`To Admire Her Before She Goes'

A treat to see fall again in a northern latitude. During the thirty-mile drive from the airport in Toronto to my son’s boarding school in Aurora, we enjoyed an early-autumn landscape familiar from twenty years of living in upstate New York. Once it was dairy country but development has turned much of it into apartments, condos, gas stations and strip malls. Cows are sparse but the hills that haven’t been leveled are covered with long grasses, goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace and, most conspicuously, mulleins, all turning brown and gray this time of year. I think of mulleins as the aristocrats among the weeds – they grow in vacant lots and along the sides of country roads. They begin as rosettes of downy leaves, soft as a rabbit’s ear, and send up tall stems with small yellow flowers. In winter, the leafless stalks stand like a field of broomsticks, some tall as a man.      

It was Eric Ormsby who introduced me to the homely, late- Romantic poems of Archibald Lampman (1861-1899), born not far from here in Morpeth, Ontario. In his "Mullein," Ormsby quotes the concluding line of Lampman’s “In November (2)”: “A pleasure secret and austere.” In “Autumn Maples,” Lampman says the trees, turned scarlet in the fall, “Have fired the hills with beaconing clouds of flame.” This reminded me of a passage in “New England: An Autumn Impression,” the lovely first chapter in Henry James’ The American Scene (1907):

“…the way the colour begins in those days to be dabbed, the way, here and there, for a start, a solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy-ball, with the whole family gathered round to admire her before she goes.”

`You're Reticent, But Sure'

On Sunday, when a reader sent a link to Delmore Schwartz’s “Father and Son,” he didn’t know I was taking my middle son back to his boarding school in Ontario today. If anyone still reads Schwartz, it’s likely through the filter of Bellow or Berryman. My late friend D.G. Myers once hooted with glee when I quoted from memory the opening lines of “The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me,” and Nabokov claimed to hear “divine vibrations” in Schwartz’s story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.”

Schwartz’s madness, drug and alcohol abuse, and solitary death are better known than his work, some of which is good. The reasons for this are many, including reader morbidity, but Schwartz bears some responsibility. Take “Father and Son,” a poem steeped in a rancid Freudian marinade, and poetically in thrall to Auden and perhaps MacNeice. In other words, it is very much an artifact of its time, dated by being in lockstep with fashionable thinking. Despite this, “Father and Son” contains some good lines, especially timely with my fifteen-year-old’s return to St. Andrew’s College for another year. I could speak the father’s opening word:
     
“On these occasions, the feelings surprise,
Spontaneous as rain, and they compel
Explicitness, embarrassed eyes——"

The father misreads Hamlet à la Freud and Ernest Jones, but I hope my son someday might be able to say:

“Father, you’re not Polonius, you’re reticent,
But sure. I can already tell
The unction and falsetto of the sentiment
Which gratifies the facile mouth, but springs
From no felt, had, and wholly known things.”

The only character in the play I would want to be even less than Polonius is Hamlet, the terminally arrested adolescent. Oh, I almost forgot Ophelia.

[Another poem on my mind today: ”At the San Francisco Airport.”]

`As When She Played Them First'

Even among those of us who are stubbornly unmusical, music is a reliable trigger of memory and emotion. The classical station played an old warhorse I’ve heard ten thousand times, Für Elise, and the memory of my cousin playing the piece more than half a century ago in her basement returned. Her posture was excellent. She sat at the upright with her metronome on top of the piano and played. The walls were paneled in knotty pine. My uncle’s National Geographics were stacked in the corner. Julie was two or three years my senior and the first person to beat me at chess. She would abruptly stop playing, stand and open the hinged top of her bench, and impatiently riffle through the sheets of music for the one she wanted. That’s what impressed me—translating black marks on paper into beautiful, orderly sounds. It still seems like magic.  The widow in “Love Songs in Age” (The Whitsun Wedding, 1964), while “looking for something else,” discovers her old sheet music, and looks at it,

“Relearning how each frank submissive chord
Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
And the unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein
That hidden freshness sung,
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first.”

Larkin has a gift for coupling unexpected adjectives. No one else could have written “frank submissive chord.” The emotions released by the woman finding her old music are sweet and sad, as it would be for anyone who has lived long enough. I haven’t seen my cousin in more than forty years, and the memory of my ancient, secret crush is unexpectedly vivid and innocent. Someone else, not I, admired her so, and the thought of  sheet music releases another memory. In 1975, when I worked for Kay’s Books in Cleveland, Tiny Tim visited the shop. His career, brief and intense as many things were in the sixties, had already peaked, and he was in town to perform at a small club on the West Side. He was looking not for books but sheet music, which was heaped in the cramped space beneath the steps leading to the basement. He spent several hours digging through the pile and left with a shopping bag filled with music. We had him autograph the wall in our shipping department, and I won’t pretend to quote him verbatim but in effect he said the old songs were always the best.

`One of the Murmurers at Fortune'

“Of his life, little is known; and that little claims no praise but what can be given to intellectual excellence, seldom employed to any virtuous purpose.”

As an epitaph, one could do worse – as the recipient, I mean, not the composer. The latter, Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the English Poets, labors to be fair with Edmund Smith (1672-1710), who might have been erased from literary memory without Johnson's salvage job. In the chapter “Shakespeare and Johnson” in Latest Readings (Yale University Press, 2015), Clive James cites the blandly surnamed Smith as one of the “unrecognizable” poets Johnson reclaims. “Johnson had good things to say about Milton and Dryden,” James tells us, “but he also had good things to say about Smith.” It couldn’t have been easy. Here is a sample of Smith’s “A Poem on the Death of Mr. John Philips”: 

“Once on thy Friends look down, lamented Shade,
And view the Honours to thy Ashes paid;
Some thy lov'd Dust in Parian Stones enshrine,
Others immortal Epitaphs design;
With Wit, and Strength, that only yields to thine:
Even I, though slow to touch the painful string,
Awake from slumber, and attempt to sing.” 

In 1709, one year after Smith’s translation of Racine’s Phaedra (probably his most noteworthy accomplishment) was produced, his friend Philips (author of the splendidly  titled Splendid Shilling, a Milton burlesque) died of tuberculosis at age thirty-two. Smith wrote a heartfelt elegy which, for this reader, is almost unreadable. Johnson says of the poem: “. . . justice must place [it] among the best elegies which our language can shew, an elegant mixture of fondness and admiration, of dignity and softness. There are some passages too ludicrous; but every human performance has its faults.” 

James is correct in his characterization of Johnson as a critic. He works to find worth – “good things,” as he says -- in the almost worthless. One wonders if Johnson’s soft heart betrayed him, touched as he was by Smith’s devotion to his friend.   And yet it was Johnson in his “Life of Milton” who called another elegy, “Lycidas,” “easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting.” Consistency is not among the essential virtues of a critic. As suggested earlier, Johnson may disapprove of Smith the man even more than Smith the poet: “With all his carelessness and all his vices he was one of the murmurers at Fortune; and wondered why he was suffered to be poor when Addison was caressed and preferred; nor would a very little have contented him, for he estimated his wants at six hundred pounds a year.” This is gossip as criticism, and very amusing, though James redirects our attention: 

“But Smith had a certain renown for his poetic abilities, and Johnson did not disagree. Johnson said that Smith had all the talents, but achieved nothing with them . . . Johnson’s specific criticism, full of detail about technical points, abounds with general topics that lead you into questions about the creative life. Nor was `Dictionary Johnson’ ever quite the strict academician that you might have expected from his reputation for whipping the ignorant.”

`It Brought Us This Far'

“Promising myself to read only what I needed, I read on and on for hours, even rereading those poems which I have known almost by heart since the week they were first published.”

The distinctive mark of a dedicated reader may be not the number of books he has read or even their quality, but rather the helplessness, after a lifetime of reading, with which he still surrenders himself to the pull of the good book he happens to be reading today. He hasn’t burned out, grown jaded or too sophisticated to enjoy himself. Like a kid, he’s still tempted to read under the covers with a flashlight, or stay up too late during the workweek and wake up stupid and achy in the morning. The reader writing above is a famously dying man, Clive James, speaking of The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, the grand edition edited by Archie Burnett and published in 2012. The essay quoted is a three-pager, “Always Philip Larkin,” included in Latest Readings (Yale University Press, 2015). Like most of the other pieces, it’s written in an ave-atque-vale spirit addressed to both readers and the books he has read. In 2010 he was diagnosed with emphysema, kidney failure and leukemia, and has since published four or five books. That is when, James says in his introduction, he “wondered whether it was worth reading anything both new and substantial, or even rereading something substantial that I already knew about.” He answers yes and yes.

James’ books, in poetry and prose, tempt a reader to fill a commonplace book with nuggets. He writes at once tightly and expansively, and moves a reader to share the good stuff with the nearest set of ears. James is an aphorist, usually without sounding portentous:

“The childish urge to understand everything doesn’t necessarily fade when the time approaches for you to do the most adult thing of all: vanish.”

“Finally you get to the age when a book’s power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it.”

“. . . culture is a matter not of credentials, but only of intensity, and sometimes you will find things out from fans and buffs [even bloggers] that you won’t from a tenured professor.”

   

Of his rereading of Joseph Conrad: “Time felt precious and I would have preferred to spend less of it with him, but he wouldn’t let me go.”

“[The books he read] . . . are not a necropolis. They are an arcadian pavilion with an infinite set of glittering, mirrored doorways to the unknown: which seems dark to us only because we will not be in it. We won’t be taking our knowledge any further, but it brought us this far.”

And those are just from the six-page introduction. James is nearly always generous and grateful in his judgments. He is more of a celebrator than a scourge. It’s good to know he only recently read the entirety of Boswell’s Life of Johnson for the first time and discovered the work of a great American poet, Edgar Bowers. The immanence of death is no reason to cease discovering new things or reject old ones.  Here is James’ close to the Larkin piece:

“The turmoil of his psyche is the least interesting thing about him. His true profundity is right there on the surface, in the beauty of his line. Every ugly moment of his interior battles was in service to that beauty. That being said, his unique thematic originality should be remarked: no other great modern poet, not even Yeats, was so successful at making his own personality the subject, and this despite the fact that his personality was something that he would really rather not have been stuck with. He would rather have been Sidney Bechet.”

`Important People Think It Funny'

“It is in these poems that we become acquainted, not with a mere literary performer—though Du Bellay was a skilful one—but with the mind of a man who survives the differences of centuries and speaks to us directly. This is the real test of literature, and the reason why the fashions and reputations of particular ages, including our own, do not count for much.”

In anything I have read by C.H. Sisson, even an introduction to a translation aimed at a general, non-academic audience, I finally hear the distinctive Sisson note – confident, learned and with adversaries lurking in the underbrush. The passage above is from his 1984 translation of The Regrets (Carcanet) by Joachim Du Bellay (1522-1560). Sisson might be describing Du Bellay’s younger contemporary, Montaigne (1533-1592). Both were defined by headstrong waywardness, recognition of tradition coupled with an inability to be other than themselves. Obviously, that also applies to Sisson, who distinguishes Les Regrets from Du Bellay’s other work by describing the sonnets as “more weighty, if still casually voiced, reflections.” A retired civil servant by the time he was translating Du Bellay, Sisson felt kinship with Du Bellay, who in 1553 went to Rome to work as secretary to his cousin, a cardinal and diplomat (Sonnet 39: “I love liberty, but I am a servant, / I don’t like servile manners, but must have them.”). Like Montaigne, both were men of affairs who knew the obligations of public service. None inhabited the garret. Here is Sisson’s translation of the eleventh sonnet in the sequence:

“Although people at large have nothing to do with poetry,

Although it is not a way of getting rich,

Although soldiers need not carry it with their kit

And to the ambitious it is merely silly:

Although important people think it funny

And those who are clever keep away from it,

Although Du Bellay is sufficient witness

To prove it not a skill that is valued highly:

Though writing for nothing seems idiotic to courtiers,

Though workmen don’t expect payment from sonneteers,

And although following the Muse is the way to be poor,

Yet I don’t feel tempted to give up

Because writing poems is my only comfort

And the Muse has given me six years writing and more.”

In 1965, Sisson published an essay on the Dorset poet William Barnes (1801-1886), who was energetically prolific and often wrote in the Dorset dialect.  Sisson says Barnes was “not a local poet except by accident,” one who “exploited the natural speech of his boyhood.” He writes:

“His use of dialect probably enabled him to maintain his liberty of feeling amidst the uncomprehending pressures he must have faced from his social superiors. Barnes is not there to encourage a factitious oddity, but on the contrary to demonstrate that the poet has to develop in a straight line from his origins, and that the avoidance of literature is indispensable for the man who wants to tell the truth.”

When Carcanet published his collected essays in 1978, including the piece on Barnes, Sisson titled the volume The Avoidance of Literature.

`To Form a Bowl-Shaped Cavity'

So long as we use them prudently and with wit, one can never have enough words, so I was pleased when a friend sent me a note with the subject line “your boys might get a kick out of this list of words.” I did too. Of the 102 exotics, I knew or could figure out about thirty of them. Among my favorites is petrichor: “the smell of the first rain of the season after a long dry spell.” That’s pertinent to Houston, where we’ve smelled it all too rarely. The Australian poet Les Murray uses it in his essay “The Import of Seasons” (written in 1985, collected in A Working Forest, 1997):

“In the mid-1960s, Drs. Joy Bear and Richard Thomas of the CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization] discovered that the characteristic smell of rain on dry earth, one of the truly poignant smells of Australia, was called by a yellow oil which they could distill from rocks and soil. They termed this oil petrichor, `essence of stone. . .’”

“Heavy rains release some of it from the earth’s surface to wash down into swamps and streams, where it triggers the reproductive activity of fish and other aquatic animals and thus starts the cycle of life after a drought. A fraction of this oil rising from the earth provides the smell we notice, an odour to which many animals are probably keyed.”

The OED confirms Murray’s explanation, citing an excerpt from an article Bear and Thomas published in the journal Nature in 1964: “The diverse nature of the host materials has led us to propose the name `petrichor’ for this apparently unique odour which can be regarded as an `ichor’ or `tenuous essence’ derived from rock or stone. This name, unlike the general term `argillaceous odour,’ avoids the unwarranted implication that the phenomenon is restricted to clays or argillaceous materials; it does not imply that petrichor is necessarily a fixed chemical entity but rather it denotes an integral odour.”

One criterion for the usefulness of an obscure word is the sense it gives of plugging a hole in the world. Even in less arid climates, people recognize that smell. I associate it with rain on old slate sidewalks. When I learned the word years ago I promptly removed it from the museum and put it into circulation.

One can never have enough terms of abuse for fools of various species, and the list obliges – hoddypeak, nihilarian, pronk, philosophunculist, phlyarologist, rastaquouere, slubberdegullion, ultracrepidarian, widdiful. Of that arsenal, pronk is the likeliest weapon, with its monosyllabic bluntness and generally comedic sound.  The OED labels it “Brit. slang (derogatory). Now rare,” and defines it as “a fool, an idiot; (also) an ineffectual or effeminate person.” Judged by its utility, pronk ought to go into heavy rotation.

A word like yepsen is different. The OED defines it as “the two hands placed together so as to form a bowl-shaped cavity; as much as can be held in this.” It sounds too much like a Danish surname to be used without irony, but knowing that a simple human act – cupping water, gold or grain -- inspired a word of its own, lends one a rare sense of solidarity with his fellows.

[Speaking of Les Murray, Dave Lull has passed along a link to a television commercial the poet made for Australian tourism. Murray recites lines from his poem “The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever”: “Spirituality with pockets!”]

`Long Before I Had Drugs'

A reader passed along a formerly well-known crack from Oscar Levant (1906-1972), a formerly well-known pianist, actor and wit: “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.” Humor is mortally rooted in time and place, and perishable as watercress, as is most pop culture. Americans my age would get the Doris Day reference. Not so for young people, though some might appreciate the wit even without knowing Day’s reputation for Hollywood wholesomeness. She was “America’s Sweetheart.” Levant, too, is forgotten, though even at the height of his fame (c. 1945-1965) he was an unlikely celebrity. Friend to George Gershwin, student of Arnold Schoenberg, co-star with the likes of Gene Kelly and Joan Crawford, Levant was a drug-addled mess who built a career on being a funny neurotic. I remember seeing him as a guest on Jack Parr’s talk show and liking his mordancy and charmless charm. My parents disapproved, which added to his luster. He was also a modestly gifted writer and author of three memoirs worth reading once -- A Smattering of Ignorance (1940), The Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1965) and The Unimportance of Being Oscar (1968). Imagine a celebrity today writing this:

“Long before I had drugs, my real boosters were books. I thought it was I alone who discovered Ivy Compton-Burnett. I read about six books by this excellent English novelist and then talked loftily about her to Lesley Blanch, who at one time was the editor of Vogue in London. She informed me that Ivy Compton-Burnett was indeed known by others and that she, in fact, had done a whole layout on her. Thereupon I lost interest in her as a discovery but continued my admiration. Her novels are written almost entirely in dialogue—so brilliant that it makes T.S. Eliot sound like Johnny Carson.”

This is from Chapter 7 of The Unimportance of Being Oscar, an account of the writers he had admired or met. Levant is an Olympic-class namedropper, who, in one chapter, gifts us with Truman Capote, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Eric Ambler, Kenneth Tynan, Elaine Dundy, Hemingway, Clifton Fadiman, Virgil Thomson, Aldous Huxley, Robert Lowell (“he reminded me of a Gentile Clifford Odets”) and others he met. He notes, winningly: “My own opinion is that Pound is a great poet, all right, but not a great man if you happen to be a Jew.” Levant isn’t shy about dropping the names of the dead: “The two great writers who have never let me down over the years are Samuel Johnson and Oscar Wilde. They always manage to brighten my life with something new, full of flavor, and to the point.” At various times in his life, Levant enjoyed reading Ambrose Bierce, Stendhal, Thomas Carlyle and Booth Tarkington. He writes:

“In my youth, I read all the good Russian authors such as Feodor Dostoevski, Leo Tolstoi, Anton Chekhov, and Ivan Turgenev. Youth is the period when they should be read. After I passed that age in life, I was never able to stand their morbid attitude about existence.”

This sound suspiciously like Bill Clinton touting the charms of Marcus Aurelius (“he was deeply spiritual and understood that life required balance”). Except for Dostoevsky, there is nothing morbid about the Russian writers Levant mentions. He may have read them but he resorts to a boilerplate cliché about the gloomy depths of the Slavic soul. His taste is often dubious (Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy), but then he surprises us:

“Another enthusiasm of mine—and a personal revelation—were the books with one-word titles (Loving, Nothing, etc.) of Henry Green, the pseudonym of the Birmingham businessman-author [Henry Yorke]. I read them in 1952 when I was convalescing from my heart attack and found them brilliantly amusing.”

`An Ability for Joy'

With books I seek familiarity. I want to know about the world, especially people, not utopia or some other tedious fantasy. Gulliver’s Travels is about us, not giants and little people. With music, it’s different. I look for the familiar but because I’m musically illiterate I enjoy surprise as inarticulately as a child. I’m more open-minded because my experience of it is subjective. I’m free to enjoy things I don’t understand. I know what I like and I know what bores me. When it’s just me and the radio, I can’t fake sophistication. Driving to work several weeks ago, I tuned midway into Alec Wilder’s “Air for Flute” and felt better for the rest of the morning. Later, driving home, I heard Mozart’s “Turkish Rondo,” and it took care of the evening. Writers ought to envy musicians and composers the power they wield.

Mark W. Wait is dean of the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University and a longtime reader of Anecdotal Evidence. He’s also a concert pianist and lately I’ve enjoyed the Stravinsky recordings he made with the pianist Carolyn Huebl. Last week I asked Mark about Wilder, one of my favorite composers, and he replied:      

“Oh, I like Alec Wilder very much, and I think he is undervalued.  His music is witty, urbane, and well-crafted in the best sense. (In music,`well-crafted’ is sometimes code language for `competent but boring.’ I mean no such thing.) His chamber music is really good, and I enjoy his piano music, too, though of course it’s the songs that attract the most attention.”

I also asked Mark Wait about Aaron Copland, another composer I love, and he wrote: “So I’m with you on Wilder. On Copland, too. Virgil Thomson had a nice line about Copland, specifically about the Piano Concerto (1925), his most jazz-influenced work.  Thomson called the Piano Concerto `Aaron’s one wild oat.’”

Increasingly, I look to music for joy. That was not always true. I’ve had periods of Sturm und Drang and turned to an appropriate soundtrack. I listen a lot to Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Erroll Garner, Ruby Braff, Art Tatum, Paul Desmond and Maurice Ravel. In an essay on Copland collected in A Ned Rorem Reader (Yale University Press, 2001), Rorem compares him to Ravel: “Like all artists Aaron was a child, but where some play at being grown up Aaron’s childishness had a frank visibility that I’ve never seen elsewhere, except perhaps in Ravel, of all people.” Rorem says both composers dwelt “far from the madding crowd, Copland in sophisticated innocence, Ravel in naïve sophistication.” Maybe that is what I recognize in their music. In another brief piece in his Reader, “Notes on Death,” Rorem writes:

“Art and unhappiness are unrelated. Because an artist sees the truth as a way out, and can do nothing, he is unhappy. Because he is seen seeing the way out, he is happy. And he often is willing to market his misery, sweep his madness onto a talk show and laugh at his own tears. Perhaps finally the greatest intelligence is an ability for joy.”

`The Sort of Person Who Would Prose Away'

In D.J. Enright’s poetry collection Under the Circumstances (1991), he titles a prose interlude, naturally enough, “Prose.” It reads, in part: 

“Between courses a venerable oriental silently proffered his car. It described him a `Proser.’ One hid one’s smiles behind one’s chopsticks. From which dangled something unidentifiable but delicious. 

“Evidently the sort of person who would prose away, weighing the pros and cons! Who for certain boring reasons, probably prudential, would rather not be deemed a poet, sometimes labeled Rhymester or Versifier. 

“Later, having recourse to one’s Oxford Dictionary, one actually discovered the word there, much to one’s disbelief. `A writer of prose.’ Going back hundreds of years. One simply hadn’t recognized it, among all those exotic dishes.” 

Please, Enright is not guilty of “orientalism.” He taught for years in Japan, Thailand and Singapore, and knew their people more intimately than most Westerners. He’s right, of course, about the OED, which defines proser as “a writer of prose,” though my spell-check software doesn’t recognize it.  (Nor does it recognize prosiast, which is almost as funny as prosit, and promptly changed it to prosiest). The first citation for proser, dated “?1614,” is from a poem, and not just any poem but one central to the Western poetic tradition – Chapman’s Homer (Odyssey): “This Prozer Dionysius, and the rest of these graue, and reputatiuely learned.” Subsequent citations are also of interest: 

The Battaile of Agincourt (1627) by Michael Drayton: “And surely Nashe, though he a Proser were / A branch of Lawrell yet deserues to beare.” 

The Feast of Poets (1815) by Leigh Hunt: “Such prosers as Johnson, and rhymers as Dryden.” 

Leaves from My Journal in Italy and Elsewhere (1854) by James Russell Lowell: “Poets and prosers have alike compared her [sc. Italy] to a beautiful woman.”

Later citations carry a satiric tang. Proser, perhaps in part because it echoes poser, seems to have become a term of comic condescension, a puffed-up appellation, which brings us to its second definition: “A person who proses; a person who talks or writes in a dull or tiresome manner.” Its first citation comes from 1769, a century and a half after Chapman’s Homer. I’m guessing it was a matter of status. Poetry was somehow more elevated, more elegant and respectable than mere prose. Of course, there was a time when that was true. Today, most poetry is prosaic and too much prose is poetic. At their best, poetry and prose share some of the same virtues – concision, precision, musicality. My guiltiest wish is that I could someday write memorable poetry. Unlike most people who share that aspiration, I know it will never happen. For now, as I’ve said before, I’m proud to be a proser.

`Richard Savage Had Nothing on Her'

“If you would have dark themes and high-flown words,
Great albatrosses drenched in sacredness,
Go read some other book; for I confess
I cannot make my verses to your taste.
And though they are not trifles made in haste,
Mine are to those such light things, little birds,
Sparrows among their kind, whose one last shift
Is shelter from the universal drift."                                                 

In a few of us, at some rare and unforeseeable point, humility and defiance merge – a point often mistaken for self-pity, knee-jerk rebelliousness or aggrieved entitlement. But some people really are different from the “universal drift,” for reasons internal and otherwise, and a few among them serve as witnesses who report back to us, the naïve and skeptical masses. Their news is not happy or hopeful but possesses the rarer virtue of clear-eyed truthfulness. The intelligence they supply is reliable.

Until now, Catherine Breese Davis (1924-2002) as a poet and woman hardly existed. The lost souls among us leave little evidence of their existence. Their lives and deaths are anonymous. Davis’ fate is described by George Eliot in the final paragraph of Middlemarch: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” The long-deferred publication by Pleiades Press of Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life & Work of an American Master (2015) gives readers a chance to appreciate a gifted poet virtually erased from the memory of readers.

Helen Pinkerton, who attended Stanford with Davis and edited her poems in an earlier unsuccessful effort to get them published, contributes an essay to the new volume, placing Davis’ poems in their poetic context: “Her best poems are in the classical plain style of the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets – Wyatt, Ralegh, Donne, and Herrick—and are further influenced by the modern American plainness of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Louise Bogan and J.V. Cunningham.” Davis’ academic pedigree is impeccable. Among her teachers were Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Cunningham, Yvor Winters and Donald Justice. Another Stanford veteran, Kenneth Fields, in “Learned Distrust,” writes of the poem quoted above, “Passerculi,” part of a sequence of epigrams titled “Insights”:

“Davis herself understood how fragile the survival of her poems might be, and she expresses this in her references to the Roman poet Catullus. In “Passerculi” (little sparrows) she at once refers to Catullus as well as the rhetorical formula of the lesser contrasted to the greater—Sappho staking her territory of amorous passion against Homeric epic warfare is one example. Davis is thinking of Catullus mourning the death of Lesbia’s sparrow, one of the little things (like all of us) destined to be lost in the obliterating underworld.”

Fields briefly chronicles Davis’ “rough life, never far from poverty.” Her father went to prison for armed robbery when she was a baby, and she never saw him again. Her mother was a textbook monster. Davis suffered a mild case of cerebral palsy, misdiagnosed as polio. When her mother discovered Davis was a lesbian, she threw her out of the house and never saw her again. Davis suffered from mental illness, alcoholism and Alzheimer’s disease. As Fields says, “She knew about loss.” Her best and probably best-known poem is “After a Time,” which begins:

“After a time, all losses are the same.

One more thing lost is one thing less to lose;

And we go stripped at last the way we came.” 

One is impressed not by the pain or even by Davis’ stoicism, but by the way in which her command of form contains the suffering and loss. This is not writing as therapy. There’s nothing “confessional” about it. Davis is an artist. She’s not competing in the crowded field of the Victim’s Marathon. Please read Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life & Work of an American Master, especially the earlier poems, for their artistry, not because Davis belongs to some demographic du jour. Fields writes: “It’s pointless to wonder what she might have been like as a writer in less straitened circumstances, but I wonder anyway. Richard Savage had nothing on her; Doctor Johnson would have loved Catherine Davis.” To my knowledge, Davis never murdered anyone. But Fields is surely right about Johnson.

`We All Sat Composed As At a Funeral'

Inside every sane, sober and honest man is a schoolboy waiting to shout Bottom!, if not something stronger, during the sermon. This is not a defense of anti-clericalism. Rather, it describes our essentially anarchic, pre-adolescent natures. Part of us remains forever in the third grade, when every suggestive word or sound elicits a snort. By nature we are divided, and no one is perpetually grown-up and well-mannered, or even civilized. The more disciplined among us just keep it under wraps. Consider a gathering held at the home of the recently widowed Mrs. David Garrick on April 20, 1781. Among those present were Johnson, Boswell and Reynolds. Boswell, who recounts the evening in his Life, describes it as “one of the happiest days that I remember to have enjoyed in the whole course of my life.” He writes of his friend, then seventy-one and just three years from death:

“Talking of a very respectable author, he told us a curious circumstance in his life, which was, that he had married a printer's devil. REYNOLDS: `A printer's devil, Sir! Why, I thought a printer's devil was a creature with a black face and in rags.’ JOHNSON: `Yes, Sir. But I suppose, he had her face washed, and put clean clothes on her. (Then looking very serious, and very earnest.) And she did not disgrace him; ­­ the woman had a bottom of good sense.’”

You can see where this is going. Boswell, who sought treatment for gonorrhea at least nineteen times, continues:

“The word bottom thus introduced, was so ludicrous when contrasted with his gravity, that most of us could not forbear tittering and laughing. His pride could not bear that any expression of his should excite ridicule when he did not intend it; he glanced sternly around, and called out in a strong tone, `Where's the merriment?’ Then collecting himself and looking aweful [sic], to make us feel how he could impose restraint, and as it were searching his mind for a still more ludicrous word, he slowly pronounced, `I say the woman was fundamentally sensible;’ as if he had said, hear this now, and laugh if you dare. We all sat composed as at a funeral.”

I admire Johnson’s sangfroid, the way he acknowledges the giggle-provoking thing he said by undercutting it with irony, and thus preserving his dignity. Boswell’s final comment – “We all sat composed as at a funeral” – is priceless. It reminds me of something Charles Lamb wrote in a letter in 1815 to Robert Southey: “I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.”

`The Laws of the Universe Should Be Repealed'

I was talking with a reporter I worked with at a newspaper in Indiana more than thirty years ago. Time has soothed old grudges and gripes, and we laughed about them. Like most reporters, we knew editors were sub-literate cretins. We were young and certain of our righteous cause. Both of us still write for a living, but not for newspapers, and we seem to have cooled off significantly. One memory was different, more sobering, and we remembered it identically.

One of the guys on the production side – not a reporter or editor – also ran a dairy farm. I didn’t know him well but our relations were cordial. I knew he had a wife and young children. One day on the farm, his wife was backing up a tractor and ran over one of their boys, killing him instantly. He was, as I remember, four or five years old. Most of the newspaper staff attended the memorial service. The little boy was laid out in formal clothes, in an open casket, with his right hand holding a toy tractor. That’s when I started crying. Everyone wept. It remains the most emotionally impossible experience of my life, and now I have three sons of my own. Those parents, especially the wife, must wake to a memory of that pain every morning. On this date, Aug. 28, in 1750, Dr. Johnson writes in The Rambler #47:

“For sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled.”

Johnson was married when he wrote these words. Two years later, Elizabeth “Tetty” Johnson would die at age sixty-three. On first meeting Johnson she had told her daughter Lucy: “That is the most sensible man I ever met.”

`Among the Headstones of the Undeceived'

To his poem “James Daniel Brock at Cold Harbor: 3 June 1864” (Voices Bright Flags, Waywiser, 2014), Geoffrey Brock attaches an epigraph borrowed from Herman Melville: “What like a bullet can undeceive!” The line is taken from “Shiloh: A Requiem (April, 1862)” (Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, 1866). Brock’s poem is part of a suite of poems titled “Staring Back at Us (A Gallery),” six of which relate to the Civil War. Out of context, Melville’s parenthetically shrouded line sounds modern to modern ears, more like a disillusioned burst from the Western Front half a century later. Shiloh was the costliest battle of the war up to that time, with combined casualties exceeding 23,700 in two days of fighting. Shiloh’s carnage was often noted in memoirs of the war. Major Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who led the Union troops, writes in Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (1885):

“Shiloh was the severest battle fought at the West during the war, and but few in the East equaled it for hard, determined fighting. I saw an open field, in our possession on the second day, over which the Confederates had made repeated charges the day before, so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.”

A similar image of Shiloh after the battle comes from U.S. Lt. John T. Bell’s Tramps and Triumphs of the Second Infantry, Briefly Sketched (1886): “In places dead men lay so closely that a person could walk over two acres of ground and not step off the bodies.” And this is from A Boy at Shiloh (1896) by U.S. Col. John A. Cockerill: “The blue and gray were mingled together. This peculiarity I observed all over the field. It was no uncommon thing to see the bodies of Federal and Confederate side by side, as though they had bled to death while trying to aid each other.”

In his notes to the poem, Brock says he drew details from Horace Porter’s Campaigning with Grant (1897). More than 18,000 casualties were suffered at Cold Harbor. Brock writes of the battle that took his “grandfather’s grandfather[’s]” life:

“A few more days, he might have stuffed his nostrils

(many survivors did) with crushed green leaves

as the entrenched living, awaiting further orders,

stared at each other across ripe fields of dead.”

Brock adds a bracketed, first-person coda that ends with an echo of the epigraph from Melville:

“[Six years it took me to make the time to find

the Confederate cemetery in Fayetteville;

it’s a quarter mile from my house in the crow’s mind,

but he flies over a private, wooded hill.

“On foot, it's down, back up, around a bend

atop a steep road marked (oh please) DEAD END.

And why come now, I wondered, as I weaved

among the headstones of the undeceived.]”

The final poem in the “Staring Back at Us” sequence is “Grant on His Deathbed: 1885,” a dramatic monologue by the retired general and president, with details taken from Grant’s Personal Memoirs. Here is the first stanza:

“Have never dwelt on errors. On omissions.

Cold Harbor—order for that last assault.

The field of wounded staring back at us.

At me. Helplessly dying. Dreams’ projections.”

For this poem, Brock takes his epigraph from Grant’s Memoirs: “Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions.”

`No Great Relish for Mirth'

In June 1950, Malcolm Muggeridge visited Max Beerbohm at Rapallo. The great essayist was then seventy-seven years old. In Like It Was: The Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge (1981) he writes of Beerbohm: “His face very old, somehow shaggy, gentle, quite sad; affectionate, gentle, sad eyes; head bald, very browned from the sun. Speaks in a slightly tremulous way, but with perfect lucidity. No clouding of his mind, but a wearying, a slow fading out.” Muggeridge tells us they spoke of interior decorators, the painter John Churchill and newspapers. Beerbohm said he first read the headlines, and if the news was bad he moved on to another story. Muggeridge writes:

“I heartily agreed, and pointed out that [Samuel] Johnson had taken this view. He was glad to know it was Johnson who, he said, was one of the few cases of man of powerful intellect who was also sensible. So many others, he had found, were brilliant, learned, etc., but essentially silly in their attitude to life. In illustration of his point, I quoted Johnson’s remark: `Why is it that the loudest whelps for liberty come from the drivers of slaves?’”

The most rankling thing we can say about intellectuals, the most earnest of people, is that they are silly. Muggeridge, in fact, is often quite silly and duplicitous, though seldom stupid. In a diary entry from 1960, four years after Beerbohm’s death, Muggeridge refers to him as a “sweet, indolent old fraud.” Beerbohm the master ironist was the least fraudulent of writers and men. His love for Johnson was heartfelt. In “London Revisited,” a radio broadcast from 1935, Beerbohm said: “Well, Dr. Johnson had a way of being right. But he had a way of being wrong too—otherwise we shouldn't love him so much.” And I’ve written before about Beerbohm’s “A Clergyman,” his recasting of a well-known incident recounted by Boswell. At least on occasion, Muggeridge shared Beerbohm’s appraisal of Johnson. In a 1957 diary entry, he describes a visit to a Johnson Society meeting at Gough House:

“Somehow very moved to be sitting there thinking about Johnson in very room in which he’d produced the dictionary. Of all Englishmen he appeals to me most—the best, the greatest. Taken with quotation referring to his publisher--`Cave has no relish for humour, but he can bear it.’ Felt this referred to readers of Punch.”

The line Muggeridge misquotes actually was written by Boswell, though perhaps in paraphrase of Johnson: “Cave had no great relish for mirth; but he could bear it . . .” I find a diary entry from 1962 quite moving, though not well written: “Woke up with that feeling of being a castaway which Cowper so exquisitely expressed in his verse. The night still in my head; a sense of being lost and alone in an inhospitable universe. No refreshment from the troubled night hours. Then started reading the Pensées (Pascal), and, miraculously, the clouds all cleared away and my fears dissolved. Such is the power, across three hundred years, of one clear, true mind on another which, however inadequately, is striving after clarity and truth . . . The communion with Pascal was greater than I have ever felt on any previous occasion in reading, or dwelling upon those who went before.”

`Remoteness Can Be Confused with Imperviousness'

“Autobiography is not in my line and my life has to the outside eye been uneventful.”

The words are Ivy Compton-Burnett’s as quoted by Frank Baldanza on the first page of the monograph he devoted to the English novelist and published in the Twayne Author Series in 1964. Six years later I arrived as an immature and bookishly cloistered freshman at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where Baldanza had been teaching in the English department since 1957. People I trusted spoke highly of him and suggested I enroll in one of his classes. As a sophomore I signed up for Baldanza’s “Modern Japanese Novel,” an unlikely subject about which I knew nothing, but thanks to the class I came to admire Natsume Sōseki and detest Yukio Mishima.

Baldanza wore a beautifully tailored suit and tie to class, which made him an anachronism. His shoes gleamed, his silver hair was razor-cut and he wore gold-framed glasses. He was perhaps the first man I ever met who might fairly be described as “dapper.” We assumed he was gay but that wasn’t a subject anyone dreamed of investigating forty-five years ago. While I was still a junior, Baldanza permitted me to enroll in his graduate seminar devoted to James Joyce. Twice a week we met in a library conference room, six or seven students and the professor, and the only work by Joyce we did not read in its entirety, only in excerpts, was Finnegans Wake. The most precious book I own is the Random House Ulysses I annotated for the class. Unlike the other students I had already read the novel while in high school, and had some grasp of its scheme. I concentrated on identifying allusions, and had to tape additional pages into the volume to accommodate my notes. It was the most demanding (even more than organic chemistry) and rewarding (even more than “Eighteen-Century British Novel”) experience I had at the university.

I remember trying to thank Baldanza for the privilege of working with him, but he seemed uninterested in (or made uncomfortable by) gratitude. In appearance and manner he was vain and almost aristocratic in bearing, but seemingly indifferent to praise (at least from a self-conscious undergraduate). While looking for something else in the library this week I came upon his Compton-Burnett volume. I don’t think I was previously aware of it, or of the book he devoted to Iris Murdoch and published with Twayne in 1974. That would have been the last year I saw or spoke with him. I seem seldom to have a sense of what intersections with other lives will prove memorable. I looked him up online and discovered he had died more than thirty years ago of an apparent heart attack. He was sixty, two years younger than I am today. Almost all of the information in the obituary is new to me. Here are the final sentences in his survey of Compton-Burnett (a writer I admire very much but never discussed, as best I remember, with Baldanza):

“She is herself as removed from the ephemeral literary preoccupations of her day as the Gothic sculpture on a cathedral overlooking a busy thoroughfare. While this remoteness can be confused with imperviousness to time, P.H. Newby’s assertion that she is the only writer since Joyce who is likely to be read one hundred years from now is as safe a statement as any contemporary could risk.”

`His Psychological Weather'

“Sensibility” has been showing up a lot lately. This probably has something to do with getting older. Young people have no sensibility, or rather they try on multiple sensibilities, like Halloween costumes, until they find one that fits pretty well and spend the rest of their lives having it tailored. Sensibility is one’s stance before the world. It’s not a single capacity but a mingling of many; most obviously, the emotional and intellectual. Some of us are by nature observers or spectators; others, participants seldom content merely to watch. Some of us filter experience through multiple lenses of books, friends and experience; others proceed as though each event were unprecedented, always novel. None of these alternatives is necessarily right or wrong, and few of us possess such qualities in their undiluted form. Sensibility is never static and no one is ever entirely himself. Our natures are contradictory, and most of us get along just fine with that reality. On Sunday the poet Norm Sibum wrote to me:                                                   

“I was thinking that what I got from [Gilbert] Highet wasn’t literary knowledge so much as sensibility, or a temper of mind that knows what or what not to do with knowledge. There are plenty of people out there who `know’ stuff, but there isn’t much sensibility, and I don’t mean sensibility in some stuffy, silly ass guise. Sometimes I wonder if sensibility is something one is born with rather than taught. Having said that, I’m a self-proclaimed barbarian inasmuch as I'm very wary of the literary and literariness.” 

I value and enjoy literary knowledge, but it’s never an end in itself. I too am wary of literariness when it’s just another costume, not a way of trying to understand the world. I like people who know things and like to share them, not as a form of braggadocio but as a collection of shiny things brought back to the nest. Norm may be right. Perhaps our sensibility, or at least its schematic diagram, is with us from birth. It is our daimon. Guy Davenport says in his introduction to Herakleitos and Diogenes (1979): 

“In Fragment 69 [in Heraclitus] I have departed from literalness and accepted the elegant paraphrase of Novalis, `Character is fate.’ The Greek says that ethos is man’s daimon: the moral climate of a man’s cultural complex (strictly, his psychological weather) is what we mean when we say daimon, or guardian angel. As the daimons inspire and guide, character is the cooperation between psyche and daimon. The daimon has foresight, the psyche is blind and timebound. A thousand things happen to us daily which we sidestep or do not even notice. We follow the events which we are characteristically predisposed to cooperate with, designing what happens to us: character is fate.” 

[Today is a happy one for literature. Born on Aug. 24 are Robert Herrick, 1591; Max Beerbohm, 1872; and Jorge Luis Borges, 1899. Imagine a sensibility informed by their work and lives.]

`Earth's Bluish Animals Are Few'

Because of alternating spells of drought and heavy rain, flowers are sparse in the garden. We lost a lime bush growing in a terra cotta pot. Fewer blossoms mean fewer hummingbirds, which normally flit about in late summer like iridescent clouds. Saturday afternoon, my middle son said, “Look, Dad,” and pointed out the front window.  For less than a second I saw what appeared like a blue exclamation point on a blank sheet of paper, and then it was erased. Three species are common in Houston – ruby-throated, rufous and black-chinned – and none is predominantly blue. What had I seen? My son confirmed the color, but even young eyes can be tricked. Blue is rare in nature, especially at non-tropical latitudes, but shows up in fish, birds, amphibians, butterflies and other insects. Mammals, as a rule, are dowdier creatures. Louise Bogan noticed this irregular color distribution in a poem she wrote in 1936, “Variation on a Sentence” (The Blue Estuaries, 1968):

“Of white and tawny, black as ink,
Yellow, and undefined, and pink,
And piebald, there are droves I think.

“(Buff kine in herd, gray whales in pod,
Brown woodchucks, colored like the sod,
All creatures from the hand of God.)

“And many of a hellish hue;
But, for some reason hard to view,
Earth’s bluish animals are few.” 

Bogan’s biographer, Elizabeth Frank (1985), tells us she based the poem on Thoreau’s Feb. 21, 1855 journal entry: “How plain, wholesome, and earthy are the colors of quadrupeds generally! The commonest I should say is the tawny or various shades of brown, answering to the russet which is the prevailing color of the earth’s surface, perhaps, and to the yellow of sands beneath. The darker brown mingled with this answers to the darker-colored soil of the surface. The white of the polar bear, ermine weasel, etc., answers to the snow; the spots of the pards, perchance, to the earth spotted with flowers or tinted leaves of autumn; the black, perhaps, to night, and muddy bottoms and dark waters. There are few or no bluish animals.”

Thoreau wasn’t the first to notice protective coloration among animals, though he is writing four years before the publication of On the Origin of Species. We have blue jays, the noisiest birds in Houston. I occasionally find an explosion of their feathers on the lawn when one has been grabbed and torn apart by an owl or hawk, but “bluish” birds of any species are otherwise rare. Did my son and I share a hallucination? Or were our feeble senses merely being kind to us, compensating for some absence?

`Daily Demands a Different Color of Praise'

Some writers we embrace with an enthusiastic, unself-conscious bear hug. We like the first thing of theirs we read and keep reading everything by them we can get our hands on. Momentum carries us into criticism of their work, biography and work by their friends, followers and precursors. That describes the process, long-deferred, by which I came to Louis MacNeice. For years I pigeonholed him as another small talent (like Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis) eclipsed by Auden. He grabbed me only about fifteen years ago, and one of the catalysts for that unexpected rediscovery was a 1967 essay, “The Black Clock: The Poetic Achievement of Louis MacNeice,” by the American poet William Jay Smith. The tribute is the first piece in Smith’s The Streaks of the Tulip: Selected Criticism (Delacorte Press, 1972).

The title of that collection may sound familiar. Smith takes it from a well-known passage in Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas (1759): “`The business of a poet,’ said Imlac, `is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and appearances: he does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest.’” Smith uses the excerpt as one of his epigraphs. The other is from MacNeice’s posthumously published The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography (1965): “Dr. Johnson has said that the poet is not concerned with the minute particulars, with `the streaks of the tulip.’ This, I thought, was just where he was wrong.” Smith respects Johnson but approves of MacNeice’s disagreement. In his essay he writes:

“MacNeice was interested in the concrete, as true lyric poets always are; he wanted to get things straight. (He believed that a critic should not speak of poetry in the abstract, but should point out specific qualities, merits in individual poems.) Dr. Johnson was wrong, he remarks at one point, when he said that the poet is not concerned with minute particulars, with `the streaks of the tulip.’ MacNeice was passionate about particulars.”

Johnson often shared that passion, in some of his poems but most of all in his prose and conversation. His aesthetic, which, with qualifications, we might call neo-classical and pre-Romantic, was less concerned with detail. He wished to formulate general conclusions about the world, especially human behavior. MacNeice never wrote at length about Johnson but at least once he hinted at his approval. To illustrate his observation that MacNeice was “passionate about particulars,” Smith quotes Canto VI from Autumn Sequel: A Rhetorical Poem (1954):

      

“Everydayness is good; particular-dayness

Is better, a holiday thrives on single days.

Thus Wales with her moodiness, madness, shrewdness,

lewdness, feyness,

Daily demands a different color of praise.”

Some years before reading Smith’s essay I had read MacNeice’s Autumn Journal (1940) and a smattering of other poems, especially the early work, but little seems to have stuck. Smith’s essay helped correct my indifference. He says of MacNeice, “Absorbed in the dailiness of life, he could not tolerate lofty rhetoric, the grand gesture: he was not taken in.” High praise for any writer or human being. Smith died this week at age ninety-seven. I found him by way of The Golden Journey: Poems for Young People (1965), an anthology he edited with Louise Bogan. I came to her by way of Theodore Roethke. That’s how literature works.

`No, Sir, I Wish Him to Drive On'

In the wrong hands, pity is a pre-fabricated emotion having little to do with its putative object. Its true object is the one doing the pitying. It tends to be self-congratulatory, a self-administered stamp of virtue. The same might be said of any fashionable, socially sanctioned emotion. Even the shrewd moralist La Rochefoucauld is naïve when it comes to pity:

“Pity is often a perception of our own troubles through the woes of others; it is a clever anticipation of the misfortunes which may befall us. We help our neighbor to make sure of his assistance under similar circumstances; hence, the kindness we do others is in truth an anticipated kindness we do ourselves.” (trans. John Heard Jr., La Rochefoucauld Maxims, 1917)

I have little objection to the arrangement La Rochefoucauld describes. Civility is based, in part, on mutual back-scratching. Perhaps this was pity in France in the seventeenth century, but today the emotion is far less tactically premeditated. No, the real payoff for feeling pity is that warm quiver of conviction that says: I really am a good person – and probably better than you. In 1968, W.H. Auden reviewed a reissue of Henry Mayhew’s four-volume London Labour and the London Poor (1851). In his review, collected in Forewords and Afterwords (1973), Auden writes:

“Yet, for all its harrowing descriptions of squalor, crime, injustice and suffering, the final impression of Mayhew's great book is not depressing. From his many transcripts of conversations it is clear that Mayhew was that rare creature, a natural democrat; his first thought, that is to say, was never `This is an unfortunate wretch whom it is my duty, if possible, to help’ but always `This is a fellow human being whom it is fun to talk to.’ The reader’s final impression of the London poor is not of their misery but of their self-respect, courage and gaiety in conditions under which it seems incredible that such virtues could survive.”

Auden judges “gaiety,” not self-pity, a virtue. His use of “fun” may come as a shock, but a good one, and it rings true to my experience as a newspaper reporter (and as a reader of Mayhew). I knew other reporters who were sob sisters, of course, condescending to people by feeling sorry for them. Inevitably, the writing suffered. A pre-fabricated emotion leaves behind it a pre-fabricated trail of clichés. We see this in Mayhew’s contemporary, Charles Dickens, whose linguistic exuberance is compromised by reflexive sentimentality. True pity is quiet sympathy coupled with a desire, however impotent, to relieve the suffering. True to his time, Dr. Johnson over-estimates pity’s dependence on “the cultivation of reason,” but otherwise his understanding, as reported by Boswell, is acute:

“Pity is not natural to man. Children are always cruel. Savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason. We may have uneasy sensations for seeing a creature in distress, without pity; for we have not pity unless we wish to relieve them. When I am on my way to dine with a friend, and finding it late, have bid the coachman make haste, if I happen to attend when he whips his horses, I may feel unpleasantly that the animals are put to pain, but I do not wish him to desist. No, Sir, I wish him to drive on."

`Copious Overflows of Ghastly Bosh'

Holbrook Jackson appends three epigraphs to Bookman’s Pleasure: A Recreation for Booklovers (1947), including one from The Rambler #159: “The utmost which we can reasonably hope or fear, is to fill a vacant hour with prattle and be forgotten.” No wonder Beckett loved Dr. Johnson, though the larger context moderates somewhat the blow to our vanity when the sentence is read in isolation: 

“The truth is, that no man is much regarded by the rest of the world. He that considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others will learn how little the attention of others is attracted by himself. While we see multitudes passing before us, of whom perhaps not one appears to deserve our notice or excite our sympathy, we should remember, that we likewise are lost in the same throng, that the eye which happens to glance upon us is turned in a moment on him that follows us, and that the utmost which we can reasonably hope or fear, is to fill a vacant hour with prattle and be forgotten.”

Some words seem genetically imbued with the DNA of a single writer and his sensibility. If sere, descry, tinct and pallid belong to Keats, Johnson owns cant and its second-cousin, prattle. The OED defines the noun form as “foolish, inconsequential, or incomprehensible talk; childish chatter; gossip or small talk,” rooted in the Middle Low German prātelen, “to chatter, to babble, to cackle.” The word is also used figuratively to mean “something resembling chatter or prattle, as the sound of birdsong, running water, etc.,” as in Louis MacNeice’s “Prattle of water, palaver [another “p” word meaning empty chatter, like persiflage and piffle] of starlings in a disused chimney.” In his Dictionary, Johnson defines prattle bluntly and memorably as “empty talk, trifling loquacity.” I like the sound of prattle, its echo of rattle (as in bones) and battle – further evidence of our vanity.

Jackson describes his anthology as a “composite portrait of a writer of books,” hinting at “what writers of books think of their predecessors, their contemporaries, and themselves.” Johnson is represented by more than twice as many quotations as Shakespeare, and the only writer showing up more often is Carlyle. Unsurprisingly, the cranky Scotsman also took a shine to prattle, though not in Jackson’s anthology. It shows up often in his letters, as in this one to his long-suffering wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, on Aug. 24, 1831: “Lastly, write, write, O write abundantly, were it the merest prattle, it is better to me than all eloquence.” Of course, Ambrose Bierce christened his long-running newspaper column "Prattle." In its best-known appearance, Bierce wrote the definitive deflation of Oscar Wilde after the Irish gasbag’s visit to San Francisco in 1882:

“That sovereign of insufferables, Oscar Wilde has ensued with his opulence of twaddle and his penury of sense. He has mounted his hind legs and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck, to the capital edification of circumjacent fools and foolesses, fooling with their foolers. He has tossed off the top of his head and uttered himself in copious overflows of ghastly bosh.”