`A Face in the Fire'

Even in our domesticated oblivion, the seasonal cycle moves us. I was home five days with my younger sons while my wife worked six days straight. The weather, by Houston standards, turned damp and cold. The heat came on for the first time. I responded by moving indoors and “nesting,” like any good mammal. I made the Thanksgiving turkey and trimmings and, the next day, two turkey-and-vegetable pies with the leftovers. I baked bread, scrubbed toilets, washed floors, unstuck drains. I vacuumed and dusted, for only a fool fouls his nest. I reread the “House-Warming” chapter in Walden, which begins like this: “In October I went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than for food.” I went a-graping to Costco, where the bunches are as beautiful as Thoreau’s but without much fragrance or flavor.

In the same chapter, Thoreau notes that during his first winter in the cabin he cooked on the fireplace, with wood he had gathered and chopped himself. In the second winter he used “a small cooking-stove for economy, since I did not own the forest.” Of course, for the author of Walden, the switch signals a fall into technological perdition:

“Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the Indian fashion. The stove not only took up room and scented the house, but it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion. You can always see a face in the fire.”

Spoken like a true childless bachelor. I have a family, if I want to see a face, and if I’m roasting turkey and baking bread, I’ll use a stove, thank you. We attended a Thanksgiving dinner three year ago at which the host (also childless) prepared one of his turkeys in a propane-fired deep fryer in the backyard. I felt ridiculous standing around the damned thing, listening to it gurgle and hiss, and waiting for one of the kids to tip it over. Fortunately, my middle son threw up on the back steps, so we went home early, without turkey.

It’s important to know the rhythms of the world. Biology is humbling. Even at this latitude, where the seasons are flattened and blurred, there’s comfort in knowing our small place in the big cycles. Tom Disch put it like this in “October,” a poem from About the Size of It:

“Without the fable of these falling leaves
How would we know how to die?”

Junior High Waste Land

I entered seventh grade at Greenbriar Junior High School, in Parma Heights, Ohio, in the fall of 1964. I had spent the previous seven years in an elementary school where the average number of students in a class was 20, and where by year’s end the teachers, uniformly female, had become benign surrogate mothers. Without exception I adored them – in one case, it was a severe crush – and I remember all of their names.

Without warning, junior high was sustained trauma. Seventh-graders were “moldies” (does anyone know the etymology of this word?), fair game for any thug who wanted to knock your books to the floor or punch you in the face. Once, I watched a kid comb the dandruff from his hair onto a table in the cafeteria. He pushed it into a neat pile with his hands and ate it. The staff was little better. A drunken, red-faced phys. ed. teacher smacked us with wet tennis shoes. A coach who purportedly taught civics spoke admiringly of National Socialism, and a pear-shaped algebra teacher suggested we use baseball bats against rioting blacks. No wonder I succumbed to books.

Off the cafeteria was a bookstore – a dim closet with wood-and-wire racks stocked with paperbacks. The hours were irregular and the selection eccentric. I bought the Bantam edition of The Mouse That Roared, by Leonard Wibberley, but I also picked out the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, a slender yellow paperback published by Harcourt, Brace and World. It cost 60 cents and I still have it. The pages are brown and brittle, and smell deliciously of dry, old paper. I was probably aware of Eliot’s death in January 1965, but I don’t remember. On my own, without prodding from a teacher, I set out to memorize Eliot’s lines, probably as a distraction from the surrounding Hobbesian mayhem – “The Hollow Men,” scraps from The Waste Land, and bits and pieces of the early poems, especially “Prufrock.” Did I understand what I was memorizing? Partially: the music, a tone and mood. That’s what came back to me on Saturday, when the rain never stopped, the sky was low and milky, and the temperature stalled in the mid-40s. Dead leaves on the driveway turned into a thick brown impasto and lines from “Preludes” came back:

“And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.”

At this depth, over many decades, the barrier between life and literature, permeable even at its most resilient, dissolves. Do I understand “Preludes?” In my bones.

`The Basic Documents'

I hadn’t thought about Kenneth Rexroth in many years until I recently discovered the Bureau of Public Secrets and its extensive Rexroth archive. I had filed him away in a drawer labeled “Beatnik-Lite,” which is unfair, I know, but reading is a Darwinian enterprise that winnows out the weak, and even a hearty reader has finite patience and time. Rexroth’s poetry still seems trifling, too voluble and slack, too sentimental, too in thrall to Pound and his Cathay translations, but the literary essays, especially Classics Revisited and More Classics Revisited, if not as reliable as, say, comparable work by Hugh Kenner or Guy Davenport, are admirably enthusiastic and personal. Rexroth has lived a long time with most of the books he writes about. As critic or literary journalist, Rexroth is sometimes old-fashioned, sometimes bohemian, sometimes both simultaneously, but it’s safe to say he was more deeply read than most of his countercultural admirers. He’s no Kerouac, who often sounded illiterate. Rexroth’s essays entered the world as journalism, not scholarship, and were published first in such periodicals as Saturday Review, The Nation and the San Francisco Examiner. In his Introduction to Classics Revisited (1968) he writes:

“Men have been writing for over five thousand years and have piled up a vast mass of imaginative literature. Some of it is just writing that happens to have lasted physically. There are, however, a small number of books that are something more. They are the basic documents in the history of the imagination; they overflow all definitions of classicism and, at the same time, share the most simply defined characteristics.”

The most significant phrase is “a small number of books that are something more.” Rexroth is writing on the eve of the ascension of institutional nihilism, when scorning the supreme accomplishments of humanity became fashionable. His unspoken opponent is not today’s tenured radical but yesterday’s conventional illiterate, though the two are easily confused. In More Classics Revisited, he describes the work of St. Thomas Aquinas as “very entertaining reading,” and writes:

“The flaws in Aquinas are the flaws of the age before rigorous experimentation and before the development of an acutely sensitive humanitarianism. He may have believed that vultures were only female and fertilized by the wind, and that one of the minor joys of the blessed is the contemplation, from the walls of Heaven, of God’s Justice inflicting suffering on the damned in Hell, but quaint notions like these, painlessly expurgated by most of his modern editors, have nothing to do with the integrity of his system. If they had, it would not be possible for a thoroughly modern man like Étienne Gilson to find Thomism a completely satisfactory world view.”

Rexroth’s voice is Johnsonian in its confidence and common sense. Its chief defect is a striving too hard after provocative bluffness, as though he wished to say not only, “This is good stuff,” but, “This is good stuff even if it seems lousy, and if you don’t agree the fault is yours.” Also, like many writers of his generation (he was born in 1905, and died in 1982), Rexroth overindulges in the empty language of psychology, throwing around “archetypes” and “gestalt” and other quaintly shopworn rubbish. His love of great books, however, overcomes the inherited clichés of the age. In his piece on one of my favorite novels, Parade’s End, by Ford Madox Ford, Rexroth articulates some of my own evolving feelings about fiction:

“The great bulk of the world’s prose fiction, contemporary and past, does not wear well. Almost all of it is soon forgotten and of those books which survive the wear of time, only a few withstand the effects of time on the reader himself. Out of all the novels ever written there is only about a ten-foot shelf of books which can be read again and again in later life with thorough approval and with that necessary identification that Coleridge long ago called suspension of disbelief. It is not ideas or ideologies or dogmas that become unacceptable. Any cultivated person should be able to accept temporarily the cosmology and religion of Dante or Homer. The emotional attitudes and the responses to people and to the crises of life in most fiction come to seem childish as we ourselves experience the real thing. Books written far away and long ago in quite different cultures with different goods and goals in life, about people utterly unlike ourselves, may yet remain utterly convincing….remain true to our understanding of the ways of man to man the more experienced we grow.”

I found this passage oddly cheering. Fiction, perhaps because its stuff, the matter of which its narratives are composed, is so inextricably rooted in our social dailiness, ages poorly, like a heavy smoker. Nothing grows stale so quickly as the timely. This is why Proust remains as fresh as this morning and Denis Johnson already smells musty. Of Parade’s End, Rexroth writes:

“The result is a little as though Burnt Njal had been rewritten by the author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”

Who can resist?

`He Was Younger Than Any of Them'

Today would have been Guy Davenport’s 80th birthday. The one time I met him, in June 1990, he was 62 and looked and spoke as though he were 20 years younger. His was the most nimble of minds, as close readers of his fiction and essays know. He was a lifelong teacher for whom teaching was a mingling of love and enthusiasm, not a paycheck or a pretext for bullying. He was formidably learned but never pretentious or grimly pedantic. In his “Introductory Note” to The Hunter Gracchus (1996) he came close to identifying writing with teaching:

“The way I write about texts and works of art has been shaped by forty years of explaining them to students in a classroom. I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.”

In 1963, Guy published his first book, The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz: A Specimen Book of Scientific Writings, an anthology drawn from the work of the great Swiss-American zoologist. Among Agassiz’s friends and admirers were Thoreau, Longfellow, William James and Henry Adams. In his 25-page introduction, Guy tells the delicious anecdote of Emerson squirming while Thoreau and Agassiz discussed the mating habits of turtles. The entire book, essay and selections from Agassiz’s work, is refracted autobiography, for Guy seems most impressed with Agassiz as a teacher and writer, less so as a scientist. His conclusion to the introduction is pure self-portrait:

“In an age of touchy formalities and pathological restrictions of spirit, Agassiz insisted that the teacher was both a dedicated scholar and a good-natured human being. The Agassiz intellect was as admirably liberal in its commerce with the world as intense and uncompromising in scholarship. Agassiz’s father, Benjamin Rodolphe, hunted on Sabbath mornings, leaving his game and fowling-piece at the church door while he preached to his congregation at Motier, on Lake Morat. Agassiz himself broke every smoking rule at Harvard, fenced with his students, and once offered the Emperor of Brazil an assistant’s position at the university museum.

“Scholarship, imagination, energy, intellect, good nature. Theodore Lyman, watching the Harvard students bearing Agassiz’s heavy casket to the chapel in the Yard, said: “He was younger than any of them.”

Among the last things Guy wrote before his death on Jan. 4, 2005, more than 40 years after the Agassiz essay, was an introduction to Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments, selected and translated by Burton Raffel. Here, too, the self-portrait is disguised but discernable:

“Burton Raffel calls these Greek poems `pagan’ because they were not written in Chicago or Aberdeen. Pagan is defined by Samuel Johnson as meaning `heathenish’; both words, pagan and heathen, mean `living in the country.’ The Greeks, like all civilized people, felt that country life was more authentic, more earthy and forthright, sexier and healthier, than life in the city. It was more natural. So these poems are pagan because the past is another country. The pagan is always other, over yonder, or way back when, interesting because different.”

Guy, who was born in Anderson, S.C., and lived the last 40 years of his life in Lexington, Ky., was the most interesting, different country boy you could ever hope to meet. The best way to do that is to read his books.

`A Strange Vacancy in the Afternoon Light'

A French computational and applied mathematics professor whose office is down the hall stopped me on Monday and asked if I could explain Thanksgiving Day. Over the last year I have become his unofficial interpreter – not of language, for his English is flawless, but of American culture and folkways. I began with a digression on religious persecution, the Pilgrims, the Wampanoags, tough New England winters and the proto-Thanksgiving gorgefest, and from there the conversation ranged from cranberry sauce to genocide.

“So, the Indians saved the Pilgrims’ lives and the Indians are killed and this is why you have a holiday with large meals?” Jean-David asked, reasonably.

“The short answer is yes,” I said. “The long answer is, everything Americans do is riddled with contradiction. Don’t look for purity.”

My friend scratched his crewcut, wished me “Happy Thanksgiving,” and walked back to his office – another triumph for international relations. Despite sentimentality and the poultry lobby, Thanksgiving will always remain a second-tier holiday, one that has not fared well in a secular age, and for these reasons I work hard to enjoy it. A day off from work, yes. Good food and lots of it, yes. An occasion for formally reviewing one’s reasons for gratitude, of course. But I dislike parades, football and ersatz bonhomie, so what does that leave me?

A writer I admire, Verlyn Klinkenborg, has a partial answer. Since I read his first book, Making Hay, more than 20 years ago, I’ve loyally followed his work, which nicely balances the poetic and the journalistic, Thoreau and A.J. Liebling. He is E.B. White without the ickiness. In 1991, I wrote an enthusiastic review of The Last Fine Time. Since 1997 he has been a member of the editorial board at The New York Times. Klinkenborg lives in rural Columbia County, not far from where I lived in upstate New York for almost 19 years. In 2003 he published The Rural Life, a collection of Times pieces about life on his farm, arranged around the cycle of the seasons. Here’s Klinkenborg on Thanksgiving Day:

“Sitting down to the big meal seems like the crux of Thanksgiving, but it really comes a couple of hours later. The pumpkin pie is gone, the dishes are done, the dogs and overnight guests are napping, and there’s a strange vacancy in the afternoon light. For a moment the year halts, a moment when the wakeful aren’t quite sure what to do with themselves. In that instant, that hollow in time, you find yourself listening to the unnatural stillness of the afternoon, pausing to look closely at the world around you. That’s all the celebration necessary on this most modest, most poignant of days.”

Klinkenborg is refreshingly accepting of Thanksgiving as it’s sold to us – no sermons on materialism and overindulgence. Without a mention of giving thanks, he suggests – “pausing to look closely at the world around you” – that counting our blessings might be in order. And when he writes of “a strange vacancy in the afternoon light,” I recognize it because I’ve seen it and because I’ve read Emily Dickinson:

“There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.”

On Wednesday, Joseph Epstein had a good piece about Thanksgiving in the Wall Street Journal. Here’s a taste, which I heartily second:

“I wish the poet W. H. Auden were still alive, so that he might be at the same table where I eat my Thanksgiving dinner. Auden, I think, nicely captured the spirit of Thanksgiving when he wrote that, in prayer, it is best to get the begging part over with quickly and get on to the gratitude part. He also wrote, `let all your thinks be thanks.’

“To be living in a prosperous and boundlessly interesting country, at a time of high technological achievement, and of widening tolerance -- much to be thankful for here. ‘Wystan,’ I'd like to tell the poet, `you got it right, kid. Now how about a drumstick.’”

`Sense and Cheer'

What attracted me to Oscar Mandel’s The Cheerfulness of Dutch Art: A Rescue Operation was the title. In the last year I’ve looked at a lot of Dutch and Flemish paintings, especially 17th-century still lifes, because they give me quiet but intense pleasure. The paintings of gooseberries and asparagus spears by Adriaen Coorte, for instance, seem to me perfect in their numinous composure, and I enjoy looking at them for the same reason I enjoy reading, say, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Matsuo Bashō. In addition, writers important to me – Zbigniew Herbert, Guy Davenport, Theodore Dalrymple, among others – have expressed admiration for Dutch still-life painting. I enjoy being in such company, while avoiding the company of most art critics and historians. Like wallflowers at the dance, they don’t seem to know how to have a good time.

Mandel’s book is unapologetically polemical – or, rather, polemically anti-polemical. Born in Belgium, he is emeritus professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology and, apparently, an old-fashioned polymath. In The Cheerfulness of Dutch Art, he takes on the academic wet blankets who have sought to turn beautiful paintings into coded moralistic tracts (or, in some cases, “prurient innuendo,” in Mandel’s words) which only they, with the gift of art-historical insight, can accurately decode. In the first chapter, Mandel, dismisses these decoded messages “rank platitudes.”

Mandel calls these prigs “the betekenis school.” The Dutch word means simply “meaning.” He accuses them of forever uncovering “odious subtexts” or expressing “indignation at [the painters’] failure to cope with the horrors and miseries of real life.” In the spirit of pleasure and common sense he writes:

“In short, the counter-offensive must continue. We need to search out the basic fallacies of betekenis reasoning, and not rest easy until, moving across the boundary between learned monographs and public life, we have restored sense and cheer to the museums.”

Then Mandel really gets going:

“Does a painter show a person enjoying his pipe in a tavern? Beware! We are looking at a sermon on the evanescence of life and mortal joys. Is a young couple sharing a pretzel at table? Grim! The crookedness of human nature is meant. Do the edibles on a kitchen table and the maid at work look singularly luscious? That is only to warn us against voluptas carnis. Are we tempted to smile at the depiction of a mother wiping her baby’s bottom? Halt! We are being taught that life is no better than dung. Is there charm in the portrayal of a child playing with a toy windmill, and of another fishing in a river? Anything but! Windmills mean foolishness, and fishing means sinful idleness. Does the artist paint a scene of villagers playing with rackets and ball? Look out! We are being lectured on the uncertainty of life. Are we shown an astronomer gazing at the stars, a globe and candle at his side? Only to instruct us that Learning is vanity. Has the artist portrayed a rambunctious kermis? Here comes the Prodigal Son again.”

Mandel memorably refers to “the characteristic twentieth-century aversion to euphoria.” The Pleasure Police are earnestly on the job. Permit me to quote something I wrote last year:

“In The Art of Celebration (1992), the Nabokov scholar Alfred J. Appel Jr. proposes that we devote four or five of our bookshelves exclusively to what he calls “the life-affirming, celebratory works of the twentieth century.” Along with recordings by Louis Armstrong, Ruby Braff and Henry `Red' Allen, and the movies of Astaire-Rogers, Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin and Keaton, Appel suggests appropriate books:

“`Ulysses should occupy a place of honor on the top, shortest Yes Celebratory Shelf, flush left against the varnished wood. Nabokov, a writer whose works I happen to love, should have seven or so inches to himself there, next to Joyce. Hardcover volumes of the collected poetry of W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Richard Wilbur will be conspicuous for their handsome, durable spines.'

“Appel is not suggesting we judge literature with a Happy Meter: Life-affirming, good; Nay-saying, bad. In fact, he admires Kafka while placing him, rightly, on the “No” shelf, probably next to Beckett. But assigning Moore to the Yes-saying shelf is appropriate. In 1966, in a letter to Writer’s Digest, she quoted John Cheever approvingly: `I have an impulse to bring glad tidings. My sense of literature is one of giving, not diminishing.’”

(The edition of The Cheerfulness of Dutch Art: A Rescue Operation I’m reading was published in 1996 by Davaco Publishers, in The Netherlands. The company specializes in books devoted to16th and 17th Century Dutch and Flemish Art, and their catalog looks expensively tempting.)

`The Doxology for a Wind-Up'

What little I know of the sea and seafaring men I learned from Homer, Melville and Conrad. Born a landlubber (Lake Erie doesn’t count), I was nearly 16 when I first saw salt water. The ocean will always remain a strange, scary, mythic place, the natural realm of storytelling. For much of the weekend I listened to a belated birthday present, Rogue's Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys, a two-CD gathering of 43 songs, most of which are not as cornball as the title implies. Most, drawn from the ballad tradition, are story-songs. It’s the best new (or old) music I’ve heard since Tom Waits came out with Orphans. The opener, “Cape Cod Girls,” performed by a Popeye-voiced Seattle musician, Baby Gramps, is my favorite if judged by effortless memorization. Here’s a video of an abbreviated version of the song from The David Letterman Show. And here are samples of lyrics from other songs in the collection:

The euphoniously named Jack Shit performs “Boney Was a Warrior,” about Napoleon Bonaparte:

“Boney was a warrior
A warrior, a terrier.
Boney beat the Prussians,
The Austrians, the Russians.
Boney went to school in France
He learned to make the Russians dance.”

The Akron Family, who also accompany Baby Gramps, perform a sparse arrangement of a beautiful ballad, “One Spring Morning”:

“Since hard fortune
Around me frowns,
I’ll sail this ocean
Round and round.
I’ll sail this ocean
Until I die.
I’ll quit my ways
On the mountain high.”

And John C. Reilly renders a rousing drinking song, “Fathom the Bowl,” which has its own Wikipedia entry:

“From France we do get brandy, from Jamaica it's rum,
Sweet oranges and lemons from Portugal come;
But stout, ale and cider are England's control,
Bring me the punch ladle, we'll fathom the bowl.”

For the best song I know about cannibalism, consult Ralph Steadman and Co. singing “Little Boy Billee,” about dining on the cabin boy. Notes accompanying the CDs mention the two shipwrecked sailors in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, my favorite Poe story, who eat a cabin boy named Richard Parker. Here’s the song’s conclusion:

“They hung Gorging Jack and Guzzling Jimmy,
But they made an admiral of Little Boy Billee.”

As a bonus, a reproduction of Howard Pyle’s painting Marooned, the image of desolation, is on the cover of the CD. With his book Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates, he distilled our expectation of what pirates look like.

To put sea chanteys in their proper literary context, read this exchange between Stubb and Starbuck from Chapter 119, “The Candles,” of Moby-Dick:

“`Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck,' said Stubb, regarding the wreck, `but the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can't fight it. You see, Mr. Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps, all round the world it runs, and then comes the spring! But as for me, all the start I have to meet it, is just across the deck here. But never mind; it's all in fun: so the old song says;' -- (sings.)

“Oh! jolly is the gale,
And a joker is the whale,
A’ flourishin' his tail, --
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky
lad, is the Ocean, oh!
The scud all a flyin’,
That's his flip only foamin’;
When he stirs in the spicin', --
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky
lad, is the Ocean, oh!
Thunder splits the ships,
But he only smacks his lips,
A tastin’ of this flip,-
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky
lad, is the Ocean, oh!

“`Avast Stubb,' cried Starbuck, `let the Typhoon sing, and strike his harp here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold thy peace.'

“`But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward; and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr. Starbuck, there’s no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my throat. And when that's done, ten to one I sing ye the doxology for a wind-up.'”

`Faulkner Deserved My Best'

I was alone one weekend in my junior year of college. My friends had left town and I was, for once, caught up with my studies or caught up enough to read what I wanted. It was spring in Northwestern Ohio and the trees were smeared with green. I felt a self-conscious sense of ceremony as I went to my carrel on the sixth floor of the library solely to read The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton. I knew the book secondhand by way of Laurence Sterne, who had cribbed from it shamelessly in Tristram Shandy. I read through the afternoon and into the warm, humid evening. For perhaps the first time in my life, I read as a form of ritual and without effort, as though the book were somehow reading me. That’s where my memory ends. I’ve read thousands of other books in the subsequent 34 years, reread The Anatomy of Melancholy twice and dipped into it more times than I can remember but in no other reading experience have I felt so passive, privileged and overpowered. Guy Davenport knew what I was talking about the one time I met him. In “On Reading,” an essay first published in Antaeus and collected in The Hunter Gracchus, he describes a similar experience with another word-drunk book:

“A memory: I was desperately poor as an undergraduate at Duke, did not belong to a fraternity, and except for a few like-minded friends….was romantically and self-indulgently lonely. I was already learning the philosophical simpleness that would get me through life, and I remember a Saturday when I was the only person in the library. I took out Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (buff paper, good typography) and went back to my room. I felt, somehow, with everybody else out partying….Faulkner deserved my best. I showered, washed my hair, put on fresh clothes, and with one of Bob Loomis’s wooden-tipped cigars, for the wickedness of it, made myself comfortable and opened the Faulkner to hear Miss Rosa Coldfield telling Quentin Compson about Thomas Sutpen.”

When we are ready for it, a book can turn us into supplicants. Such a book inspires wonder, humility and the most sublime pleasure for a lifetime.

`The Attention We Pay to the Wholeness of the World'

Only now, almost three years after his death, has the vulgar reality of Guy Davenport’s absence, the knowledge that no more essays, stories or letters will issue from Lexington, Ky., that my truest educator (“to lead out,” to which I mentally add, “of ignorance”) has left me with only the lessons of his life and work – only now does this dark knowledge illuminate my days. I often think of Guy as I live, read and write, and I thought of him again on Friday as I read Eric Ormsby’s “Microcosm”:

“The proboscis of the drab grey flea
Is mirrored in the majesty
Of the elephant’s articulated trunk. There’s a sea
In the bed-mite’s dim orbicular eye.
Pinnacles crinkle when the mountain-winged, shy
Moth wakes up and stretches for the night.
Katydids enact the richly patterned light
Of galaxies in their chirped and frangible notes.
The smallest beings harbor a universe
Of telescoped similitudes. Even those Rocky Mountain goats
Mimic Alpha Centauri in rectangular irises
Of cinnabar-splotched gold. Inert viruses
Replicate the static of red-shifted, still chthonic
Cosmoi. Terse
As the listened brilliance of the pulsar’s bloom
The violaceous mildew in the corner room
Proliferates in Mendelian exuberance.
There are double stars in the eyes of cyclonic
Spuds shoveled and spaded up. The dance
Of Shiva is a cobbled-soled affair –
Hobnails and flapping slippers on the disreputable stair.
Yggdrasils
Germinate on Wal-Mart windowsills.”

Whatever acuity of vision I possess I honed on Guy’s example, and Ormsby shares it. We can never see too much or know too much, and nothing is beneath the dignity of our knowing, regardless of its seeming tawdriness or triviality – even Wal-Mart. In his translation of Herakleitos, the pre-Socratic sage who ranked among of Guy’s educators, he writes:

“Men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.”

The Greek, we notice, says nothing about the significance or elegance of the details, only their particularity. And in his inspired essay on the fiction of Eudora Welty, “That Faire Field of Enna” (collected in The Geography of the Imagination), he writes:

“The artist shows the world as if meaning were inherent in its particulars. We dress biological imperative in custom and ritual; the artist dresses it in analogy, and finds design in accident and rhythm in casualness. That every event is unique and every essence distinct from all others rarely interests the artist, for whom event is pattern and essence melodic.”

And this, one page later:

“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.”

`Small Swales Of Hope'

Milkweed is a northern plant I miss in Houston. A beguilingly humble weed, it grows along fences and in clumps in fields, and is the diet of choice for the larvae of monarch butterflies. I’ve never seen the Texas species, Asclepias texana. Judging from photographs, it’s un-Texas-like in its scrawniness, with jarringly white flowers. The blossoms of the familiar northern species, Asclepias syriaca, or common milkweed, are lavender or dusty pink. As kids, we favored milkweed because we smeared other kids with the sticky, white, bitter-tasting sap that gives the plant its name, and because when they ripened in the fall a good smack would burst the pods and release a cloud of silk-tufted seeds that blew away on the slightest breeze. The tufts resemble corn silk but are finer and white not yellow. Among the uncollected poems collected in Time’s Covenant: Selected Poems, by Eric Ormsby, is “Milkweed”:

“The milkweed with its stringent silk
Erect in October when the long blades lie
Burnished to glistening under a dwindling sky,
And the trees have the accents of things about to die,
Startled my glance, the way the tressed and milk-
Bright strands of its hidden diadem
Peep from the knobbed and gathered pods.
A field of milkweed, where each black stem
Juts from the cold earth, catches the sun
At its palest declination. Spun
Inside themselves, concealed in the husk
Of their future, the folds of the seeds
Are pleated upon themselves, are wounds
The way a woman wraps a shawl at dusk
Over her shoulders. The weeds
Are populous. The column neglected ground.
Tassel and toss the smudged air of the fall.
And from a little distance the stalks grow tall
And shattered, porch and peristyle
Of some yet undiscovered ruin. Meanwhile,
At the breeze’s twitch, the seeds rise
Upon the air, are lofted, puffed, they float
In the sunset, flitter like white butterflies
And inhabit all your sight. With no note
Struck they lilt on the wind, speckle the slope,
Already winter-darkened, with small swales of hope.”

Word for word the poem is a marvel, but I particularly prize the finish, culminating in “small swales of hope.” “Swale” inevitably echoes with “sail” and “whale,” in a way recalls Gershwin’s “’S Wonderful.” The Oxford English Dictionary dates Ormsby’s sense of the word from Shakespeare’s time, and defines it as “a hollow, low place; esp. U.S., a moist or marshy depression in a tract of land, esp. in the midst of rolling prairie.” The alternation of “winter-darkened” swells and white-tufted swales is memorable, suggesting a cross between a Grant Wood landscape and a piano keyboard.

In a Sept. 24, 1851, journal entry, Thoreau describes the pods of Asclepias syriaca. Typically, he picks the pods and squeezes them, and reaches conclusions similar to Ormsby’s:

“They are already bursting. I release some seeds with the long fine silk attached – the fine threads fly apart open with a spring as soon as released --& then ray themselves out into a hemispherical form, each thread freeing itself from its neighbor & all reflecting prismatic tints. The seeds besides are winged, I let one go and it rises slowly & uncertainly at first now driven this was then that, by airs which I cannot perceive --& I fear it will make shipwreck against the neighboring wood – but no, as it approaches it – it surely rises above it & then feeling the strong north wind it is borne off rapidly in the opposite direction – ever rising higher & higher --& tossing & heaved about with every commotion – till at a hundred feet in the air & 50 rods off steering south I loose sight of it. How many myriads go sailing away at this season over hill & meadow & river – to plant their race in new localities – on various tacks until the wind lulls – who can say how many miles. And for this end these silken streamers have been perfecting all summer, snugly packed in this light chest – a perfect adaptation to this end – a prophecy of the fall & of future springs. Who could believe in prophecies of Daniel or of Miller that the world would end this summer while one Milkweed with faith matured its seeds!”

Both Ormsby and Thoreau celebrate the milkweed as a herald of hope – “swales of hope” and “a prophecy of the fall & of future springs.”

In the final sentence, Thoreau pokes fun at William Miller (1782-1849), the American Baptist preacher who calculated from his reading of the Bible that the world would end in 1843. Specifically, he used Daniel 8:14: “Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.” For Miller and his followers, a Biblical day represented one year. Thus, Christ’s Second Coming was predicted for a non-specified day in 1843, though when pushed by his followers he set the target somewhere between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. When nothing happened, Miller revised the date to April 18, 1844. Further adjustments were made, but Miller and his thousands of followers, the Millerites, experienced what came to be called the Great Disappointment. Like Thoreau, Miller was a native of Massachusetts and lived all his life in New England. Oddly, the final phrase from the journal entry – “one Milkweed with faith matured its seeds!” – echoes the title of a “new” volume of Thoreau’s scientific writing, published 132 years after his death, in 1994: Faith in a Seed.

`When Daisies Pied and Violets Blue'

I was looking up something about flowers in the library when I happened upon Gary Bukovnik: Watercolors, published in 2005 by Hudson Hills Press. Bukovnik specializes in painting flowers that have intersected with humans. That is, they are rooted in pots, or already have been cut and are heaped or boxed or standing upright in a vase. Most of his backgrounds are blank and white so his rigorously detailed blooms float in space like Platonic ideals of flowerness.

Flowers are soothing. I walked into my boss’ office not long ago, revved up over some trifle, and a dozen yellow-orange roses in a vase on her desk calmed me, just their colors and fragrance. Bukovnik’s watercolors had a similar effect. November in Houston is not the monochromatic palette of upstate New York. We’re not entirely flowerless, but leaves and grass share an almost uniform brown-green-gray. Visit Bukovnik’s website for a second-hand floral infusion.

One of the minor pleasures of reading Shakespeare is identifying the more than 200 plants he mentions in his plays and poems. That’s what I was doing when I stumbled on Bukovnik’s book, at which point I got sidetracked into seeing how many of his flowers also show up in Shakespeare. I didn’t get far, but in Love’s Labours Lost (Act V, Scene 2) Don Adriano de Armado sings:

“When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight…”

Bukovnik covers daisies and violets, but not the lady-smock (Cardamine pratensis) or the cuckoo-bud, better known as the buttercup (Ranunculus acris). And Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act II, Scene 1) sings:

“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.
Here sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight.”

Bukovnik paints violets and roses. In Act IV, scene 5, of Hamlet, Ophelia expresses her grief and madness with a lexical bouquet:

“There's rosemary,
that's for remembrance.
Pray you, love, remember.
And there's pansies, that's for thoughts…
There's fennel for you, and columbines.
There's rue for you, and here's some for me.
We may call it herb of grace o' Sundays.
Oh, you must wear your rue with a difference.
There's a daisy. I would give you some violets,
but they withered all when my father died.
They say he made a good end.”

The watercolorist paints pansies and violets but not the others. He selects his flowers from the florist’s stock, while Shakespeare’s garden is drawn from nature. (I would argue that Shakespeare created spring as we understand it, just as Dickens created Christmas.) Much scholarship has gone into interpreting Ophelia’s choice of flowers, the symbolic meanings they had accumulated in folklore by Shakespeare’s time, all of which his audience would have understood. Supposedly, she first mentions rosemary to her brother, Laertes, because it signifies remembrance and faithfulness, and she is calling up the memory of Polonius, their dead father.

Looking at Bukovnik’s watercolors and revisiting Shakespeare, Houston seems a little brighter and more pleasantly aromatic. In an interview included in Watercolors, Bukovnik, who lives in San Francisco, talks about the influence California has had on his work, and adds, “I grew up in northern Ohio where it’s cold and overcast, a very Scottish or Scandinavian [Hamlet’s Denmark?] climate.” I checked, and Bukovnik, whose ancestry is Slovenian, was born, like me, in Cleveland. Northerners cherish flowers more than most.

`In Poetry the Immediate Pleasure is Physical'

Poetry stops working when it stops singing, though there are many ways to sing. When the singing stops, poetry turns into a species of prose, and often not very good prose. Here’s Thomas Dekker singing in Patient Grissil (Act IV, scene ii):

“Golden slumbers kisse your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise:
Sleepe pretty wantons do not cry,
And I will sing a lullabie,
Rocke them rocke them lullabie.”

Sorry, it’s not Lennon-McCartney, circa 1969. It’s Dekker, circa 1603, but you can only laud the Beatles for their good taste in musical lyrics. Now, for the tone-deaf:

“I remember your death, reject all answers,
Noon, tall time, at Orizaba stern you stood.
In ecstasy of wake you who made a bridge leaped.”

That’s from “You, Hart Crane,” a poem that manages to sound simultaneously vulgar, sentimental, dull and perversely unmusical. The author is Charles Olson, whose “masterwork,” Maximus Poems, Eric Ormsby has rightly declared “unreadable.” Olson was among the prime contributors to the ongoing demusicalization of American poetry. Here’s a countervailing argument, a celebration of the inseparability of poetry and music. I excerpt it from “Poetry as Isotope,” in Ormsby’s Facsimiles of Time:

“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.”

From the same essay, here’s Ormsby’s definitive assessment of politically polemical poetry:

“This is the poetry of protest and in many ways is typical of much of the poetry written in the United States and Canada over the last few decades. Often discursive, generally outraged, indeterminate as to form, such poetry is a poetry of opinion and message; we tend to like or enjoy it in proportion to the correspondence of our own opinions with those of the author rather than for any overriding literary reason; indeed, it is almost invariably bad as poetry.”

For its massive but graceful learning, the beauty of its prose and the soundness of its good sense, I urge you to read Facsimiles of Time, published in 2001 by The Porcupine’s Quill, of Erin, Ontario. Ormsby was born in Georgia in 1941, raised in Florida, and for 20 years was director of libraries and professor of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal. Since 2005 he has served as chief librarian of the Institute of Ismaili Studies, in London. I have just received Time’s Covenant: Selected Poems, published earlier this year by Biblioasis, of Windsor, Ontario. It’s an elegantly beautiful piece of bookmaking that brings together Ormsby’s five previously published books of poems, and some 40 pages of previously uncollected work. The collection reflects a life’s work. In his preface, Ormsby says the earliest poem dates from 1958 (when he was 17); the most recent, 2006. The pleasure of his poems begins in the mouth. They give pleasure to the tongue and lips and ears. Take the first stanza of “A Fragrance of Time,” first published in Daybreak at the Straits (2004):

“Time is not sequential but serpentine.
Time winds in retrogressive coils.
Time monuments itself in sudden pearls,
Accretes and crests and columns travertine
Confections that turn vaporous as lace.”

Those lines, as I read them aloud to myself, make my mouth water. The repeated “k” sounds in the fourth and fifth lines give me a shiver, and I noticed I nodded my head as I read them, responding to their pulse. For now, forgo meaning and listen to Ormsby’s chamber orchestra later in the same poem:

“For us death’s moment will be crystalline,
The vein of quartz within the lode of time,
And promise of the ores of consequence.

“I who have always cherished sentience
The way the May-wind-ruffled columbine
Cradles its petals as its leafstalks climb,
Am privileged to know that moment mine.

“Cessation is itself a fragrance of time.”

The cascade of rhymes and half-rhymes is ravishing. I will spend a lot of time listening to Time’s Covenant.

`But Who Looks East at Sunset?'

One of the rare blessings associated with living in Houston, the sixth-most polluted city in the United States, is the frequency of spectacular sunrises and sunsets. Often grandiose in design – immense, textured, multi-layered flotillas of garishly colorful clouds and back-lighting – they are, in a word, Turneresque, with special effects by Maxfield Parrish. Even my kids will notice a notably conspicuous sunrise, and argue over who saw it first.

I started thinking about sunrises and sunsets while reading The Lyttleton Hart-Davis Letters, because Rupert Hart-Davis, in 1955, briefly inherited the job of editing The Note-books of Gerard Manley Hopkins, after the death of his friend, Humphrey House, for whom he served as literary executor. Eventually, he turned the task over to another scholar, Graham Storey, who later became known for editing Dickens’ letters. I have a copy of The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which Storey published in 1959 with Oxford University Press, and was browsing through it the other day when I found this 1873 entry from Hopkins’ journal:

“Fine sunset Nov. 3 -- Balks of grey cloud searched with long crimsonings running along their hanging folds – this from the lecture room window. A few minutes later the brightness over; one great dull rope coiling overhead sidelong from the sunset, its dewlaps and bellyings painted with a maddery campion-colour that seemed to stoop and drop like sopped cake; the further balk great gutterings and ropings, gilded above, jotted with a more bleedings red beneath and then a juicy tawny `clear’ below, which now is glowing orange and the full moon is rising over the house.”

This is less a naturalistic description of a natural event than a linguistic workout by a young, word-besotted poet (Hopkins was 29, and died at 44). Note the unexpected verbs, gerund strings, consonant clusters (“campion-colour”) and other hints of his later verse. Hopkins continued to take what might be called a “scientific” interest in celestial events. In 1882, in the letters column of the journal Nature, amateur and professional observers began reporting on the phenomenon of rayons du crepuscule, dark beams observed in the eastern sky after sunset. In November, Nature published a letter from the young Jesuit in which he reported having seen the crepuscular shadows in the east. He observed:

“There seems to be no reason why the phenomenon should not be common, and perhaps if looked out for it would be found to be. But who looks east at sunset? Something in the same way everybody has seen the rainbow; but the solar halo, which is really commoner, few people, not readers of scientific works, have ever seen at all. The appearance in question is due to cloud-shadows in an unusual perspective and in a clear sky; now shadow may not only be seen carried by misty, mealy, dusty, or smoky air near the ground, but even almost every bright day, by seemingly clear air high overhead.”

Hopkins’ explanation of the phenomenon sounds convincing, and he poses a delightful question: “But who looks east at sunset?” Poets of genius, obviously, and the scientifically minded in general. A year later, Hopkins wrote a second letter to Nature in which he stresses the importance of the observer’s perspective in describing natural phenomenon. He writes:

“Yesterday the sky was striped with cirrus cloud like the swaths of a hayfield; only in the east there was a bay or reach of clear blue sky, and in this the shadow-beams appeared, slender, colorless, and radiating every way like a fan wide open.”

Now geology joins optics and meteorology. On Aug. 26-27, 1883, a volcano on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa erupted, sending some 25 cubic kilometers of rock and ash into the atmosphere. For months, spectacular sunrises and sunsets, often blue or green, were reported around the globe, and the phenomenon and its relation to the eruption were hotly debated in Nature and other scientific journals. Eventually, scientists generally agreed with the explanation offered by Norman Lockyer, the founding editor of Nature, who theorized that moisture and particulate matter in the atmosphere obscured various bands in the spectrum of sunlight. In January 1884, Hopkins wrote a letter to Nature in which he attacked the theory of C. Piazzi Smyth, the astronomer royal of Scotland. The letter is lengthy, detailed and aggressive. Most interesting to readers of his poetry are Hopkins’ painterly descriptions of sunsets, in which “the green is between apple-green or pea-green (which are pure greens) and an olive (which is tertiary color).” He also observes that the post-volcanic sunsets can be distinguished from earlier ones

“in the nature of the glow, which is both intense and lusterless, and that both in the sky and in the earth. The glow is intense, this is what strikes everyone; it has prolonged the daylight, and optically changed the season; it bathes the whole sky, it is mistaken for the reflection of a great fire; at the sundown itself and southwards from that on December 4, I took a note of it as more like inflamed flesh than the lucid reads of ordinary sunsets. On the same evening the fields facing west glowed as if overlaid with yellow wax.”

In 1888, when the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society published its report, The Eruption of Krakatoa and Subsequent Phenomena, it reproduced much of Hopkins’ letter. I’ve often observed in Houston a phenomenon similar to the poet’s yellow-wax glow. Just before rain falls, or during a pause in a storm, when the sky typically is overcast but not black, the air will glow with a pale yellow light. The effect is eerie and dreamlike. Objects appear more vivid, as though in contrast to the yellow light. The effect is fleeting but memorable. In the letter already cited, Hopkins further describes such lighting:

“The two things together, that is intensity of light and want of luster, give to objects on the earth the peculiar illumination which may be seen in studios and other well-like rooms, and which itself affects the practice of painters and may be seen in their works, notably Rembrandt’s, disguising or freely showing the outlines or distinctions of things, but fetching out white surfaces and colored stuffs with a rich inward and seemingly self-luminous glow.”

In passages like this – and readers can find their own in Ruskin, Thoreau and Nabokov – the arbitrary distinctions between science and art disappear. Hopkins’ final letter to Nature, written Oct. 30, 1884, is more scientific and less artistic than the others. It is also more polemical. Dismissing the theories of Smyth and a painter allied with him, Robert C. Leslie, Hopkins writes:

“To set down variations in light and heat to changes in the sun when they may be explained by changes in our atmosphere, is like preferring the Ptolemaic to the Copernican system.”

Clouds, skyscapes and sunsets often show up in Hopkins’ poetry, but my favorite is the opening of “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection,” from 1888:

“Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs they throng; they glitter in marches.”

`The Shape and Sound of a World'

Thanks to Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti for introducing me to Eugénio de Andrade (1923-2005). On Monday, Mike posted one of the Portuguese poet’s characteristically brief poems, “On the flyleaf of a copy of The Georgics,” in Portuguese and English, and linked to an interview with de Andrade by Paulo da Costa. The interview is brief and fragmentary but it impressed me, especially de Andrade’s seriousness and love of Shakespeare and Melville. Here’s an excerpt:

“`Poetry and truth, the ethic and the aesthetic, go hand in hand as Goethe told us.’ For Eugénio de Andrade poetry is the supreme art form, everything else is secondary. Prose is the poor child of literature, although he is quick to point that the novels of Tolstoy are poetry to him. `Poetry is a kind of music,’ he adds. Andrade is a lover of music and spends much of his time listening to chamber music, from Bach to Bartók. He is clear that poetry is his life and that he has lived for poetry. The rigor he imparts to poetry is not a science-like rigor but derives from the obstinate sense as proposed by Leonardo da Vinci. Eugénio de Andrade searches for exactitude in his work, he searches the exact words for each poem and despises anything that is not exact. `In its end result poetry has to be capable of communicating.’”

De Andrade’s words seduced me into borrowing four translated collections of his work from the library: Inhabited Heart (1985), Memory of Another River (1988), Another Name for Earth (1997) and Dark Domain (2000). All are translated by Alexis Levitin, de Andrade’s friend and a professor of English at the state University of New York at Plattsburg. De Andrade’s poems are seldom longer than 20 lines, highly concentrated, and dense with thought and music. He often writes of elemental natural objects – stones, sand, wood. He’s at home in a pre-Christian world of earth, water, air, and fire. This is “In Words,” from Dark Domain:

“I breathe the earth in words,
and on the back of words
I breathe
cool whitewashed stone;

“I breathe a vein of water
that is lost
somewhere between shoulder blades
or rounded cheeks;

“I breathe a recent sun
in words,
smooth and fresh,
with the stately slowness of an animal.”

In de Andrade’s poems, words reflect the world. Words are discrete objects, surrounded by soft, warm Mediterranean light. In “Crystalizations,” from Inhabited Heart, he writes: “I love with words.” From the same collection, this is “Words”:

“They are like a crystal,
words.
Some a dagger,
some a blaze.
Others,
merely dew.

“Secret they come, full of memory.
Insecurely they sail:
cockleboats or kisses,
the waters trembling.

“Abandoned, innocent,
weightless.
They are woven of light.
They are the night.
And even pallid
they recall green paradise.

“Who hears them? Who
gathers them, thus,
cruel, shapeless,
in their pure shells?”

What he says of words -- “Secret they come, full of memory.” – is reminiscent of Emerson likening language to “fossil poetry.” De Andrade’s emphasis on poems being “capable of communicating” is a reproach to highly hermetic poetry. While hardly simple, declarative or prosy, his poems acknowledge the reader’s active existence, the other half of the conversation. The American poet Ron Slate recently wrote on his blog:

“But writing poetry isn’t primarily an opportunity for self-awareness. It’s an opportunity to make an effective poem for someone else’s awareness. (Yet we also insist that the poet discovers as he/she writes. What is discovered? Mainly the shape and sound of a world.)”

Slate’s observations reflect a minority opinion among contemporary American poets. Most mornings, when I hear Garrison Keillor intoning a poem on “The Writer’s Almanac,” it’s not a poem at all but a prose anecdote chopped into short lines, usually someone’s precious revelation, dull and unmemorable. However, Keillor will defy expectations on Wednesday when he reads “Rain in Childhood,” by the estimable Eric Ormsby.

`My Spiritual Mainstay'

In “Escape from Civilization,” written in 1972 and included in The Collected Stories (1983), the narrator, who sounds very much like a younger incarnation of the author, Isaac Bashevis Singer, wishes to flee the Lower East Side of Manhattan to live in the Sea Gate section of Brooklyn. He’s a romantic young man, born in Bilgoray, Poland (Singer’s mother’s home town), who first fled to Warsaw, then to the United States. He is an aspiring writer, well known enough to have his picture in a Yiddish newspaper. He withdraws his savings from the bank ($78) and packs his cardboard suitcase with his belongings:

“I carried a few books to be my spiritual mainstay while away from civilization: the Bible, Spinoza’s Ethics, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, as well as a textbook with mathematical formulas. I was then an ardent Spinozist and, according to Spinoza, one can reach immortality only if one meditates upon adequate ideas, which means mathematics.”

I pay attention when people, real or fictional, distill their library to essentials, or play the old parlor game: Which books would you chose to take with you to a desert island? After all, what better reveals our values, our genuine priorities as opposed to social pretenses? While living in my college dormitory, I had two built-in shelves above my desk for books. I agonized over what to bring, what to leave home. In my sophomore year, I was certain the greatest novel ever written was The Wings of the Dove, but I owned the hefty two-volume New York Edition of James’ masterpiece. Bringing it meant slighting another title I couldn’t live without. I brought the James, however, even though I didn’t reread that year. I remember my relief when I found a diminutive hardback edition of Gulliver’s Travels (Oxford University Press, 1925 – I still have it), which could rest horizontally on top of other books, thus saving me precious shelf space.

I feel a kinship with Warshawsky, Singer’s narrator. He writes stories but carries no fiction on his comic odyssey to Brooklyn. Like so many Singer characters – I think of Dr. Nahum Fischelson, in “The Spinoza of Market Street” – Warshawsky is a high-minded sensualist, dwelling in the pure realm of Spinoza’s geometry while lusting after his newly divorced landlady. I share my love of books with Warshawsky, and my divided nature. As Dr. Fischelson says at the end of his story:

“Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.”

`Our Curly, Dimpled Lunatics'

Some perceive the world in categories so rigid they might as well be deaf and blind. On Saturday, for two hours, I sat close enough to such a specimen to hear the sound of mouth breathing. My 7-year-old, a very ambitious Cub Scout, took a workshop at the natural science museum to earn a loop in geology. The instructor intoned the mantra of igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic without thought for the meaning or appearance of such rocks, or the temperaments of second- and third-graders. Questions were an impertinence, suffered with much sighing and louder mouth breathing. When she asked why the Pacific Rim, with its abundance of volatile geological faults, was called the Ring of Fire, I said, “Because it was discovered by Johnny Cash?” Two of the eight adults in the room giggled and the instructor was not among them.

I enjoy geology and collected rocks as a kid, and my son enjoyed it until Saturday. In case of drones I carried a paperback Emerson in my hip pocket. Soon, I was holding it under the table and reading surreptitiously. In “Nature,” I found what I needed:

“The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon or a gingerbread-dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic.”

We need teachers who are the fools of their senses. They understand our curly, dimpled lunatics.

Good Riddance

"Let's use our imaginations. It means that one human being has determined to extinguish the life of another human being. It means that two people are engaging in dialogue with eternity. Now if the brute does it and at the last moment likes the man he is extinguishing then perhaps the victim did not die in vain. If there is an eternity with souls in that eternity, if one is able to be born again, the victim may get his reward."

-- Norman Mailer, 1961

`Language is the Dress of THought'

Last month I loaned a copy of For a Modest God to my youngest son’s preschool teacher after he read something I had written about Eric Ormsby’s poetry and thought it sounded interesting. Earlier this week, Mr. Johanson mentioned his wife had complained about Ormsby’s vocabulary. He used too many “big,” obscure and ostentatious words, and isn’t that precisely why people don’t read poetry in the first place? Obviously, she hasn’t read much contemporary American verse, most of which draws upon a desiccated lexicon of a few hundred words. Shakespeare used 31,534, and 14,376 of them he used only once.

Call me sesquipedalian but I enjoy encountering unfamiliar words. Any excuse to visit the dictionary is a good one. This happened just the other night as I was reading the first volume of The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters. George William Lyttelton (1883-1962) taught at Eton for 37 years, and among his students were George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane and Cyril Connolly. Also among them was Rupert Hart-Davis (1907-1999), who studied with Lyttelton in 1925-26. In 1955, after Lyttelton had retired and Hart-Davis was an eminent publisher, editing the voluminous letters of Oscar Wilde, the friends began a weekly exchange of letters that continued until Lyttelton’s death.

Between 1978 and 1984, Hart-Davis published their correspondence in six volumes. They document a loving friendship between two enviably bookish men. Hart-Davis is always respectful and admiring of his former teacher, and Lyttelton is forever reminding him to ignore the teacher-student imbalance. Between them, they seem to have read everything worth reading, at least in the English tradition, and known many of the best writers and scholars of their time. Both are very funny. On November 30, 1955, Lyttelton writes:

“One sentence in your letter brought me in M. Twain’s words a `spell of the dry grins,’ viz your apprehension that when we meet we shall have nothing to say. My dear, these weekly outbreaks of epistolary elephantiasis on my part – well they are like imposthumes or furuncles (and I shall be disappointed if you don’t have to look out that one!). They are proofs of over-fulness. The only not wholly pleasurable thing about your letters is that after one we can’t settle down and tire the sun with talking.”

Five days later, Hart-Davis started his reply like this:

“I certainly did have to look up `furuncle’ and am delighted to add such a specimen to my vocabulary.”

Both “imposthumes” and “furuncles” were lost on me. The Oxford English Dictionary spells the former “imposture,” and the first definition is “a purulent swelling or cyst in any part of the body; an abscess.” The first citation is dated c. 1400, and the last is from 1841 – a fading but useful word. The second meaning, described as “figurative,” illustrates how word mutate metaphorically: “With reference to moral corruption in the individual, or insurrection in the state: A moral or political `festering sore’; the `swelling’ of pride, etc.” In other words, from the body to the body politic. Subsequent definitions, also metaphorical, are “Applied to a gathering cloud or its contents,” and “Applied to a person swollen with pride or insolence.” That’s vivid: a cloud or ego likened to an abscess swollen with puss.

Shakespeare uses “imposthume” twice. In Troilus and Cressida (Act V, Scene I), Thersites delivers a memorable curse:

“Why, his masculine whore. Now, the rotten diseases of the south, the guts-griping, ruptures, catarrhs, loads o’ gravel i’ the back, lethargies, cold palsies, raw eyes, dirt-rotten livers, wheezing lungs, bladders full of imposthume, sciaticas, limekilns i’ the palm, incurable bone-ache, and the rivelled fee-simple of the tetter, take and take again such preposterous discoveries!”

In Hamlet (Act IV, Scene IV), the prince, who often uses vividly corporeal imagery, says:

“Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats
Will not debate the question of this straw:
This is th’ imposthume of much wealth and peace,
That inward breaks, and shows no cause without
Why the man dies. I humbly thank you, sir.”

The OED defines “furuncle” (from the Latin for “little thief”) as “a boil or inflammatory tumour.” When I saw it in Lyttelton’s letter, my first association was “nuncle,” which the Fool uses six times in King Lear. The first citation for “furuncle” is from 1676, the last from 1872, and all are strictly medical. The same goes for other forms of the word – “furuncular,” “furunculosis” and “furunculous.” Ormsby, I suspect, knows these wonderful and probably has used them in a poem. In an essay, “Shadow Language,” he writes:

“When I read a poem new to me, I always looked at once for the feel and texture of the language, even though it may have been the subject matter that first drew me. If the poem was uninteresting to my mouth, I stopped reading it; that is, if it did not in some way seduce me into saying it, into forming and re-forming its particular aural configuration, I immediately lost interest in it. I was looking for lines like Milton’s wonderful:

“`their lean and flashy songs
grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw.’

“That was undiluted pleasure for the ear, not only because of the infinitely interesting collocation of syllables, but because of its perfect aptness for its subject.”

Of course, when I learn a new word I want to use it. When I worked for a newspaper in Indiana, another reporter and I used to challenge each other to successfully work arcane words into our copy. I once described a county commissioner as “freaming” a comment. The OED defines the verb “fream” as “to roar, rage, growl: spec. of a boar.” A cautious copy editor changed it to a pallid “said.”

A blanket dismissal of odd or obscure words, often as part of a misguided campaign to bolster “accessibility,” is wasteful of our dearest birthright – English. A new word is a new world, or a new window on the old one. Language is too precious, too much fun, to always be served at the consistency of gruel. Recall what Samuel Johnson writes in his Life of Cowley:

“Language is the dress of thought; and as the noblest mien or most graceful action would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rusticks or mechanics, so the most heroick sentiments will lose their efficacy, and the most splendid ideas drop their magnificence, if they are conveyed by words used commonly upon low and trivial occasions, debased by vulgar mouths, and contaminated by inelegant applications.”

Pure Gold

I pounce on references to Cleveland, my home town, with the graceful alacrity of my Uncle Harry snagging nickels off the sidewalk. Like poet Richard Howard, cultural historian Constance Rourke and saxophonist Joe Lovano, the novelist Herbert Gold is a native Clevelander, born in 1924. Many years ago I read his early novels and retain a vaguely pleasant impression of The Man Who Was Not With It (1956), which was written in the wake of The Adventures of Augie March and shows it. In Thursday’s post I mentioned Nabokov’s praise for a story by Gold, “Death in Miami Beach,” which in fact is more likely an essay, and collected in The Age of Happy Problems (1961). The piece holds up well and has a good opening:

“The state of madness can be defined partly as an extreme of isolation of one human being from everyone else. It provides a model for dying. Only an intermittent and fragmentary awareness of others interrupts the black folding of the layers of self upon each other – this also defines the state of that dilemma known as `mental health.’”

In the same volume is “Cleveland: Inflation on the Erie,” a magazine-style feature originally published in discovery [sic] in 1951, the year before I was born. Much of it feels gleaned from the newspaper morgue and encyclopedia, but Gold gives a native son’s glimpse of the flush postwar world I entered, when Cleveland was the sixth-largest city in the country. Today, it’s thirty-third on the list and no longer even the largest in Ohio. Sounding like a winded A.J. Liebling, Gold writes:

“The water on a first-baseman’s knee, the laryngitis of a disc jockey, or another policeman surprised in an act of burglary or venery while on duty provide the staple diet of newspapers in quest of local catastrophe. Cleveland policemen obey the Philosopher’s great doctrine of the Golden Mean between penuriousness (Atlantic City) and profligacy (Beverly Hills), accepting just the amount required in favor and shakedown to send these commissioned Aristotelians to Miami Beach, Coral Gables, and a proper dignity in the sunset of their days. They are sometimes punished for the excessive taking of bribes by a lonely duty on the East Ninth Street pier, jutting onto Lake Erie, where they are told to watch out for invaders from Canada.”

Which reminds me of the Cleveland scene in Stranger than Paradise (directed by Jim Jarmusch, another Clevelander), when the New York City trio stands on the shore and stares at the blank whiteness of frozen Lake Erie. Today, I.M. Pei’s hideous glass pyramid, home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, stands where the East Ninth Street pier once stood. As to entertainment in the “Forest City,” circa 1951:

“Not long ago, a small west-side bar, far from downtown, hired Rudy Vallee for a week of the `Whiffenpoof Song’ and nostalgia about old Yale for the pleasure of the neighborhood loungers. `Big names’ visit supper clubs which used to be satisfied with high-school bands. The kids who once made out with a soda and a few nickels for the juke box are now in the habit of parking their convertibles at Moe’s Main Street and investing respectable sums in an evening with Johnny Ray (`Mr. Emotion in Person NOW’), as he puts his head against the piano, sobs briefly, and sings, `Tell the Lady I Said Good-bye.’”

Gold catalogs the city’s boosterish nickname, “The Best Location in the Nation”; “Juno, the Transparent Lady” at the city’s Health Museum; “The Mad Killer of Kingsbury Run”; Hart Crane’s brief residence; and The Flats, the industrial area along the Cuyahoga River where, 25 years after Gold’s story, Pere Ubu and other punk bands evolved. Here’s Gold on The Flats, Cleveland’s version of Blake’s “dark satanic mills,” now long gone:

“By day this area is covered with an acrid pall. By night the sky is violet, throbbing and flaring with the reflection from the blast furnaces.”

Describing himself as a flâneur, Gold closes the essay by telling of his impromptu rendezvous with “a lovely young artist” sketching the city’s skyline from The Flats. The woman mistakes his overture for an “assault, purse-snatching, or at least what is called `exposing his person.’” She runs away, leaving behind her sketch of the Terminal Tower, once the tallest building in the world outside New York City:

“She seemed to have talent. Like the spirit of Cleveland, her talent might develop with greater richness if she were more confident of her power, less speedy in the flight with money, and yet more adventurous in the exposing of her person to the risks of love.”

`The Stained-Glass Windows of Knowledge'

I took Stories from The New Yorker: 1950-1960 out of the library as an experiment in nostalgia. By the time I started reading the magazine almost a decade later, around 1968, its signature fiction writers were Donald Barthelme, with his postmodern bric-a-brac, and the great Isaac Bashevis Singer, neither of whom is represented in this anthology. What impresses me about the collection is how much first-rate fiction was produced in the often maligned nineteen-fifties, and how many of its best writers published in The New Yorker.

Of the 47 stories included, eight were written by writers whose names I don’t recognize (Calvin Kentfield?), and many were written by favorites – Vladimir Nabokov (“Lance”), Saul Bellow (“A Father-to-Be”), V.S. Pritchett, J.F. Powers, William Maxwell, Daniel Fuchs, John Cheever, Peter Taylor (represented by one of his best stories: “What You Hear from ‘Em”), Philip Roth (“Defender of the Faith”) and Eudora Welty. By my reckoning, the only major short story writers of that era not included are Flannery O’Connor and Bernard Malamud, neither of whom published in The New Yorker. The selection is so variegated, so resistant to critical ghettoizing, the myth of the monolithic “New Yorker”-style story looks laughable (or at least it did until the nineteen-seventies).

I’m not the only reader to esteem some of the stories included in the anthology. In 1973, shortly after he published Transparent Things (which I remember receiving as a gift for Christmas 1972), Nabokov published a brief essay, “Inspiration,” in the Saturday Review. In it he mentions the glut of fiction anthologies shipped to him by publishers eager for the master’s blessing in the form of a fulsome blurb. Naturally, most of the fiction was dreck but, Nabokov says, “almost in each of them there are at least two or three first-rate stories.” He took to grading stories (“an A, or a C, or a D-minus”), much as he had the term papers of Cornell undergrads:

“Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge. From a small number of A-plus stories I have chosen half-a-dozen particular favorites of mine. I list their titles below andparenthesize briefly the passage -- or one of the passages – in which genuine afflation appears to be present, no matter how trivial the inspired detail may look to a dull criticule.”

Of the six stories he names, two are included in The New Yorker anthology: “The Country Husband,” by Cheever, and “The Happiest I’ve Been,” by John Updike. Of the former he writes:

“`Jupiter [a black retriever] crashed through the tomato vines with the remains of a felt hat in his mouth.’ The story is really a miniature novel beautifully traced, so that the impression of there being a little too many things happening in it is completely redeemedby the satisfying coherence of its thematic interlacings.”

And of the Updike:

“`The important thing, rather than the subject, was the conversation itself, the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of these Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone.’ I like so many of Updike's stories that it was difficult to choose one for demonstration and even more difficult to settle upon its most inspired bit.”

The other stories Nabokov singles out for praise are “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” by J.D. Salinger (who is represented in The New Yorker anthology by “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”); “Death in Miami Beach,” by Herbert Gold; “Lost in the Funhouse,” by John Barth; and “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” by Delmore Schwartz. The only ostensibly postmodern story in the bunch is the Barth, which is also the dullest and least substantial (though closely rivaled by the Salinger).

Of course, The New Yorker also published reams of eminently forgettable fluff during the nineteen-fifties. Mercifully, John O’Hara doesn’t show up in the anthology. And remember that A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell, those nonfiction masters at The New Yorker, were working at the height of their powers during those years. Can anyone think of a magazine during a comparable period that has produced so much that remains worth reading? Here’s how Nabokov, who famously sought “aesthetic bliss,” concludes his rhapsodic essay:

“I must add that I would be very pleased if a Professor of Literature to test his students at the start or the close of the term would request them to write a paper discussing thefollowing points:

“1. What is so good about those six stories? (Refrain from referring to `commitment,’ `ecology,’ `realism,’ `symbols,’ and so forth).

“2. What other passages in them bear the mark of inspiration?

“3. How exactly was that poor lap dog made to howl in those lace-cuffed hands, close to that periwig?”