself, and my sons have caught me at it. No hallucinations accompany such speech, no imaginary friends or prime directives to “get the bastards.” I’ve always sung, whistled and hummed as forms of one-way expression, and as a writer I read my copy half-aloud, moving my lips to gauge the sound – a practice I often encourage young and inexperienced writers to adopt. I’ve tried to remain conscious of this newly observed behavior, and have concluded that the driver behind it is simple and entirely non-pathological: pleasure. Most often I’m repeating flavorful words. I suck on them the way some people suck on hard candy (on the cover of Blue Train, John Coltrane sucks pensively on a lollipop, not a reed). When a good word or phrase comes along, I savor it, reluctant to let it go. I’m greedy for word-satisfaction. I’ve never thought of words as exclusively utilitarian. That would be like watching a televised symphony with the sound turned off.     

Eric Ormsby, a sybarite of sound, suggests in his essay “Poetry as Isotope: The Hidden Life of Words” (Facsimiles of Time, 2001): “Poetry is made up of words and words are sounds. Poetry is sound before it is anything else. This is easy to forget. Indeed, this little fact is more usually forgotten than remembered by poets themselves, and it is why much of our contemporary poetry is so unmemorable.” Who can imagine sucking the toothsome marrow from the lines of such poets as Robert Bly or Gary Snyder, whose words are oatmeal – possibly good for you, but appallingly flavorless. In his same essay, Ormsby rhapsodizes his medium:   

“In poetry the immediate pleasure is physical. Recurrence, repetition, pattern, design, account for much of the pleasure we receive from poetry; these returning patterns correspond to something in ourselves, to something in nature. They correspond to the rhythm of things. They echo the beat of our hearts, the pulse in our throats, the cadence of our breath. They reflect larger sequences of recurrence: the alternations of night and day, the succession of the seasons, the elemental speech of natural processes; the voices of rivers or of oceans; the various dialects of the winds; the articulated and recurrent cries of birds.”

The other day my fifteen-year-old son, who plays trombone, asked me the origin of gig in the context of jazz. The OED is disappointingly blunt: “Origin unknown.” Its first citation dates from 1926, in Melody Maker, but like Topsy, the word seems to have jes’ grew. Over the next day I would find myself experimentally repeating the mysterious little monosyllable, a word at once moist and nugget-like, a juicy stone. For a while I couldn’t squeeze enough pleasure from it. Then I spit it out like a watermelon seed. Shakespeare turned solitary talk into sublime expression – the soliloquy: “Words, words, words.” 

`With All Their Obdurate Beauties Intact'

“My late friend and longtime pen pal Guy Davenport—essayist, classicist, modernist scholar, artist, teacher, and Calvinist pagan—gave conclusive evidence throughout his life and work that all harmony (aesthetic, social, or spiritual) is based on both balance and distance . . . Undue closeness, argued Guy, invariably leads to discord, meanness, and sentimental `wetness’—all failures of harmony, all opposed to the dictum of Heraclitus (one of the seven Greeks Guy famously translated) that `a dry light is the best soul.’”

Michael Alec Rose is a composer who teaches composition at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music. In other words, he practices the human gift I envy most. (As Davenport writes in a letter to Rose: “I eat music. It feeds me.”) That a composer should single out harmony for attention would have pleased Davenport, an inharmonious man (“Calvinist pagan”) who valued the quality nearly as much as he valued imagination, its natural complement. The word concludes one of the loveliest paragraphs Davenport ever composed (in his essay on the fiction of Eudora Welty, “That Faire Field of Enna,” in The Geography of the Imagination, 1981):

“Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world. Ancient intuition went foraging after consistency. Religion, science, and art are alike rooted in the faith that the world is of a piece, that something is common to all its diversity, and that if we knew enough we could see and give a name to its harmony.”

Rose’s “`Another Acre or so of Being’: Letters from Guy Davenport” appears in the spring 2015 issue of Literary Imagination. He takes his title from a sentence in Davenport’s “Ronald Johnson” (The Geography of the Imagination): “The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.” “Another Acre” consists of an introduction, five letters from Davenport written in 1988, at the beginning of their correspondence, and one from Rose. Davenport’s letters recall those I received from him – learned, playful, balanced and distanced, gentlemanly but happy to admonish professorially. (In his first letter to me he corrected my use of the prefix “Ur-” and my shameful spelling of Edgar “Allen” Poe –mistakes I’ve never repeated, which was the whole point.) In his introduction to the letters, Rose says he “still has not forgiven” his friend, but it’s unclear whether that’s because Guy died of lung cancer in January 2005 or because he never told Rose he was dying. Rose continues:

“In the same way, I can never `forgive’ Joyce or O. Henry, Picasso, or Burchfield, for being so drily distant from my wet and easy grasp. I am able to love these figures because of Guy, who took all things exceptionally unyielding to the human heart—poems, novels, paintings, death itself—and delivered them as gifts of ongoing understanding, with all their obdurate beauties intact.”

A portion of Rose’s introduction appears in the afterword to his Audible Signs: Essays from a Musical Ground (Continuum, 2010). Rose says six people, including Davenport, made his book possible: “Each has worked wonders in the world, delivering beautiful obdurate things as gifts of understanding, with all their difficulties intact.” They are the violinist Peter Sheppard Skaerved, the mathematician Bill Rosenthal, his mother Ryda Rose, the photographer Brian H. Peterson, and his wife and proprietor of Bible Belt Balabusta, Joanna Brichetto (all are concerned with attention, harmony and education in the broadest sense). In one of his essays, “An Intimate Iconography of Music,” Rose usefully misquotes Davenport’s essay on the incoherent poet Charles Olson: “Knowledge is the harvest of attentions.” Guy actually writes:

“Knowledge to Olson was a compassionate acquisition, an act of faith and sympathy. He meant primarily that knowledge is the harvest of attention, and he fumed in great rages that the hucksters prey on our attention like a plague of ticks.”

Again, “attention”: “Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world.”    

`I Prefer to Give It to Him Now'

I’m a sucker for the kind of email Ian Jackson, an antiquarian book dealer in Berkeley, Calif., sent me on Monday. Included were three passages borrowed from his reading, including an excerpt from a letter written by Leo Spitzer to Cesi Kellinger, and translated from the Italian by Ian: “Thus [he has just made a little money on the stock market with the proceeds of his Feltrinelli prize] we have been able to repair the house a little: to repaint the wood of the porch, the windows, etc. I’ve always loved having workmen in the house: their methodical ways, their expertise . . .”

Next came some lines from St. Augustine’s De Doctrina (trans. R.P.H. Green, On Christian Teaching, 1997): “For a person who has to speak wisely on matters which he cannot treat eloquently, close adherence to the words of scripture is particularly necessary. The poorer he sees himself to be in his own resources, the richer he must be in those of scripture, using them to confirm what he says in his own words; so that although once deficient in words of his own he can grow in stature, as it were, by the testimony of something really important. A preacher who cannot give pleasure with his words may give pleasure with his texts.”

Like the Spitzer passage, the Augustine lines serve as a comment on a recent post at Anecdotal Evidence. The third quote comes from the poet Robert Francis (1901-1987), a poet I knew only by name and mostly as a friend to Robert Frost. Ian writes:

“He would seem to be the sort of poet you'd approve of. His autobiography, The Trouble with Francis (University of Massachusetts Press, 1971) is a delight and an inspiration to be content with little. (The title comes from a review of one of his books: ‘The trouble with Francis is not that he’s too happy as that his happiness lacks weight’).”

It’s reassuring to be reminded that four decades ago reviewers were already humorless and disapproving of happy people. Ian goes on, “In Pot Shots at Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 1980), a collection of (largely half-page) observations and aphorisms, [Francis] remarks:

“`When I think of the poetry festivals I have attended and taken part in, my mind goes back to the Book of Hosea, the twelfth chapter, the first verse: Ephraim feedeth on wind.’

Ian: “And since you mention Yvor Winters as one of the few whose recorded voice does justice to verse, I will add this reference to perhaps that very recording: “`This,’ says The Yale Series of Recorded Poets of Yvor Winters, `is a field recording made in the poet’s own locale.’” I was reminded of the John and Alan Lomax recording Lead Belly at Angola, and of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. My next step was to borrow Pot Shots at Poetry. Remember Ian’s reference to Francis’ autobiography as “an inspiration to be content with little” when reading this exchange from a 1974-75 interview. His interlocutor notices the sparsity of books in Francis’ house in Amherst, Ma. The poet explains he has never had enough money to buy a lot of them, and he instead relies on the public library. Francis adds:

“Yet small as my collection is, it is larger than one might suppose in entering my house. Books are stowed away in my bedroom and others are in boxes in the attic. I am more interested in reducing my store than in enlarging it. Whenever I have a book that a friend would enjoy owning, I prefer to give it to him now rather than wait till I die.”

`Traditional Expertness'

The heat-index in Houston was 110° F. on the day I chose to spend my lunch sitting on a bench, eating my sandwich and watching the tree-service men trim the oaks that line the road in front of my building. Their manner was military and methodical. They begin with pole pruners and, for thicker branches, pole saws. Soon the road, sidewalk and border were littered with branches, leaves, flakes of lichen and ball moss. They removed the refuse with rakes and by hand, and disposed of it in the wood chipper. No motion was wasted. When they finished, the road, normally densely canopied and tunnel-like with branches, was brightly lit and airy again, reducing the indoor sensation the outdoors sometimes possesses with changes of light. Watching the men at work was deeply satisfying. I like tidiness but I also love to watch a process worked out to its conclusion. And I admire skill honed by experience. These guys knew precisely what they were doing, and did it with stylish efficiency. 

V.S. Pritchett, perhaps the best-read critic of the last century, left school at fifteen to work in the London leather trade. Some of the most interesting pages in the first volume of his memoirs, A Cab at the Door (1968), recount his apprenticeship in tanning (and bring to mind Philip Roth’s account of glovemaking in American Pastoral). Pritchett says, “I was happier in my hours in the leather trade than I was at home,” and continues:

“When I grew up and read Defoe’s Complete English Tradesman I knew the pleasure he felt in the knowledge of a trade, its persons and its way. If I knew nothing else, at the end of four years I was proud of my knowledge of leather. It was a gratifying knowledge. During the last war I had to spend some time in shipyards on the Tyne and on the Clyde and the passionate interest in a craft came back to me; and although I was then an established writer, I half wished I had spent my life in an industry. The sight of skill and of traditional expertness is irresistible to me.” 

I share the sentiment. The closest I came to learning a trade was being a newspaper reporter. I still feel nostalgia for the process of putting out a daily newspaper, the enormous collaborative effort that once involved practitioners of so many trades. Of course, that was how I learned to write, to elicit information, to craft a story, to meet a daily deadline – the skills I still exercise every day.

`Things of the Heart and Not the Mind'

“With all her studious nature she had set herself to study love, and study it she would.  She made the most of what the holiday offered and when the exponents were absent she fell back on the textbooks—Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Wuthering Heights at that time.” 

So writes Elizabeth Taylor in her story “Girl Reading” (A Dedicated Man, 1965). The girl in question is Etta Salkeld, just turned sixteen, who lives with her widowed mother in London, in near-poverty. Her best friend is Sarah Lippmann, a seemingly happier girl from a larger, louder and more prosperous family. Taylor packs a remarkable amount of observation – physical, social, psychological -- into twenty pages, without hobbling her story. Etta reminds me of me at her age, despite the obvious differences. She is reading Sense and Sensibility, as I first did around her age. Taylor’s use of “textbooks” in the passage above is what I most admire, for that is how many of us read fiction, and have for generations – as a sort of surrogate instruction in living. Conflict and love, war and peace – these are the themes and lessons novels and stories can teach if we choose to read them that way. This must sound inexplicably quaint to many young people, readers and non-readers alike. Etta’s mother, a sad woman who labors to understand her bookish daughter and thereby give her a happy life, thinks late in the story: 

“She began to wonder if there were things of the heart and not the mind that Etta fastened upon so desperately when she was reading. Or was her desire to be in a different place?” 

That spells out the two classic reasons for reading fiction – call it education (or moral improvement) and “escape,” pure, benign distraction, a refuge from life’s seeming impossibility when you are fifteen and sometimes later. Sarah’s father, the relentlessly hearty sort, is suspicious of too much attention devoted to books, says, without nastiness, to Etta: “`Too much of a bookworm,’ I’m afraid,’ he added and took one of her textbooks which she carried everywhere for safety, lest she should be left on her own for a few moments. `Tess of the D’Urbervilles,’ read out Mr. Lippmann. `Isn’t it deep? Isn’t it on the morbid side?’” Hasn’t every devoted reader, especially when young, heard such things? In “A Literary Education: On Being Well-Versed in Literature” (A Literary Education and Other Essays, 2014), Joseph Epstein reminds us, as the title of his essay suggests, that literature, the novel in particular, teaches essential lessons in life. That may not be its immediate purpose, for such a book might turn appallingly didactic. His own literary education, Epstein says, was “slapdash, wildly uneven, and chiefly autodidactical, but adds that “we are all finally autodidacts, making our way on our own as best we can, with our real teachers being the books we happen to read.” His most valuable class while a student at the University of Chicago was a “badly conceived” and “ill-taught” survey of the novel “from The Princess of Cleves through Ulysses.”  He writes: 

“From it I sensed that, if any inkling about the way the world works and the manner in which human nature is constituted were to be remotely available to me during my stay on the planet, I should have the best chance of discovering it through literature, and perhaps chiefly through the novel. The endless details set out in novels, the thoughts of imaginary characters, the dramatization of large themes through carefully constructed plots, the portrayals of how the world works, really works—these were among the things that literature, carefully attended to, might one day help me to learn.” 

By the final paragraphs of “Girl Reading,” life has taught Etta a lesson in love, but she has already been well tutored by Austen, Hardy and Brontë.

[In the Aug. 7 Wall Street Journal, see John Agresto’s “The Suicide of the Liberal Arts”: “I know I would have learned much by working on the Brooklyn docks. Vinnie the butcher and his brother Angel would have opened my eyes to things I’m still clueless about. The pay and job security might have been better than life in academia and government. And, yes, I might have encountered a modern-day Achilles or Hector or Agamemnon. But I think that, at least for me, it was better to meet them first in the Iliad.”]

`Save Someone's Memory from Oblivion'

That J.V. Cunningham and Stevie Smith are among the most enjoyable, memorable and rereadable poets of the last century is to me beyond argument. Is either “major?” If we define “major” in the conventional sense – influential, popular (especially with critics and the professors), resonant with the times – probably not. Both were too idiosyncratic, too contrary, too immune to the fickle fashions of their day. Both came to their mature styles early – a sure sign of seriousness of intent – and neither radically changed the way they wrote. Each was a poet’s poet, though not in the sense of flattering an exclusive coterie of readers and critics. Both wrote as though their audience included their influential forebears. Each created his or her own precursors, in the sense described by Borges.  

In “I’m Not Dante or Milton, but Won’t You Remember Me, Too?” David Wheatley salvages a curious anthology compiled in 1927 by J.C. Squire, The Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets. Wheatley lays on the whimsy a little heavily for my taste, but Squire’s book is worthy of rediscovery on its own terms (some of the poems he chooses are excellent, which suggests that a minor poet can leave us a major poem or two), and as a healthy reminder that art is not democratic or egalitarian, and never fair. In his preface, Squire says his collection is assembled as a “supplement” to the canon-forming anthologies that ruled his day – Francis Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1861) and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s The Oxford Book of English Verse (1900). Among his reasons for collecting “lesser” poets, Squire says, is that “certainly the vast riches of our English poetry would be illustrated if a book of almost equivalent size were made from which all the greater writers should be omitted.” Also, he wisely leaves out poets still alive as of 1927.

Of William Somerville (1675-1742), Dr. Johnson writes in Lives of the Eminent English Poets: “Somervile has tried many modes of poetry; and though perhaps he has not in any reached such excellence as to raise much envy, it may commonly be said at least, that `he writes very well for a gentleman’ . . . His subjects are commonly such as require no great depth of thought or energy of expression. His fables are generally stale and therefore excite no curiosity.” Hardly a hearty endorsement, but Squire includes one poem by Somerville, “Address to His Elbow-Chair, New Clothed.” If William Cowper can sing of his sofa, Somerville can praise his reupholstered chair:

“True, thou art spruce and fine, a very beau;

But what are trappings and external show?

To real worth alone I make my court;

Knaves are my scorn, and coxcombs are my sport.”

No one will confuse this with the work of Pope, the major English poet among Somerville’s contemporaries, but the poem is amusing and reminds us how form can lend interest to fluff. Quibbles are inevitable and Squire sometimes falters. He includes three poems by Dr. Johnson, including at least one “major” work, the poignant “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet.” He also, rather early in the “Melville Revival,” includes four poems by Herman Melville (with Dickinson, one of the two indisputably major American poets of the nineteenth century). In The Uses of Pessimism (Oxford University Press, 2010), Roger Scruton offers a pertinent reminder: “A dose of pessimism reminds us that great art is not easy to come by, that there is no formula for producing it, and that creativity makes sense only if there are also the rules that constrain it.” Any moron can yawp barbarically, and most can slavishly follow a formula. It’s the balance of those two unseemly extremes that results in something interesting, something that has a chance of surviving its time. An attentive reading of Squire’s anthology leads the reader to an inevitable conclusion: much of yesterday’s “minor” poetry is superior to most of today’s “major” work. Wheatley’s concluding sentence is his best:

“Read a minor poem today and save someone’s memory from oblivion.”

`Relics, Anecdotes, Glimpses of Character'

There’s nothing fancy or permanent about the way I mended my copy of Under the Volcano – multiple layers of Scotch tape, newer tape repairing older tape, inside and outside the front and back covers. It’s a paperback published by New American Library in 1971, and two years later I carried it around France and Germany in my duffel bag. Even when new it was an ugly volume with a ridiculous introduction by Stephen Spender. I read it religiously, annotating heavily, writing for some reason on the front endpaper a list of names, pertinent and otherwise, including Spinoza, Blake and Sabbatai Zevi. As a physical object, it’s a ragged mess, like a pit bull after a dog fight. I have no plans for ever again reading Lowry’s novel and yet I cherish the book because of the memories it trails. The Canadian poet Grant Buday puts it like this in his essay “Old Paper”:

“Each book has a story, or rather history. As objects, they are tangible, tactile, solid. Their spines creak as you open them and their pages lie as individually as a woman’s hair on a pillow. So it is with most every book.”

This skirts fetishism but I share the sentiment. One of the unanticipated pleasures of reading devotedly across a lifetime is the aura of significance accrued by long-owned volumes, apart from any literary value they may possess. My beat-up Under the Volcano carries with it a sort of supplement, like the OED and Mencken’s American Language – the memories and associations lent it by our lives together. Somewhere in southern France I saw my first apricot tree, growing on the side of a cliff. I must have had the book with me, because I see that tree again each time I glimpse its spine on the shelf. I see a row of empty wine bottles on the desk in my room in a maison des jeunes in Chambéry. And, for some reason, I think of Arno Schmidt and a paperback copy of King Lear, among other memories. I find no literary or financial justification for holding on to the book, but I do.

Sir John Collings (J.C.) Squire (1884-1958) was a poet, essayist and literary editor based in London. In 1918 he reviewed The Amenities of Book-Collecting and Kindred Affections by A. Edward Newton for the Observer. “Book-Collector” is included in Squire’s Books Reviewed (1920). Newton was a wealthy American writer and bibliophile. According to Squire, “his favourite book is Boswell, his heroes are Johnson and Lamb.” Squire defends Newton against anti-American and anti-wealth prejudice. He says of Newton, interestingly: “The fact is he has a passion for possessing little fragments of people’s lives, an interest in relics, anecdotes, glimpses of character.” That’s as good a defense of book collecting as I’ve ever read, and in some way related to the reasons I hold on to my battered Under the Volcano. Here is the conclusion of Squire’s essay:

“For there is no end to the strange adventures that books have had or the strange places in which they have been found, and in the history of mere bibliography, matter of types, spacing and pagination, there are detective stories more elaborate and ingenious than those of Poe.”

[Thanks to Norm Sibum for leading me to Grant Buday.]

`Bob Would Not Do Something Like That'

Robert Conquest’s first book makes only glancing references to Communism and the Soviet Union, and was not written in prose. It is simply titled Poems (1955), and here is the dedication:

“In Memory of

MAURICE LANGLOIS

poet,

died in the hands of the

secret police of the occupying power.”

I’ve learned little about Langlois, though I found a photo of his memorial in Champagne-Ardenne. The site reports he died on Aug. 30, 1944, five days after the Nazis surrendered Paris, though they still occupied parts of northern and western France, including Champagne-Ardenne. In his final work in prose, The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History (2005), Conquest again refers briefly to “my dear friend Maurice Langlois,” and adds that the Frenchman dedicated a poem to him in his collection Les Passagars Clandestins (roughly, “stowaways”).

Two things strike me, apart from Conquest’s loyalty as a friend. The bland anonymity of “the secret police of the occupying power” in the dedication is worthy of Kafka. Rather than the Gestapo, it might have been the NKVD (the subject of Conquest’s Inside Stalin’s Secret Police: NKVD Politics, 1936–1939, published in 1985). Conquest was not the first to note the moral parity of Hitler and Stalin, but he, even before Solzhenitsyn, documented it and published the results. Also, the reference to Langlois in Dragons appears in a passage devoted to Conquest’s debts to France and French thinking. The chapter is titled “Choose Your Enlightenment,” and Conquest qualifies his gratitude:

“No, it was the French political and bureaucratic intelligentsia, against whom some of the best French work of our time was written, that prevailed and, as [French historian and former Communist Alain] Besançon pointed out, infected the Anglosphere: the Sartres of this world, followed by the Derridas, helping to undermine our academe, our thought.”

Conquest reminds us that Communism also thrived in non-Communist nations, and still does. Marxism Lite remains gospel among our bien pensants. The death on Aug. 3 of Robert Conquest at age ninety-eight is a loss to many constituencies – readers of poetry and history, historians, anyone subjected to Communism, anyone offended by the casual refutation of Truth. The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (1968) and The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986) are essential texts for understanding the last century.  So are some of Conquest's poems. Consider “George Orwell” from Arias from a Love Opera (1969), especially these lines: “We die of words. For touchstones he restored / The real person, real event or thing.” That was Conquest’s task, too.

If his histories were serious, his poems were funny – and serious. Here is “This Be the Worse” (Demons Don’t, 1999), a poem that begins as a parody of, or homage to “This Be the Verse,” the best-known poem by his friend Philip Larkin:

“They fuck you up, the chaps you choose

To do your Letters and your Life.

They wait till all that’s left of you’s

A corpse in which to shove a knife.

“How ghoulishly they grub among

Your years for stuff to shame and shock:

The times you didn't hold your tongue,

The times you failed to curb your cock.

“To each of those who’ve processed me

Into their scrap of fame or pelf:

You think in marks for decency

I'd lose to you? Don't kid yourself.”

Kingsley Amis devotes a chapter in his Memoirs (1991) to Conquest, whom he met in 1951. Judging by the stories recounted, each found the other reliably funny, intentionally and otherwise -- perhaps the essential component in any durable friendship. Here is a choice Amis-told anecdote:

“Years ago there was a public lavatory (gents) immediately outside the Marlborough, needless to say much used by its patrons, others too. One day Bob and I were descending the lavatory steps when without warning he bawled,

“`All right, Sergeant, get your notebook at the ready.’

“I had only just stopped myself from crying out in terror when four or five little men appeared below and dashed past us up the steps. There was never a time when you could be quite sure Bob would not do something like that.”

[See Roger Kimball's remembrance of Conquest here, and a recent poem by him here.]

`A Writer Writes Better Than He Lives'

“I had no part in this learned disappointment, who am content to credit my senses, and to believe that rain will fall when the air blackens, and that the weather will be dry when the sun is bright. My caution, indeed, does not always preserve me from a shower.”

Once common-sensical, the words have turned audacious and bracing. Ours is a skeptical age, when skepticism means not open-minded questioning but adversarial stridency. We delight in doubting everything, arguing with everything, leaving nothing precisely what it is. We wish to be clever and not to be taken in like the credulous hoi polloi. Our skepticism is a universal corrosive that dissolves thinking, emotion and morals. Among sophisticates it serves as a genderless surrogate for machismo.

Unsurprisingly, the passage quoted above was written by Dr. Johnson in The Idler #17, on this date, Aug. 5, in 1758. Johnson’s customary concern is the contradictory nature of human nature. True to form, he continues: “Of those that spin out life in trifles and die without a memorial, many flatter themselves with high opinions of their own importance, and imagine that they are every day adding some improvement to human life.” So much for do-gooders, meddlers and scolds. Johnson then eases into his true target: animal vivisection and its practitioners. By starting with the general and slowly focusing on the particular, Johnson suggests no one deserves blanket absolution. Morality is a spectrum on which we all find a place to occupy. Johnson writes:  

“Among the inferior professors of medical knowledge, is a race of wretches, whose lives are only varied by varieties of cruelty; whose favourite amusement is to nail dogs to tables and open them alive; to try how long life may be continued in various degrees of mutilation, or with the excision or laceration of the vital parts; to examine whether burning irons are felt more acutely by the bone or tendon; and whether the more lasting agonies are produced by poison forced into the mouth, or injected into the veins.”

More than two and a half centuries later, this reads like the work of a writer Johnson heartily disliked, Jonathan Swift, and still has the power to disturb. (One can’t help but think of Dr. Mengele and his colleagues.) We’ve come a long way in a mere five paragraphs. By its conclusion, the essay turns into an anomaly in Johnson’s collected works. Almost an anomaly. In his notes to these lines in Cymbeline (1765) – “Your highness / Shall from this practice but make hard your heart” – Johnson writes, seemingly out of the blue:

“There is in this passage nothing that much requires a note, yet I cannot forbear to push it forward into observation. The thought would probably have been more amplified, had our author lived to be shocked with such experiments as have been published in later times, by a race of men that have practised tortures without pity, and related them without shame, and are yet suffered to erect their heads among human beings.”

The passage is left to stand, undeveloped, without larger context, an impassioned non sequitur. To study human contradiction and inconsistency, Johnson had only to look within. He was like the rest of us, only more so. The late Yeats scholar and longtime professor of English at Hollins College, John Rees Moore, wrote “Dr. Sam Johnson”:

“That great hulk of a man, Dr. Johnson,

Had many ills both of mind and body

As Boswell shows; in spite of melancholy

He could be merry, and simply bent on fun.

His opinions were bold, and I can tell you,

His authority was kingly, his generosity as well.

To his verbal sword Lord Chesterfield fell.

A writer writes better than he lives, it is true,

Nine years on his dictionary, what a noble feat!

Hester Thrale `betrayed’ him; he loved her still.

God might punish her; he never will.

He had a stroke, got back on his feet,

Wrote Lives of the English Poets, a masterpiece.

Let this master of words lie in perpetual peace.”

Not much of a poem but for that one line: “A writer writes better than he lives . . .” Perhaps Moore is answering Yeats’ “The Choice.”

`Joyful Friendship with the Great Dead'

A reader is unhappy with my use of quotations. He accuses me of laziness, of padding my words with the words of others, of trying to mooch off their authority and claim it as my own. Technically, I’m guilty, sort of, but I plead the precedent defense. Think of Montaigne, Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Herman Melville, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett and Geoffrey Hill. Passages in some of their works are virtual palimpsests of words drawn from other writers, sometimes unacknowledged, even verging on plagiarism (especially in Sterne’s case). No, I’m not mooching off their authority, elevating my status to theirs, etc., merely putting the practice, the temperamental proclivity to quote, in context.

I am rereading Petrarch and His World (1963) by Morris Bishop (the best friend at Cornell of Nabokov, no slouch when it came to artful quotation). Bishop notes that Rerum memorandarum libri (1343), “like Petrarch’s other books, is marred for the modern reader by his abuse of quotations. But we live in an age of reference books and of libraries [not to mention, anachronistically, the Internet]. Petrarch’s readers had no place to look up anything.” In Epistolae metricae (1347), Petrarch replied to his critics:

“I could use fewer [quotations]; I could even not write at all….But there is nothing that moves me so much as the examples of great men. It’s useful to uplift oneself, to test one’s mind to see if it contains something solid, generous, firm, and constant against ill fortune, or if one has lied to oneself about oneself. To do this there is no better way than to measure oneself against these great men.” [All translations by Bishop.]

Bishop approves: “His joyful friendship with the great dead moved him constantly to repeat their words. To quote is to recognize another’s wisdom and to share it.” Bishop then quotes another pertinent passage from one of Petrarch’s letters and adds, parenthetically: “(Does a critic reproach me for quoting too much? I quote Petrarch in defense of quotation.)”

What I most want to do at Anecdotal Evidence is share my enthusiasm for writing well and for reading good books. Often, the most efficient way to do that is to quote our betters, “the great dead,” those who came before us, whose works constitute the tradition in which all of us live. Call it writerly, readerly gratitude, an impulse Chesterton described as “happiness doubled by wonder.”

`The Poetry Recital Chortle'

I have never been to a satisfactory poetry reading. Not one has failed to embarrass or bore me. Poets invariably get in the way of their poems. There’s the plummy-voiced Richard Burton, the tortured James Dean mumbler, the aw-shucks Jimmy Stewart. Bad poets long not to be writers but actors or politicians – that is, famous and influential. A reader this weekend sent me a video of a contemporary American poet reading, and I deleted it at 2:12. In theory, good readings are possible. I’ve heard recordings of Eliot and Yvor Winters that sounded like the work of intelligent grownups. Dylan Thomas was insufferable, on the page and on vinyl. The poem is about the words on the page, not the words in the poet’s mouth, despite all the arguments for poetry as an oral art. Maybe for Homer but not for W.S. Merwin. I don’t want my concentration on the words interrupted, unless, of course, it’s a lousy poem. In an interview from earlier this year, Geoffrey Hill nails it nicely: 

“I don’t want it to be a sort of simpering drizzle. I really do want there to be some sense of order battling anarchy within the very structure of a poem. I think one of the most dreadful sounds in all of modern culture is what I will call the poetry recital chortle, and most contemporary poems seem to me to be written in order to arouse the desire of the listener to chuckle appreciatively. To be blunt, I can’t really stand that.”

`Inviolable, Strong, Immutable, and Vivid'

I know a man who fell in love with Natasha Rostov. Even he was aware his love was unrequited, though that knowledge did little to relieve the intensity of his infatuation. With time, his passion eased but I’m certain the lingering memory aches when he thinks of the novel in which she dwells. Zbigniew Herbert plays with this conceit, approaching it from another angle and turning it into a meditation on the power of imagination and the way it may be mistaken for fraud. He wrote the prose fable “Voice” in 1981, the year of Solidarity-led strikes and imposition of martial law in his native Poland. 

In Herbert’s tale, the poet Francesco Petrarca – Petrarch – receives a letter from a former schoolmate, Guido Noia, telling him their “unforgettable preceptress,” Donna Novella, has died. “She always spoke from behind a curtain because her extraordinary beauty—it was universally claimed—might distract the attention of her audience.” Before burial, her body was wrapped in a black cloth and arranged on a bier in the Church of Santo Lorenzo. A “scoundrel” entered the church and reveals Donna Novello’s face is scarred and pock-marked, her skin “swarthy like the skin of a common peasant woman.” She is bald. 

In his reply to Guido, Petrarch says he has no memory of Donna Novello: “The idea that I loved her, dear Guido, is the work of your fantasy.” Petrarch reminds his friend that he hated the study of law, that he “lost irretrievably seven precious years of my youth.” (Herbert studied law at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and received a Master of Law degree. He never practiced law.) Petrarch adds that he just received a codex containing, amidst much trash, a copy of the Bucolics: 

“He did not return to reading Virgil. He was seized by panic, by a horror that destroyed all thought and feeling. Guido’s letter was an attack, yet another attack on the sacred secret of his soul.” 

Herbert tells us Petrarch has only ever loved one woman – not Laura, his famed fiction, but Donna Novello. “He had invented Laura in Avignon and never met any young lady of that name, which lent itself like no other to erotic wordplay.” He even had a “Sienese master” in Avignon paint a portrait of Laura. “A real voice was united to an invented name and figure,” Herbert writes. “Laura became a shield covering Petrarch’s singular, defenseless love. The rest was just a matter of poetry.” Other writers question the existence of Laura but Petrarch defends her reality with ferocity. Even Boccaccio argues Laura “should be understood allegorically.” Herbert’s narrator parenthetically notes: “(the human passion for destroying all that is beautiful and pure is truly fathomless).” In a 2004 review of recent Petrarch translations, Eric Ormsby considers Laura’s reality: 

“Is Laura, his great poetic subject, a real woman or a phantom of the poet’s brain? Is she merely the personification of love in a particular form, a Platonic simulacrum of some transcendent archetype? Is she the breathing embodiment of all his ambition and striving? Or is she, as seems more likely, all of these, and none of these, at once? We are no longer at ease in addressing—let alone falling in love with—archetypes; nowadays, any poet foolhardy enough to install his beloved on a Platonic pedestal would be more liable to see stars than perfected eidolons.”

And the loss, of course, is ours. Herbert resolves nothing. His story/essay is worthy of Borges: 

 “So we have strayed onto tricky ground riddled with uncertain circumstantial evidence and indiscreet inferences,” Herbert writes. “A criminological-literary method that strives to determine incontrovertibly the place, time, and victim of the crime of love, a pettifogging investigation into the reliability of the witnesses for the prosecution and defense, both aim to announce triumphantly that Laura never existed. Laced with smug nihilism, it is all pedantically arid and futile.” 

Herbert suggests we not seek Laura, that we respectfully leave her alone: “May she lie in the alabaster tomb of three hundred sonnets.” Petrarch only became Petrarch when he abandoned writing about Donna Novello and wrote of his love for the possibly non-existent Laura, who then became real. After the poet’s death, Herbert concludes, “Laura would be inviolable, strong, immutable, and vivid as Penelope, Dido, Isolde, and Beatrice” – and Natasha Rostov. 

[“Voice,” as translated by Alissa Valles, can be found in The Collected Prose 1948-1998 (2010). An earlier translation by John and Bogdna Carpenter was published in 1987 in Parnassus (vol. 14, no.1) and collected in Parnassus: Twenty Years of Poetry in Review (ed. Herbert Leibowitz, University of Michigan Press, 1994).]

`Methodical Reading'

Like Shakespeare, Herman Melville was a book-suffused writer. He read largely in order to write, a quality that belies his one-time reputation as a composer of South Sea romances and yarn-spinner for children. During his visit to London in 1849, the year he published Redburn and Mardi, and was gestating Moby-Dick, Melville kept a record of the books he acquired. On his list is popular gothic junk like Frankenstein, The Castle of Otranto and Vathek, but also Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Sir Thomas Browne, Shakespeare, Charles Lamb and De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. (See Melville’s Journals, eds. Howard C. Horsford and Lynn Horth, Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1989). In a journal entry dated Dec. 16, 1849, Melville notes:

“We had some coffee, music, dancing & after an agreeable evening I came away at 11 o’clock, & walking to The Cock near Temple Bar drank a glass of Stout & home & to bed, after reading a few chapters in Tristam [sic] Shandy, which I had never yet read.”

In a note on this passage, the Journals editors report Melville “must have read deeper into the work in coming months, for its influence on Moby-Dick has often been noted . . . And is unmistakable in the last paragraph of Chapter 26.”

The editors further note that the narrator of Melville’s story “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” (1853) is reading Tristram Shandy, and attempts to tell his creditor “a fine joke about my Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman!” Nor was Melville above literary tourism while in London. On Nov. 16, 1849, he meets a friend at the Mitre Tavern, off Fleet Street, “the place where Dr Johnson used to dine.” There he sees the portrait bust of Johnson modeled from life by the sculptor Joseph Nollekens (1737-1823). Melville continues:

“Had a `stewed rump steak’—very fine, & bread & cheese, & ale (of course). Then upstairs & smoked a cigar. Cosy, & comfortable place enough. No cursed white walls. Stopped in at the `Dr Johnson Tavern’ over the way & drank a glass of ale. Bust of him there, also. Go to the place thro’ a court, where the Dr used to live. Some rivalry between the two places. The last the darkest.”

In our day, writers seem to read little beyond the work of their contemporaries, and usually not even the best among them – one explanation for why much current writing seems flat and parochial, as though born into an intellectual and literary vacuum. In his two-volume biography of Melville, Hershel Parker discusses his deep reading of various poets (Dante, Spenser, Milton) in 1860, when Melville was turning away from prose to write poetry. Melville called it “methodical reading.” Parker writes: “Melville was not reading in order to acquire knowledge for its own sake,” but rather, “his evident purpose in reading epics of Western civilization was to learn how to write great poetry in his own time.”

Melville, the most bookish of writers and thus an education for attentive readers, was born on this date, Aug. 1, in 1819, and died on Sept. 28, 1891, at age seventy-two.