'And Mailed This Guy Gold Every Time'

“By all accounts,” writes Erik Bader, “[Guy Davenport] wrote a legit stack of letters every single day, and would respond to literally anyone -- and here’s an anecdote to confirm.” Dave Lull alerted me to Bader’s account of Davenport and an unlikely correspondent that mirrored my own experience with the Kentucky writer and polymath: 

“Many years ago I wrote an obit on Davenport for a local newspaper and a strange and shy old dude showed up at the bookstore where I worked a few days later. Apparently he lived in a halfway house and said he was moved by my piece and that he used to correspond with Davenport for many years -- he had just written him one day and the dude always wrote back. Yeah right, I thought. Incredibly, he showed up a few days later with a stack of the letters and they were some of the most incredible things I have ever read to this day - the level of care, love, and knowledge dropped into every single one was off the charts. Some were handwritten. Some were illustrated. Every single one had at least one line that outclassed entire careers. It was clear from the letters that Guy knew he was just responding to some lonely weirdo with possible me[n]tal problems --but he didn’t give a shit, he put his A-game into ever[y] single letter, and mailed this guy gold every time. Next time any of y’all think a comment on yr stack ain’t worth responding to -- think of Guy, and think again!”

 

I had been reading Davenport since the seventies. I collected his books, at least the editions I could afford, and my timing was good, as North Point Press started publishing his work in 1981. Seven years later, as a reporter for an upstate New York newspaper, I was writing a profile of Paul Metcalf, author of Genoa (1965), who lived across the state line in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. I knew from an essay in The Geography of the Imagination that Guy admired Metcalf’s work, so I looked up his number and interviewed him by telephone. What I recall is instant openness and intelligent volubility. He gave me precisely what I was after. I asked for his address in Lexington, Ky., and that started an exchange of letters. I have seldom encountered such unqualified acceptance by a stranger. It exceeded mere politeness.

 

In 1990, a buddy and I went on an uncharted road trip. First night, a campground in Cumberland, Maryland (birthplace of J.V. Cunningham, whose poems, Guy wrote, were “as well made as wristwatches”). Second night, a campground in Lexington, Ky. I called Guy and he told me to stop by his house on Sayre Avenue the following morning.

 

We talked for several hours. I wish I had kept notes. I do have the two books I brought along for Guy to inscribe – The Geography of the Imagination (1981) and Apples and Pears (1984). In the former, in his fine draftsman’s hand, he wrote “For Patrick Kurp, Lexington, 18 June 1990.” We talked so much, he forgot to sign his name and I didn’t notice until I was back in the car. He did sign the other volume.

 

I can’t claim to have much insight into Davenport the man. I knew him as a writer and teacher, though never in a formal sense. With me he was always generous and encouraging. When I reviewed his 1989 volume A Balthus Notebook (Ecco Press) and sent him the clipping, he replied with a letter of gratitude in which he didn’t exactly correct me but expanded on what I had written. His first instinct was to share knowledge. It was a memorable exercise in tact and courtesy. As a newspaper reporter I had met and interviewed many “celebrities.” None was so charming and just plain interesting as Guy Davenport. I’m not one to fetishize books, writers or dates on the calendar but I do, every June 18, give thanks for Guy and his work.

'Sea-shell and Leaf Alike'

As the human world seems to grow more chaotic, as though entropy were finally triumphant, I look for evidence of pattern and design in nature and among writers I admire.

In his short story “The Bicycle Rider,” Guy Davenport arranges a still life evoking order, including two shells: “A glass jar of acorns. A nautilus shell. Shale slab with a fossil gingko leaf. A Greek coin from Metaponton in Sicily. A snail shell.” In the same story, Davenport writes: “Luck has nothing to do with happiness, which comes from rhythms, order, clarity.” In his poem “For Basil Bunting,” Davenport celebrates the spiral, which you will find everywhere if you take the time to look: 

“to be Greek as a curl

on a flat cheek

 

“the coil of white

the Ismene lily

 

“spirals, hound’s tail

when his nose is down

 

“snail shell, paper nautilus

wavetop scroll

 

“ear, weather, world

this shape of turning”

 

In his essay “Marianne Moore,” Davenport says the poet loved things “cunningly made.” See her poem “The Paper Nautilus.” Here is the opening sentence of his short story “The Dawn in Erewhon”:

 

“The Dutch philosopher Adriaan Floris van Hovendaal was arranging the objects on his table, a pinecone to remind him of Fibonacci, a snail’s shell to remind him of Ruskin, a drachma to remind him of Crete.”

 

Leonardo Bonacci of Pisa, better known as Fibonacci (c. 1170-c. 1250), lent his name to the sequence known as the Fibonacci numbers. Starting with 0 and 1, each number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two numbers. Thus: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, and so on. The ratio between each term and its predecessor approaches 1.618 . . ., the golden ratio, which appears commonly in nature and art.

 

The Fibonacci numbers suggest, at least to this non-mathematician, the presence of design principles in the universe, perhaps one of nature’s structural default modes. The notion, I know, appealed to Davenport, from whom I first learned of Fibonacci decades ago in “The Dawn of Erewhon”:

 

“The Fibonacci number following thirty-four is fifty-five. A set of thirty-four helix curves radiating from a common center clockwise crossing a set of fifty-five helix curves rotating counterclockwise from the same center gives the finely meshed honeybrown redgold spiral net panier of the Grote Zonnebloem, Helianthus annuus.

 

“Adriaan had one on his desk, others in a wicker basket at his feet. If one spiral is a rotation of thirteen helices, then the counterspiral is twenty-one. Fibonacci, both. And he [Fibonacci] had brought the ancient Indic naught, the Arabian number unoccupied by quantity, to be our zero.

 

“Fibonacci harmonies ran through the pinecone which he kept on his table, through the snail shell.”

 

Helianthus annuus is the sunflower, in which each floret is positioned toward the next at an angle of about 137.5 degrees, the golden angle. This produces the pattern of interconnecting spirals described by Davenport. Botanists speculate that the arrangement results in the most efficient packing of seeds.

Clearly, this pattern fascinated Davenport – and Marianne Moore, though she doesn’t name it. In her poem “The Pangolin,” she notices the creature’s skin with “scale / lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity.” In fact, the scales on cones are arranged in alternating spirals, like the sunflower, with the number of spirals always representing two adjoining numbers in the Fibonacci sequence – say, three and five, or eight and thirteen. Because Fibonacci numbers approximate irrational numbers, the scales do not line up precisely, and weaken the arrangement. There’s structural integrity in regular irregularity. Science overlaps with aesthetics. As Paul Valéry puts it in Sea Shells (1936, trans. Ralph Mannheim):

 

“Run off by the billions, each different from the rest (though the difference is sometimes imperceptible), they offer an infinite number of solutions to the most delicate problems of art, and of absolutely perfect answers to the questions they suggest to us.”

 

Another poet, Howard Nemerov, in “Figures of Thought” (Sentences, 1980), celebrates the patterns hiding in plain sight:

 

“To lay the logarithmic spiral on

Sea-shell and leaf alike, and see it fit,

To watch the same idea work itself out

In the fighter pilot’s steepening, tightening turn

Onto his target, setting up the kill,

And in the flight of certain wall-eyed bugs

Who cannot see to fly straight into death

But have to cast their sidelong glance at it

And come but cranking to the candle’s flame —

 

How secret that is, and how privileged

One feels to find the same necessity

Ciphered in forms diverse and otherwise

Without kinship — that is the beautiful

In Nature as in art, not obvious,

Not inaccessible, but just between.

 

It may diminish some our dry delight

To wonder if everything we are and do

Lies subject to some little law like that;

Hidden in nature, but not deeply so.”

 

[Davenport’s poem appears in Thasos and Ohio (North Point Press, 1986). His story “The Bicycle Rider” is collected The Jules Verne Steam Balloon (North Point Press, 1987). The Moore essay is in The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981). “The Dawn in Erewhon” is collected in Davenport’s first story collection, Tatlin! (Charles Scribner’s Son, 1974).]

'Alive and Vivid'

“I believe that it behooves the living, for our own sake, to keep the memory of the dead alive and vivid . . .” 

That’s William Maxwell in 1980 when he received the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, given every five years for the most distinguished novel published during that period. For once, they got it right. Maxwell was honored for So Long, See You Tomorrow, his finest novel, published when he was seventy-eight. Here is the remainder of his sentence, so typical of Maxwell’s graciousness:

 

“. . . and so I would remind you now of Louise Bogan, or her ravishing formal poetry and her literary criticism, so free from intellectual display and so on target. Because of her encouragement at a critical period of my life I stopped being a full-time editor and went back to writing novels and I therefore have her to thank for the fact that I am standing where I am this minute.”

 

Bogan had died a decade earlier, on February 4, 1970, at age seventy-two. Maxwell’s obituary for her appeared in the February 7 issue of The New Yorker. He wrote of his friend:

 

“To say that she was one of the finest lyric poets of our time is hardly to do her justice; her best poems have an emotional depth and force and a perfection of form that owe very little to the age she lived in and are not likely to go out of style, being a matter of nobody’s style but her own. She was a handsome, direct, impressive, vulnerable woman. In whatever she wrote, the line of truth was exactly superimposed on the line of feeling.”

 

We’ve all heard funeral eulogies delivered by strangers to the deceased, collages of cliché, just as we’ve heard award-show acceptance speeches that amount to Olympic-class displays of ass-kissing. The most important thing in the Howells speech is a homely four-word phrase: “for our own sake.” We are diminished as men and women if we forget our dead.

 

Back in the seventies, at the first newspaper where I worked as a reporter, the first thing I wrote was an obituary for a farmer whose last name was Campbell. That’s all I remember but I’ve taken it as a sign. I was given my theme: “to keep the memory of the dead alive and vivid . . .” That goes for our personal dead and the writers whose memory we keep alive by reading their books.

'He Was Dull in a New Way'

“A dull country magistrate gave Johnson a long tedious account of his exercising his criminal jurisdiction, the result of which was his having sentenced four convicts to transportation. Johnson, in an agony of impatience to get rid of such a companion, exclaimed, ‘I heartily wish, Sir, that I were a fifth.’” 

Recently I endured the company of a descendant of Dr. Johnson’s tiresome judge, a person for whom storytelling was an excuse for holding his listeners hostage and torturing them. He reminded me of my father who, whenever we visited someone, on arrival promptly recited details of the route we had taken, including street names, landmarks and weather conditions. This abuse, endured throughout childhood, left me with a burning intolerance for bores, especially conversational bores. I wanted desperately to be a grownup so I wouldn’t have to be polite to such dullards.

 

Elsewhere in Boswell, Johnson says of Thomas Sheridan: “Why, Sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in Nature."

 

And another anecdote recounted by Boswell: “He attacked [the poet Thomas] Gray, calling him ‘a dull fellow.’ Boswell: ‘I understand he was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not dull in poetry.’ Johnson: ‘Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.’”

 

Johnson never uses the words we would apply to such people – bore, boring, boredom. Bore appears in his Dictionary as “the hole made by boring,” as in carpentry. His words are dull and dullness. The OED tells us the modern sense of the noun bore showed up in the nineteenth century and cites Benjamin Disraeli: “The true bore is that man who thinks the world is only interested in one subject, because he, himself, can only comprehend one.”

'The Document of Our Time'

Among my teachers when I was young was a man I never met. In fact, he had died several years before I enrolled in his school. Oscar Williams, born in Ukraine, died in New York City in 1964. He was a poet but I knew him strictly as an anthologist. Sorry to say, his poems are forgettable. Around 1966 I bought Immortal Poems of the English Language and, a little later, The Pocket Book of Modern Verse and A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry: English and American. That was how I learned the tradition of poetry in English. Anthologies get dismissed but thanks to Williams I read Wyatt and Jonson, Robinson and Auden. I started from zero, knowing nothing, and discovered the writers I loved. I remember falling for Karl Shapiro's war poems. Thanks to Williams, I learned the continuity of poetry in English. 

A Williams anthology I didn’t read was The War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of the 20th Century (John Day Co., 1945). In his introduction, dated December 31, 1944, Williams writes: “The poet’s poem has always outlived the names of battles, generals and statesmen; our was poetry as a whole is perhaps the document of our time that will outlive all the rest.” That’s optimistic but World War II was months away from ending.

Williams divides his book into three sections: Great War poems, “Poems by the Men in the Armed Forces of England and America” and “War Poems by the Civilian Poets.” The poets in the second section are identified by their military rank. Sgt. William Abrahams (1909-98), a poet I had never heard of, is author of “Poem in Time of War,” which includes an unexpected Paul Valéry allusion. And there’s Lt. William Jay Smith’s “3 for 25,” which reminds me of the snapshots my father brought home from North Africa and France.

I’m still reading the book but I can recommend it for historical and literary reasons. Most of the good poems in the anthology I already knew. Some of the poets included by Williams had already been killed by the time of publication. Take Sub-lieutenant, Fleet Air Arm Gervase Stewart (1920-41). The blogger Richard Warren remembers him here.

Williams includes my favorite poem by Edwin Muir, “Reading in Time of War”:

“Boswell by my bed,

Tolstoy on my table;

Thought the world has bled

For four and a half years,

And wives' and mothers' tears

Collected would be able

To water a little field

Untouched by anger and blood,

A penitential yield

Somewhere in the world;

Though in each latitude

Armies like forest fall,

The iniquitous and the good

Head over heels hurled,

And confusion over all:

Boswell's turbulent friend

And his deafening verbal strife,

Ivan Ilych's death

Tell me more about life,

The meaning and the end

Of our familiar breath,

Both being personal,

Than all the carnage can,

Retrieve the shape of man,

Lost and anonymous,

Tell me wherever I look

That not one soul can die

Of this or any clan

Who is not one of us

And has a personal tie

Perhaps to someone now

Searching an ancient book,

Folk-tale or country song

In many and many a tongue,

To find the original face,

The individual soul,

The eye, the lip, the brow

For ever gone from their place,

And gather an image whole.”

'Green As an Arbour Grew Leafy June'

I had seen the phrase before and guessed correctly at its meaning from context but still found the expression puzzling: “widow’s weeds.” It entered English in the fifteenth century and is defined, according to the OED, as “the mourning clothes or weeds of a widow.”  Weeds in isolation meant “clothing customarily worn by a widow during a period of mourning for her spouse, and traditionally comprising a black or dark-coloured dress and a veil.” Pairing the words produced memorable alliteration. The phrase stands as evidence of a faded world, what Emerson called “fossil poetry.” I happened on the phrase again in a poem by Walter de la Mare, “A Widow’s Weeds” (Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes, 1913): 

“A poor old Widow in her weeds

Sowed her garden with wild-flower seeds;

Not too shallow, and not too deep,

And down came April -- drip -- drip -- drip.

Up shone May, like gold, and soon

Green as an arbour grew leafy June.

And now all summer she sits and sews

Where willow herb, comfrey, bugloss blows,

Teasle and pansy, meadowsweet,

Campion, toadflax, and rough hawksbit;

Brown bee orchis, and Peals of Bells;

Clover, burnet, and thyme she smells;

Like Oberon’s meadows her garden is

Drowsy from dawn to dusk with bees.

Weeps she never, but sometimes sighs,

And peeps at her garden with bright brown eyes;

And all she has is all she needs --

A poor Old Widow in her weeds.”

 

De la Mare plays off the dual meaning of weeds (and raises the question of what distinguishes a “weed” from a “flower”) and recalls Oberon’s floral catalogue as delivered to Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act II, Scene 1):  

 

“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight;

And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin,

Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in:

And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes,

And make her full of hateful fantasies.”

 

True poets, Seamus Heaney said somewhere, know the names of flowers.

'The Excitement of Entomological Exploration'

A pivot or lasting change of focus occurred to me as a teenager. For years, since probably late toddlerhood, I had thought of myself as a budding naturalist. Behind our house in suburban Cleveland were a creek, grassy fields and second-growth woods, including a dense stand of poplars, locust trees and sassafras. Blackberries grew everywhere. In and along the creek were crayfish, salamanders, frogs and water striders. Our backyard was, in effect, a bountiful museum of biodiversity, surrounded by heavy development. Insects thrived – yellow jackets and hornets, spittlebugs and mosquitoes, and, best of all, the order Lepidoptera, butterflies and moths. 

Cecropia moths favored the trunks of ash trees. We found luna moths and mourning cloaks. The first field was rich in milkweed, which attracted monarchs. Various species of swallowtails, painted ladies and fritillaries seemed drawn to blackberry and strawberry blossoms. I became a collector and a devoted reader of field guides.

 

Perhaps it was the arrival of puberty. I never lost complete interest in the natural world but my attention shifted to literature. I stopped collecting. Around 1967, I discovered the work of Vladimir Nabokov, a love that has never faded and served to supplant my devotion to applied biology. He sustained lifelong  interest in lepidoptery and literature, with brilliant accomplishments in both. In the June 5, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, Nabokov published “Butterflies,” a memoir of his infatuation with Lepidoptera while growing up in prerevolutionary Russia. He later revised the piece which became Chapter Six of Conclusive Evidence (1951), then of Speak, Memory (1966), the finest of all autobiographies. He writes of those childhood quests:

 

“Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration. From the very first, it had a great many intertwinkling facets. One of them was the acute desire to be alone, since any companion, no matter how quiet, interfered with the concentrated enjoyment of my mania. Its gratification admitted of no compromise or exception. Tutors and governesses knew that the morning was mine and cautiously kept away.”

 

The New Yorker excerpt concludes with one of Nabokov’s best-known set-pieces, an early digression on his great subject, Time:

 “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which I cannot explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love, a sense of oneness with sun and stone, a thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern, perhaps to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to the tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

 

Nigel Andrew in his delightful book The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment (Saraband 2025), refers to Nabokov as “the most literary of all butterfly lovers,” saying he was “conscious of the inadequacy of his own representations of butterflies in his fiction, when compared to his scientific work.” Yet no one who reads Pale Fire (1962) will forget the repeated appearance of Vanessa atalanta, the red admiral (or “red admirable,” as the novel’s poet John Shade prefers).

'Keep Abreast of the Essentials First'

In a letter to his friend the Rev. William Unwin, written in March 1784, nine months before Dr. Johnson’s death, William Cowper says he is “very much the biographer's humble admirer,” and continues:

“His uncommon share of good sense, and his forcible expression, secure to him that tribute from all his readers. He has a penetrating insight into character, and a happy talent of correcting the popular opinion, upon all occasions where it is erroneous; and this he does with the boldness of a man who will think for himself, but, at the same time, with a justness of sentiment that convinces us he does not differ from others through affectation, but because he has a sounder judgement.”

Cowper had been reading Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81). His assessment of Johnson’s critical judgment is accurate. Incidentally, it might also be applied to Yvor Winters. We no longer associate criticism with common sense and an implicit refutation of “theory.” In his biography of Johnson, John Wain tells us Johnson’s “method” relied on “his memory, his judgement, his learning.” The same might be said of the way he assembled his Dictionary more than twenty years earlier. In writing of fifty-two English poets, Johnson combines biographical storytelling with critical assessment, which in his case means tart, unexpected judgments. He’s not shy about praise or condemnation. Take this from his “Life of Pope”:

“Pope was from his birth of a constitution tender and delicate; but is said to have shewn remarkable gentleness and sweetness of disposition. The weakness of his body continued through his life, but the mildness of his mind perhaps ended with his childhood.”

Wain describes the Lives as “Johnson’s gentlest, most companionable work.” This is true yet Johnson is often at his most entertaining when cantankerous. In his “Life of Milton” he famously said of “Lycidas” that “the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing.” Johnson knew what he was doing and how some readers would react. Boswell reports that on March 26, 1779:

“He said he expected to be attacked on account of his Lives of the Poets. ‘However (said he,) I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an authour is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse; an assault may be unsuccessful; you may have more men killed than you kill; but if you starve the town, you are sure of victory.’”

Reading the Lives is always entertaining. Were I forced to bring only a single work of criticism, or a single work by Johnson, to that mythical desert island, it would be this one, Johnson’s final masterpiece. Who do you think Johnson is writing about in this passage:

“Next to argument, his delight was in wild and daring sallies of sentiment, in the irregular and excentrick violence of wit. He delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning, where light and darkness begin to mingle; to approach the precipice of absurdity, and hover over the abyss of unideal vacancy. This inclination sometimes produced nonsense.” 

Read the complete biography and you’ll never think the same way about John Dryden. In his postscript to an essay about Kingsley Amis collected in The Revolt of the Pendulum: Essays 2005-2008 (Picador, 2009), the late Clive James writes:

“One doesn’t say that Aubrey’s Brief Lives set the desirable measure, but it always helps to remember how much got said by Johnson in his Lives of the Poets, any one of which is the first thing to read on the poet in question. Not, of course, the only thing: but surely our aim, like Johnson’s, should be to keep abreast of the essentials first.”

'The Changing Year’s Successive Plan'

Walter Jackson Bate tells us in his biography of Dr. Johnson that as he aged, the crusty old man mellowed. “[I]n many ways,” Bate writes, “he was changing—not changing in his character but in what he said or admitted.” Previously, Johnson had denied the impact of the seasons on the emotions (“imagination operating on luxury”), what we call in some cases “seasonal affective disorder (SAD).” In 1784, the year he would turn seventy-five, Johnson spent July through November in Lichfield, the city of his birth. 

“As November came to Lichfield, which he could reasonably doubt that he would ever see again,” Bate writes, “he felt the poignance of autumn as never before. One of Horace’s odes (IV, vii) especially haunted him – the one in which the large revolving changes of nature, destroying and re-creating, are contrasted with the hopes and destiny of short-lived man.” Johnson’s translation of the ode, composed in Lichfield, is among the last things he ever wrote:

 

“The snow dissolv’d, no more is seen;

The fields and woods, behold! are green;

The changing year renews the plain,

The rivers know their banks again;

The sprightly nymph and naked grace

The mazy dance together trace.

The changing year’s successive plan

Proclaims mortality to man.

Rough winter’s blasts to spring give way,

Spring yields to summers sovereign ray;

Then summer sinks in autumn’s reign,

And winter chills the world again:

Her losses soon the moon supplies,

But wretched man, when once he lies

Where Priam and his sons are laid,

Is nought but ashes and a shade.

Who knows if Jove, who counts our score,

Will toss us in a morning more?

What with your friend you nobly share,

At least, you rescue from your heir.

Not you, Torquatus, boast of Rome,

When Minos once has fix’d your doom,

Or eloquence, or splendid birth,

Or virtue, shall restore to earth.

Hippolytus, unjustly slain,

Diana calls to life in vain;

Nor can the might of Theseus rend

The chains of hell, that hold his friend.”

 

Johnson would soon leave Lichfield, return to London and die on December 13. Bate writes of Johnson’s version: “Of the many translations of this famous ode, none catches the spirit of Horace more closely.” 

'Cherries, Nectarines, Apricots and Early Peaches'

Neighbors gave us a sack of golf-ball-size peaches from the tree in their front yard. I’ve been watching it for months through the front window. They covered it with gauzy white netting resembling an oversized shower cap to keep off the bugs and squirrels, and generally babied the tree. The fruit is fuzzy, blemish-free and sweet. Because they are smaller than the peaches you find at the grocery store, you’re tempted to eat two or three at a time. We’re trying to be strong. 

Yvor Winters was the pomologist among poets. Along with raising goats and Airedales, he tended a small orchard of fruit trees at his home in Los Altos, Calif. On November 16, 1958, he writes to Don Cameron Allen at Johns Hopkins:

 

“The frost finished my fig crop, but ripened my persimmons and pineapple guavas. The last of my Valencia oranges were picked recently, but we are still eating them (they ripen in May). My tangerines will ripen around Christmas. My strawberry guava crop has just come to an end, after about two months of heavy production. My pomegranates are ripe. Most of my olives are picked (a big cast-iron washtub full) and I am now engaged in putting them in rock-salt (for Greek olives) and in the lye-and-brine cure.”

 

A professor at Stanford, an active poet and critic, a husband and father – and Winters finds the time to tend and harvest, by my count, eight varieties of fruit. It was from Winters that I first heard of loquats, and this Northerner first saw the trees here in Houston some twenty years ago. He goes on:  

 

“In May my loquats will ripen (loquats are one of the finest fruits I know, but they deteriorate rapidly after picking and so are never marketed) and I shall have loquats for two months. In early June my cherries, nectarines, apricots and early peaches, and in mid-June my early figs (white) and my first crop of black mission figs. In July my late peaches and the end of the loquats. The black figs should continue through half of July and start their second crop late in August, at which time my late white figs and grapes will be starting. In addition to this we have quinces, limequats, and Meyer lemons. The lemons and limequats bear fruit straight through the year.”

 

Throughout my life I have tended flower and vegetable gardens, never fruit trees. Few activities are so primally satisfying. In the summer before second grade (1959), I grew a small patch of watermelons beside the garage. At Christmas I gave my teacher, Miss Esson, the gift of a watermelon. The gift of peaches and Winters’ description of his orchard remind me of my favorite among his poems, “Time and the Garden,” including the opening lines:

 

“The spring has darkened with activity.

The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree:

Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape,

Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape.

These will advance in their due series, space

The season like a tranquil dwelling-place.”

 

[See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (ed. R.L. Barth, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 2000).]

'Acquainted With His Real Character'

We all do it, even the most sophisticated and open-minded among us: we draw conclusions about people based on their physical appearance. Sure, there’s pretty/handsome versus ugly/plain. Most men will pause when they see a beautiful woman. That’s natural, not depraved. But we read faces and bodies in ways other than aesthetically. In The Spectator on this date, June 8, in 1711, Joseph Addison writes: 

 “[E]very one is in some Degree a Master of that Art which is generally distinguished by the Name of Physiognomy; and naturally forms to himself the Character or Fortune of a Stranger, from the Features and Lineaments of his Face. We are no sooner presented to any one we never saw before, but we are immediately struck with the Idea of a proud, a reserved, an affable, or a good-natured Man; and upon our first going into a Company of Strangers, our Benevolence or Aversion, Awe or Contempt, rises naturally towards several particular Persons before we have heard them speak a single Word, or so much as know who they are.”

 

A parent will tell a child: “Stop staring.” It’s rude and can be interpreted as invasive or threatening. Most of us learn early to conceal our interest in another’s face. But Addison suggests we can glean useful information from observing the faces of strangers, though I was told before my first visit to New York City: “Don’t make eye contact.” It’s complicated and we can easily commit a faux pas. Addison writes: “I think we may be better known by our Looks than by our Words; and that a Man’s Speech is much more easily disguised than his Countenance.” He quotes Martial’s epigram 12.54:

 

“Crine ruber, niger ore, brevis pede, lumine lœsus:

Rem magnam prœstas, Zoile, si bonus es.”

 

Here is a translation:

 

“Red-haired, black-mouthed, lame-footed, squint-eyed;

it would be a miracle, Zoilus, if you were honorable.”

 

Poor Zoilus. His appearance condemns him to perpetual misunderstanding. He will seldom be judged an honorable man, despite what might be an honorable life. We’re no different. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles Darwin suggests facial appearance is important, and that certain expressions are likely an evolutionary inheritance.

 

“We are so familiar with the fact of young and old animals displaying their feelings in the same manner, that we hardly perceive how remarkable it is that a young puppy should wag its tail when pleased, depress its ears and uncover its canine teeth when pretending to be savage, just like an old dog; or that a kitten should arch its little back and erect its hair when frightened and angry, like an old cat. When, however, we turn to less common gestures in ourselves, which we are accustomed to look at as artificial or conventional,—such as shrugging the shoulders, as a sign of impotence, or the raising the arms with open hands and extended fingers, as a sign of wonder,—we feel perhaps too much surprise at finding that they are innate.”

 

Addison urges thoughtfulness as a antidote to prejudice:

 

“[A] wise Man should be particularly cautious how he gives credit to a Man’s outward Appearance. It is an irreparable Injustice we are guilty of towards one another, when we are prejudiced by the Looks and Features of those whom we do not know. How often do we conceive Hatred against a Person of Worth, or fancy a Man to be proud and ill-natured by his Aspect, whom we think we cannot esteem too much when we are acquainted with his real Character?”

'Among the Essential Text-Books of Our Schools'

A reader in North Dakota tells me he has acquired Donald Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford University Press, 1957) and asks for recommendations among them. Really, he can’t go wrong starting anywhere, and he already has his eyes on “Of Sleep,” “Of Books” and Montaigne’s longest essay, “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Almost randomly I would suggest “Of Idleness” (his shortest essay: one page) and “Of Cruelty.” A sample from “Idleness”: 

“Just as we see that fallow land, if rich and fertile, teems with a hundred thousand kinds of wild and useless weeds, and that to set it to work we must subject it and sow it with certain seeds for our service; and as we see that women, all alone, produce mere shapeless masses and lumps of flesh, but that to create a good and natural offspring they must be made fertile with a different kind of seed; so it is with minds.”

 

Typical Montaigne: homely, readily understood metaphors and a sort of punchline bringing it all together. Here’s the next sentence, which amounts to common sense on minds: “Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination.”

 

In 1934, the English literary critic F.L. Lucas (1894-1967) published in the journal Studies French and English an essay, “The Master-Essayist.” Lucas gives us a charming profile of the Frenchman:

 

“That a gaily self-indulgent old gentleman in Perigord once loved scratching his ears is and will be remembered where lives, by the thousand, of desperate industry and devoted idealism leave not a ripple on the inky waters of oblivion. Such is justice.”

 

Montaigne was the first to make the first-person singular a worthy subject, and he is seldom tedious, unlike Rousseau and a thousand imitators. Here is Lucas’ conclusion:

 

“Today Montaigne would rather have lived in a garret, alone with his own thoughts, than have earned his living in many of our occupations, or joined many of the movements of the modern world. After all, would he be wrong? If only we were wise, I believe that among the essential text-books of our schools, and of our schoolmasters, would be the Lives of Plutarch and the Essais of Montaigne.

 

[Find Lucas’ essay and many others in the “Articles” section of Isaac Waisberg’s essential IWP Books.)

'Pain an Evil'

I was seated in the waiting room of the physical therapy center with the rest of the human wreckage. Two men were seated to my right, speaking Spanish. Both were in street clothes with no obvious signs of injury or disease. To my left was a black man about my age, dressed all in black. He had a prosthetic right leg beneath the knee and was drinking a cup of coffee. He uses a walker to navigate. We chatted, indifferent stuff at first, before I asked him how he lost the leg. “Fuckin’ diabetes,” he said. He still occasionally feels his foot, the so-called “phantom limb” phenomenon. 

He goes to PT hoping to ease other pains – knees, hips, back. Edema is an ongoing problem. He spoke clinically, without complaint, and I appreciated his apparent absence of self-pity. When he stood, he groaned softly. It sounded familiar. He had noticed my cane and I told him about the arthritis. As he moved toward the PT room he said, “Life’s a bitch, ain’t it?” and laughed.

 

To read while waiting I brought along Santayana’s The Life of Reason, originally published in five volumes in 1905-06. I haven’t read it in years and I’m luxuriating in the prose. Can you think of another writer whose English prose is as fluent as Santayana’s? Perhaps Ruskin. Or Evelyn Waugh. No academic nonsense or stiffness, little jargon, philosophical or otherwise. In the first volume, Reason in Common Sense, in the chapter titled “First Steps and First Fluctuations,” he devotes an extended digression to the subject of pain:

 

“[T]o deny that pleasure is a good and pain an evil is a grotesque affectation: it amounts to giving ‘good’ and ‘evil’ artificial definitions and thereby reducing ethics to arbitrary verbiage. . . . A man who without necessity deprived any person of a pleasure or imposed on him a pain, would be a contemptible knave, and the person so injured would be the first to declare it, nor could the highest celestial tribunal, if it was just, reverse that sentence.”

'A Mission to the University Extension Scheme'

I have a typically human taste for taxonomy, classifying things, sorting them into categories. There’s comfort in order. A friend in Los Angeles shares my bent and proposes three classes of books as outlined by Oscar Wilde in his essay "To Read or Not to Read" (1886):

 

1. Books to read.

2. Books to reread

3. Books not to read at all

 

Makes sense. Most of us probably follow a similar scheme without having formalized it. Here are Wilde's entries in the first category: Cicero’s Letters, Suetonius, Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, the Duc de Saint-Simon’s Memoirs, Theodor Mommsen and, “till we get a better one,” Grote’s History of Greece.

 

Little to argue with here, though I’ve not read Mandeville, Marco Polo and Grote. Here is the second category, the books to reread:

 

Plato and Keats. “In the sphere of poetry,” Wilde writes, “the masters not the minstrels; in the sphere of philosophy, the seers not the savants.” That’s a little vague but leaves plenty of room for nominations. I have an extensive list. In fact, it may be the second-largest category, topped only by the third, the books not to read at all:

 

“[James] Thomson’s Seasons, [Samuel] Rogers’s Italy[: A Poem], [William] Paley’s Evidences [of Christianity], all the Fathers except St. Augustine, all John Stuart Mill except the essay “On Liberty,” all Voltaire’s plays without any exception, [Bishop Joseph] Butler’s Analogy [of Religion], [Sir Alexander] Grant’s Aristotle, [David] Hume’s [History of] England, George Henry Lewes’s [Biographical] History of Philosophy, all argumentative books and all books that try to prove anything.”

 

So far, I’m safe from most of these titles, though I have read Thomson and a lot of Hume but not his History. I want to endorse that final phrase, which Wilde expands on here:

 

“The third class is by far the most important. To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for, the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching . . . But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission to the University Extension Scheme.”

 

Such negative endorsements are unenforceable, of course. People are free to read any tripe they fancy. The best we can do is share our experience of books and trust that a few readers out there will follow the suggestion, read the book and conclude that we knew what we were talking about.

[A note to readers: the comments section at Anecdotal Evidence is reserved strictly for readers. I’ve had my say. If you have a question, send it to me via email: Patrick.kurp@gmail.com. Otherwise, I’m unable to reply.]

'All Sit in Sullen Silence and Await'

My middle son has a friend, a fellow Marine, who had questions about Russian literature. He asked about Andrei Platonov and Leonid Andreyev. I’ve never read the latter but told him what little I knew about the former. I recommended Vasily Grossman, and he said he intends to read Stalingrad. Previously, he had suggested Michael read The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, one of my favorite novels. This Marine, whom I have never met, has an interest in colonial Algeria and I was able to recommend Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (1977), which he subsequently read. 

This is one of the ancillary pleasures of reading good books. Suggestions, of course, are made to be ignored but occasionally one takes hold and one’s pleasure is doubled. I don’t remember anyone recommending a book to me when I was young. That probably contributed to me becoming a semi-secretive reader. I assumed no one was interested in the books I loved. That began to change at the university when I met a few students and faculty members who shared my enthusiasm. There’s an informal underground out there of adventurous readers, those who eschew bestsellers and often contemporary books and indulge in our inheritance.

 

D.A. Cooper is a poet who, I’m told, lives here in Houston. This is his poem, “To Read”:

 

“There are so many books to read; they fill

the shelves of libraries and stores across

the world, as well as every empty space

inside my house. The stacks grow year by year;

they rise like zombie corpses on my desk,

my couch, and all across the floor. Each begs

to sink its dusty claws into my brain.

I crack their spines, flip through their crumbling pages,

and try to pick which ones I’ll give new life.

There are too many books to read. I see

those volumes and I know I’ll never have

the time I need to finish even just

the ones I own. They cry out from my shelves—

collected poems and stories of the dead—

entreating me to resurrect their souls.

And that is just the famous literature.

Great forests have been razed so I could buy

large piles of science fiction, fantasy,

detective novels, politics, and physics.

Selections of the best known -ologies,

a sampling of the most loved -ographies,

and sprinkles of my favorite -osophies,

all sit in sullen silence and await

the hoped for yet unlikely future date

when I will find the time I need to read.”

 

Cooper describes an anxiety I once suffered from: too many books looming over my head. How would I ever be able to read all of them? With time, I turned that around. Now it’s reassuring to know such bounty awaits me. Even better, I know precisely which books I will soon reread.