'His Passage Paid Home Free'

Late in 2024 I was browsing in old issues of The American Scholar from the era when Joseph Epstein was the editor. In the Winter 1986 issue I found a poem by Edward Case titled “As Grammarians”:

 

“This life which is a sentence

Is also a declaration.

We make the sense of it

In our own terms.

As grammarians

We assert our meaning,

In what we decline,

In what we affirm,

In the conjugation of love,

In the predicates

And imperatives

And ambiguities

Of prosaic choice

We essay briefly

To define ourselves

Before the stop.”

 

Why had I never heard of Case? Long before 1986, free verse had taken over like an alien species of weed and virtually snuffed out the formal natives. Case’s poem was witty – a series of near-puns playing off, Elizabethan-style, the implications of “grammar.” And yet there was nothing archaic about the language and nothing slangy. Not a syllable is out of place. No filler and nothing to excess. It left me wanting to read more by this guy. Why had I never heard of Case? Here is the tagline accompanying the poem:

   

“Edward Case’s work has appeared in various journals, including the New Criterion, the Wall Street Journal, and Modern Age. This poem was taken from a collection of recent work that he was preparing for publication at the time of his death last summer.”

 

I was shocked and saddened. Case had never published a collection of his poetry “Before the stop.” I found a scattering of his other poems, several as accomplished as “As Grammarians.” So I wrote about him, hoping to read more of his work and learn what had happened to this gifted unknown poet. I soon heard from James Case, the late poet’s son, a recently retired architect living in New Jersey. “He was one of the most gifted people I’ve ever known,” he wrote. We subsequently spoke many times and exchanged emails as he resolved to publish that “collection of recent work.”

 

In a resolute act of filial devotion, James has worked for the last year and a half editing, introducing, annotating, designing and publishing The Business Of The Dancer (Kaseowitz Publishing, 2026).  Full disclosure: I proof-read the book several times at James’ request and tried to answer his questions when I felt competent to do so. It’s very much, however, a one-man job. In his introduction to the collection of seventy-five poems, James writes:

 

“Edward Case’s poetry is formal, often employing rhyme and meter. The poems are efficient, with no excess. While accessible, they exhibit nuanced complexity, with words often bearing multiple meanings. The tone is philosophical, with observations on life, mortality, politics, love, nature, and the nature of things. Serious but not without wit, the poems are the work of a well-read, broad intellect.”

 

Edward Case, born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, had been reviewing books since the nineteen-fifties. At the same time he was a businessman, owning a company that manufactured gasket pumps. He held ten patents. He befriended Hilton Kramer. He wrote for the Wall Street Journal and National Review and exchanged letters with the English novelist Joyce Cary. After Cary’s death in 1957, Case published an essay about his work in the Spring 1959 issue of Modern Age, in which he wrote:

 

“And then he died, and after the obituaries were written the makers of literary opinion continued to write about lesser artists, and there was no sign to indicate that anyone understood that one of the greatest creators in the history of the novel had finished his work.”

 

Case died of leukemia on July 10, 1985, at age sixty-two. Here is a brief sampler of poems from The Business Of The Dancer beginning with the early “Now I Have Died a Little”:

 

“Now I have died a little.

I am a little old.

Though not for coffin ready,

Nor stone-weighed cold.

Now I have died a little,

And my dying is this:

What I cannot do, I see,

And what I shall miss.”

 

“Hasidim”:

 

“To be closer

They keep their distance.

As shadows defining light

They wear black space formally,

Like the discreet livery

Of proud servants:

Black hats, the plane width of distance

And black coats the hiding lengths

In which they stoop.

They stare inward

Like blind astronomers.

Beneath the effacing beards

Countenance is immaterial.

Hair, pious, templed,

Argues intricately

For the guarded head

Covered against the glittering, temporal,

Perilous dust.

Beauty, which is of things, is dark.

The fire which sustains the world

Hides in a spark.”

 

“Minor Poet” (reminiscent of Samuel Menashe’s work):

 

“Saved by a line

Before he sank

Into the nameless sea:

His sentence stayed,

His passage paid

Home free.”

 

And here is “1914,” one of four poems by Case published in the October 1985 issue of The New Criterion:

 

“The pearly throat of that peacock age was torn

In summer and its shriek yet grows, screaming

Unheard in all our days and deeds, like static

From a falling star, unseeming as the dust

Of space, yet crying murder as it bleeds.

So the voiceless moon imparting gravity

To frivolous tides roils the world unseen

But never hides its light nor ever slows.

 

“Slain then the nightingale and the steed,

The garden wall then fallen, the enchanted

Wood a tiring room for weary death

And summer’s lawn sown to widows’ weed.

For winter came in August killing fruit and seed.

In that broken season forever died the rose.”

 

[The Business Of The Dancer is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org.] 

'Winter Came in August Killing Fruit and Seed'

A sad and sorely final yet incomplete tagline found after a poem in the Winter 1986 issue of The American Scholar: 

“Edward Case’s work has appeared in various journals, including the New Criterion, the Wall Street Journal, and Modern Age. This poem was taken from a collection of recent work that he was preparing for publication at the time of his death last summer.”

 

It reads like the epitaph on a stone in a cemetery one will never again visit. Who is Case? Why have I never heard of him? How did he die? Here is the accompanying poem, “As Grammarians”:

 

“This life which is a sentence

Is also a declaration.

We make the sense of it

In our own terms.

As grammarians

We assert our meaning,

In what we decline,

In what we affirm,

In the conjugation of love,

In the predicates

And imperatives

And ambiguities

Of prosaic choice

We essay briefly

To define ourselves

Before the stop.”

 

A clever exercise in double-meanings. Not a syllable out of place. The author has taken pains to make it work. No filler and nothing to excess. It leaves me wanting to read more by this guy. Here is “1914,” one of four poems by Case published in the October 1985 issue of The New Criterion:

 

“The pearly throat of that peacock age was torn

In summer and its shriek yet grows, screaming

Unheard in all our days and deeds, like static

From a falling star, unseeming as the dust

Of space, yet crying murder as it bleeds.

So the voiceless moon imparting gravity

To frivolous tides roils the world unseen

But never hides its light nor ever slows.

 

“Slain then the nightingale and the steed,

The garden wall then fallen, the enchanted

Wood a tiring room for weary death

And summer’s lawn sown to widows’ weed.

For winter came in August killing fruit and seed.

In that broken season forever died the rose.”

 

“Winter came in August”: The Great War changed everything and we’re still dealing with its repercussions. Case’s poem reminds me of Ford Madox Ford, who enlisted in the Welch Regiment in 1915 at age forty-two. A year later, twelve days after the start of the battle, he was sent to the Somme in northeastern France in time for the bloodiest one-day engagement in English military history. Ford was blown into the air by the explosion of a German shell, suffered memory loss and for three weeks remained incapacitated.

 

Ford was hospitalized again with lung problems exacerbated by exposure to poison gas, and in March 1917 was sent home as an invalid. For the rest of the war he was stationed on the North Yorkshire coast, where he helped train troops. Ford was promoted to lieutenant and then to captain, and in 1918 held the temporary rank of brevet major. On Armistice Day, Ford was still in North Yorkshire. He was discharged in 1919. Ford went on to write the greatest of all Great War fiction, the tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-28).

 

In a 1931 letter to T.R. Smith, Ford writes: “The world before the war is one thing and must be written down in one manner; the after-war world is quite another and calls for quite different treatment.”

 

Does anyone know anything about Edward Case?

[James Case: I would love to speak with you but have no contact information. Can you send me your email address? Thanks.]

'And Talked Down Speechless Death'

In my November 1 post I asked, “Does anyone know anything about Edward Case?” I had stumbled on a gifted poet previously unknown to me who had died in 1985. This week I heard from his son James Case, an architect living in New Jersey, who briefed me on his father and his work. “He was one of the most interesting people I’ve ever known,” James told me.

 

Case died from leukemia at age sixty-two. Born in Manhattan, he had a book review column in the fifties, owned a company manufacturing gasket pumps and held ten patents. He befriended Hilton Kramer. He wrote for the Wall Street Journal and exchanged letters with the English novelist Joyce Cary. After Cary’s death in 1957, Case published an essay about his work in the Spring 1959 issue of Modern Age, in which he wrote:

 

“And then he died, and after the obituaries were written the makers of literary opinion continued to write about lesser artists, and there was no sign to indicate that anyone understood that one of the greatest creators in the history of the novel had finished his work.”

 

At the time of his death, Case had assembled a manuscript of seventy-five poems titled The Business of the Dancer, rhymed and unrhymed, metrically regular and free verse. “Minor Poet” is one of five poems by Case published in the October 1985 issue of The New Criterion:

 

“Saved by a line

Before he sank

    Into the nameless sea:

His sentence stayed,

His passage paid

    Home free.”

 

Case’s poems are serious, not solemn. With the years, they grew in terseness. Here is “A Voluntary for Doctor Johnson” in the Summer 1958 issue of Modern Age:

 

“Gentlemen, let us tie the tongue of talk

And be silent -- bid the trumpeter sound

A voluntary for Doctor Johnson.

 

“A voluntary for Doctor Johnson

Whose carcass gross as far-gone pregnancy

Concealed the fearful wonder of a child;

Who couched himself in the cushioned phrase

Of dogma and felt it creak against his weight

And pound of anguish;

Who cheered himself with the sound of voices

And tilted his tongue against his terror

And talked, talked, talked, till Despair herself despaired

And like a squelched woman bit her lips and schemed.

 

“Gentlemen, let us tie the tongue of talk

And be silent -- bid the trumpeter sound

A voluntary for Doctor Johnson.

 

 “A voluntary for Doctor Johnson

Who, in his fright, conversed against the night

And talked down speechless death.”

 

Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary defined the noun voluntary as “a piece of musick play’d at will, without any settled rule.”

 

James Case hopes to publish his father’s poems. He sent me a pdf of the manuscript, which I haven’t finished reading, but the quality is consistently high. Is there an enterprising editor/publisher out there who might want to read the poems and consider publishing Case’s work? Let me know at patrick.kurp@gmail.com. Case writes in his Cary essay: “When an artist is appraised at less than his true worth, he may fairly be said to be neglected.”

`To Cheer & Check Fears'

A reader in Juba, South Sudan, suggests I might enjoy Edward Hirsch's The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems 1975-2010, in particular one of the new poems, “The Case Against Poetry”:

“While you made the case against poetry—
Plato’s critique of the irrational,
Homeric lying, deluded citizens—
to a group of poets in Prague

“night deepened in old windows,
swallows gathered on a narrow ledge
and called to the vanishing twilight,
and a beggar began to sing in the street.”

I’ve never bought the so-called case against poetry, Plato’s or anyone else’s, though I strongly endorse the case against badly written poetry (and prose), based as it is on a literary application of Gresham’s law. Hirsch’s understanding of poetry is a little too mushily Romantic for my taste – swallows, twilight, singing beggar – but at least he pits his poem against the positivists. Also, Hirsch wrote a piece about John Clare some years ago which I remembered being useful. A rereading partially confirmed my impression:

“Clare was a prodigious walker, a solitary who sought out the secret recesses of nature, a hidden, underappreciated, overlooked country, which he detailed with a sharp eye and a naturalist's sensibility. Accuracy was a scrupulous habit, a moral imperative.”

That’s a quality I expect of good poetry and prose – the scrupulous habit of accuracy, which is never contrary to a vigorous imagination. Fancy rooted in particulars is almost the definition of art – and a “moral imperative.” Richard Mabey devotes some of the best pages in Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants to Clare’s close observations of the natural world in his native Northamptonshire. Mabey praises Clare for writing about plants and animals as “things-in-themselves, not as a colourful palette of symbols and metaphors,” and his celebration of the poet sent me back to The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare (ed. Margaret Grainger, Clarendon Press, 1983). Once you’ve accustomed yourself to Clare’s unschooled spelling and grammar, his prose can be photographically scrupulous without being dull or uninspired. In his journal for Sept. 10, 1824, Clare writes, like Hirsch, about swallows:

“My health woud permit me to do nothing more than take walks in the garden today what a sadly pleasing appearence gardens have at this season the tall gaudy holliock with its melancholy blooms stands bending to the wind and bidding the summer farewell while the low asters in their pied lustre of red white & blue bends beneath in pensive silence as tho they mused over the days gone by & were sorrowful the swallows are flocking together in the skies ready for departing & a crowd has dropt to rest on the wallnut tree where they twitter as if they were telling their young stories of their long journey to cheer & check fears”

[On Saturday I watched Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch again. As the bunch rides out of Angel’s village, his people sing the beautiful “La Golondrina” – “The Swallow.” The song is reprised at the end of the film, after the massacre at Agua Verde, over Freddy Sykes’ laughter.]

'Mr. Moore’s Poems Are Obviously Unrevised'

Dr. Merrill Moore (1903-57) is remembered as a psychiatrist and sonneteer with a bad case of poetic elephantiasis. Not that his poems were big. They seldom exceeded fourteen lines but there were a lot of them – one estimate suggests 50,000 -- and a remarkable number actually saw print. He was the sort of poet who could – and often did -- write a sonnet in the car while waiting for the traffic light to change. In 1938 he published M: One Thousand Autobiographical Sonnets (Harcourt, Brace). It tips the scales at almost three pounds. 

Moore was born in Tennessee. At Vanderbilt he was a member of the Fugitives, that group of Southern poets including John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. He went on to teach neurology at Harvard Medical School. Even a layman is tempted to diagnose Dr. Moore’s sonneteering as pathological in origin. One senses he needed to get them out of his system. I’ve probably read several hundred of his sonnets over the years and remember nothing about them, no flash of insight or memorable phrase. I’m fairly certain I’ve never reread a single one. Of course, Moore’s definition of the sonnet is elastic. In his “Admission Note” to Case Record from a Sonnetorium (Twayne, 1951) he writes:

 

“These are samples of the new and varying forms the sonnet can take when it is freed from the ancient prescription that it must have an octet and a sestet to be ‘regular’ (Petrarchan or Italian), and, likewise, that it is ‘irregular’ if it has three quatrains and a couplet (Shakespearean, or English, form). In other words: Give the sonnet a little liberty, and see what happens.”

 

What happens is a whole lot of chopped-up prose with little direction, focus or punch. Why bother calling these things “sonnets”? In 1930, when Yvor Winters reviewed Moore’s The Noise That Time Makes in Poetry, which comes with a foreword by Ransom, he diagnosed the doctor’s problem:

 

“Mr. Ransom, in his introduction to Mr. Moore’s poems, has said that Mr. Moore has always found it easier to write a new poem than to revise an old one; this is, I imagine, true of all of us. Mr. Moore’s poems are obviously unrevised; the meters are a kind of rhymed and butchered prose, and the diction is for the most part very, very approximate, to speak as charitably as possible.”

 

Winters’ assessment might be rubber-stamped on the works of a thousand poets. Revision is the essence of all writing, not just poetry. Few of us get it right the first time. I did find Case Record from a Sonnetorium amusing, though not for his contributions. The book is modeled as a series of medical case histories. Thus, the previously mentioned “Admission Note,” followed by a “Prognosis” by Louis Untermeyer and a series of epigraphs titled “Overheard in the Waiting Room.” The book closes with a “Consultant’s Opinion” by Ransom, a “Laboratory Note” by “Henry H. Wells, Ph.D.” and a “Discharge Note” by William Carlos Williams, M.D. Here’s a sample of a Moore sonnet, “Elizabeth Fox, Single, Age 54”:

 

“Lives alone (alone) on the fifth floor

To which she climbs by power of her legs

After her work at the Five-and-Ten Cent Store

Where she covers counters with green baize

After the sales and customers are over.

 

“Elizabeth has arthritis and her spine

Aches at least eight hours out of nine.

 

“Elizabeth Fox was once young; she is old

Now, her feet and hands are always cold.

 

“The mattress she sleeps on is hard and dirty;

It was clean and soft when she was thirty.

 

“For supper she eats crackers, some preserves,

A piece of bacon and some thin weak tea.

 

“Elizabeth, it is not entirely your own fault.”

 

This is pretty lame stuff, a little embarrassing, though the idea of a physician writing a book of poems based on patients, real or imagined, is promising. The quoted sonnet is typical of Moore’s poems, no worse than most. Now for the good news: the book is wonderfully illustrated by Edward Gorey (1925-2000). Each of the two dozen poems is accompanied by one of his cartoons. The copy I borrowed from the Fondren Library was signed by Moore for Alice Dixon Bond, the literary editor of The Boston Herald from 1940 to 1964:

'To Inhale Their Presence'

“There is something distinctive about the good bookstore, the loss of which would lead to a loss of a particular way of being in the world.” 

It’s easy to get nostalgic about the bookstores of old, those dusty, chaotic caves stocked with inexpensive treasures and presided over by bibliophilic curmudgeons and a cat. I’m still looking for one. The closest to this romantic ideal in Houston is Kaboom Books, though its owner, John Dillman, is more of a curmudgeon-in-remission. He’s casually well-read, which isn’t always the case among book dealers. On Sunday, as usual, we swapped stories about books – hunting, selling, buying, reading and complaining about them, and I left with two volumes: Osip Mandelstam: Selected Essays (trans. Sidney Monas, University of Texas Press, 1977) and Surviving: The Uncollected Writing of Henry Green (ed. Matthew Yorke, Viking, 1992).

 

I usually enter a bookstore with a two-part list, whether mental or written. The first consists of writers I’m always in the market for, including Mandelstam and Green. Joining them, for instance,  are A.J. Liebling, J.V. Cunningham, Chekhov, Rebecca West and Nabokov. I own volumes by all of them but I’m selectively greedy, always hoping to plug holes in the collection or bag an especially choice specimen. All are on my want-list, kept up-to-date by John. The second part of the list is pure serendipity.

 

The passage quoted at the top is the final sentence from In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton University Press, 2022) by Jeff Deutsch, director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores. Wisely, Deutsch’s first sentence quotes a 1963 essay by Edward Shils, “The Bookshop in America”:

 

“The sociologist Edward Shils wrote, ‘It may well be that we live in an epoch in which the bookshop is an institution suspended between “the dying old society” and the “society struggling to be born.” Would that we were living in an epoch in which the bookshop itself was so clearly the given, as it was in Shils’s.”

 

It’s to Deutsch’s credit that he so prominently quotes Shils, whose essay is one of my favorites, at once formal and scholarly, and warmly personal. Here is Shils retrospectively romancing bookshops, sixty years ago:  

 

“My own relations with bookshops began more than forty years ago and they have extended into many countries and to all continents. I have gone to bookshops to buy and browse. I have gone to them to buy books I wanted, and because I just wanted to buy a book, and much of the time just because I wanted to be among books to inhale their presence. My case is an extreme one, and there are perhaps few people in my generation, more or less in their right minds and heavily engaged with all sorts of duties, who have spent so much time in bookshops as I have. I have talked with booksellers of every kind, angular Brahmins, mad Ostjuden, motherly widows, elegant patricians, sweet mice, and cagy and distrustful touts. I have in the course of years read a fair amount on the history of the book trade. From all this, I claim some authority to speak about the state of the retail book trade in the United States.”

The customer standing behind me at the counter while John and I yacked obliviously was polite and soft-spoken when I apologized. He was buying something by Annie Dillard and a hardcover edition of The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman.  He said, "He's my favorite poet."

'There Are Uses for All Kinds of Books'

I’m skeptical of book lists. Experience tells me good books are best discovered serendipitously. Good readers tend to be hungry and enterprising, and they will always find the books they want to read, one way or another. Systematizing the process seems pointless. Unless a book is part of a mandatory curriculum, or one is reading for review, some of us resent unsolicited reading suggestions. I hate being told there’s a book I “just have to read.” No, I don’t. Tastes are prohibitively individual. I’m famous in my family for being hard to shop for on birthdays and holidays. Non-readers seem to think any old book will do. 

A reader has asked for a list of books I think “everybody should read.” He’s young and smart, and already seems fairly well-read, especially for someone his age. I’ve suggested he use Anecdotal Evidence as an ad hoc, loosely organized library catalogue. Poke around. See if my account of a given writer, or the frequency with which I mention him, sounds attractive. Then go to the library or bookstore. You have little to lose. When reading, always follow through, a suggestion I took from my brother. By that I mean, what writers does the first writer allude to, imitate or praise? This encourages happy discoveries and raises your awareness of literature as a vast, loosely woven fabric. Every book is linked, however remotely, to every other book. That’s what Borges taught us. 

 

Frank MacShane, the biographer of Raymond Chandler and Ford Madox Ford, wrote a remembrance of Edward Dahlberg soon after the latter’s death in 1977. Dahlberg had known Ford in the Thirties and supplied MacShane with background. The biographer writes:

 

“Edward venerated the classics, and anyone who knew him was bound to have one of his book lists, most of whose titles are never read in the universities. One of mine includes these books: the Letters of Eric Gill, Ruskin’s The Political Economy of Art, Strabo’s Geography, Seneca’s Morals, Plutarch’s Moralia, Lucian’s Dialogues, The Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno, Egolatry by Pio Baroja and a dozen more. He thought it absurd that students be required to rush through their literature courses at the rate of a novel a week, and he always cautioned that you should not proceed with a book if you did not like it.”

 

In general, I agree. In the past I’ve written about reading lists assembled by Dahlberg and Marianne Moore. They are entertaining mostly for what they say about the list-makers. Among the titles recounted by MacShane, I’ve read most – not Gill, certainly, or Strabo – but the Unamuno has been one of my Desert Island Books for half a century. See what I mean? Pick and choose privately, according to your own bent, which can change significantly over time. In this case, Dahlberg was a difficult, angry guy. Weigh his thoughts carefully. MacShane goes on:

 

“Quoting Nietzsche, he said the book may be ripe for you, but not you for the book. Edward's book lists were daunting and  somewhat indigestible, but they reinforced the idea that books were written by human beings for others of their kind to read. Also he believed that for the education of a whole and feeling person it was as important to know about geography and natural history and cooking as it was to be expert in textbook knowledge. This awareness is wonderfully liberating for a writer because it gets rid of the idea of specialisation. Also, it means that nothing is forbidden: there are uses for all kinds of books.”

'Wisdom Is Heavy Stuff'

From a biochemist I learned a phrase new to me – “epigenetic switching.” It means changes in gene expression without corresponding changes in the DNA sequence. What struck me was the profusion of English words with the prefix epi-: epitaph, epilogue, epitome, epicenter, epithet, episode, epinephrine, epilepsy, epidermis, epithalamium, epiglottis, epicarp, epidemic, Silas Marner’s adopted daughter and my favorite, epigram. English is epically promiscuous. 

The root is the Greek epi meaning “upon, at, close upon (in space or time), on the occasion of, in addition.” “Epigram” is from ἐπίγραμμα (epigramma), “inscription,” from a related verb meaning “to write on, inscribe.” For the Greeks, epigrams started as brief verses written on votive offerings or monuments to the dead. Their appeal, for this reader, is terseness and wit. They mean something and are about something, rare qualities in poetry today. Every syllable has its place. None is superfluous. Take “You Don’t Have to Be So Smart” from Edward Case’s posthumously published The Business Of The Dancer (2026):

 

“If you want a pound of wit

An epigram will fit.

Even an ounce of sense

Is weighty though not dense.

With minimal reflection

You may glass perfection.

A drop of thought’s enough.

Wisdom is heavy stuff.”

 

The late X.J. Kennedy was likewise a master of the form. “In writing epigrams, most poets gain control over their natural tendency to blab. Besides, an epigram permits them to get a gripe off their chests.” Kennedy is writing in “Gists, Piths, and Poison-Pills: The Art of the Epigram” (An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, 2002). As bloat proliferates, short forms look attractive as a corrective to congenital logorrhea. Kennedy published eleven epigrams in the April 1996 issue of Chronicles, including “For a Friend to Whom He’d Sent His Book”:

 

“I wish you’d say, ‘What hopeless trash, you twit,’

And not ‘look forward soon to reading it.’”

 

Another master of the epigram in English is J.V. Cunningham. Kennedy elsewhere says of him, “you had to respect a man of his sour integrity,” a quality almost unique among poets, at least since the death of Walter Savage Landor. Here is his “Epigram 23” from the sequence "Epigrams: A Journal" (The Judge is Fury, 1947): 

 

“Dark thoughts are my companions. I have wined

With lewdness and with crudeness, and I find

Love is my enemy, dispassionate hate

Is my redemption though it come too late,

Though I come to it with a broken head

In the cat-house of the dishevelled dead.”

A contemporary practitioner of the epigram is Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War R.L. Barth. Here is “De Bello,” collected in Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems (Broadstone Books, 2021):

 

“The troops deploy. Above, the stars

Wheel over mankind’s little wars.

If there’s a deity, it’s Mars.”

 

Barth’s Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books, 2026) will be published later this month. Bob has been translating the epigrams of Marcus Valerius Martialis – the first-century Roman poet Martial, as we know him – for more than forty years.

`He Was the Third'

I read Sholem Aleichem, né Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, even before I read Isaac Bashevis Singer. Fiddler on the Roof, based on his Tevye stories, had given the Yiddish writer an unexpected currency. In eighth-grade choir, within a year of the show’s opening, we were singing “If I Were a Rich Man” and “Matchmaker, Matchmaker.” An enterprising publisher put out a cheap paperback of the Tevye stories, and I read it. When I learned some wag had dubbed Sholem Aleichem “the Jewish Mark Twain,” I saw the sense. Both were funny. Aleichem’s stories, like Twain’s, often have a folkish quality, as do Singer’s, and none is the lesser artist for it.

Sholem Aleichem’s return (he died in New York City in 1916) coincided with the great mid-century flowering of writing by Jewish Americans. Everyone was reading Bellow, Malamud and Roth (“the Hart, Schaffner and Marx of American literature,” Bellow quipped). An earlier generation was rediscovered: Edward Dahlberg, Daniel Fuchs, Henry Roth, Nathanael West. With writers this good, and factoring in the Jewish comedians we watched on television and, in 1967, the great Israeli victory in the Six-Day War, some of us wished we were Jewish.

Sholem Aleichem wrote more than Tevye. He was enormously prolific, and an ardent Zionist. For his writings dedicated to that cause, see Why Do the Jews Need a Land of Their Own? (Herzl Press, 1984). A good place to start with his fiction is the collection edited in 1979 by Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse, The Best of Sholom Aleichem. Included is “Dreyfus in Kasrilevke” (trans. Julius and Frances Butwin), which describes the impact of the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) on the Jews in the fictional Russian village of Kasrilevke:

“So how did Kasrilevke learn about the Dreyfus case? From Zeidel. Zeidel, Reb Shaye’s son, was the only person in town who subscribed to a newspaper, and all the news of the world they learned from him, or rather through him. He read and they interpreted. He spoke and they supplied the commentary. He told what he read in the paper, but they turned it around to suit themselves, because they understood better than he did.”

The author recounts the affair in condensed form, and the reactions of the villagers: 

“Later when Zeidel came to them and told them a fresh tale, that the whole thing was a plot, that the Jewish Captain Dreyfus was innocent and that it was an intrigue of certain officers who were themselves involved, then the town became interested in the case. At once Dreyfus became a Kasrilevkite. When two people came together, he was the third.”

That final sentence is a beauty, and here are several more:

“There were two people whom Kasrilevke came to love and revere. These were Emile Zola and [Fernand] Labori [attorney for Dreyfus and Zola]. For Zola each one would gladly have died. If Zola had come to Kasrilevke the whole town would have come out to greet him; they would have borne him aloft on their shoulders.”

The story is at once amusing and deadly serious, a very Jewish mingling of tones and voices.  Sholem Aleichem was born on this date, March 2, in 1859, in Pereyaslav, Ukraine.

`After Shedding Warm Tears'

Living in upstate New York after having already lived in Ohio and Indiana, I could fairly accurately gauge the time of year, sometimes calibrated to the week, by the state of flora and fauna. Skunk cabbage peeking through the snow? Late February, early March. Trilliums in flower? Late April. Catalpas blooming? Second week of May. Living in Houston is like inhabiting a world of broken clocks. I’ve never felt so detached from the natural world, out of sync with unfamiliar rhythms. My ignorance of Texas wildlife is appalling, and I’ve done little to remedy the situation – a case, in part, of self-sabotage.

Moving to Seattle means, among other things, proximity to a more familiar temperate zone but also exotic ecosystems – tide pools and rain forests among them. For now most of my pleasure in nature is vicarious, by way of books. The boom in nature writing in recent decades, however, has amounted mostly to a lot of New Age hot air and oh-so-sensitive mysticism. Edward Hoagland has his moments. So, too, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez. But none possesses Thoreau’s intricately balanced gifts – self-taught naturalist, self-taught writer – rooted in his acute visual and auditory strength. He wrote with lyrical precision. Some of his prose, scattered in Walden and the journal, is the best written by an American. On May 29, 1857, during the loveliest time of the year in the Northeast, with the last snow melted only weeks earlier, Thoreau writes in his journal:

“The sun came out an hour or more ago, rapidly drying the foliage, and for the first time this year I noticed the little shades produced by the foliage which had expanded in the rain, and long narrow dark lines of shade along the hedge or willow-rows. It was like the first bright flashings of an eye from under dark eyelashes after shedding warm tears.”

Often Thoreau is judged cold and emotionally thwarted. True, he was no bestower of gratuitous hugs, but his writing is emotionally rich in an unconventional way. The metaphor in the passage above is complicated, lovely and a little disturbing. He expresses the human by way of the natural world. This in not unfeeling but different-feeling. Here’s a brave, plaintive passage from the journal dated March 28, 1856:

“I think to say to my friend [Emerson?], There is but one interval between us. You are on one side of it, I on the other. You know as much about it as I, -- how wide, how impassable it is. I will endeavor not to blame you. Do not blame me. There is nothing to be said about it. Recognize the truth, and pass over the intervals that are bridged.

“Farewell, my friends, my path inclines to this side the mountain, yours to that. For a long time you have appeared further and further off to me. I see that you will at length disappear altogether. For a season my path seems lonely without you. The meadows are like barren ground. The memory of me is steadily passing away from you. My path grows narrower and steeper, and the night is approaching.”

His finest biographer, Robert D. Richardson, understood and accepted this side of his subject with little compulsion to psychoanalyze him. In Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, referring to Thoreau’s cessation of poetry writing around 1852, Richardson says, beautifully:

“Strictly speaking, his poetic spring had pretty much dried up, but his prose had grown stronger and tougher with time and discipline. He no longer ignored or made light of losses, disappointments, and regrets but made them into songs – prose songs, indeed, but songs nevertheless. The writer of Walden is one of our greatest poets of loss, along with Longfellow, Frost, and Eliot, but his songs are about sustainable losses, and how not to go down beneath them.”

'Grazing Idly in a Literary Pasture'

For no good reason I’ve read very little by Donald Hall, who died recently at age eighty-nine. Partly out of guilt I resolved to read at least one of his books. Almost at random I took Principal Products of Portugal: Prose Pieces (1995) from the library shelf, because I liked the title’s non sequitur. He explains his choice of title like this:

“. . . code for things miscellaneous, unrelated, boring, and probably educational. The title should please not only for its prodigious procession of p’s but for its metrical Longfellowship, bringing back memories of ‘This is the forest primeval, the mur- ’—and rote recitation standing in the third grade doing the multiplication tables, 7s maybe, or maybe the principal products of Portugal.”

This is a man who ought to have run a blog. The thought is confirmed by a number of Hall’s essays, which usually avoid academic mummification on one side and folksy jolly-good-fellowism on the other. Hall’s voice is casual and conversational but he never whispers the lousy writer’s lament: Love me. Love me. Take “Long Live the Dead,” originally published in that well-known scholarly journal the Boston Globe. From the title you would never guess it was devoted to Hall’s love of Edward Gibbon. He starts with this:

“Really, disinterested reading—reading by whim or chance, without conscious purpose—contributes most to a writer’s interest. Grazing idly in a literary pasture, we discover manners of language alien to our habit, which allow us new invention. If we stick to what we already know, we stick to what we already do.”

As an undergraduate, Hall had tried to read Gibbon, he says, “but I never took him in.” In late middle age he tried again, and everything was different: “I took him in whole, headlong, in an ecstasy of disinterested reading. I read nothing for months but Gibbon, poleaxed by rhythms, by syntax that branched like a maple, by irony administered through sentence structure.” Hall’s experience with Gibbon resembles my own. I tried when young, succeeded at age forty-seven. Now I periodically revisit, using the notes I took as a guide. Hall and I share another late-life revelation:

“Reading Gibbon I discovered the pleasure of reading two books at once. While I studied the decline and fall of Rome, I also attended to the mind of the later eighteenth century.”

And, of course, as is always the case when rereading, another book is added to the stack, for you will recall scraps of your previous readings, and the sort of person you were. Every book in the hands of a thoughtful reader is a palimpsest. Hall says Gibbon sent him back to the Greek and Roman historians, and then to Hume, Macaulay (“whose gorgeous prose expends itself in sentimental pursuit”) and Henry Adams. Perhaps history is an old person’s preserve after all. Hall credits Gibbon with “drawing my attention to neglected possibilities of language, especially long controlled sentences in which syntax (enforcing its own drumbeat or rhythmic dance) provides or enables judgment. And Gibbon encouraged me to depart from the imitation of common speech. . . . The tone of a vocabulary establishes a vocabulary of tone.”

I enjoy reading what a poet has to say about prose. We like to assume his awareness of language and its potentials and limitations is informed, perhaps privileged. Not always the case, of course, but here’s something Hall writes in another essay in Principal Products of Portugal, devoted to Henry Adams:

“Among the great historians, Henry Adams’s style does not call attention to itself so much as the styles of Gibbon, Macaulay, and Parkman—not to mention (as I suppose) Tacitus or Thucydides. But it is no glass of water.”

`A Genteelish Toothpick Case'

In 1782, William Cowper published his first book, cumbersomely titled Poems by William Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esq. In a letter to his stalwart friend, the Rev. William Unwin, written on April Fool’s Day, Cowper thanks him for publicizing the publication: “I could not have found a better trumpeter.” When not insane, Cowper was the most wittily gracious of men. He never says “thank you” when a more baroque expression of gratitude is handy. Two sentences later, and extending the musical metaphor, Cowper writes:

“Methinks I see you with the long tube at your mouth, proclaiming to your numerous connections my poetical merits and at proper intervals levelling it at Olney, and pouring into my ear the welcome sound of their approbation. I need not encourage you to proceed, your breath will never fail in such a cause; and thus encouraged, I myself perhaps may proceed also, and when the versifying fit returns produce another volume.”

Cowper was a fragile soul. His sense of self-worth was brittle at best. Writers tend to be children when it comes to wanting attention and approval. Cowper thanks Unwin for recognizing this need. He goes on to feign indifference to Edward Thurlow of the Inner Temple, who had become Lord Chancellor in 1778. Thurlow has said nothing about Cowper’s book. He feels unjustly snubbed, calling it a “mortification” -- but pretends otherwise. Cowper writes:

 

“. . . Mr. Newton tells me that my book is likely to run, spread, and prosper; that the grave cannot help smiling, and the gay are struck with the truth of it; and that it is likely to find its way into [King George III’s] hands . . . Now, if the King should fall in love with my muse, and with you for her sake, such an event would make us ample amends for the Chancellor's indifference, and you might be the first divine that ever reached a mitre, from the shoulders of a poet.”

Cowper launches into the obligatory writer’s rant, leavened with humor, against reviewers: “[They] are such fiery Socinians that they have less charity for a man of my avowed principles than a Portuguese for a Jew.” Spend a few hours unwrapping those metaphors. Cowper’s on a roll. He suggests to Unwin that each of them write a book and have the other review it (which, of course, is how book reviewing has always worked). More shenanigans follow, and a garden update, but my favorite part of Cowper’s letter is the coda, the post scriptum not preceded by a P.S.:

“If your short stay in town will afford you an opportunity, I should be glad if you would buy me a genteelish toothpick case. I shall not think half a guinea too much for it; only it must be one that will not easily break. If second-hand, perhaps it may be the better.”

Cowper was a man of modest needs, but with a taste for accessorizing. Elsewhere, he asked for a stock-buckle, a new hat (“not a round slouch, which I abhor, but a smart well-cocked fashionable affair”) and a cuckoo clock (a penchant he shared with Wordsworth).