`Suffered to Survive in Print'

First, a digression:

“If you do not care for either novels or newspapers, you can try biography, poetry, drama, essays, or those books mysteriously classed as belles-lettres. Most of these also are bad, but they are not quite so numerous as newspapers and novels. You should be careful about poetry, as this is often poor….There are only quite a few living poets who write good poetry. It is safer to read dead ones, as only a few of these have been suffered to survive in print. As to most modern plays, these should not be read, but only seen, if that. Memoirs, essays, and travels may be amusing or (more probably) may not. Those who write of their travels are sadly apt to be discursive, and to give their private opinions, whereas all we want of them is an account of the places they saw, the inns that put them up, and the best ways to get from place to place.”

The work of Rose Macaulay is one of those clandestine pleasures too complicated to explain to most readers. She was born six months before James Joyce but her name packs no frisson of hipness or even recognition. If you tell people you admire Proust, they nod approvingly even if they’ve never advanced beyond “For a long….” Yet Macaulay (1881-1958), after her apprenticeship, never wrote a dull book and she is often very funny. Like many comic writers, she revels in her characters’ contradictions, which is one of the reasons she is a great religious writer. Her best and best-known novel is The Towers of Trebizond, published in 1956 when she was 75. Its first sentence is vintage Macaulay: “`Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.” New York Review Books returned it to print several years ago, and I wish they would do the same for The Pleasure of Ruins (1953).

I excerpted the lengthy passage above from A Casual Commentary, a collection of essays Macaulay published in 1925. The literary situation in England 80 years ago, described in “Problems of a Reader’s Life,” resembles our own except less good poetry is being written today. Earlier in the same essay she writes:

“A novel on any theme may be witty, graceful, charming, or interesting. A novel on any theme may be the reverse of all these things. It quite often is; that is the trouble. Whether it be about crime, love, psychology, international crooks, desert islands, family life, great white trails, politics, finance, young women or young men, the same heavy, witless touch is usually brought to bear on it, kneading it into the dull mass of dough that lies in piles on the library table, repelling our investigations.”

This is a sensibility you want to investigate. I had not previously read A Casual Commentary. Serendipity, both online and the old-fashioned library-traipsing sort, led me to Macaulay’s amusing little collection of essays. I mentioned this was a digression because I started by writing about my 7-year-old and his casual but persistent interest in music. He attended his first music class last weekend and, in addition to learning about Mozart and sixteenth-notes, he listened as his teacher played something on the oboe. The sound enchanted him, so I’ve been playing a seven-CD set of recordings by the late oboist Robert Bloom – Bach, Telemann, Haydn, Schumann, you name it.

Anyway, I got interested in the oboe in literature and history, and remembered Wallace Stevens’ “Asides on the Oboe,” with its mention of “If you say on the hautboy man is not enough….” That led me to etymology and the Oxford English Dictionary, where I found the linguistic precursor to the English “oboe” was the French hautboy, meaning “high wood,” used by Falstaff in King Henry IV, Part II:

“I saw it, and told John a Gaunt he beat his own name; for you might have thrust him and all his apparel into an eel-skin; the case of a treble hautboy was a mansion for him, a court, and now has he land and beefs.”

Finally, after another circuitous ramble, I found my way to Macaulay’s essay, in which, after dismissing most of contemporary literature, she writes:

“Always excepting the Oxford [English] Dictionary. If you can manage to lift one of the volumes of this from its shelf, you will find it the best reading of all, infinitely varied in it contents, and full of elegant and brief extracts from the English literature of all times.”

As I said, a sensibility worth investigating.

`The Excellent Foppery of the World'

In January my 20-year-old son will spend 10 days in Israel, his first visit to a foreign country other than Canada, one of the safer places in the world. He might have chosen a less dangerous destination but I understand his reasons for going. For him, the trip could prove life-changing, though I feel a flash of fear as I write those words and understand their ambiguities. Israel is a nation of 5.9 million surrounded by 292 million Arabs, most of whom don’t recognize their right to exist and many of whom wish to see them exterminated. None of this is new. For almost 60 years, Israel has been the target of inexplicable savagery. Until now these facts have resided comfortably in mental files labeled “History, “Anti-Semitism” and “Evil.” Like any reader of the news, I wince at the daily barbarism and move on to more important – that is, more self-centered -- matters. Suddenly, my son could turn into news.

On Sunday night, as though to torment myself, I read The Roots of Evil, by John Kekes, a philosophy professor retired from the state University of New York at Albany. His message, his moral anatomy of humanity, is astute, thorough and utterly lacking in comfort. As to basics:

“Part of what makes human actions evil, then, is that they cause serious harm and lack excuse.”

Evildoers, of course, will deny the truth of that final phrase because they, like all humans, possess a capacity for rationalization, and effortlessly justify their foulest acts. Evil is its own justification, just as virtue once was its own reward. We inhabit an age when psychology and politics, not individual volition, are the acceptable explanations for evil. Kekes will have none of it:

“Attributing evil to injustice, poverty, or a noxious ideology is thus to misunderstand it. For the deeper and prior question is why adverse social conditions exist. And the answer must be that they exist because of the evil tendencies of those who create them. It is evil that explains adverse social conditions rather than the other way around.

“If the roots of evil are psychological, not social, then changing social conditions cannot do more than close off a particular expression of evil. Unless the psychological causes are themselves changed, other ways of expressing evil will undoubtedly be found, since its particular expressions are incidental to the underlying motivation.”

This would have made sense to Shakespeare. When Macbeth sends thugs to murder Banquo, he has already convinced them their victim is the author of all their troubles. Macbeth is not crazy. His cunning is rivaled only by his savage ambition. The thugs need only encouragement, and Macbeth obliges with fictions of bitterness, self-pity and revenge. The second murderer, speaking for every frustrated little nobody, says:

“I am one, my liege,
Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world
Hath so incensed that I am reckless what
I do to spite the world.”

That’s the logic of suicide bombers, and it’s sufficient to get the job done. Evil is just that homely and unglamorous. Kekes, too, sheds light on evil with Shakespeare’s aid. Without comment, he cites Edmund’s great speech from King Lear, Act I, Scene II. I return the phrase Kekes elides:

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune [, -- often the surfeit of our own behavior, --] we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers [OED: “A deceiver, a cheat; one who deceives by trickery; sometimes, a traitor.”] by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience to planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man.”

Shakespeare, too, offers little comfort. All of us, potentially, are whoremasters, and when we have children we become vulnerable to them in ways previously unimaginable. Kekes’ final admonitory words are chilling: “…human motivation and the contingencies of life make evil a permanent threat to human well-being.”

`A Wild Flower Planted Among Our Wheat'

Besides regulation gear, what does a soldier choose to carry in his knapsack? How does he balance burden and benefit? In October 1915, when Isaac Rosenberg headed for the Western Front, he packed two 17th-century volumes -- John Donne’s poems and Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici. Born in Bristol, England, in 1890, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Rosenberg first read Donne in 1911, and the Metaphysical poet’s influence is already discernable in his pre-war poems. This defies conventional literary understanding, which assures us that Donne’s literary reputation was moribund before his post-war rehabilitation by T.S. Eliot, and that the Great War poets – Rosenberg, Owen, Sassoon, Sorley, Blunden and Thomas – were heirs to the Romantic tradition. Rosenberg embodies a premature literary tradition truncated before it could flourish. In a 2000 interview collected in In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland, Michael Longley says:

“Pound and Eliot are not among my favourite poets….How many people in the world actually enjoy them?…Really great English poets like Edward Thomas and Wildfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg who died in the trenches would have made it more difficult for Pound and Eliot, more complicated.…The war poems of Owen and Rosenberg ring out in my ear like modern versions of Sophocles and Aeschylus. Utterly modern. Huge. Who care if they’re `Modernist?’”

Longley is being provocative but not merely provocative. Pound is important but I suspect few actually enjoy his work. It’s more a matter of literary obligation, a rounding out of one’s literacy. Eliot is another story, but let’s concede Longley’s point. Had Rosenberg and the other Great War poets – especially Thomas – survived the slaughter, what we recognize today as Modernism might have worn a very different, more human face. Donne’s influence, via Rosenberg, and Keats’, via Owen and Sassoon, might have mutated into unimaginable forms. In an essay that appeared shortly before The Waste Land, Eliot claimed Donne and George Herbert “feel their thought as immediately as the odor of a rose. . . . A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.” I detect something similar in Rosenberg and his poetic brothers in arms. In June 1916, Rosenberg wrote “Break of Day in the Trenches,” a poem that mingles whimsy and horror in a manner new to Western poetry, while recalling Donne’s “The Flea.” It was published the following December in the American journal Poetry:

“The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver--what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe –
Just a little white with the dust.”

The “queer sardonic rat” with his “cosmopolitan sympathies” is a witty buffer against shell-shock and raw horror, and perhaps something of a self-portrait. In a letter he wrote from the front in the summer of 1916 to a friend in England, Rosenberg makes clear his feelings about “romantic” war poetry:

“I did not like Rupert Brooke’s begloried sonnets for the same reason. What I mean is second hand phrases `lambent fires’ etc takes from its reality and strength. It should be approached in a colder way, more abstract, with less of the million feelings everyone feels; or all these should be concentrated in one distinguished emotion. Walt Whitman in `Beat, drum, beat,’ has said the noblest thing on war.”

A long-time advocate for Rosenberg’s work is Geoffrey Hill. One of his first published poems, “For Isaac Rosenberg,” appeared in the journal Isis in 1952, when Hill was 20 and still a student at Keble College, Oxford:

“Princes dying with damp curls
In the accomplishment of fame
Keep, within the minds of girls,
A bright imperishable name –
And no one breaks upon their game.

“Yet men who mourn their hero's fall,
Laying him in tradition's bed –
With high-voiced chantings and the tall
Complacent candles at his head –
Still leave much carefully unsaid.

“When probing Hamlet was aware
That Death in a worn body lay
Cramped beneath the lobby-stair –
(Whose mystery was burnt away
Through the intensity of decay) –

“It followed, with ironic sense,
That he himself, who ever saw
Beneath the skin of all pretence,
Should have been carried from the floor
With shocked, tip-toeing drums before.

“With ceremony thin as this
We tidy death; make life as neat
As an unquiet Chrysalis
That is a symbol of defeat:
A worm in its own winding-sheet...”

Perhaps Hill is heir to several diverse traditions, in ways convention-minded critics don’t recognize. In “For Isaac Rosenberg,” we hear echoes of Donne, Shakespeare, Eliot and Rosenberg (for whom Eliot expressed public admiration). Rosenberg was killed near Arras, France, on April Fool’s Day, 1918, while on dawn patrol. He was 27 and his body was never recovered. Edward Thomas had been killed nearby almost one year earlier. I’m reminded of something Michael Oakeshott wrote in one of his rare ventures into literary matters. This is from “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind”:

“Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.”

`Need One Really Read More?'

Guilt by association is not always unfair. When certain readers and critics trumpet a book, it amounts to the opposite of an imprimatur: You can assume it is error-ridden and a waste of your precious time. Have Gabriel Josipovici or Terry Eagleton ever liked anything worth reading? Only a brave critic points out such things, and Joseph Epstein is a hero to honest, discerning readers everywhere. On Friday, in the Wall Street Journal, Epstein reviewed How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, by Pierre Bayard, and he made me laugh out loud. I probably won’t read Bayard’s book, but Epstein’s review makes that task unnecessary:

“Mr. Bayard argues that the gaps in our reading shouldn't distress us. His thesis helps one own up to the fact that there are many books that one is supposed to admire but cannot. My own list would include Lolita, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, the novels of Hermann Broch, most of Walter Benjamin, all of Günter Grass. Then there are those writers who seem to have existed less to be read than to have had Susan Sontag write essays about them: Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Michel Leiris. To the not reading of books, to reverse Ecclesiastes, there is no end.

“As Mr. Bayard notes, one doesn't always have to read a book to grasp its value. If certain critics, for instance, are enthusiastic about a book, that is all I need to know. I cannot count how much time the ecstatic endorsement of books on the part of John Leonard, by instantly putting me off reading them, has saved me over the years. Authors, like restaurants, should perhaps be given a second but not a third chance. Having read one or two books by a writer who disappoints, need one really read more?”

I don’t even agree with Epstein on all of his specifics. I love Nabokov, Musil, Broch and Sebald, but Barthes, Leiris and Sontag were frauds with inexplicably loyal followings. Epstein’s point is that most bookchat amounts to posing and politics, an elaborate and ultimately sterile courtship ritual. Books should sustain us and give us pleasure. Leave bad tastes and ideology to grad students and the terminally hip. Let’s give the final word to Samuel Johnson, from his review of Soame Jenyns' A Free Enquiry Into the Nature and Origin of Evil:

“The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”

`There is Nothing He Desires Not to Know'

The best teachers wish only to outlive their usefulness. They have done so when their students are equipped to live and think autonomously, which does not mean in a manner ruled by self will alone, or in a moral or intellectual vacuum. Rather, the teacher’s lessons have been become second nature, including the lesson that learning is never complete and judgment never without flaw. In short, we need frequent reminders. A teacher (in the broadest sense) once told me: “You’re not a slow learner; you’re a quick forgetter.” In “A Premonition, of the Title and Use of Characters,” his 1608 introduction to Characters of Vertues and Vices [original spellings retained throughout], Joseph Hall urges readers to heed the wisdom of the ancients:

“The Divines of the old Heathens were their Morall Philosophers: These received the Acts of an inbred law, in the Sinai of Nature, and delivered them with many expositions to the multitude: There were the Overseers of manners, Correctors of vices, Directors of lives, Doctors of virtue, which yet taught their people the body of their naturall Divinity, not after one manner….drawing out the true lineaments of every virtue and vice, so lively, that who saw the medals, might know the face: which Art they significantly tearmed Charactery.”

Hall’s teacher here, his “Morall Philosopher,” is Theophrastus, founder of the genre Hall is introducing to English. Theophrastus was Greek and lived from 370 until about 285 BCE. What little we know of him comes from Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers, written 400 years later. His real name was Tyrtamus. According to legend, “Theophrastus” was an honorific bestowed by Aristotle, meaning “divine expression,” because of his gift for conversation. Theophrastus was a student of Aristotle, and may have derived the his notion of emblematic “characters” from the latter’s analysis of character in Book IV of the Nicomachean Ethics (for instance, the marvelously named megalopsuchos, Aristotle’s man whose actions indicate largeness of spirit). In “The Prooeme” [defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “An introductory discourse at the beginning of a piece of writing; a preface, preamble.”], Hall acknowledges his debt to Theophrastus:

“This Worke shall save the labor of exhorting, and disswasion. I have here done it as I could, following that ancient Master of Morality, who thought this the fittest taske for the ninety and ninth yeare of his age, and the profitablest monument that he could leave for a fare-well to his Grecians.”

In distilled characters, in “types,” Hall embodies 11 virtues and 15 vices – an interesting and probably inevitable disparity. He follows the method articulated by Theophrastus almost 2,000 years earlier, in the Greek’s “Proem” to The Characters:

“Often before now have I applied my thoughts to the puzzling question — one, probably, which will puzzle me for ever — why it is that, while all Greece lies under the same sky and all the Greeks are educated alike, it has befallen us to have characters so variously constituted. For a long time, Polycles, I have been a student of human nature; I have lived ninety years and nine; I have associated, too, with many and diverse natures; and, having observed side by side, with great closeness, both the good and the worthless among men, I conceived that I ought to write a book about the practices in life of either sort.”

Theophratus, almost two and a half millennia ago, is puzzled by a matter that remains puzzling to us: Why are people so various? Why are some good and others less so? As moderns, heirs of Proust and Freud (and Shakespeare), we accept that most men and women embody a spectrum of moral qualities, and this spectrum can shift over a lifetime. Some will object that “Characters” are too static, too pure an embodiment of a single quality. Of course, this is true but the form is instructive. A character without moral or psychological nuance offers a more readily useful litmus test against which to evaluate ourselves. In Characters of Vertues and Vices, Hall distils 11 virtues and 15 vices – probably an inevitable disparity. In “Of the Wise Man,” he writes:

“There is nothing that he desires not to know; but most and first himselfe: and not so much his own strength, as his weaknesses; neither is his knowledge reduced to discourse, but practice. Hee is a skilfull Logician, not by nature so much as use; his working mind doth nothing all his time but make syllogisms, and draw out conclusions, every thing that he sees and heares, serves for one of the premises: with these he cares first to informe himselfe, then to direct others.”

Readers who know their Seneca and Montaigne will hear familiar echoes. This, too, will sound familiar, on the teaching theme mentioned above, from “He is a Happy Man”:

“That hath learn’d to read himself more than all books; and hath so taken out this lesson, that he can never forget it; That after many traverses of thoughts, is grown to know what he may trust to, and stands now equally armed for all events.”

On to the vices. Here is an excerpt from “Of the Vaine-glorious,” with whom the blogosphere, among other places, is overrun:

“All his humour rises up into the froth of ostentation; which if it once settle, falls downe into a narrow roome. If the excesse be in the understanding part, all his wit is in print; the Presse hath left his head empty; yea, not only what he had, but what he could borrow without leave….To conclude, he is ever on the Stage, and acts still a glorious part abroad, when no man caries a baser heart, no man is more sordid and carelesse at home. He is a Spanish Souldier on an Italian Theater; a Bladder full of wind, a skin full of words, a fooles wonder, and a wise mans foole.”

The volume I am using is titled Heaven upon Earth and Characters of Vertues and Vices, edited, and with an introduction and notes, by Rudolf Kirk, published in 1948 by Rutgers University Press. Occasionally, I detect traces of Theophrastus and Hall in the witty, compact lines of J.V. Cunningham, whose great theme, the otherness of others and our responsibility to respect that otherness, is suited to the genre. Here is an epigram from 1944:

“This Humanist whom know beliefs constrained
Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.”

And here is “The Solipsist,” from 1943-44:

“There is no moral treason;
Others are you. Your hence
Is personal consequence;
Desire is reason.

“There is no moral strife.
None falls in the abysm
Who dwells there, solipsism
His way of life.”

Waves and Particles

The professor of computational and applied mathematics celebrated his 90th birthday in September, an accomplishment that seems to hold little interest for him, perhaps because the focus of his research is probability theory. His father lived to age 85. His mother died three years ago, 13 days short of her 105th birthday. The professor became an “emeritus” almost a decade ago but still reports to his campus office most weekdays at 8:30 a.m. On his desk are the current issues of Foreign Affairs and Macworld.

On his resume I noticed he earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering here at Rice University in 1938. Five years later he received a bachelor of divinity degree from the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. He preached for several years in Dallas, and also rode the circuit of small country churches, at the same time he was teaching and studying at Rice, eventually earning his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1952. I asked him about his parallel lives, his balance of faith and science, which for some would signify inconsistency or, worse, hypocrisy.

“It changed, but I didn’t lose my religion,” he said. “That would imply an inadequate notion of what science is and does, and a limited view of what religion is. I’m a bigger person than that.”

So are millions of others, and so was R.S. Thomas. The Welsh poet-priest devoted much thought and many poems, beginning in the late 1940s, to the purported antagonism between science and religion. Thomas famously rejected the abject worship of technology, and the spiritual and environmental damage it caused, but he was sympathetic to science and more knowledgeable about it than most 20th-century poets. Here’s an example from one of his interviews:

“The West has been under the thumb of reason for a very long time. Because of this we divide everything into A and not-A. Nothing can be A and not-A at the same time. However, contemporary physics contradicts this by showing how matter is both a wave and a particle at the same time, and by describing the strange behaviour of one of the elements of life, the electron. We are gradually beginning to see how the scientific mind works. Some of the most abstruse and complex problems of nature have been solved, not by means of a process of reasoning, but as a result of a sudden intuition which was closer to the vision of an artist or a saint than anything else….So, in the long run, what emerges from the vision of contemporary physics is a picture of the world as a living being of which we all form a part. This is the unity of being of which we must be aware, if we wish to survive.”

Thomas insisted he was suspicious not of the scientific method (his 1986 book of poems was titled Experimenting with an Amen), but of what he called “applied science as manifest[ed] in technology.” In another interview he said:

“So it is not pure science and religion that are irreconcilable….If pure science is an approach to ultimate reality, it can differ from religion only in some of its methods.”

The nonagenarian professor had never heard of Thomas, and said he didn’t know much about theoretical physics. For a recent revised edition of a textbook on probability theory he published more than 40 years ago, he had to brush up on combinatorial analysis and set theory, but what’s really engaging him is a close textual analysis he has undertaken of the New Testament, augmented by the findings of recent scholarship.

“What we’re learning about is the kind of world Jesus was living in,” he said. “It was a pretty primitive place.”

`Gratitude for the Beauty of Those Things that Sustain Us'

We sometimes learn of new writers – new to us, I mean – unexpectedly, in unlikely contexts or from resolutely unliterary sources. I came to Rimbaud via Bob Dylan, and Eric Hoffer by way of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In the Autumn issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple writes about the recent spate of bestselling atheist tracts by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and others. Like Dalrymple, I am not a believer, but the shrill self-righteousness of these self-proclaimed rationalists is annoying and offensive. Their arguments are at once flawed and beside the point, and Harris in particular comes off like an adolescent shocked and thrilled to learn that L-I-V-E backwards spells E-V-I-L. Dalrymple dispatches them summarily: “If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior, neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly.”

In contrast to their smug, angry, prideful spirit, Dalrymple cites the still-lifes of the 17th-century Spanish painter Juan Sánchez Cotán:

“Even if you did not know that Sánchez Cotán was a seventeenth-century Spanish priest, you could know that the painter was religious: for this picture is a visual testimony of gratitude for the beauty of those things that sustain us. Once you have seen it, and concentrated your attention on it, you will never take the existence of the humble cabbage—or of anything else—quite so much for granted, but will see its beauty and be thankful for it. The painting is a permanent call to contemplation of the meaning of human life, and as such it arrested people who ordinarily were not, I suspect, much given to quiet contemplation.”

That phrase is arresting: “gratitude for the beauty of those things that sustain us.” One need not be religious in a conventional sense to recognize our obligation to honor the world in a spirit of reverence. Not to do so is to court misery for ourselves and, more importantly, for others. On a visit to the country house of friends, Dalrymple finds a library, accumulated by generations of churchmen, of works by 17th- and 18th-century Anglican divines. Among them was Joseph Hall (1574-1656), Shakespeare’s junior by 10 years, who outlived the playwright by 40 years. It’s to my shame that his name was new to me, for his prose is at once precise, detailed and spirited, an earthier, less ethereal version of Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations. Dalrymple quotes amply from Hall’s work, and I was immediately hooked.

In my university library I found a useful volume edited by Frank Livingstone Huntley and published in 1981 by the Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies. The full title is cumbersome but exact: Bishop Joseph Hall and Protestant Meditation in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study With the Texts of The Art of Divine Meditation (1606) and Occasional Meditations (1633). I skipped Huntley’s introduction and related apparatus and stayed up Tuesday night reading the 80 pages of Occasional Meditations. It consists of 140 brief contemplations of homely objects or events. They resemble still-life paintings, though like Hall’s contemporaries, the metaphysical poets, he reads meaning, usually divine, in the humble. In fact, everything is charged with meaning in Hall’s world. Here is Meditation XXVIII, titled “Upon the Sight of a Crow Pulling off Wool from the Back of a Sheep”:

“How well these creatures know whom they may be bold with! The crow durst not do this to a wolf or a mastiff; the known simplicity of this innocent beast gives advantage to this presumption.

“Meekness of spirit commonly draws on injuries; the cruelest of ill natures usually seeks out those, not who deserve the worst, but who will bear most.

“Patience and mildness of spirit is ill bestowed where it exposes a man to wrong and insultation [in a footnote, Huntley glosses this wonderful archaism as “the act of insulting”]. Sheepish dispositions are best to others, worst to themselves. I could be willing to take injuries, but I will not be guilty of provoking them by lenity. For harmlessness let me go more a sheep, but whosoever will be tearing my fleece let him look to himself!”

Hall combines naturalist observation, psychology (human and otherwise) and a parable-like narrative. His prose is admirably clean and good-natured. Whose company would you choose – Hall’s or Richard Dawkins’? The latter famously described faith as “lethally dangerous nonsense.” In Meditation LXXI, “Upon the Sight of a Great Library” [which Huntley tells us was probably the Bodleian at Oxford], Hall writes:

“What a world of wit is here packed up together! I know not whether this sight doth more dismay or comfort me. It dismays me to think that here is so much that I cannot know; it comforts me to think that this variety yields so good helps to know what I should. There is no truer word than that of Solomon, `There is no end of making many books’ [Ecclesiastes 12:12]; this sight verifies it.”

ADDENDUM: Please see, in the November issue of New English Review, Dalrymple's essay, a sequel of sorts to the one cited above, "A Strange Alliance." The same issue includes "The Cult of Non-Judgmentalism," a review of Dalrymple's In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas, by Rebecca Bynum.

Happy Birthdays

I remember figuring out in college that October, not April, is the true month of poetry. Today, Halloween, is the birthday of John Keats, born Oct. 31, 1795. Here are some others:

Wallace Stevens: Oct. 2, 1879
Flann O’Brien: Oct. 5, 1911
James Whitcomb Riley: Oct. 7, 1853
Marina Tsvetaeva: Oct. 9, 1892
Eugenio Montale: Oct. 12, 1896
E.E. Cummings: Oct. 14, 1894
Publius Vergilius Maro: Oct. 15, 70 BCE
Mikhail Lermontov: Oct. 15, 1814
Oscar Wilde: Oct. 16, 1854
Les Murray: Oct. 17, 1938
Arthur Rimbaud: Oct. 20, 1854
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Oct. 21, 1772
John Berryman, Oct. 25, 1914
Andrew Motion: Oct. 26, 1952
Dylan Thomas: Oct. 27, 1914
Sylvia Plath: Oct. 27, 1932
Zbigniew Herbert: Oct. 29, 1924
Paul Valery: Oct. 30, 1871
Ezra Pound: Oct. 30, 1885

I could have stretched the category “poet” and included Groucho Marx, Art Tatum, Sir Thomas Browne and Evelyn Waugh, but I figured I had already stretched it enough by including Riley, Thomas and Plath.

`Wave From the Fat Book Again'

William Meredith, who died last May at age 88, was a fine poet who counted John Berryman among his closest friends. About a year after Berryman’s death by suicide in January 1972, I remember reading Meredith’s poem about his friend, “In Loving Memory of the Late Author of Dream Songs,” in the Saturday Review. I was 19 when Berryman died and his was probably the first public death I took personally, as though I had known him. Meredith’s poem expressed some of the hurt and incomprehension I felt, but also my gratitude for the work Berryman left us, especially The Dream Songs. That’s the spirit in which Meredith ends his elegy:

“I do what's in character, I look for things
To praise on the riverbanks and I praise them.
We are all relicts, of some great joy, wearing black,
But this book is full of marvelous songs.
Don't let us contract your dread recidivism
And start falling from our own iron railings.
Wave from the fat book again, make us wave back.”

I’ve been skimming Poems Are Hard to Read, a collection of Meredith’s essays and reviews published in 1991. Three pieces are devoted to Berryman – a review of 77 Dream Songs and two elegiac memoirs – but his traces are everywhere. Meredith met him shortly after World War II, at Princeton, but their friendship blossomed in 1962 at Bread Loaf. Berryman was burning with Dream Songs, which wouldn’t be published in book form until 1964. In a piece titled almost identically to the poem mentioned above, “In Loving Memory of the Late Author of the Dream Songs,” Meredith writes:

“That evening was the first time I heard “Dream Songs” read, though I was to hear them at all hours for the next several weeks. Once he came to my room at 4 a.m. for what was supposed to be a private reading of a song just finished. The acoustics of the big wooden house made it an unpopular public event. When John read aloud, the etymology of the word aloud was brought forcibly home.”

Meredith moves on to their final visit, in May 1971. Without denying or excusing Berryman’s alcoholic self-centeredness and histrionics, he writes with love and tenderness of his friend, of their temperamental affinities despite Meredith’s reticence and seemingly good-natured sense of moderation. They shared “a yearning for decorum, even for old-fashioned manners. I’m not speaking about our social behavior, which is dubious in both cases, but about a social ideal. At heart, Berryman was a courtly man, though usually (like most of us) he could act out only a parody of that. The forms of behavior that attracted him were as traditional as the forms of prosody.”

Meredith wrote about Berryman directly in at least two other poems, besides the one cited above. “John and Anne” is preceded by an excerpt from Berryman’s “The Development of Anne Frank,” an essay collected in The Freedom of the Poet:

“I would call the subject of Anne Frank’s Diary even more mysterious than St. Augustine’s, and describe it as: the conversion of a child into a person …. It took place under very special circumstances which – let us now conclude as she concluded – though superficially unfavorable, were in fact highly favorable to it; she was forced to mature, in order to survive; the hardest challenge, let’s say, that a person can face without defeat is the best for him.”

In light of Berryman’s own compromised maturity, self-sabotaging and ultimately his suicide, these words are heartbreaking. He must have been an impossible human being, as drunks are, yet Meredith, Saul Bellow, Donald Justice, Edward Hoagland and Robert Lowell, among many others, loved him and have attested to his charm, generosity, brilliance and humor. Meredith recalls that on the night before their final meeting, Berryman had “endured a crisis” in his hotel room in Hartford, Conn. The experience is described in a poem, “The Facts & Issues,” published in Berryman’s posthumous collection, Delusions, Etc. In Berryman’s telling, the crisis sounds more spiritual than merely emotional or biochemical. The poem begins:

“I really believe He’s here all over this room
In a motor hotel in Wallace Stevens’ town.”

Meredith says of this great, wracked poem: “It ends with the baffling spectacle of a man fending off torrents of a grace that has become unbearable. It is an heroic response to that crisis, as I think his death was too.”

Obviously, like Meredith, I judge Berryman a major poet, probably the major poet of their embattled generation, which included Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke and Delmore Schwartz. Earlier in the same essay, Meredith puts Berryman in an interesting poetic context, one that seems self-evident to me but will irk some readers:

“It is a curious fact about modern poetry that many of its large figures have been men of enormous intelligence (we couldn’t have made good use of Tennyson) supported by enormous reading, and that they want to restore rather than overthrow traditions. With our lesser poets, it has mostly been the other way around – average intelligence, average or below-average literacy, and enormous radicalism. The radicalism often seems, by comparison with Pound or Auden or Berryman or Lowell, naïve.”

He might be describing most of American poetry today. All of the poets cited by Meredith were scholars of various sorts, brilliant men for whom literature was a matter of blood and conviction. With few exceptions – Geoffrey Hill comes to mind -- their species appears to be almost extinct.

A Nation of Poets

My vision of England is large, vivid and uncorrupted by experience. I have never been there. For me, England is a land compounded of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Johnson, Keats, Dickens, Auden and a hundred other writers. I am its heir not only because English is my inheritance but because England’s writers, in particular her poets, remain unsurpassed. Chief among their accomplishments is the collective fabrication of “England,” which I intend as praise, not mockery. As an American, which makes me part of another collective work-in-progress, I am the grateful offspring of “England's green and pleasant land.” With thoughtful pride, Bryan Appleyard has written “Poetry and the English Imagination,” a movingly learned, non-academic hymn of praise for his nation’s poetic tradition. It appears in the Autumn 2007 issue of The Liberal, and it’s the best thing I’ve read online in weeks:

“Poetry has no serious contenders as the English national art. Ah, it is often said, but Shakespeare wrote plays. And so he did. But consider these plays. Hamlet is a weird drama made magnificent by a torrent of peerless poetry, and I have always thought of it as a long poem whose cosmic structure seems to pivot on the words `We defy augury.’ Shakespeare is the greatest playwright on earth, but he is heaven’s poet. And the list of his poet-compatriots – Chaucer, Browning, Dryden, Wordsworth, Clare, Donne, Auden, Tennyson, Keats, Pope, Herbert, etc. etc. – closes the case. We are a nation defined by and consisting of poets. To deny this is to deny England.”

Think of John of Gaunt’s death speech in the second act of Richard II, moving even to an American, in which lament for England’s decay -- “This other Eden, demi-paradise” -- is already being sounded:

“This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leas’d out – I die pronouncing it –
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of wat’ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds;
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!”

Appleyard is no jingoist. Amusingly, honestly, he admits an “unfortunate fact: in the 20th Century, English poetry became American. After Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, England produced only one further uncontestably great poet – W.H. Auden. Ted Hughes seldom works for me and Philip Larkin is superbly second rank. But Eliot, though an aspirant Englishman, never stopped being American.” In his magnanimity, Appleyard goes on to overvalue John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, American nobodys, but neglects England’s own Geoffrey Hill, the supreme poet in the language since Yeats, Eliot and Auden. And don’t forget R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet/priest, and Basil Bunting. Appleyard continues:

“`Poetry’, wrote Auden, `makes nothing happen’ – but, he added, `It survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.’” Poetry is England’s way of happening.

“And yet few now know this. Poetry is barely taught and, when it is, the emphasis is always on the ‘accessible’. What on earth does this mean? That the poem should wallow only in the familiar? Children exposed to such supposed difficulty at an early age have no trouble with real poetry. My daughter understood Stevens’ ‘The Rabbit as King of the Ghosts’ better at ten than I did at 45.”

The Auden line, from his great elegy for Yeats, is often contested, though I take it literally when referring to political or social change. Bullets and occasionally even ballots may change things, but not poetry. The late American poet William Meredith takes Auden to task in “Talking Back (To W.H. Auden),” arguing that poetry’s power is circumscribed but undeniable:

“What it makes happen is small things,
Sometimes, to some, in an area
Already pretty well taken
Care of by the senses.”

Meredith means the power of metaphor to augment the senses. To Auden he says:

“The exact details of our plight
In your poems, order revealed
By the closest looking, are things
I’m changed by and had never seen,
Might never have seen, but for them.”

Try to imagine your emotional, sensory and intellectual lives without the gift of English poetry. This “thought experiment,” as Appleyard might call it, would leave us hobbled, crabbed, hard of hearing, nearly blind and dumb. There are lessons here for Americans. The nation is awash with certified college graduates who have never read Shakespeare, Milton and Keats, but who likewise know nothing of Whitman, Dickinson and Stevens. Appleyard is generous in celebrating jazz and movies as America’s gift to the world, as poetry is England’s. He laments England’s burgeoning illiteracy but, with the aid of an American poet, suggests a solution to our “shameful conquest” of ourselves:

“Nobody can understand England without some sense of her poetry. That means, of course, that very few now understand England. Perhaps that is the way it must be: `The roar of time plunging unchecked through the sluices / Of the days’ (Ashbery) must sweep all away. But, though the signs are not good, English poetry is buried too deep in English soil ever to be quite eradicated; and so, like Hamlet, we must defy augury and send the brats home to learn at least a sonnet a night.”

`Passionate Men'

That one man has been the subject of the two finest biographies in the language is evidence of his excellence as a writer and human being. It also suggests he inspires excellence in others. I suppose worthless biographies of Samuel Johnson have been written, but they remain unknown and unread by me. James Boswell and W. Jackson Bate give the lie to the notion that biography is a strictly parasitic art. Readers with little knowledge of Johnson or his work can enjoy and learn from The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) and Samuel Johnson (1977) as works of literary art. Bate (1918-1999) also wrote indispensable lives of Keats and Coleridge. Like Johnson, he possessed a finely calibrated moral compass, which is why the following story is so disappointing. Peter Breslau, in Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, relates an anecdote told by Harry Levin, the Harvard professor, pioneering Joyce scholar and author of The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (1958):

"Stevens was very conscientious about coming up for the Visiting Committee meeting [at Harvard] though in the questioning of the department he never said anything. He was one of the appointed members; we always had some writers and scholars. On one occasion, after dinner and after the speeches and questions at the Harvard Club, we adjourned to the rathskeller. A relatively small group, two or three people in the department and Stevens. He was really very glad to have a stiff drink or two. I have the impression that because of his shyness, he sometimes relied on this to break the ice. At any rate, he then began to talk, and he told us one or two smoking-car stories. They wouldn’t be considered anything today, but in those days they might have been considered slightly risqué. My colleague Walter Jackson Bate was there. He’d always had a very good sense of humor, but with each joke he grew grimmer. Stevens finally said, `I’m afraid I’m not amusing you, Mr Bate.’ And Bate, who was then very much the enfant terrible of the department, said, `You’ll have to be funnier than that to make me laugh, Stevens!’ Poor Stevens was quite humiliated, got very red, and stopped talking."

Context here is minimal. Was Bate under the influence? Was this typically priggish behavior or an aberration? Did he and Stevens have a history of antagonism? I once worked with a reporter who had studied under Bate at Harvard, more than 30 years after the unpleasantness Levin describes, and the scholar he knew was always a gentleman and a gentle person. I wonder: Had Bate, at the time of the Stevens contretemps, read this passage from The Rambler #11, published April 24, 1750:

"There is in the world a certain class of mortals, known, and contentedly known, by the appellation of passionate men, who imagine themselves entitled by that distinction to be provoked on every slight occasion, and to vent their rage in vehement and fierce vociferations, in furious menaces and licentious reproaches. Their rage, indeed, for the most part, fumes away in outcries of injury and protestations of vengeance, and seldom proceeds to actual violence, unless a drawer or linkboy falls in their way; but they interrupt the quiet of those that happen to be within the reach of their clamours, obstruct the course of conversation, and disturb the enjoyment of society."

The story, of course, doesn’t detract from my admiration for Bate and his work, though it does boost my fondness for Stevens. It’s nice to know the inscrutable poet/insurance executive could unbutton his vest, enjoy drinks with the boys and tell off-color stories. In other words, when not writing poetry he was almost like the rest of us.

`The Fiction of Happiness'

The elementary schools attended by my younger sons, ages 4 and 7, held Fall Festivals on Saturday. Houston, of course, has no fall in the strict sense, merely less humidity and fewer mosquitoes, though I’ve observed some Houstonians mark the season by stringing their houses with Christmas lights, assuming they took them down last year. Leaves remain green. One maple at the entrance to our subdivision is turning yellow, but from disease. In the afternoon, we found the cast-off skin of a three-foot snake on the side of our house.

The festivals consist largely of games, food, loud children and louder adults. Among the games is a variation on bowling in which the pins are upright gourds and the balls are small pumpkins. Every bowler, regardless of prowess, is rewarded with a plastic trinket manufactured in China, so no tender sensibilities are bruised. My kids enjoyed several variations on Mr. Bouncety Bounce – inflatable plastic cages in which children ready themselves for the mosh pit. Music was provided by a band whose members wore pinstripe suits, and whose playlist was unconventional: “Tiny Bubbles,” “Mustang Sally,” “Poke Salad Annie” and “To Sir, With Love,” among others. The cuisine was narrow: nachos, Tootsie Rolls, sausage-on-a-stick and Sno cones. I had some water.

Most distressing were the crowds in heated pursuit of amusement – weeping children, angry parents. The latter appear to be getting ever younger and wearing more tattoos and less clothing. I’ll give the last word to Dr. Johnson, from Idler #18, published Aug. 12, 1758:

“To every place of entertainment we go with expectation and desire of being pleased; we meet others who are brought by the same motives; no one will be the first to own the disappointment; one face reflects the smile of another, till each believes the rest delighted, and endeavours to catch and transmit the circulating rapture. In time, all are deceived by the cheat to which all contribute. The fiction of happiness is propagated by every tongue, and confirmed by every look, till at last all profess the joy which they do not feel, consent to yield to the general delusion, and, when the voluntary dream is at an end, lament that bliss is of so short a duration.”

`Give Me Books'

The Friends of the Fondren Library, at Rice University where I work, held their annual book sale on Friday, thoughtfully coinciding it with my birthday. As I entered the Great Hall in Rice Memorial Center, where long rows of tables were packed with books and already mobbed by readers, I felt familiar symptoms – sweaty forehead and palms, tingling scalp, dry mouth. Conspicuously, my heart pounded. This is what hunters feel when they take to the field.

I reconnoitered for 45 minutes, trying to appear nonchalant, and bagged my biggest catch almost immediately: the boxed, two-volume set of The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, edited by Hyder Edward Rollins, published in 1958 by Harvard University Press. Finally, I can give away the paltry paperback selection I’ve had for years. Its original price was $20, the Friends charged twice that amount, and I would have happily paid more for volumes graced with some of my favorite prose, by one of the heroes of the language. This comes from a letter Keats wrote his sister Fanny on Aug. 28, 1819:

“Give me Books, fruit, french wine and fine whether [sic] and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know…”

Note that Keats capitalizes “Books” but leaves “french” in the lower case. Here’s what else I found:

The Modern Library edition of The City of God, by St. Augustine, with an introduction by Thomas Merton. The Penguin paperback I’ve had for 34 years is held together with a rubber band.

The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, by Henry James. This was edited by John Sweeney, and published in 1956, in London, by Rupert Hart-Davis. Across from the title page is a photograph of James, taken by Alice Boughton, I had never seen before. The Master stands in front of a small portrait, hanging on a wall, of what appears to be a man in profile. James’ nose is perhaps 10 inches from the canvas. He wears a long coat and a tall black hat is on his head. With hands behind his back, he holds gloves and a cane or walking stick. In profile, and except for the clothes, James resembles a Roman emperor

A hardcover copy of Samuel Johnson: A Biography (1977), by John Wain, which I have read several times but never owned.

A first edition of James Boswell: The Early Years 1740-1769 (1966), by Frederick A. Pottle.

Another prize, my favorite after the Keats: a first edition of Robert Chandler’s translation (1985) of Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman. This is among the supreme works of fiction of the last century. Now I can give my New York Review Books paperback to some deserving reader. In the Grossman, between pages 158 and 159, I found the Delta Air Lines boarding passes of Bonnie and John Bauer. They were bound for Atlanta.

For my kids I found two Dr. Seuss titles, Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, and The Knobby Boys to the Rescue (1965), by Wende and Harry Devlin – all hardcovers.

All this bounty for $59, and the money goes to the library. Happy birthday, indeed.

`The Celestial Blueness of Those Distant River Reaches'

On Oct. 26, 1852, Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal:

“There are no skaters on the pond now. It is cool today & windier. The water is rippled considerably. As I stand in the boat the farther off the water the bluer it is. Looking straight down it is dark green. Hence apparently the celestial blueness of those distant river reaches – when the water is agitated – so that their surfaces reflect the sky at the right angle. It is a darker blue than that of the sky itself. When I look down on the pond from the peak, it is far less blue.

“The blue stemmed & white golden rod apparently survive till winter – push up & blossom anew – And a few oak leaves in sheltered nooks do not wither. A. undulatus [wavy-leaf aster] -- Very few crickets for a long time. At this season we seek warm sunny lees & hill sides – as that under the pitch pines by Walden shore – where we cuddle & warm ourselves in the sun as by a fire -- where we may get some of it reflected as well as direct heat.

“Coming by Hadens – I see that the sun setting its rays which yet find some vapor to lodge on in the clear cold air impart a purple tinge to the mts in the NW. Methinks it is only in cold weather I see this.

“Richard Harlan M.D. in his Fauna Americana 1825 says of man that those parts are `most hairy, which in animals are most bare, viz. the axillae and pubes.’

“Harlan says the vespertilio [parti-colored bat] catch insects during the crepusculum.

“Harlan says that when white is associated with another color on a dog’s tail that it is always terminal -- & that the observations of [Anselme Gaëtan] Desmarest [French zoologist, 1784-1838] confirm it.”

These were Thoreau’s thoughts 100 years before the day I was born. Those expecting a Yankee prig are surprised Thoreau even notices the absence of skaters. In fact, he skated enthusiastically and mentions it twice in Walden. With the painterly eye of Ruskin, he notes the effect of light on water and landscape. The man who boasted he could identify the day of the year by reading its fauna recognizes the late-autumn stalwarts (how I miss the asters and golden rod of upstate New York), and then shocks us with his choice of verb: Who would expect Thoreau to “cuddle?” Back to sunlight, then he tells us what he’s been reading: Dr. Richard Harlan (1796-1843), who was born in Philadelphia, studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and at age 25 became professor of comparative anatomy at the Philadelphia Museum. Thoreau acknowledges the existence of armpit and pubic hair, the twilight feeding habits of bats and the color of a dog’s tail.

Thoreau reminds me that the only sane response to one's birthday is gratitude. We’ve made it another year, which certainly beats the alternative, and think of how much we have left unlearned. Think of the books unread or in need of rereading. Think of the details we have missed, out of exhaustion, laziness or apathy. Think of the remarkable Dr. Harlan. A cursory web search reveals that, among other things during his 47 years [Thoreau died at 44], he translated Jean-Nicolas Gannal's History of Embalming from the French, the free online text of which is available here. With all of these gifts, how can a birthday be anything but happy?

Terry Talks

Commentary has posted Terry Teachout's latest video interview.

`The Chair was Just a Chair'

Morning is grim but coffee and a few good bloggers ease the transition back to humanity. On Wednesday, Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti posted a lovely poem by Ivor Gurney, “Common Things,” and still-life paintings on related themes by two 19th-century American realists – Claude Raguet Hirst and William Michael Harnett. Mike uses the first line of Gurney’s poem as his title -- “The Dearness of Common Things” – which distils a sense I’ve had since childhood that certain objects, through long acquaintance, take on an aura of benevolence. Something of us rubs off on them. As a boy I was an animist, convinced my toys, especially toy soldiers, came to life in my absence. As father of three sons, I know my fantasy was not unique. More recently, I’ve had similar thought about books, that they grow promiscuous when I’m out of the room, accounting for my burgeoning dearth of shelf space.

In Hirst’s painting, “Companions,” we see a pile of four volumes, a pipe, a tobacco sack, a glass holding five stick matches and a vase with a recumbent stag on the lid. I’m not a smoker (neither is Gilleland) and I’m not fond of bric-a-brac. Nevertheless, the painting suggests home, leisure and comfort, as well as an appealingly old-fashioned sense of masculinity. This feels like a portrait by way of a still life. Hirst, by the way, despite the first name, was a woman. In one of his posthumously published lectures on education, Emerson wrote:

“We learn nothing rightly until we learn the symbolical character of life. Day creeps after day, each full of facts, dull, strange, despised things, that we cannot enough despise--call heavy, prosaic, and desert. The time we seek to kill: the attention it is elegant to divert from things around us. And presently the aroused intellect finds gold and gems in one of these scorned facts -- then finds that the day of facts is a rock of diamonds; that a fact is an Epiphany of God.”

For “facts,” substitute objects, and we hear a theme common to Whitman, Rilke, Francis Ponge and the Polish masters, Herbert and Milosz – the warm, pulsing life of the inanimate. The daily, taken-for-granted thing – the lamp, the coffee cup, the book – is always more than functional and inert in its human setting. In Painting and Reality, Étienne Gilson writes:

“Whether its origin be Dutch or French [or, presumably, American], the things that a still life represents exercise only one single act, but it is the simplest and most primitive of all acts, namely, to be….Always present to that which is, this act of being usually lies hidden, and unrevealed, behind what the thing signifies, says, does, or makes. Only two men reach an awareness of its mysterious presence: the philosopher, if, raising his speculation up to the metaphysical notion of being, he finally arrives at this most secret and most fecund of all acts; and the creator of plastic forms, if purifying the work of his hands from all that is not the immediate self-revelation of the act of being, he provides us with a visible image of it that corresponds, in the order of sensible appearances, to what its intuition is in the mind of the metaphysician.”

Gilson specifies the plastic arts, though on occasion we see it in language, particularly poetry, words at their most precise and conscise. Singling out objects, as Gurney does – “Beech wood, tea, plate-shelves” – illuminates them as though from within. Their being shines on us. Gurney’s poem assumes the permeability of the human and inanimate. In a comic key, they resemble the bicycles and their riders in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.

Miller Williams wrote a sonnet, “Things,” about his visit to the house of John Ciardi, after the poet and Dante translator’s death in 1986:

“The day we went to visit the house of the poet
I sat in the chair he sat in when he died
to look at the last things he looked at:
the cribbage board; the blue wall; the clock,
the slow brass pendulum; the deck of cards;
the small Picasso, slapdash black on white,
almost oriental, one foot by two;
the black round telephone with the circular dial;
the rug with wine roses; books on the floor.
I sat until the pendulum took my attention
to feel what he might have felt, sitting there.

“For nothing, of course, for all my foolishness.
The dying gave the room its brown meaning.
When he sat down, the chair was just a chair.”

Even in death, traces remain, if only we have the corresponding sense to know them. “Brown meaning” is suggestive, and not just because of the palette of Hirst’s painting. The wall, Williams specifies, is blue, and the Picasso is black on white. The human is brown, of the earth, wood, coffee, grain and warm Dutch interiors.

`Matter Aye and Spirit Too'

For laughs I go to Fred Chappell, the Last American Man of Letters, who is not recognized as such because he makes us laugh and that means he can’t be serious. His masterwork, Midquest (1981), is a gathering of four earlier volumes of poetry – River, Bloodfire, Wind Mountain, Earthsleep – intended from the start as a unified work, a “verse novel,” Chappell calls it, a 20th-century Dantean comedy, a “growth of a poet’s mind” without Wordsworth’s prim portentousness. The Dante figure is “Ole Fred” or “I,” a version of Chappell never banally autobiographical, and his guide is Virgil Campbell. Chappell has written that he “never experienced such unalloyed joy” as he did while writing Midquest, and it shows. Joy need not be sanctimonious. I open Midquest at random and this shines forth:

“`My mind’s about as sprightly as a shelf of Dreiser.’”

I’m reminded of Steven Millhauser’s Enchanted Night, in which a character uses Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt, a tombstone of a book, as a weapon. Here’s a longer passage from the same section of Midquest:

“I’ll say this about the Book of Earth,
The guy who wrote it didn’t cheat a jot,
Even the footnotes are brimming over with matter,
Matter aye and spirit too, each
And every page is chock to stupefying,
Any page as good as any other.
. . . Oh sure, Jean-Paul, there’s a chapter on `Misery,’
And one on `Disease,’ a deadly dark one, `Torture,’
But tell you what, I’ll trade mine for which
Ever one you choose, I’ll still break even.
Bring me your tarred, your poor, your muddled asses,
I’ll bear the burden on’t. What I care, bo?
It’s only the suffering of children that truly hurts,
Most of the others just ain’t learned to read good yet.
Lemme check the Index, what’ll I find,
Hemorrhoids, aw rite, fetch it hither,
I got a gut of cheerful iron, believe.
Can’t be worse than reading William Buckley.”

In it’s anything-that-fits inclusiveness, in its easy mingle of high and low, I hear Melville and Twain in this demotic brew, but most of all I hear the voice of a poet born and raised in North Carolina, who ventured into the world, read everything, forgot nothing, and turned it all into colloquial speech jolted into poetry. This may account for Chappell’s paltry acclaim beyond the borders of the Tar Heel State. He’s no Johnny One Note in terms of tone and character, perhaps because of his parallel career as a fiction writer. His work is as sensitive to dynamics as a Bill Evans solo. Just 12 lines after the Dreiser crack, he writes:

“I ride the clashbutt hayrake to the barn,
Which is heaven. Barn is home. Home is heaven.
The barn resounding like a churchbell in
The rain, home, home, home.”

I love the rumble of monosyllables. I Googled “clashbutt” and came up empty, not even a stray misspelling, and it’s not in the Oxford English Dictionary, but who would wish Chappell had not used it? It sounds like my favorite name for a musical instrument, “sackbut,” which brings me to something Chappell said in an interview on the subject of music:

“My musical experience is passive—if that’s what listening and enjoying can be called. I have no real training, though I have read a fair amount of musical history, biography, criticism, and so forth. I can read music fairly well but have not all that much occasion to. I use music in a number of ways—to organize poems and stories by rough analogy. (I know the fallacies associated with this silly practice, but I still find the ploy useful.) And as Walter Pater remarked, all art aspires to the condition of music—that is, the other arts envy its totality of expressiveness, its immediacy, its direct access to emotion, and its purity of expression. What it lacks is definable content—which is the advantage that words have over both music and plastic art.”

Chappell is no hick crafter of gimcrack folk art, though he seems to enjoy playing the role for sophisticates. Here’s another insight into Chappell’s art: He closes Midquest with an exchange between Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, from Twelfth Night,
an exchange he recycles in his 1999 novel Look Back All the Green Valley:

“Sir Toby: A false conclusion: I hate it as an unfilled can. To be up after midnight and to go to bed then, is early; so that to go to bed after midnight is to go to bed betimes. Does not our life consist of the four elements?

“Sir Andrew: Faith, so they say; but I think it rather consists of eating and drinking.

“Sir Toby: Thou art a scholar; let us therefore eat and drink. Marian, I say! a stoup of wine!”

The OED defines “stoup” – which flourished in the 16th century but fizzled in the 19th --variously as “a pail or bucket,” “a drinking-vessel” and “a vessel to contain holy-water.” Chappell is a writer comfortable with all those shades of meaning.

Mystery Writer: Marilynne Robinson

One reader correctly identified the writer I cited in Tuesday's post: Marilynne Robinson. The essay comes from Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament (1990), edited by Alfred Corn. Robinson wrote of the First and Second Epistles General of Peter.

`A Harrowing Dream'

Please read the following paragraph from the sixth page of an 11-page essay:

“Humankind is an extraordinarily isolated creature, whose history must appear from any distance a harrowing dream of frustration and fear and self-contempt, itself villain, itself victim. We have no other enemy, yet we are needlessly assaulted and besieged. This state of affairs is neither recent nor local, nor does it show signs of melioration. Everywhere harm is done on ingenious pretexts, even now when every risk is insupportable. With Utopia precluded fully and finally, truce would be accomplishment enough. But that has no hold on the imagination, perhaps because it cannot be made a pretext for violence.”

I cite this excerpt because in its admirably precise, measured way it states an unpleasant truth about our species and, though published less than 20 years ago, echoes faintly with the stern prophetic voice of such 19th-century figures as Carlyle and Melville. With some writers, Emerson among them (though this passage is decidedly un-Emersonian), the reader can detach blocks of copy, savor their self-contained rigor out of context, and lose nothing in the process. This is not a criticism. As an experiment in prose logic, now read the paragraph that precedes the one just cited:

“Now, at what must be very nearly the end of history, reading these old documents, I fall to thinking how little seems to have happened. It is as true of Christendom as of humankind that its fall came so briskly on the heels of its creation as to make the two events seem like one. If a hint of divine origins has always been discoverable, the fact is owed to the continuous sense of failure, of falling short, that makes meaning float beyond the reach of language, that makes beauty slide away from every form we try to give it, that makes giant loneliness the measure of small love. The shape of what we ought to be, which we cannot fill, remains our nimbus, the best claim we have to our own loyalty.”

Even without the moorings of its home-essay, this is the work of a confident, thoughtful writer. The prose is rare, purposefully metaphoric, devoted to the task at hand, free of purple lapses. It expresses sublime understanding of the human lot without sentimentality and never pleads the depth of its own sincerity – a self-sabotaging error in so much contemporary prose. A self-assured writer with the burden of a truth to relate is coolly indifferent to readers’ reaction. Now, finally, continuing the backward journey, here is the predecessor to the last paragraph:

“I imagine primordial crones, husking and stemming the weedy staples of a tenuous life and telling old stories until they become strange and perfect. This to my mind is not at all incompatible with divine inspiration. It is no demystification to say that from the first the Bible feels steeped in human experience. So early the people of the Bible were ready to concede to one another innocence and dignity, not compromised by evil, only obscured by it. Their stories are a brilliant rescue of humanity’s ingratiating essence from its brutal ways. The spirit of the stories is a revelation in itself.”

The writer addresses not merely the origin and purpose of scripture, I think, but of any significant narrative. Isn’t the human instinct to tell stories precisely that -- “a brilliant rescue of humanity’s ingratiating essence from its brutal ways?” Think of Moby-Dick and Molloy, by writers, not coincidentally, steeped in the Bible. Do you know who wrote these three paragraphs?

`I Kicked a Rock'

My 7-year-old announced last week he likes poetry and wants to write it. His self-declared models are Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky (the “Children’s Poet Laureate,” whose work is superior to Charles Simic’s), Mother Goose, limericks and the singsong gibberish coming out of my mouth. Michael has asked me to publish one of his poems. Please, be kind. This is juvenilia and should be judged “experimental” in the best sense, by a young poet whose voice is still evolving. Unlike the work of the influences cited above, this poem is written in vers libre, with but a single rhyme (not counting the internal rhyme). With the author’s permission, I have titled it “Untitled”:

“I saw a pumpkin when I was trick or treating.
I kicked a rock.
The cake she baked made me sick with food poisoning.
I saw a black duck.
I saw a pickup truck.”

I savor the Johnsonian allusion in the second line and the sly send-up of Texas, our adopted state. At the risk of violating a confidence, let me suggest an unlikely influence: Tadeusz Różewicz. The other day I watched clandestinely as Michael examined the books on my nightstand. On top was the new Archipelago Books edition of Różewicz’s New Poems, translated from the Polish my Bill Johnston. Różewicz is a poet I have been unable to enjoy as much as I do his compatriots Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz, but Michael apparently feels otherwise and perused the volume for a good 10 minutes. You decide. This excerpt is from “the wheels are going around,” collected in 2004 in exit:

“yesterday between apocalypse and idyll
I heard across the ether
that the greenhouse effect
is caused
not only by the automobile industry
but also by cowpats”

ADDENDUM: Michael asked me to append this poem, "Oh, Dragon," as more representative of his work:

"Oh, dragon!
Oh, dragon!
What makes you a dragon?
Is it your firey breath or
Your wings that fly gently through the sky?
What makes you a dragon?'