'Fullness For the Time That Was to Come'

Donald Justice on Edwin Arlington Robinson: 

“Robinson’s techniques were more or less the same as those of his contemporaries, the meters strict always, so strict and even jingly at times as to suggest light verse. Only—and this makes all the difference—the pieties are not quite in place . . .” 

After two hundred fifty years, America has produced a handful of world-class poets, and many good ones. Robinson I rank as the greatest to emerge between Dickinson and Eliot. His only rival among close contemporaries is Robert Frost. A reader has accused me of exaggerating Robinson’s importance. I’m reminded of Virginia Woolf’s assessment of Middlemarch: “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” The same can be said of Robinson. Whitman, William Carlos Williams and Roethke, for instance, write essentially for children and the childish.

 

By “pieties” Justice means the Emersonian bromides and sentimentalities, often religious or warmed-over Romantic in nature, that have dominated so much American verse. That slippery term “realist” applies to Robinson largely because he is seldom naïve about human nature. Neither is he exaggeratedly cynical on most occasions. Robinson’s instincts overlap with the fiction writer’s. Take “Isaac and Archibald” (Captain Craig and Other Poems, 1902). Robinson was a great story teller, among his other gifts. In this poem he encourages the reader to inhabit at least four characters – those named in the title, the narrator and the narrator’s younger self. This complex arrangement of sympathetic ties mirrors our life and the way we preserve it and transform it in memory:

 

“’Look at me, my boy,

And when the time shall come for you to see

That I must follow after him, try then

To think of me, to bring me back again,

Just as I was to-day. Think of the place

Where we are sitting now, and think of me—

Think of old Isaac as you knew him then,

When you set out with him in August once

To see old Archibald.’—The words come back

Almost as Isaac must have uttered them,

And there comes with them a dry memory

Of something in my throat that would not move.”

 

When read aloud the passage sounds almost unbearably plangent – Isaac speaking of himself in the third person, as though already dead, urging the narrator to remember; the narrator’s act of remembrance as a man of the boy he was; the boy’s tacit sense that Isaac’s words are important and deserve to be remembered. And then our narrator remembers his time alone with Archibald and the old man’s warning that echoes Henry James’ Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”

 

“I’m in the shadow, but I don’t forget

The light, my boy,—the light behind the stars.

Remember that: remember that I said it;

And when the time that you think far away

Shall come for you to say it—say it, boy;

Let there be no confusion or distrust

In you, no snarling of a life half lived,

Nor any cursing over broken things

That your complaint has been the ruin of.

Live to see clearly and the light will come

To you, and as you need it.”

 

There’s another line, almost a throwaway, that makes me look at myself and the boy I was and at my own sons: “And all was as it should be. I was young.” Robinson encourages this sense of mutual vision, of being the see-er and the seen, the remembered and the one who remembers. Isaac and Archibald are at once foolish old men and heroes out of Homer, “the loved and well-forgotten.” The nameless boy remembers that summer moment under the apple tree and his vision of the anticipated future:

 

                                                            “I felt

Within the mightiness of the white sun

That smote the land around us and wrought out

A fragrance from the trees, a vital warmth

And fullness for the time that was to come,

And a glory for the world beyond the forest.”

 

That a poem about a boy and two old men should kindle powerful emotions in a reader is no surprise. When not trivial or pyrotechnical, when the poet subsumes himself in words, a poem can be as humbly potent as a memory.

'The Oxford of All Sicknesses'

I spent much of Monday in the hospital for “tests” involving various bodily fluids – one more reminder that the human body is profoundly ridiculous. In two weeks I’m scheduled for surgery. The text for the day was Karl Shapiro’s “Hospital,” one of seven poems he published in the July 1941 issue of Poetry. Five months later the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor, the U.S. would enter World War II and Shapiro (1913-2000) would write the poems he is best remember for while serving in the Army in the South Pacific. “Hospital” is written by a twenty-eight-year-old poet very much under the sway, like so many young poets at the time, of W.H. Auden: 

“Inside or out, the key is pain. It holds

The florist to your pink medicinal rose,

The nickname to the corpse. One wipes it from

Blue German blades or drops it down the drain.

The novelist with a red tube up his nose

 Gingerly pets it. Nurse can turn it off.

 

“This is the Oxford of all sicknesses.

Kings have lain here and fabulous small Jews

And actresses whose legs were always news.

In this black room the painter lost his sight,

The crippled dancer here put down her shoes,

And the scholar's memory broke, like an old clock.”

 

Joseph Epstein borrowed the title of his 2003 short story collection, Fabulous Small Jews, from the poem. Shapiro was one of my favorite poets when I was a teenager.

'Chekhov Saved Me But Also Ruined Me'

Recently I woke from a dream adapted from Nostromo and directed by Joseph Conrad. Something about Martin Decoud in the lifeboat, weighted down with silver ingots. The dream, typically, was fragmentary and out of focus. This is only the second time I can remember having a dream lifted from a work of fiction. The other involved Leopold Bloom embracing Rudy, his dead infant son. Do I find profound significance in these nighttime theatricals? That both involve death? Not really. They tell me that fiction, like one’s "real" life, is raw material for the subconscious, and perhaps that I know these novels nearly as well as my own life. There’s a touch of pride in knowing Conrad and Joyce are among the greatest writers, longtime favorites, and that Joyce Carol Oates hasn’t infected my subconscious. 

In her latest post at The Little White Attic, “My Personal Library,” Di Nguyen examines the books she owns – a common practice among serious readers -- and writes:

 

“Sometimes I try to find some pattern behind the writers who speak the most to me, but can’t find any. I like both sane writers (Jane Austen, Chekhov, Tolstoy) and mad writers (Emily Bronte, Melville, Akutagawa); both warm writers (Chekhov, Molière, Dickens) and cold writers (Jane Austen, Flannery O’Connor, Muriel Spark). I think I like writers preoccupied with the subject of death, but Jane Austen leaves it offstage. I think I like writers with a sense of humour, but does Tolstoy make anyone laugh? (Maybe twice in War and Peace). I think I like writers who see some goodness and nobility in humanity and don’t just depict us all as base and bestial, but why do I like Flannery O’Connor?”

 

These are the sort of questions I ask myself. Like Di, I see no pattern. This says something about me but also about the great library of fiction, the way it reflects, after sufficient reading, the infinite complexity of human beings, our capacity for humility and love, duplicity and evil, our essentially contradictory nature. Di writes:

 

“[D]uring that difficult period of my life, I found solace in Chekhov and found myself moving away from Austen—she didn’t write about the subjects that were preoccupying me. But now looking back, I can’t help wondering if I was making a mess of things because I absorbed Chekhov’s pessimism and accepted that human relationships were messy and my life was over and there’s no happiness on earth. I was going through volumes and volumes of Chekhov—how many stories did I read? Chekhov saved me but also ruined me.”

 

In a letter to his sister, shortly before committing suicide, Martin Decoud writes: “[A]ll this is life, must be life, since it is so much like a dream.”

'The Summer Has Begun to Pass Away'

 Anton Chekhov wrote nothing in the summer of 1888 but thought about writing a novel. He stayed at the villa of his editor and friend Aleksi Suvorin in Feodosia, in Crimea on the Black Sea. He was leading a “vile, lotus-eating life,” as he says in a letter to his family written July 23-24: 

“The days pass in an endlessly replete stream, the cup of life overflows . . . Lounging about on the beach, Chartreuse, punch, fireworks, bathing, good cheer at supper, trips, songs – all such pleasures make the days go by so quickly that you hardly notice them; time flies while the drowsy head nods off to the sound of the waves and refuses to get down to work.”

 

Despite his inactivity, earlier that year he had written “The Steppe.” Soon he would write “A Dreary Story” and “Gusev.” The novel was never written but Chekhov was on the cusp of his greatest period.

 

Every year as Northerners we are surprised by summer’s passing, as though it were a fluke. We go on sensing within us the cycle of the seasons. Saturday morning here in Houston the temperature dipped to sixty-one degrees, the first time that cool this season. It felt almost chilly but I left my jacket at home. Howard Nemerov published “Summer’s Elegy” in The Blue Swallows (1967):

 

“Day after day, day after still day,

The summer has begun to pass away.

Starlings at twilight fly clustered and call,

And branches bend, and leaves begin to fall.

The meadow and the orchard grass are mown,

And the meadowlark’s house is cut down.

 

“The little lantern bugs have doused their fires,

The swallows sit in rows along the wires.

Berry and grape appear among the flowers

Tangled against the wall in secret bowers,

And cricket now begins to hum the hours

Remaining to the passion’s slow procession

Down from the high place and the golden session

Wherein the sun was sacrificed for us.

A failing light, no longer numinous,

Now frames the long and solemn afternoons

Where butterflies regret their closed cocoons.

We reach the place unripe, and made to know

As with a sudden knowledge that we go

Away forever, all hope of return

Cut off, hearing the crackle of the burn-

ing blade behind us, and the terminal sound

Of apples dropping on the dry ground”

 

That year, 1967, I was almost fifteen and I accompanied my father when he installed the wrought-iron railing and fence he had made for a wealthy family in Bratenahl, a tiny village northeast of Cleveland on Lake Erie. The lady was friendly and served us lunch. She invited me afterwards into the backyard which was almost filled with a small apple orchard. She gave me a burlap sack and said I could fill it with apples. I had picked crabapples before. They were wormy and indigestible, and we used them in apple fights. Picking large, unblemished apples was a novelty and is forever associated with the passing of summer and the arrival of autumn: “the terminal sound / Of apples dropping on the dry ground.”

'These Remarks Are Heretical'

Like Edward Gibbon, Yvor Winters tucks some of his best stuff into footnotes. Take this provocation from “English Literature in the Sixteenth Century,” published in the Summer 1955 issue of The Hudson Review and collected in The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises (Swallow Press, 1957): 

“At this point, I would like to interject one word of warning to the professors. Poets are not fools (I mean good poets); they are capable of perceiving in their early twenties facts which professors may or may not manage to perceive in their sixties or seventies. I am not trying to be insulting (the technical term, I think, is ‘arrogant’); I am trying rather to state an important truth which is overlooked for the greater part in the academic world. There is likely to be over long periods what one might call an underground or unpublicized, tradition of the best writing, which one can discover only if one has the perception to trace the tradition from poem to poem. I am fully aware that these remarks are heretical.”

 

Winters’ essay is a review of three academic volumes including English Literature in the Sixteenth Century by C. S. Lewis. The footnote was added to the book and doesn’t appear in the journal article. As always, Winters focuses his attention on individual poems not individual poets. He uses the occasion to celebrate the “plain style” of poetry, as he does in his poem “Time and the Garden”:

 

“I would expand to greatness. No one hears,

And I am still retarded in duress!

And this is like that other restlessness

To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned,

One which the tougher poets have discerned—

Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,

Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,

And spaced by many years, each line an act

Through which few labor, which no men retract.”

 

The plain style is the most exclusive in the history of English literature, shunned by or unknown to most contemporary poets. A convenient example is the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature who, strictly speaking, is not a poet at all but an assembler of au courant bric-a-brac. Readers of Winters’ final book, Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (1967), will recognize the poems Winters names, including George Herbert’s “Church Monuments,” Henry Vaughan’s “To His Books” and Fulke Greville’s “The world that all containes.”

 

The footnote quoted above has proved prophetic. Most of our best poets are part of an “underground.” Not in the self-congratulatory, politicized Sixties sense but apart from the big publishers and name-brand critics. They often rely on Twitter, Substack, various blogs, small publishers and self-publication. Winters closes his review like this:

 

“[O]ne reads and reads and reads, and one does one’s best to remember. It is a messy business, any way one takes it; but it is also fascinating.” 

 

Winters was born on this date, October 17, in 1900 and died in 1968 (annus horribilis) at age sixty-seven.

'The Dead World's Much Too Crowded'

“I know, for both of us, the dead world’s much too crowded.” 

Live long enough and all, reluctantly, must agree. Most of our relatives and oldest friends are dead – the unhappy price paid for longevity. As Dr. Johnson describes grief in The Idler (January 27, 1759):

 

“The loss of a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavour was tended, is a state of dreary desolation, in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horror. The blameless life, the artless tenderness, the pious simplicity, the modest resignation, the patient sickness, and the quiet death, are remembered only to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, to deepen sorrow for what cannot be recalled.”

 

The line at the top is from “Letter to Horace After Reading Ode i.24” by a poet new to me, Tamara Nicholl-Smith, published in Modern Age. The poem is dedicated to David Solomon. She addresses the Roman poet as she might a friend:

 

“Horace, I must confess, you’ve managed to surprise

Me. I had thought there were too many centuries

Between us—that your verse would sound like dusty, sighs;

Nothing that would please.”

 

Nicholl-Smith endorses a notion commonly dismissed: a writer born millennia ago can still speak to us, often more potently than contemporaries. “Despite our progress, pain is pain. / And Death, in any age, won’t give back what he reaps.” The next line in the fourth stanza, “Our loss remains his gain,” sounds like an echo from Bob Dylan’s "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest": “My loss will be your gain.”

 

Horace’s Ode i.24 is dedicated to Virgil. David Ferry’s translation (Of No Country I Know, 1999) begins: “How should this grief be properly put into words?” It concludes:

 

“It is hard. But all of this must be endured,

And by endurance what can never be changed

Will be at last made easier in the heart.”

'I Have Known His Voice Quaver'

“It was wonderful luck for me that I should have worked with Yvor Winters. at this particular stage of my life, rather than earlier, when I would have been more impressionable, or later, when I would have been less ready to learn. So he came at just the right time for me.” 

Good teachers are exceedingly rare, which we’re not supposed to admit, but the same goes for students. It’s a matter of temperament and, as Thom Gunn suggests above, timing. By my count I had five excellent teachers in the formal sense, and dozens of lousy or indifferent ones. The good ones made it clear they had expectations of me. Since then, I’ve known several people I’ve informally adopted as teachers, beginning with Guy Davenport.

 

Gunn’s portrait of Winters is taken from a lecture he gave in 1977 at Lake Forest College in Illinois. The recovered transcript, titled “An Apprenticeship,” was first published in Winter issue of The Threepenny Review in 2022.

 

In 1954, Gunn had graduated from Cambridge, published his first poetry collection, Fighting Terms, and came to the United States to study with Winters at Stanford.

I’m always touched by Winters’ thoughtfulness and hospitality. He met Gunn at train station, invited him home for dinner and made sure he had a place to stay. More from Gunn about Winters:

 

“Winters emphasized that poetry has to engage the whole self. He saw it as the prime art-form, into which one concentrated as much of one’s experience and intelligence and emotion as possible.”

 

“We were brought to feel a direct continuity between ourselves and other practicers of the art, like Corbière, Williams, the American Indian poets, and George Herbert.”

 

“There were two compelling things about Winters. One was his great personal warmth, his charm and good humor. The other was that he had a deeper love of poetry than I have ever come across in anybody else. I have known his voice quaver almost into tears while reading a poem to which he was especially attached.

 

“The love was behind his increasingly strict conception of what a poem should and should not be. It seemed to him an insult to the poem that it should be used as a gymnasium for the ego. Poetry was an instrument for exploring the truth of things, as far as human beings can explore it, and it can do so with a greater verbal exactitude than even good prose can manage. Large generalized feelings (as in Whitman, whom he abhorred) were out, and rhetoric was the beginning of falsification.”

 

Gunn, a fine portraitist, offers an alternative to stereotyped notions of Winters as a reactionary crank. Years after being his student Gunn would write “To Yvor Winters, 1955,” which concludes:

 

“Though night is always close, complete negation  

Ready to drop on wisdom and emotion,  

Night from the air or the carnivorous breath,  

Still it is right to know the force of death,  

And, as you do, persistent, tough in will,  

Raise from the excellent the better still.”

'I Would Have Been Enchanted'

We think Titus Lucretius Carus died on this date, October 15, in 55 B.C. at roughly age forty-four. We know he wrote the philosophical poem De rerum natura, usually translated On the Nature of Things. Though read less often than other Roman poets, Lucretius can be traced in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, George Santayana, Wallace Stevens and Guy Davenport. 

I’ve stumbled on him again while reading The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology, edited by Primo Levi and published in Italy in 1981. The collection is an inspired hodgepodge Levi describes as “a harvesting, retrospectively and in good faith, which could bring to light the possible traces of what has been read on what has been written.” Included by Levi are selections from Sir William Bragg’s Lucretian-titled Concerning the Nature of Things (1925).

 

In his introduction, the translator, Peter Forbes, writes: “It is Lucretius who provides the link between Levi’s scientific, moral and aesthetic worldviews.” Levi worked for decades as an industrial chemist and credited his reading of Bragg’s book at age sixteen with inspiring his choice of careers. Bragg had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915 for development of the first X-ray spectrometer. In his introduction to the excerpt from Bragg’s book, Levi says the physicist “belonged to an epoch in which a pioneering genius could still do brilliant work in isolation.” The same, of course, was true for Levi. 

 

He titles his selection from Lucretius “The Poet-Researcher” (as translated from the Latin by Sir Ronald Melville), and says in his introduction: 

 

“If I had read Lucretius in high school I would have been enchanted, but he is not willingly read in school, officially because he is too difficult, actually because there has always been a whiff of impiety about his verses. For this reason, at the end of antiquity a cloak of silence was wrapped around him and today almost nothing is known of this extraordinary man. Consciously or not, for a long time he was regarded as dangerous, because he sought a purely rational explanation of nature, had faith in the evidence of his own senses, wanted to liberate man from suffering and fear, rebelled against all superstition, and described earthly love in lucid poetry.” 

 

In his introduction, Forbes revels, as does Levi, in Lucretius’ proto-scientific thinking and the sheer pleasure he took in it: 

 

“In Lucretius the world of sensation is a joy: it sings with the sights and sounds and feel of the world, with the spirit of healthy animals enjoying their animality. There is a wonderful Italian tradition of science writing that derives from Lucretius. Galileo is its greatest figure as a scientist, and Italo Calvino, Levi’s contemporary and friend is another exponent. In Levi’s case, his philosophy was put to the starkest test in Auschwitz. The result is as if Lucretius had endured Dante’s hell and emerged, a survivor, tempered by the experience.” 

 

What I most enjoy in Lucretius is the mingling of scientific observation and speculation, and a zest for the pure physicality of the universe. The examples he cites are vivid and humble. This comes from the C.H. Sisson translation, De Rerum Natura: The Poem of Nature (1976): 

 

“In any building, if the basic measure is wrong 

And there is error in judging the perpendicular 

Or the level somewhere is even the slightest bit wrong, 

Everything will be out of true and lopsided, 

Crooked, sloping, leaning this way or that; 

It will threaten to fall and some of it actually will fall 

And all on account of the first erroneous measurements: 

So your reasoning about things is always bound to be false 

If it is based on sense you cannot rely on.”

'He Lessens the Gayety of Life'

I’ll spare you the joke the phlebotomist told me while drawing blood from my arm. Given the circumstance I mustered a polite titter in response. I had already diagnosed him as a member of that blight on humanity, the would-be comedian, the sort of guy – almost always male – who wishes to be thought a funny fellow, a jokester, a real card (“he has to be dealt with” – heh-heh). To make sure you recognize his wit, he helpfully laughs at his own joke. The condition’s etiology remains a mystery but I blame misguided parents who laughed at Junior’s jokes regardless of their witlessness. In her essay “The Mission of Humour” (Americans and Others, 1912), Agnes Repplier left-handedly defends the humorless man: 

“Charles Lamb said it was no misfortune for a man to have a sulky temper. It was his friends who were unfortunate. And so with the man who has no sense of humour. He gets along very well without it. He is not aware that anything is lacking. He is not mourning his lot. What loss there is, his friends and neighbours bear.”

 

Repplier refers to section XVI of Lamb’s “Popular Fallacies,” “That a Sulky Temper Is a Misfortune.” She continues:

 

“A man destitute of humour is apt to be a formidable person, not subject to sudden deviations from his chosen path, and incapable of frittering away his elementary forces by pottering over both sides of a question. He is often to be respected, sometimes to be feared, and always—if possible—to be avoided. His are the qualities which distance enables us to recognize and value at their worth. He fills his place in the scheme of creation; but it is for us to see that his place is not next to ours at table, where his unresponsiveness narrows the conversational area, and dulls the contagious ardour of speech. He may add to the wisdom of the ages, but he lessens the gayety of life.”

'No Gold This Go-Round'

This is the time of year I feel a pang for the Northern autumn. The temperature in Houston, as I write on Monday, is eighty-six degrees. The trees are as green today as they were last month and last April. Butterflies still flit in the garden, as do anoles, green and brown. Years have a circadian rhythm as do our days. Mine is definitely Northern, Ohio by way of upstate New York, and my clock is always off.

Our front yard was the deepest on the street, lined on the right with four silver maples, with a sugar maple nearest the street. All are long gone, but starting in September when I was a kid all were blazing yellow with the occasional dash of red. I remember writing a paper in which I described maples as “sugar factories.” Few maples grow in Texas. In her poem “Suburban Samsara,” Maryann Corbett, who lives in Minnesota, writes of the cycle of seasonal change and the larger cycles of life. Here is the second stanza:

“Arid, this summer. | After, when air

chilled, and the days | damped down, cheerless,

small color came: | the crabbed rust-brown,

the dull, dry green. | No gold this go-round,

wealth we waited for. | Only the work—

the raking, bent, | the wrenched back.”

Yes, hours of raking, in our yard and the neighbors’. Samsara is the Sanskrit word for the cycle of life, death and rebirth, common to Buddhism and Hinduism. Every autumn, this native Northerner recalls a sentence from The American Scene (1906) by Henry James:

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

'The Second Life of Art'

As an obstinately monolingual American, I rely on the precious work of translators. The three poets I read most often in translation, in order of frequency, are Dante, Eugenio Montale and Zbigniew Herbert. I have much English and American poetry safely stored in memory – one of many reasons I am almost never bored -- but only scraps of the Italians and the Pole. Rough outlines, fragments, incomplete lines, yes. This is shameful, I know. One of the tests of great writing, especially poetry, is memorability. The personal stamp of some poets is so indelible, so poetically DNA-specific, as to lay claim not only to stanzas, lines and phrases but individual words. Perhaps this is the ultimate memorability, to wield a single word so forcefully that readers, centuries later, recognize its ownership. “Slant” immediately conjures Dickinson; “madding,” Gray. “Fruitfulness” and “clammy” are forever Keats’. I'm denied this with the three foreign-language poets cited above. 

Montale was also a memorable writer of prose. In his 1949 essay “The Second Life of Art” he writes: "An art which destroys form while claiming to refine it denies itself its second and larger life: the life of memory and everyday circulation. I will try to explain what this second life of art is so as not to be misunderstood.” Montale dismisses much of modern poetry for the absence of this “second life”; that is, in the reader’s consciousness and, sometimes, his memory:

 

“Paradoxically, one could say that music, painting, and poetry begin to be understood when they are presented but they do not truly live if they lack the capacity to continue to exercise their powers beyond that moment, freeing themselves, mirroring themselves in that particular situation of life which made them possible. To enjoy a work of art or its moment, in short, is to discover it outside its context; only in that instant does the circle of understanding close and art become one with life as all the romantics dreamed.”

 

Montale was a rare critic who changed for the better my understanding of art. Clive James writes of him:

 

“If it ever came to the point where a lifetime’s memories of artistic exaltation shrank to nothing except a single image, an image of dignity would be a good one to see. One would want to retain at least that much. But Montale must have had that idea in mind, or he would not have talked about the inevitability of forgetting in a way that emphasized the quality of what is remembered.”

Montale was born on this date, October 12, in 1896 and died in 1981 at age eighty-four.

 

[The Montale prose translations are taken from The Second Life of Art (trans. Jonathan Galassi, 1982). Clive James’ essay on Montale can be found in Cultural Amnesia (2007).]

'An Interzone Between Prose and Poetry'

Among Clive James’ books, perhaps the least read is Gate of Lilacs (Picador, 2016), a book of poems mostly about Marcel Proust and James’ imminent death (he would die in 2019). The poet taught himself French by reading Proust and a dictionary across many decades. Proust and his masterwork were essential to my education as well. I first read the Scott-Moncrieff translation, Remembrance of Things Past, over the summer of 1971 while managing a miniature golf course – a silly setting Proust would have appreciated. Ten years later, when I was working as a newspaper reporter, I read Terence Kilmartin’s newly revised edition of In Search of Lost Time. While reading Proust I remember thinking all the rest of literature was somehow second-rate, even Shakespeare. That left me feeling rather guilty and somehow disloyal. In his postscript James writes: 

“Proust was a very clever man, and had nothing to do with his day except observe, study and write. His powers of observation were as acute as Dante’s, Shakespeare’s or Goethe’s, but we might say the same of Lucretius, or of Homer when he registered in a set of syllables the quivering of a bowstring: when Conrad said that the writer’s aim was ‘above all, to make you see’, he forgot to say that the ability to observe is the writer’s first qualification.”

 

That’s what I remember: Proust’s powers of concentration, the way he could observe a scene and analyze it for many pages without being tedious. James takes up one of his favorite themes: the relationship of prose to poetry:

 

“Perhaps it merely blurs categories to say that the expression of a thought in prose can have a poetry of its own, but in fact poets have always been attracted to the mere sound of phrases lying loose. Tell a poet that Kepler, with his newly improved refracting telescope, observed SN 1604 in Serpentarius and you might get no reaction. But tell the same poet that Kepler studied the geometry of lunar shadows and he might make a note, because the phrase sounds good. There is an interzone between prose and poetry: a porous border where the discursive expression of a thought is rhythmic or resonant enough to take off on its own and enter the area where words and phrases, seemingly in search of one another, combine into a meaning beyond analysis.”

 

The accompanying poems are not merely discursive. James often returns to his illness and mortality. In the section titled, after Prospero, “I’ll Drown My Books,” James writes:

 

“And soon

All that I love will leave me, as I go

First into silence, then the fire, and then

The harbour water, in which there will be

At last no room to breathe, no time to think:

No time to think even of you, Marcel.”

 

If you have ever contemplated reading Proust but have been daunted by its length or reputation, let me recommend Gate of Lilacs as an excellent orexigenic – an appetite stimulant. I’m taking a dose of it myself for a third reading.

'An Art of Measured Speech'

Can a congenital pessimist reject the notion of an imminent apocalypse, a collapse of all that Western Civilization has accomplished? Sure, I can. I dislike fashionable doom-saying at least as much as blinkered, kneejerk optimism. Not everyone out there is a mindless nihilist, a lazy critic of all that is best in our species. I’m reminded of the late Terry Teachout calling himself (and H.L. Mencken) an “ebullient pessimist.” We have attained too much wisdom and aesthetic accomplishment to let it rot or be torn down from within. It’s easier to criticize, say, Aristotle or Shakespeare, if you haven’t read them and incorporated the way they look at the world into your life. 

I’m thinking of writers like James Joyce, who could hardly make a move without evoking Aquinas or Flaubert, or George Santayana, who wrote with Democritus and Spinoza at his shoulder. At the conclusion of Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (1990), his three-hundred-page historical and aesthetic defense of formal verse and review of free verse, Timothy Steele writes:

 

“What is most essential to human life and to its continuance remains a love of nature, an enthusiasm for justice, a readiness of good humor, a spontaneous susceptibility to beauty and joy, an interest in our past, a hope for our future and above all, a desire that others should have the opportunity and encouragement to share in those qualities. An art of measured speech nourishes these qualities in a way no other pursuit can.”

 

Steele is no stiff-necked reactionary. One page earlier he writes:

 

“The poetry of the past can elevate and console us. But it cannot do this as fully and richly as poetry of the present. Only the poetry of the present speaks of our life and time. And though the poetry of Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson can connect us with the past, only the poetry of our time can connect us with the future and give us the indispensable hope that something that we say will matter to our descendants and will enable them to live more intelligently and happily than otherwise they might. Only the poetry of our time can offer the prospect that, after we and those we love have returned to dust, some reader somewhere will be moved by lines that bear witness to us and will commit our words to heart and mind that we may live again.”

'Give One Thing More, a Gratefull Heart'

I spent Thursday morning in the hospital having a nuclear stress test performed. It’s a painless, time-consuming procedure made pleasant by the nurses and techs who worked on me. By my count they represented five countries of origin, not including my cardiologist, who is from India. My blood pressure has been distressingly low and the doctor urged me to use more salt after I’ve spent a lifetime hearing the opposite advice. He also fetched a can of Coke, the high-test stuff, something I haven’t drunk since I was a kid. He thought the caffeine would help, considering I had been fasting and didn’t consume my usual two cups of coffee first thing in the morning. 

To pass the time and fortify my heart (the purpose of the test was to clear me for multiple surgeries) I brought along the pocket-size Oxford World’s Classic edition of The Poems of George Herbert, Such a companionable poet. See “Gratefulnesse,” which begins:

 

“Thou that hast giv’n so much to me,

Give one thing more, a gratefull heart.

See how thy beggar works on thee

                                              By art.”

'I’m Still Alive; the Gods May Be Confused'

I don’t remember old people complaining about being old when I was a kid. It might have been joked about in passing but I recall little indulgence in self-pity. My maternal step-grandfather was a joker who loved his beer and, after retiring as a house painter, volunteered as a school crossing guard. He was one of the funniest people I knew when growing up. He was not a blood relative but we called him Uncle Kelly. When he talked about serving in the Army during World War I, he recalled having a turnip fight with other doughboys in some French field. The same went for my mother’s mother. In 1962, at age seventy-four, she suffered a stroke that left her left side paralyzed. She lived with us for several months. No complaining. She was a gentle soul, rare in my family. 

Now it’s common to hear my contemporaries, men and women, bitch about having reached their seventies. At the same time they want to extend their longevity, seemingly forever. I sense a generational shift toward self- centeredness, less acceptance of aging and its accompanying losses and gains. Catharine Savage Brosman was born in 1934 and is still writing. Last year in the Alabama Literary Review she published “The Body’s Past Its Prime”

 

“My youth was orderly, and I was green,

reserved, and bent on cultivating mind—

thank God; my figure, habits all were lean,

my appetites appropriate, refined.

 

“Time was abundant. One did not misspend

it, though; for ‘recreation,’ there were rules,

for play and married love, the proper end

of girlhood. Those ignoring them were fools.

 

“I’m still alive; the gods may be confused.

Or I. And now I’m squandering my old age—

these added years a favor, but unused,

my superannuated charms offstage,

 

“while there’s no need for prudence; no one cares

or notices; all conduct is the same,

all preferences; no one says affairs

or trysts. One’s liver is, perhaps, to blame

 

“for caution; any other pretext, trite.

Today, though, someone texts me from Saigon.

(He worked there once.) He’s thinking of me. Might

he come to see me? As in antiphon,

 

“I answered, ‘Yes! Of course!’ My old heart raced.

Conditions set, however; I can’t yield

too much. His company won’t go to waste;

yet I am wary. Let’s define the field.

 

“The body’s past its prime, eyes faulty, skin

discolored, muscles slack. No shorts, sarong;

no negligee for hours of yang and yin,

sweet commerce, book talk. It cannot last long.”

 

The tone is wistful, not complaining. There’s sadness, yes. Some things we’ll never recover, but that has always been the case. “I’m still alive; the gods may be confused.”

'Distress With Which We Cannot Sympathise'

I recently learned that an acquaintance had lost his job and my reflexive reaction was to laugh. The people I was with were offended. How could I be amused by another person’s misfortune? Easy, I thought but didn’t say. Our newly jobless friend had been earning an enormous annual salary, more than I made in my three or four best years. But that wasn’t what triggered my laughter. Rather, it was his spendthrift ways. He’s the sort of guy who will penny-pinch and complain about the small, essential expenses and spend extravagantly on wine and resort vacations. He’s always griping about money. My laughter was karmic. I laughed because I sensed he was getting his just comeuppance. Happy ending? He quickly got another lucrative job. 

In his lecture “On Wit and Humour” (1818), William Hazlitt roots laughter in incongruity, “the disconnecting one idea from another, or the jostling of one feeling against another.” The unexpected makes us laugh. The simplest, flattest most commonplace statement or action can spur laughter if we are not anticipating it. My big-spender acquaintance overnight became unemployed. That’s funny. Hazlitt writes:

 

“[A] rich source of the ludicrous is distress with which we cannot sympathise from its absurdity or insignificance. Women laugh at their lovers. We laugh at a damned author, in spite of our teeth, and though he may be our friend. ‘There is something in the misfortunes of our best friends that pleases us.’”

 

Hazlitt is quoting a universal truth formulated by Francois de La Rochefoucauld in his Réflexions ou Maximes Morales (1665). Laughter is more than jolliness or good humor. It can be subversive of politeness, respectability, even conventional morality. Dr. Johnson writes on May 26, 1759 in The Idler: “Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.” Laughter can explode like a bomb of bad manners. “Merriment is always the effect of a sudden impression,” Johnson writes. “The jest which is expected is already destroyed.” Hazlitt was a brilliant prose stylist, one of the finest in English, but not a particularly funny guy.

'My Sneaking Preference'

Irresistible title: “Books That Have Hindered Me.” The opening of Agnes Repplier’s essay is a fair sample of her prose and her genteelly caustic sensibility:

 

“So many grateful and impetuous spirits have recently come forward to tell to an approving world how they have been benefited by their early reading and by their wisely chosen favorites in literature that the trustful listener begins to think, against his own rueful experience, that all books must be pleasant and profitable companions.”

 

I’m reminded of the silly ritual of politicians naming their favorite or most influential books. We don’t, of course, believe a word of it. Some years ago, when Hillary Clinton named Little Women and said, “Like many women of my generation who read this novel growing up, I really felt like I lived in Jo’s family. This book was one of the first literary explorations of how women balance the demands of their daily lives, from raising families to pursuing outside goals. The book was written more than a century ago, but its message resonates today,” we’re left with the certainty that she has never read Alcott’s book or read it only at the command of her handlers’ playbook. Her husband named Marcus Aurelius (who wrote in Book VII of the Meditations: “Be thou erect, or be made erect.”)

 

Repplier’s essay was published in the July 1889 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, which also includes work by Henry James and Sarah Orne Jewett. I’m not certain any book has ever “hindered” me but I can think of several that I read only under duress – namely, textbooks and Norton anthologies. I’m a great believer in independent reading guided only by curiosity and respect for literary tradition. My seventh-grade English textbook (1964-65), I remember, might have been published in 1889. It was heavy with sub-literary Americana: Edward Evertt Hale’s “The Man Without a Country” and too many poems by William Cullen Bryant. In college I resented the warehousing of literature represented by the Norton behemoths. Repplier respects those readers who “are disposed, with an untimely levity, to confess that they have read for amusement rather than for self-instruction, and that they have not found it so easily attainable.”

 

Still pervasive among Americans is a neo-Puritanical impulse to read, or at least claim to read, books of “self-improvement,” pleasure be damned. Repplier writes of a preachy-sounding children’s novel previously unknown to me, The History of Sandford and Merton (1783-89) by Thomas Day. “Altogether,” she writes, “Sandford and Merton affected me the wrong way; and, for the first time, my soul revolted from the pretentious virtues of honest poverty. It is to the malign influence of that tale that I owe my sneaking preference for the drones and butterflies of earth.” Repplier then launches into a delightful apologia of inarguable common sense:

 

“I do not now believe that all men are born equal; I do not love universal suffrage; I mistrust all popular agitators, all intrusive legislation, all philanthropic fads, all self-styled friends of the people. I cannot even sympathize with the noble theory that every man and woman should do their share of the world’s work; I would gladly shirk my own if I could. And this lamentable, unworthy view of life and its responsibilities is due to the subtle poison instilled into my youthful mind by the too strenuous counter-teaching of Sandford and Merton.”