Anecdotal Evidence

`Intelligence, Humor, and Affection'

2009-11-24T00:01:00.000-08:00

A reader in England, knowing my fondness for the essays and stories of V.S. Pritchett, wrote some time ago asking for help locating a travel essay Pritchett published in a magazine, The Hindu, in 1961. He and his family lived for many years in India and his sister found a portion of Pritchett’s article, “A Glimpse of India,” among their mother’s possessions. The rest of the clipping had vanished. I checked the books and libraries I have access to but that was no help at all. One becomes spoiled by the ease of access to almost everything afforded by the internet, so I felt nearly as disappointed as my reader. On Monday this note arrived:

“I thought you might like to know that a correspondent (in New Zealand!), who saw my enquiry posted on the India-British-Raj list, has managed to provide most of the text of the essay by finding it in a Google digitised book (and extracting text from a number of Google's 'snippet views'). As well as also appearing in Harper's Bazaar (March 1961), the essay was anthologized in Essays Today: No. 5. Ed. Richard. M. Ludwig. (N. Y.: Harcourt Brace, 1962).”

This global anecdote, rooted in bookish love, family devotion and perhaps post-colonial solidarity, would have sounded like science fiction a few years ago. Such miracles have grown commonplace. It’s reassuring to know technology can perform tasks as humble as solving minor maternal mysteries, and connecting readers and writers separated in time and space. Here’s a Dickensian/Kiplingesque sample from “A Glimpse of India”:

“A long burning red band of light seared my eyes. It was the vermilion band of sunrise in mid-air over the brown floor of India. From that moment, I time my total entry into unreality that was to last fourteen days. `So this is your first visit to India. What is your impression please?’

“One hears the brisk Welsh twitter of Indian English. Peter Sellers, the Kipling of `The Man Who Would Be King,’ boys' books about Orientals and New Yorker jokes about turbans, first of all. E.M. Forster comes later, when someone says: You must remember our self-pity. Asia and Europe are ridiculous in each other's eyes. Which are more farcical - my trousers or his bare arms or legs sticking out of a whirl of bedclothes?”

One of Pritchett’s (and Kipling’s) gifts was for vivid, colorful, comic distillation. A magazine travel piece for Pritchett was easy money; for his reader’s, a delight. Alex also passed along a story from Saturday’s Daily Telegraph about attacks (read: displays of moral exhibitionism) on Neil Gaiman after he expressed admiration for Kipling’s work. Gaiman, a writer unknown to me, is quoted as saying:

“I started getting – not exactly hate mail – it was more disappointed mail.

“People would tell me, `How could a writer like you – that we like – like a fascist, an imperialist dog?’”

Alex also scanned for me a letter to the editor in the Telegraph from David Horsley of Moldgreen, West Yorkshire, who responds to the Gaiman donnybrook:

“Kipling’s greatest character, Kim, is the orphaned, mixed-race son of an Irishman who had died in the British Army, and lives as a vagrant in colonial India.

“To compare a late 19th-century British imperialist with the gangsters of 20th-century European fascism is to redefine ignorance.”

Guy Davenport considered Kipling the premier English short story writer. In “Journal I,” collected in The Hunter Gracchus (1996), he writes:

“What got Kipling a bad name among liberals is his intelligence, humor, and affection. These they cannot tolerate in anybody.”

`Illimitable Recollection'

2009-11-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Then when the ample season
Warmed us, waned and went,
We gave to the leaves no graves,
To the robin gone no name,
Nor thought at the birds' return
Of their sourceless dim descent,
And we read no loss in the leaf,
But a freshness ever the same.”

Sunday was sunless. What looked like fog over the lake was weak rain. The landscape was gray, slate-blue and yellow ocher. Only maples hold their leaves and have turned a color from Vermeer’s palette. The mist reduces the human busy-ness of lakefront and hills terraced with houses. I found these lines in Basil Bunting’s “Chomei at Toyama”:

“Neither closed in one landscape
nor in one season
the mind moving in illimitable
recollection.”

We drove 12 miles to a YMCA for my nephew’s fifth birthday party and brought him books as gifts. Parties, even for very young children, have grown organized and official, with waivers to sign and handlers who remind kids not to fall down or punch each other. The boys and girls climbed apparatus like a well-appointed cage for the other primates. Adults played digitalized tennis with electronic rackets. The food was cold cuts and cake. The kids got goody bags and the party was over before the birthday boy opened his presents. When we left it was raining less insistently. Here’s the rest of the poem I started with, Richard Wilbur’s “Then” (from Ceremony and Other Poems, 1950):

“The leaf first learned of years
One not forgotten fall;
Of lineage now, and loss
These latter singers tell,
Of a year when the birds now still
Were all one choiring call
Till the unreturning leaves
Imperishably fell.”

I was impressed last month when Mike Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti worked references to Wilbur and Bunting (not to mention A.E. Housman and his brother) into a single post. For serious readers there are no warring tribes of writers, only good ones and lousy ones.

`The Quantity of Pleasure One Has Had'

2009-11-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

Mike Gilleland shames me with a charming passage about moss he found in a John Ruskin volume I never knew existed -- Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers (1886). Reading Chapter I, “Moss,” online I find this sample of Ruskinian whimsy, among others:

“Going out to the garden, I bring in a bit of old brick, emerald green on its rugged surface, and a thick piece of mossy turf.

“First, for the old brick: To think of the quantity of pleasure one has had in one’s life from the emerald green velvet,--and yet that for the first time to-day I am verily going to look at it! Doing so, through a pocket lens of no great power, I find the velvet to be composed of small star-like groups of smooth, strong, oval leaves,--intensely green, and much like the young leaves of any other plant, except in this;--they all have a long brown spike, like a sting, at their ends.”

Ruskin was by nature an enthusiast, a writer whose childlike qualities, when they don’t shade into weirdness, are delightful. “Moss” begins with Ruskin on the cusp of 50 vowing, at last, to learn about the Bryophyta. This is the sort of resolution I make and seldom keep, though I ought to with moss. The stuff is ubiquitous in the rain-rich Pacific Northwest, and the moss-removal industry thrives here. Ruskin turns to his book shelves, consults the botanists and dashes to the garden for a moss-covered brick. In this he reminds me of Thoreau, one of his most attentive students (Robert D. Richardson documents the debt in Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind), though the author of Walden was dead 25 years when Ruskin published Proserpina.

Moss seems not to have seized Thoreau’s imagination the way apples and huckleberries did. Perhaps two dozen references are scattered throughout the 2 million words of his journal. On May 20, 1853, he notes:

“What is that pretty, transparent moss in the brooks, which hold the rain or dewdrops so beautifully on the under sides of the leaflets, through which they sparkle crystallinely [a rare Thoreau contribution to the reservoir of adverbs]?”

[An intermission: On the same day in his journal Thoreau writes of the beech: “It is an interesting tree to me, with its neat, close, tight-looking bark, like the dress which athletes wear, its bare instep, and roots beginning to branch like bird’s feet, showing how it is planted and holds by the ground. Not merely stuck in the ground like a stick. It gives the beholder the same pleasure that it does to see the timbers of a house above and around.”]

In a journal entry from March 4, 1859, Thoreau writes:

“I find near Hosmer Spring in the wettest ground, which has melted the snow as it fell, little flat beds of light-green moss, soft as velvet, which have recently pushed up, and which lie just above the surface of the water. They are scattered about in the old decayed trough…They are like little rugs or mats and are very obviously of fresh growth, such a green as has not been dulled by winter, and very fresh and living, perhaps slightly glaucous, green.”

Glaucous itself is an education. It's from the Greek by way of Latin and means “bluish-grey or green," and refers to that pale gray or bluish-green sheen on the skin of blueberries, plums and grapes.

Mike beat me to Proserpina but I hope I can be excused. The Library Edition of Ruskin’s works, edited between 1903 and 1912 by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, numbers 39 volumes, and that doesn't count his multi-voluminous correspondence. Was Mike answering my post on Persephone/Proserpina?

`The Vital Part of Any Doing'

2009-11-21T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Every Sunday afternoon of my childhood, once the tediousness of Sunday school and the appalling boredom of church were over with, corrosions of the spirit easily salved by the roast beef, macaroni pie, and peach cobbler that followed them, my father loaded us all into the Essex, later the Packard, and headed out to look for Indian arrows. That was the phrase, `to look for Indian arrows.’ Children detect nothing different in their own families: I can’t remember noticing anything extraordinary in our family being the only one I knew of that devoted every Sunday afternoon to amateur archaeology.”

The long-extinct automobiles set the temporal scene – 20th-century United States, probably prewar. The voice is Southern – conversational, elegant without affectation, with the limber discursiveness of a natural storyteller. As the opening sentences of an essay, they charm without slavishness. The temperament is not uncritical (“appalling boredom”) but possesses a capacity for fondness and gratitude. Writing Friday’s post on collecting sent me back to “Finding,” the finest essay by a master of the form, South Carolina-born Guy Davenport, collected in The Geography of the Imagination (1981).

Of course collecting can be driven by lust, gluttony and avarice, among other sins, but it also represents a wish to discern patterns, to order things and cherish them. A reader asks in a comment on Friday’s post, “Could we argue that this is what writing is? Collecting? I would.” I suspect Davenport would as well. He called himself a maker of collages, and every writer collects memories, words, experiences and the convergences of all three. The art is in the arrangement. In “Finding,” Davenport says “…I am grateful for the unintentional education of having been taught how to find things (all that I have ever done, I think, with texts and pictures)…”

There’s no arguing that a blog is a mutated form of collecting, rooted in the charming custom of keeping a commonplace book and the near-universal human urge to find, collect and share. My favorite sentences in my favorite Davenport essay go like this:

“And I learned from a whole childhood of looking in fields how the purpose of things ought perhaps to remain invisible, no more than half known. People who know exactly what they are doing seem to me to miss the vital part of any doing.”

`Aligning Things in Rows'

2009-11-20T00:01:00.000-08:00

Two seventh-grade boys, one of them my student, vie for possession of the long-handled magnet in shop class. True to their age and sex, both are loud, bossy and competitive. The magnet is intended for picking up screws, bolts and stray bits of sheet metal snipped from pencil boxes and pooper-scoopers. Part of their rivalry is turf. Both want to police, in however trivial a fashion, the vast concrete reaches of the shop class. Also, both are pack rats, indiscriminate collectors. Each has assembled a small museum of iron and steel shards. Neither is particularly dangerous but I frisk them to ensure they don’t remove broken drill bits and other scraps that might be mistaken for weapons elsewhere in the school. The rest they keep in their shop-class lockers and I weed out the riskier-looking stuff when they’re not around.

“Broken Blossoms,” the second story in Fred Chappell’s new collection, Ancestors and Others, begins like this:

“At first, brightly colored stones and oddly shaped leaves and bird nests and cicada husks, and perhaps it ought to end there, when one is seven or eight years old, attracted to the gathering of things by the eye’s joy and by a reverence for something which the natural world – so shadowy mysterious – has seemed to cast aside. Whatever it later turns into will be mere pleasure in collecting for the sake of collecting, in pigeonholing, in aligning things in rows, in piecing out categories.”

I could claim that passage as autobiography, even the bird nests. The narrator turns stamp collector at age 11, though I started a few years earlier. What Chappell describes is a rite of American boyhood (and perhaps girlhood – I don’t know) and something more: the human instinct for order. Over a collection, one reigns despotically without hurting a soul. Collectors, those who aren’t insane, are the benign dictators of their little kingdoms. Today, I’m sovereign only over my books but they constitute a working library rather than a true collection. Does a mechanic or carpenter “collect” tools? I’m only narrowly covetous and much of my reading, including Chappell’s book, is done from the public library’s collection – that word again.

On Wednesday, outside the library, I picked up a large, flawless, buttery yellow leaf fallen from a tulip tree. I pressed it in a book and when we returned home set it on my desk beside the computer. By the following morning, yellow was turning to brown, the edges curled and the once glossy surface had become dry and dull. I threw it away. That’s what collecting means today, knowing that beauty is evanescent and everything, even the fervently cherished, passes away.

`Covert Emotion'

2009-11-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Bill Sigler for passing along a link to “Ancient Chills,” a recent essay published at “Poetry Daily.” In his accompanying note Bill writes:

“It's by Eric Ormsby, someone you turned me on to (thank you), who is just about the most incredible poetry critic I've ever read (as you can probably imagine, this is not the kind of praise I give out easily). What's amazing about the essay is that his compelling case for why Elizabeth Bishop is important works equally well for someone like me who doesn't think she's important.”

Unlike Bill, I set Bishop on a lofty perch among 20th-century poets but I endorse his evaluation of Ormsby. The poet-critic’s nominal review of two recent Bishop titles is a model of how an excellent essay, in the proper hands, can be spun from anything. A review-as-essay absorbs the books at hand – and many more – and disregards the Consumer Reports approach to criticism. It aspires to be at least as well written as its subjects and represents a mingling of minds, a mingling that seems most fruitful when the minds are sympathetic. To use his word, Ormsby’s poetry is “gaudy” – like Stevens’ and Moore’s --and Bishop’s is not, yet the two poets are alike in their attention to the details of the world. Ormsby is very good on what Robert Lowell called Bishop’s “famous eye”:

“…Bishop in fact depicts things sketchily. The details out of which she assembles her sea- and landscapes are prosaic, unobtrusive, dowdy…On the evidence of her best work, this was a matter of aesthetic—and perhaps even moral—principle. There was a prim, almost Shaker simplicity to her eye. If her peculiar way of seeing became `famous,’ that was not because it was conspicuously acute, but because it was chaste. Hers was a renunciatory eye. It scoured objects of superfluity with the force of a solvent.”

Ormsby’s gloss on Bishop’s method might apply to Chekhov, a writer she prized. There’s no showing off, nothing superfluous (not even a self-conscious minimalism), nothing tacked on from the outside as ornament or artistic ego-booster. Sound is sense and a poem is an animated job of work. Ormsby is not an uncritical admirer of Bishop’s work, but it’s not her eye he questions:

“Accuracy is in fact of the essence in any consideration of Bishop's poetry. Those of her poems that fail—and there are a surprising number of such failures preserved in the Library of America edition—do so more often than not because they're imprecise in matters of tone and feeling.”

I’m pleased to see Ormsby dismiss Bishop’s most overrated poem, “One Art,” as “shameless bathos.” On Wednesday, after reading Ormsby’s essay, I returned to a play I happened to be reading earlier in the day and found this passage:

“A barren detested vale, you see it is;
The trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean,
O'ercome with moss and baleful mistletoe:
Here never shines the sun; here nothing breeds,
Unless the nightly owl or fatal raven:
And when they show'd me this abhorred pit,
They told me, here, at dead time of the night,
A thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes,
Ten thousand swelling toads, as many urchins,
Would make such fearful and confused cries
As any mortal body hearing it
Should straight fall mad, or else die suddenly.
No sooner had they told this hellish tale,
But straight they told me they would bind me here
Unto the body of a dismal yew,
And leave me to this miserable death…”

The lines are spoken by Tamora in Act II, Scene 3, of Titus Andronicus, the pulpiest of Shakespeare’s play. She’s accusing Lavinia and Bassianus of luring her to this forsaken place, and trying to provoke her sons into killing them. I chose these lines because (1.) They’re not King Lear. (2.) They are middling lines from inferior Shakespeare. (3.) I’m rereading the play for the first time in almost two years (after watching Titus, with Anthony Hopkins in the title role), and didn’t remember this passage. They are certainly “imprecise in matters of tone and feeling,” though that sums up most of the play. They are filled with detail, almost nothing but detail, but it’s all a matter of surface, like a cheesy set in a horror movie. Like “One Art,” but unlike “Cape Breton” (a great Bishop poem examined at length by Ormsby), we remain untouched and unconvinced. Ormsby writes:

“Though Bishop’s descriptions appear to be plain and direct, almost documentary in presentation, they’re freighted with covert emotion [again, as in Chekhov’s stories], though it isn’t always obvious what the emotion may be.”

Ormsby’s evaluation of Bishop's work is admirably even-handed, though not in the wishy-washy fashion of soft-headed reviewers. He writes of the “unpublished poems and drafts” originally collected in Edgar Allan Poe & the Jukebox (2006) that they “contain quite forgettable poems; indeed, most of them are rather awful, and one can see why Bishop refrained from publishing them. While these poems don’t damage her reputation, as some have feared, they don’t enhance it either, except perhaps by demonstrating just how hard Bishop worked to perfect the work she did make public.”

That may be the highest praise one poet can pay another: She worked slowly and hard, seldom published inferior work and was her own severest critic. If only this were true of more poets.

`Hurricane Lolita'

2009-11-18T15:06:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Roger Boylan for alerting me to a series of photographs of Vladimir Nabokov shot in 1959 for Life magazine. Most have never been published, and some show an elegantly casual VN indulging the whims of a photographer in the wake of "Hurricane Lolita" (as he referred to his bestselling novel in Pale Fire).

`A Tub of Butter...Amounts to a Platonic Idea'

2009-11-18T00:01:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a suggestion from Roger Boylan I’m reading The Lambs of London (2006), a short novel by Peter Ackroyd about Charles and Mary Lamb, and a young antiquarian bookseller and confidence man, William Ireland. Earlier I read Ackroyd’s lives of Blake and Shakespeare. He’s a gifted and prolific biographer and historian of Britain who draws on both vocations in his fiction. The Lamb book is headed with a succinct disclaimer:

“This is not a biography but a work of fiction. I have invented characters and changed the life of the Lamb family for the sake of the larger narrative.”

At least since E.L. Doctorow’s cartoon-like Ragtime, fictionalized lives of historical figures have constituted a popular sub-genre of historical fiction. I usually avoid such things, preferring nonfictionalized biographies of those people whose lives and work interest me (like Terry Teachout's much-anticipated Pops, which arrived Tuesday). Exceptions are rare – Thomas Bernhard’s use of Glenn Gould in The Loser comes to mind.

I’m reading The Lambs of London because of my love for Charles Lamb’s essays and letters, and because the novel is only 213 pages long. A mega-fiction of such material would cause indigestion. There’s much melodrama in the real Lamb story – Charles’ drinking and periodic madness, Mary’s fatal attack on their mother, Charles’ guardianship of Mary for the remainder of his life – but for this reader the plot, though skillful, is inconsequential. The pleasure comes from seeing Lamb, the most charming of men and writers, and one of the most admirable, walking about and speaking. Such enjoyment is not sophisticated and recalls the wonder with which early cinemagoers recognized pools of darkness and light dancing on the wall. Also, Ackroyd sprinkles his text, both dialogue and narrative, with references to Lamb’s essays-in-the-making. It’s great fun to recognize shards of “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig,” “Grace Before Meat,” and “The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers.” (Go here to read these and all of the Elia essays). Near the beginning of the novel, after Charles has retired to his room to “study Sterne,” Ackroyd writes of Mary:

“She could hear Charles pacing the floor, in the room above. She had become accustomed to his footsteps and knew that he was preparing to write; he was placing his thoughts in order before he began. He was treading upon a narrow strip of carpet at the foot of his bed, and after three or four more `turns’ he would sit at his desk and begin. He had been introduced to the editor of Westminster Words, Matthew Law, who had been charmed by the young man’s discourse on the acting style at the Old Drury Lane; he had commissioned from him an essay on the subject, and Charles had completed it only three days later. He had ended with a flourish, on the acting of Munden, when he had said that `A tub of butter, contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He understands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the commonplace materials of life, like primeval man with the sun and stars about him.’”

The passage quoted is the conclusion to “On the Acting of Munden,” the final, three-page essay in Essays of Elia (1823). Food and drink are everywhere in Lamb, and Ackroyd takes note. Mary calls her brother to dinner and he, the inveterate punster, replies:

“There is pork in the air, dear. The strong man may batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices.”

“Francis Bacon?”

“No. Charles Lamb. A subtler dish. Buon giorno, Ma.”

For Lambians (Lambkins?), The Lambs of London reminds us why we love our author and reread him with undiminished pleasure. Two sentences before the passage from “On the Acting of Munden” quoted above, Lamb writes:

“So the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles what it touches.”

So, too, does Lamb's.

`Pomegranates, Traveller'

2009-11-17T00:01:00.000-08:00

From a textbook imaginatively titled Elements of Literature the teacher read a bowdlerized rendering of Persephone’s story, “The Origin of the Seasons,” and pronounced the heroine’s name PURSE-a-phone until a girl tactfully corrected her. The students were to plot the story on a schematic diagram supplied by the teacher -- Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action. The prurience of the nomenclature was not lost on all of them. The teacher defined climax as “when you know who shot the sheriff” and my student, a seventh-grader, started singing the song sotto voce.

All of this was in preparation for the kids writing their own creation myths, following the teacher’s scheme. My student and his partner had chosen to explain the origin of rain, and their discussion focused on body fluids. I performed a gentle course correction and they switched from Norse mythology to Greek, expressing rudimentary interest in Persephone’s double nature -- goddess of spring and queen of the underworld. They had only the faintest notion of what a pomegranate is. I didn’t tell them I had Basil Bunting’s Complete Poems in my bag, including these lines from “Birthday Greeting,” written in 1965:

“Pomegranates, traveler;
butter, if you need it,
in a bundle of cress.”

What an opportunity, in a class called Language Arts, the school is squandering. An inspired teacher might trace Persephone through English poetry, starting with Chaucer and moving on to Arthur Golding’s unmatched translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Think of Perdita in The Winter’s Tale:

“O Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that frighted thou let's fall
From Dis's waggon! daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus [pronounced FOE-bus by the teacher] in his strength—a malady
Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and
The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds,
The flower-de-luce being one!”

A seasoned reader could easily assemble a substantial anthology of such poems, with opportunities for rich classroom digressions into Greek, Roman and English literature, mythology, geography, botany and history. Instead, the kids are writing their own myths and illustrating them with cartoons.

Monday morning, as I drove to school in the rain, I listened to the classical music station. The guitarist William Carter performed a lovely “Ciaconna” by an anonymous composer. The announcer returned and made a pitch for donations, and only one sentence he uttered – a slogan, really -- stuck in my head: “Music as intriguing as a good book!”

`Furthest, Fairest Things'

2009-11-16T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Furthest, fairest things, stars, free of our humbug,
each his own, the longer known the more alone,
wrapt in emphatic fire roaring out to a black flue.”

In flitting reveries I sometimes think my favorite poet is Basil Bunting, the Northumbrian who published his masterwork, Briggflatts, at age 66, written while he worked as a journalist in Newcastle. Then I remember Donne, Hopkins and Eliot, and return to my senses, briefly. When I read Bunting I know poetry can’t get better, more concise and musical, with words pinned to things like beetles in a drawer. Poetry is seldom so interesting and so there, on the page and in the ear.

Earlier this year, Bloodaxe Books published a deluxe edition of Briggflatts including a CD with an audio recording of Bunting reading the poem in 1967 and a DVD of Peter Bell’s 1982 film about the poet. Go here for more information about the new edition and for links to audio and video recordings of Bunting reading Briggflatts.

I lusted after such an indulgence but frugality preserved my budget. Out of nowhere – rather, out of the UK – a reader wrote me on Sunday to say he wants to send me the new Briggflatts with all the trimmings. Sometimes all one can say is “thank you.” My generous reader writes:

“I'll be going home to Elgin at Christmas (Johnson and Boswell passed through in 1775, Borges in 1965). Before the drive north from Edinburgh I hope to make an excursion south to Briggflatts, Lindisfarne, and perhaps Duns too.”

Fortunate man -- itinerary as pilgrimage.There’s more history in those two sentences than in the textbooks. These lines from Section V of Briggflatts follow the lines quoted at the top of this post:

“Each spark trills on a tone beyond chronological compass,
yet in a sextant's bubble present and firm
places a surveyor's stone or steadies a tiller.
Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone,
its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane
spider floss on my cheek; light from the zenith
spun when the slowworm lay in her lap
fifty years ago.”

`Geology's Favorite Fal-de-Lals'

2009-11-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

Some weeks ago a reader served me a savory slab of language, much of which I don’t understand, by the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid:

“All is lithogenesis — or lochia,
Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree,
Stones blacker than any in the Caaba,
Cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces,
Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige,
Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform,
Making mere faculae of the sun and moon,
I study you glout and gloss, but have
No cadrans to adjust you with, and turn again
From optik to haptik and like a blind man run
My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr,
Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveoles, …”

In 12 lines my spell-check software fails to recognize 18 words, or 1.5 words per line. There’s a density to the language, a palpable pleasure in the arcane and archaic, that has more in common with Basil Bunting, say, than Hart Crane, to cite two contemporaries of MacDiarmid (born Christopher Murray Grieve, 1892-1978) who also relish the music of words. One can hardly imagine a style more in contrast to the thin gruel of most contemporary American poetry.

The lines above are from “On a Raised Beach.” My reader, Andrew MacGillivray, says MacDiarmid’s lines “amount almost to an incantation and make obsolete hackneyed allusions to haecceity. The words themselves have just as much haecceity as what they describe.” True enough, though I’m not certain how so useful an idea as haecceity, perfected by another Scotsman, Duns Scotus, can be judged “hackneyed.” The lines quoted include 12 words, not counting those unrecognized by the computer, new to me. “Cyathiform,” for instance, which means cup-shaped, slightly widened at the top. “Glout” is to pout or stare – related to “gloat.” “Cadrans” is an instrument used by gem cutters to measure the angles of stones. “Truité” I particularly like – “having a delicately crackled surface – applied to porcelain.” I recognized the phenomenon immediately – an effect of imperfection that heightens beauty --and another hole in my world is plugged.

Readers might object that such data-mining interferes with their enjoyment of poetry. They prefer to skate over words, not to stumble, and I can sympathize. I’ve been reading MacDiarmid’s Collected Poems (Macmillan, 1962) with mingled excitement, bafflement, boredom and disgust. He’s a wayward Scottish descendent of Pound – and a Communist. In 1935 he published Second Hymn to Lenin and Other Poems. The title poem includes these lines, written in part, like much of MacDiarmid’s work, in Scots dialect:

“Wi’ Lenin’s vision equal poet’s gift
And what unparalleled force was there!
Nocht in a’ literature wi’ that
Begins to compare.”

Odious stuff, a paean to a tyrant and mass murderer – and bad poetry. We can all think of writers who diluted, compromised or destroyed their gifts with politics and moral idiocy. It’s a shame with MacDiarmid, some of whose poems are gorgeous. He loved language, even though he sometimes debased. Consider “Stony Limits,” dedicated to the great English writer Charles Doughty whose Travels in Arabia Deserta and The Dawn in Britain I read at the urging of Guy Davenport. Here’s a sample of MacDiarmid’s elegy to Doughty:

“Let my first offering be these few pyroxenes twinned
On the orthopinacoid and hour-glass scheme,
Fine striae, microline cross-hatchings, and this wind
Blowing plumes of vapour forever it would seem
From cone after cone diminishing sterile and grey
In the distance; dun sands in ever-changing squalls;
Crush breccias and overthrusts; and such little array
Of Geology’s favourite fal-de-lals
And demolitions and entrenchments of weather
As any turn of my eyes brings together.”

`His Attention Has Become Prolonged'

2009-11-14T00:01:00.000-08:00

“He reads,
He reads, until the chapel clock strikes five,
And suddenly discovers that the book,
Unevenly, gradually, and with difficulty,
Has all along been showing him its mind
(Like no one ever met at a dinner party),
And his attention has become prolonged
To the quiet passion with which he in return
Has given himself completely to the book.”

Seasoned readers will understand. Good books –books we reread and even buy, for ready access – are suffused with mind. We anthropomorphize them, turn them into neighbors, friends, family. I know many books smarter and significantly better company than many people I meet, at dinner parties and elsewhere.

At the junior high school where I’m working for the next month, during a lull when my student was collaborating on a story with another, I tried to finish rereading Transparent Things, a favorite among Nabokov’s novels, one I received as a present for Christmas 1972, one I was nudged by Nige into rereading:

“It seems a perfect condensate of Nabokov's genius, his late masterpiece, containing a hint at least of everything that makes him great, while striking out in what seems a novel and strange direction.”

The boys were getting louder, attracting attention, egging each other on with increasingly violent plotlines for their story, riffing on shards of Star Wars, H.P. Lovecraft (they loved saying “Cthulu”), Monty Python (“holy hand grenade of Antioch”) and what I took to be video games. I was irked, having reached that point late in Transparent Things when I was moved effortlessly by the narrative but dreading its imminent conclusion – a state, like life, sweet and tormenting. I had to step in because the boys, seated beside a rack of public-health pamphlets in the classroom, were working some of the titles into their story – “What I Really Mean When I Say No to Sex” and “Abstinence and Oral Sex.” The teacher was sweating and I couldn't finish the Nabokov until I returned home.

The lines quoted at the start of the post are from Thom Gunn’s “His Rooms in College” (from The Passages of Joy, 1982). The last three lines suggest the erotic pull a book can wield – “quiet passion,” “give himself completely.” Nabokov writes in Transparent Things:

“A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish. More in a moment.”

`To Have Once Been a Brilliant Picture'

2009-11-13T00:01:00.000-08:00

One of the essential joys of reading is the serendipitous encounter with a new word. This started for me in the seventh grade when I first studied Latin and found satisfaction in figuring out the etymologies of Latin-based English words – celerity, procrastination, sylvan, spelunker. It satisfied a puzzle-solving instinct but also amplified my sense of the resonance of language. I liked the idea of adding layers of meaning to sentences in a quiet way. Poets have done this for centuries – consider Milton, Hopkins and Hill.

I’m reading Monsignor Ronald Knox (1959), one of the few titles by Evelyn Waugh I had left unread. Earlier this year I read Knox’s masterpiece, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (1950), and reread Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Knox Brothers (1977). Knox (1888-1957) named Waugh his literary executor and authorized his friend and fellow Catholic convert to write his biography. On page 40 of the first American edition of Waugh’s book, he described the days when Knox and his siblings lived at their Uncle Lindsey’s vicarage in Creeton:

“The village can be seen from the main railway-line and, so surveying it, Ronald later recorded in a newspaper article fond, quite commonplace memories of paddock, pony, beehives, a swing, a damson-tree [subspecies of the plum – from its fruit slivovitz is distilled], the stone where he sharpened his slate pencil, the peculiar delight of plucking the `night-caps’ [the calyx] off the eschscholtzias (a plant which early fascinated him by the complexity of its spelling); the drama of a man gored to death by a bull and of the inquest held in the village school after a railway accident.”

“Eschscholtzias” reads like a railway accident of its own – a fatal collision between Latin and German. I understand Knox’s fascination – how unlikely and uneuphonious a word. A little online browsing cleared things up and made them interestingly more complicated. Eschscholtzia is a genus of papaveraceous plants (about 10 species) – that is, poppies, including Eschscholtzia californica, the California poppy and that state’s state flower.

The Teutonic echo issues from Johann Friedrich von Eschscholtz (1793-1831), a botanist, physician and zoologist of German ancestry born in the Estonian region of the Russian Empire. He explored the Pacific, Alaska, California, Brazil, Chile and both sides of the Bering Straits. His story, a rousing mixture of exploration and study, recalls Darwin’s (and perhaps Nabokov’s, in his lepidopteral mode), and I would love to read his biography. The nineteenth century seems generously populated with such people. Besides poppies, Eschscholtz lent his name to beetles, lizards and Eschscholtz Atoll in the Marshall Islands (renamed Bikini Atoll when the U.S. began testing nuclear weapons there in 1946).

Waugh and Knox remind us of Emerson’s claim in “The Poet”:

“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”

“Fossil poetry,” yes, but also fossil history and fossil biography. Taking a word out for a walk is a crash course in paleontology.

`A Noble Part of the Joy of Life'

2009-11-12T00:01:00.000-08:00

Q.: Why do we continue to read throughout our lives, even after long and intimate familiarity, Shakespeare, Chekhov and Proust?

A.: “I think there is no question that, on the whole, the artist we value most is the artist who tells us most about human life.”

[Henry James, “The Letters of Eugène Delacroix,” collected in The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, ed. by John L. Sweeney, 1956]

Q.: Yet, so many books are divorced from human life, absorbed in fantasy or empty technique. Art and life seem to have parted ways.

A.: “The great divide in the perception of the beauty of life comes much more between the Renaissance and the modern period than between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The turnabout occurs at the point where art and life begin to diverge. It is the point where art begins to be no longer in the midst of life, as a noble part of the joy of life itself, but outside of life as something to be highly venerated, as something to turn to in moments of edification or rest.”

[Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, translated by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch, 1996]

Q.: That sounds like an insurmountable, historically determined dilemma. How can art be created “in the midst of life” and not become solipsistic or a mere transcription of reality?

“In general, writing is not a medium of expression, of expressing oneself, but an art of empathy – that is, entering into others. You can’t write novels, which I don’t read much anyway, because I don’t have a taste for them, unless the author manages to divide himself into several characters – a protagonist, an antagonist, or whatever they’re called. That’s elementary from my point of view and doesn’t require further explanation. It’s probably my lacking, because I don’t have that kind of reliable capacity for fantasizing, that kind of imagination. The ability to put oneself in the position of another person is very useful in life.”

[Zbigniew Herbert, “The Art of Empathy,” a 1986 interview from with Renata Gorczynski, collected in Polish Writers on Writing, ed.by Adam Zagajewski, 2007]

`Terrain Where We Have Never Been'

2009-11-11T00:01:00.000-08:00

A poet reads his work to a gathering of children, seven of whom ask questions. That’s the risky set-up in Herbert Morris’ “Reading to the Children” from his 1989 collection The Little Voices of the Pears. “Risky” because Kids + Poetry in the hands of most poets spells self-congratulation and enough cuteness to make Art Linkletter gag. Morris was a great poet and he turns the premise into a moving ars poetica. The first child asks “Are these poems yours?” and the speaker replies, in part:

“I say: Yes, these are poems I have written.
I could read no one else’s half so clearly,
with as much feeling, as I read you these;
that, more than anything, may be what I would
leave with you, feeling—music, of course, meaning,
certainly, but first feeling, feeling foremost.”

Readers familiar with Morris’ under-read work will recognize the truth of the emphasis on “feeling” – that is, emotions rendered unashamedly but in all their nuances (Morris never works in primary colors), in the manner of Henry James, whose spirit is nearly always present in Morris’ poems. In 1880, in his review of The Letters of Eugène Delacroix, James writes: “…in the arts, feeling is always meaning.” The second child asks “Where do you get ideas?” – about as tiresome a question as can be imagined -- and the poet answers respectfully:

“I am moving from darkness into darkness,
from mystery to deeper mystery;
what I see seems no plainer, seems no clearer,
the deeper I go, than it seemed, but rather
infinitely more complicated, darker.”

Such humility in a writer is daunting, particularly in an age when poets and novelists are forever pontificating in public about the rigors of their self-imposed craft. Morris’ poems often hover around a mystery or absence – again, like James’s fiction. Even their origin, he implies, is a mystery to their creator. To the fourth child, who asks, “What makes poems poems?” he reiterates the theme of authorial mystery:

“We begin in ignorance, move through darkness
into the darkness, end in ignorance.
Poems are that, precisely: expeditions
mapping terrain where we have never been,
the landscape of the country of our blindness.”

As Dencombe tells Doctor Hugh in James’ great story “The Middle Years”: “`We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’” Morris wouldn't use a word like “madness.” It’s too melodramatic, and in this case he out-scruples the Master. Morris sometimes seems in awe of the privilege he has been given to write poetry. In “Making, Knowing and Judging,” an essay collected in The Dyer’s Hand, Auden, another admirer of James ("Master of nuance and scruple"), writes:

“Whatever its actual content and overt interest, every poem is rooted in imaginative awe. Poetry can do a hundred and one things, delight, sadden, disturb, amuse, instruct – it may express every possible shade of emotion, and describe every conceivable kind of event, but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening.”

`The Unteachable'

2009-11-10T00:01:00.000-08:00

First-period high-school biology. Dawn-dark outside. The teacher lectures on enzymes and writes on the board a definition of “denatured”:

“When the shape of an enzyme (or protein) changes, preventing the protein/enzyme from carrying out its job.”

My student, whom I have just met, talks endlessly about body building, protein supplements and not having a girlfriend because he’s fat. He’s not fat but walks like Walter Brennan, the result of pulling a muscle in his lower back while lifting weights over the weekend. “I look like an old grandpa,” he says, again and again. His tongue protrudes as he writes and he carries hard candy in the pockets of his hooded sweat shirt.

He works with another boy on a laptop to finish a quiz on lactase and lactose. The other kid does all the work and my student is smooth enough to leave his partner feeling the effort has been equitable. After class, I ask if he understands the material and knows what proteins and enzymes are. “Naaaah,” he says. “My back really hurts.”

In “As Expected” (collected in The Passages of Joy, 1982) Thom Gunn writes:

“…if the unteachable
can teach themselves, it follows
they can be taught by others.”

I hope so.

`The Black Dogs of Resentment Worry Less'

2009-11-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

Surely the most benign drunk in the history of letters was Charles Lamb. Serious drinkers unpredictably alternate nastiness and charm – think of Berryman and Cheever. Alcohol is a stimulant and depressant, lubricant and corrosive. It’s said that if alcohol were discovered for the first time today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration wouldn’t approve it. Lamb, despite bouts of madness, his sister’s murder of their mother, and his guardianship of Mary Lamb until his death, seems never to have been less than charming, though alcohol is everywhere in the essays and letters. Their author, unlike his childhood friend Coleridge, somehow maintained a moral and emotional balance despite over-indulgence. In “Table-Talk,” in a very different context, Lamb writes: “The vices of some men are magnificent.” This seems to have been true for Lamb, though “magnificent” overstates the case for a writer so mild and modest.

On Sept. 24, 1802, Lamb wrote to his friend Thomas Manning. The letter begins with a typically amusing Lamb digression on the subject of travel:

“A strong desire seized me of visiting remote regions. My first impulse was to go and see Paris. It was a trivial objection to my aspiring mind that I did not understand a word of the language, since I certainly intend some time in my life to see Paris, and equally certainly never intend to learn the language; therefore that could be no objection.”

Three unparagraphed pages later, at the end of his missive, Lamb gets around to his letter’s essential subject, the one most dreaded by a drinker – sobriety:

“My habits are changing, I think,--i.e., from drunk to sober. Whether I shall be happier or not, remains to be proved. I shall certainly be more happy in a morning; but whether I shall not sacrifice the fat and the marrow and the kidneys,--i.e., the night,--glorious, care-drowning night, that heals all our wrongs, pours wine into our mortifications, changes the scene from indifferent and flat to bright and brilliant? O Manning, if I should have formed a diabolical resolution, by the time you come to England, of not admitting any spirituous liquors into my house, will you be my guest on such shameworthy terms? Is life, with such limitations, worth trying? The truth is, that my liquors bring a nest of friendly harpies about my house, who consume me. This is a pitiful tale to be read at St. Gothard; but it is just now nearest my heart.”

Have dread and antic wit ever so mingled? He poses the drunk’s ultimate question --“Is life, with such limitations, worth trying?” -- and undercuts it with mock-self-pity and horror: “friendly harpies.” Few things require so much mental labor and physical dedication as self-destructive drinking. For a poetic rendering of sobriety in a more hopeful light consider “Early Autumn” by Kenneth Fields (from Classic Rough News, 2005):

“It’s been three years today, who would have guessed it?
Without a drink and happy! Unobsessed,
The black dogs of resentment worry less
At me, their chief contention, their old bone.
Whoever held me like a glass of wine
Now holds me like a sound I scarcely hear . . .
Whoever brought me down now lifts me up,
Whoever. . . . I am taken by a wind
`From the round earth’s imagined corners’ now
Into a calm I’ve never felt before.
It comes and goes. Outside, beneath my window,
Along the pavement, a young bird like a leaf
Flutters toward cover. I pray for the helplessness
Of birds, of cats, of foxes, and of wolves—
All of us in the game!—the hounds of autumn
Testing the air, the summer’s fading traces.”

“It comes and goes,” but Fields maintains sobriety for three years. The passage quoted in the fifth line is taken, appropriately (the theme is rebirth), from Donne’s seventh “Holy Sonnet”:

“At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, death, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.”

Just to keep this perpetual motion machine rolling, Philip Jose Farmer used the fourth line of Donne’s sonnet as the title for his 1971 science-fiction novel To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971). By the early 19th century, Donne’s reputation had evaporated, but Coleridge was an enthusiastic admirer. As marginalia in Lamb's copy of Donne's poems, Coleridge wrote:

“To read Dryden, Pope &c, you need only count syllables; but to read Donne you must measure Time, & discover the Time of Each word by the Sense & Passion.”

`A Golden and Stinking Blaze'

2009-11-08T00:01:00.000-08:00

No doubt someone has already written The Tao of Leaf Raking or The Bodhisattva and the Leaf Blower but I can recommend leaf removal as an inexpensive, mindless way to achieve “no mind.” If meditation is self-emptying, the trees in and around our yard produce sufficient biomass to purge an ego four or five times a day in November. Please phone ahead. Rakes provided. This is Geoffrey Hill in Section XII of Mercian Hymns:

“It is autumn. Chestnuts-boughs clash their inflamed
leaves. The garden festers for attention: telluric
cultures, enriched with shards, corms, nodules, the
sunk solids of gravity. I have raked up a golden
and stinking blaze.”

“Telluric” is terrestrial, of or referring to the earth, and also refers to the planet’s natural electric current. “Corms” are bulb-like underground plant stems in which food is stored. “Inflamed leaves” and “golden and stinking blaze” reiterate the poem’s images of gold coins and seals, newly minted and buried for centuries, of King Offa of Mercia (757-796). Hopkins places “Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls” among his pied beauties. I too found a sort of gold while raking – lovely white and yellow mushrooms, delicate and unblemished, spawned beneath big-leaf maple leaves and bushels of pine and cedar needles. Everything drips and smells of slow decay. Chesterton writes in “Gold Leaves”:

“In youth I sought the golden flower
Hidden in wood or wold,
But I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold.”

`Pretty Fancies and Profusion of Heart'

2009-11-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

“At length I have done with verse making. Not that I relish other people’s poetry less,--theirs comes from ’em without effort, mine is the difficult operation of a brain scanty of ideas, made more difficult by disuse. I have been reading the `Task’ with fresh delight. I am glad you love Cowper. I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton, but I would not call that man my friend, who should be offended with the `divine chit-chat of Cowper.’ Write to me. God love you and yours!”

I’ve developed a late-blooming taste for William Cowper’s verse since last reading Charles Lamb’s letters and am pleased to discover the pleasure Lamb took in Coleridge’s pleasure in Cowper’s verse. That’s a tangled sentence written in grateful imitation of Lamb’s epistolary prose, which recalls the talk of the wittiest, most charming barroom conversationalist you have ever heard. Imagine how it must have felt to open one of Lamb’s letters, surely among the funniest in the language. The passage quoted above is from a letter Lamb wrote his childhood friend Coleridge on Dec. 5, 1796, when Cowper was still alive. Born in 1731, he would die on April 25, 1800.

I looked in the first volume of Richard Holmes’ biography, Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804, to learn more about Coleridge’s fondness for Cowper’s verse. Holmes quotes Hazlitt’s wonderful “My First Acquaintance with Poets”: “He spoke of Cowper as the best modern poet.” And in an interesting footnote, Holmes completes the circle with Cowper and Lamb:

“The emergence between 1790 and 1797 of what I have called, rather schematically, Coleridge’s `plain style’ is an intricate question of literary history and influence…It is often said that Wordsworth was mainly responsible, but my narrative shows that Coleridge’s early reading of William Bowles’ sonnets, William Cowper’s The Task (one model for `Frost at Midnight’), Edward Young, and – above all – his very detailed correspondence on the subject with Charles Lamb (who insisted on `simplicity’) between 1794 and 1796, were prime sources.”

Lamb’s own poetry is middling at best, and all too freighted with “simplicity,” in contrast to his pun-filled, antiquarian (“antiquity-bitten,” he wrote elsewhere), discursive prose. Five days after the letter quoted above, Lamb wrote to Coleridge in reply to an intervening letter from his friend. In it, Lamb describes Cowper as “my old favorite,” and writes:

“With regard to my leaving off versifying, you have said so many pretty things, so many fine compliments, ingeniously decked out in the garb of sincerity, and undoubtedly springing from a present feeling somewhat like sincerity, that you might melt the most un-muse-ical soul, did you not (now for a Rowland compliment for your profusion of Olivers),— did you not in your very epistle, by the many pretty fancies and profusion of heart displayed in it, dissuade and discourage me from attempting anything after you.”

`My Passion is To Be Left Alone'

2009-11-06T00:01:00.000-08:00

“The most important point is – and remains – not to take oneself seriously. There is no past, and, certainly, no future. There are but a few years -- ten at most. You pass your days as best you can, doing as little harm as possible. Let the desires be few and treat expectations as weeds. You read, scribble as the spirit moves you, hear some new music, see every week the few people you are attached to. Again: guard yourself, above all, against self-dramatization, a feeling of importance, and the sprouting of expectations.”

No mystic or desert father wrote this. The words are Eric Hoffer’s, written in 1954 but unpublished until 2005 when Harper’s printed “Sparks: The Art of the Notebook,” a selection from the 131 notebooks found after his death in 1983. The editing was done by Tom Bethell in the Hoover Institution’s Hoffer archives. I quote Hoffer’s notebooks in oblique response to a reader who asked of Thursday’s post:

“Do you think Hoffer's disgust with `do-gooders’ was absent of the type of meddling judgment that he seems to have reviled? In other words, did he have a desire to change them, and is that contradictory? What in its place? A world of solitary people?

“What about actual good, aside from pretentiousness? That exists, right? People do actually `do good’ for non utopian and self-congratulatory reasons.”

Hoffer, by all accounts, was a charismatic personality deeply suspicious of charisma. He stirred people with words in a manner we customarily associate with preachers and politicians. Hoffer’s gift was coupled with distaste for proselytizing. Though he recognized the seductiveness of his writing and debating, he resisted its blandishments, including converting others to his way of thinking. He seems to have harbored no dreams of personal power beyond the radius of his private life. Unlike the true believers he anatomized, Hoffer had no wish to change others or order them around. He merely shone a light on them and exposed their hypocrisy and bad faith.

Hoffer was a genuine, not fashion-driven, individualist. He was a crank, in the best sense, in an age of poseurs. Does “actual good,” my reader asks, exist? Of course. We witness it daily in unnumbered acts of kindness. For some, these anonymous gestures count for nothing. Goodness must be organized, preferably by government, to be real, and this is why “true believers,” in Hoffer’s sense, are often deeply unkind and unpleasant people. When goodness is institutionalized it tends quickly to turn bad. Hoffer writes in The Passionate State of Mind (1955): “Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.” This makes no sense to the professionally kind. And consider this entry from Before the Sabbath (1979), a selection from Hoffer’s journals, dated Nov. 29, 1974:

“I cannot see myself living in a socialist society. My passion is to be left alone and only a capitalist society does so.”

Hoffer understood that the most precious of all rights, the right that underlies all others, is the right to be left alone, to fashion one’s own mistakes and triumphs, and pay for them accordingly. Hoffer practiced what he preached and lived an outwardly quiet, hardworking, benevolent life that many self-designated “rebels” would have found impossibly dull. Some of us are happiest living and working in customized solitude. Hoffer wrote in his journal for April 4, 1975:

“Small tightly knit circles are a peculiarity of creative milieus. You find them in Periclean Athens, in Renaissance Florence and Antwerp, and in Paris and late Hapsburg Vienna. Emulation, example, praise, and assistance are at their best in such circles. Nevertheless, I shudder when I imagine what my life would have been as a member of such a circle. I always wanted to be left alone – not to have anyone to vie with, and not to have an example.”

[Apropos only of rereading Charles Lamb’s letters while also rereading Hoffer, here’s what the essayist wrote to his friend Thomas Manning on March 1, 1800: “Public affairs—except as they touch upon me, and so turn into private,—I cannot whip up my mind to feel any interest in....I cannot make these present times present to me.”]

`A Few More Paragraphs on Freedom'

2009-11-05T00:01:00.000-08:00

“I derive a subtle pleasure from the conviction that the world does not owe me anything. I need little to be contented: two good meals, tobacco, books that hold my interest, and a little writing every day. This to me is a full life.”

The Robinson Crusoe myth, like Thoreau’s, embodies a primal fantasy of solitude, self-reliance, simplicity and values reevaluated. For me it replaced fantasies of flying and invisibility when I hit puberty, and ever since I’ve kept an unspoken inventory of what I need and what is superfluous. What I want doesn’t figure into it. I’m not preachy about such things and don’t care if others drive SUVs, nor am I by nature an ascetic, but life has a way of getting unaccountably messy even without me contributing additional clutter – mental, material or otherwise.

The passage quoted above is from Eric Hoffer’s Working and Thinking on the Waterfront (1969), a journal he kept in 1958-59 while working as a longshoreman in San Francisco. The time and place are significant – the epicenter of the Beats and the nascent counterculture -- yet Hoffer makes no mention of their shenanigans. He was too busy working on the docks (not slumming – he retired after 25 years at age 65), writing, reading and caring for friends.

When I first read Hoffer’s newspaper column late in the nineteen-sixties and soon moved on to his books – The True Believer, The Passionate State of Mind, The Ordeal of Change – I was attracted by his working-class roots, enthusiasm for self-education, common sense and the obvious pleasure he took in his outspokenness. My father was an ironworker, my mother a tax clerk, no one in my family had ever set foot on a college campus, and I had already commenced my own self-education. With Hoffer I shared a distrust of self-important “intellectuals” – a word he always used with contempt. For me he remains the model of an independent writer and perpetual learner, humble but pugnacious. He was pleased to know that “the world does not owe me anything” – about as alien a notion as one can imagine today in our age of aggrieved entitlement.

Hoffer’s words, after half a century or more, have grown in acuity. Unblinkered by ideology he saw where things were headed, the coming of a dreary gray world engineered by meddlers, do-gooders and would-be utopians. Reading Trotsky’s Diary in Exile he writes in his journal:

“It does not occur to him that you can invent a machine or write a fine poem playfully.

“He is convinced that people cannot be decent unless they have a great idea which raises them `above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.’ To a Trotsky, the mass of people who do the world’s work without fuss and feathers are morally debased.”

A few pages later he notes:

“Seven hours discharging frozen fish at Pier 17. During the day I put together a few more paragraphs on freedom.”

`Infinite Cubbies'

2009-11-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

Much of my childhood was spent in bowling alleys though I’ve never bowled a game. My parents were serious bowlers and belonged to leagues in an age when bowling was a national pastime. My father’s team won a city-wide championship in 1956 and I remember the day half a century ago when Yorktown Lanes opened. It’s been nearly that long since I entered a bowling alley but that changed Monday evening when I took my younger sons to Sunny Villa Lanes (which sounds like the name of a “retirement community”) for a Cub Scout-sponsored bowling party.

I suppose it’s possible to have felt more out-of-place than I did – perhaps at a PLO rally – but the boys enjoyed themselves and my six-year-old threw a strike and bowled the top score in the first game. Fortunately, some of the other adults were seasoned keglers so I sat at the counter and read one of the books I ordered last week with a birthday gift-card, Josef Pieper’s Guide to Thomas Aquinas – a brief (160 pages plus notes) account of the “Dumb Ox” by the German Catholic philosopher. I’ve already read his Leisure, the Basis of Culture, and Pieper has a sympathetic grip on my imagination.

In the Aquinas book he asks “What do people mean when they say `similar?’” Aquinas, Pieper notes, insists that words conform to usage, to “the multiplicity of actual possibilities for the employment of a word.” Thus, Aquinas states it is impossible to say a father is “similar” to his son. He writes:

“…it becomes clear that the concept of similarity contains something different from what we would be led to suspect by that apparently so exact definition, namely, an element of derivation, descent, origin.”

This sparked some thoughts about writing in general and blogging in particular. For some of us, “similarity” implies a natural series of associative linkages that can be triggered by anything and that possess no “element of derivation, descent, origin.” Rather, they are linked synaptically, in the brain, as evocative memories. For example:

Mention of Yorktown Lanes immediately reminds me of the miniature golf course I managed for three summers while in college. The course was behind the bowling alley. Thinking of the golf course reminds me of its shed-like clubhouse, where I could sit by the cash register, hand out balls and clubs, and read Proust for the first time all day long. The memory begins subdividing in many directions, spawning many similarities – the acne that appeared that summer on my chest, the smell of wet swim suits, the sounds of tennis balls from the courts on the other side of the fence, sweeping the grass I had mowed that morning off the hazards and the Zeppelin raid on Paris. Such things, of course, are only idiosyncratically similar. In short, I’m taking too long to define “the intersection of books and life.”

When I got home from school on Tuesday, after spending much of the day thinking about such things, I read a new essay by Kay Ryan, “Marin County, Sort Of,” that dovetailed pleasingly with these thoughts. Ryan’s essay begins as an anecdote about walking along a country road, looking at litter, and turns into an essay in applied epistemology. What interests her are scraps of litter, incomplete waste, and the way she tries to assemble them like the pieces of a scattered jigsaw puzzle: “…I’m interested in the life in shards, among shards, between shards, shard-to-shard.” She continues:

“The first scrap meant nothing to me, but my brain on its own seems to have believed that one thing may later connect to another thing, and this built-in autonomic faith apparently keeps all the bits animated. Which is to say, the brain anticipates significance; it doesn’t know which edge may in fifty yards knit to which other edge, so everything is held, charged with a subliminal glitter along its raw sides.”

Ryan is one of those rare poets I might actually enjoy meeting. She says more elegantly and succinctly what I was trying say by way of bowling, Aquinas and miniature golf. Obviously, Ryan is describing her idiosyncratic method for assembling a poem, just as I was trying to say how this blog manages to get written every day. Let’s give her the final word:

“I like the retroactiveness—or retro-attractiveness—of this process, and I like what it reveals about the mind: that it is cheerfully storing so much all the time, generating infinite cubbies each with its single broken or torn fragment waiting for a match. The whole thing seems so optimistic, as if the mind on its own believes that things are going to fit together.”

`A Pleasure Secret and Austere'

2009-11-03T00:01:00.000-08:00

Eric Ormsby affixes two epigraphs to his poem “Mullein” (collected in Coastlines, 1992, and Time’s Covenant: Selected Poems, 2007). The second, by Whitman, I knew: “And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen [sic] and pokeweed.” That’s the final line of Section 5 of “Song of Myself.” Say it aloud, and the entire poem if you have the time, and you’ll know why Ormsby relishes the taste of Whitman’s words in his mouth.

The first epigraph, “A pleasure secret and austere,” is attributed to Archibald Lampman’s “In November.” The name meant nothing but I hadn’t bothered until last weekend to discover his identity. The loss is mine. Lampman (1861-1899) was a Canadian poet born in Morpeth, Ontario, about 75 miles due north of Cleveland, Ohio, my birthplace, on the other side of Lake Erie. For most of my life I’ve lived within shouting distance of Canada but remain ignorant of its culture and history. From what I’ve learned, not knowing Lampman is comparable to not knowing E.A. Robinson, a poet whose work his resembles.

Lampman wrote two poems titled “In November,” distinguished as “(1)” and “(2).” He seems to have written many such month-poems – “In May,” “In October,” and so forth. Ormsby took his epigraph from the final line of “(2)”:

“With loitering step and quiet eye,
Beneath the low November sky,
I wandered in the woods, and found
A clearing, where the broken ground
Was scattered with black stumps and briers,
And the old wreck of forest fires.
It was a bleak and sandy spot,
And, all about, the vacant plot,
Was peopled and inhabited
By scores of mulleins long since dead.
A silent and forsaken brood
In that mute opening of the wood,
So shrivelled and so thin they were,
So gray, so haggard, and austere,
Not plants at all thy seemed to me,
But rather some spare company
Of hermit folk, who long ago,
Wandering in bodies to and fro,
Had chanced upon this lonely way,
And rested thus, till death one day
Surprised them at their compline prayer,
And left them standing lifeless there.

“There was no sound about the wood
Save the wind's secret stir. I stood
Among the mullein-stalks as still
As if myself had grown to be
One of their sombre company,
A body without wish or will.
And as I stood, quite suddenly,
Down from a furrow in the sky
The sun shone out a little space
Across that silent sober place,
Over the sand heaps and brown sod,
The mulleins and dead goldenrod,
And passed beyond the thickets gray,
And lit the fallen leaves that lay,
Level and deep within the wood,
A rustling yellow multitude.

“And all around me the thin light,
So sere, so melancholy bright,
Fell like the half-reflected gleam
Or shadow of some former dream;
A moment's golden reverie
Poured out on every plant and tree
A semblance of weird joy, or less,
A sort of spectral happiness;
And I, too, standing idly there,
With muffled hands in the chill air,
Felt the warm glow about my feet,
And shuddering betwixt cold and heat,
Drew my thoughts closer, like a cloak,
While something in my blood awoke,
A nameless and unnatural cheer,
A pleasure secret and austere.”

If Giacometti had sculpted a wildflower it might have been the mullein. Go here to see one in its summer glory, but note the dead stalks in the background, probably leftovers from the preceding year. That’s the “sombre company” the speaker in Lampman’s poem finds himself among. In winter, the gray stalks rustle in the wind, a ghostly sound Lampman's poem suggests, and that’s one of the reasons I like his choice of plant. The mullein is conspicuous – tall with velvety leaves near the ground, but humble and scorned. It’s a scrappy opportunist flourishing in empty lots and trash heaps. In his poem Ormsby says the mullein “grows big and green where other green things die.” It “domesticates / Small desolations.” Ormsby continues:

“I sometimes glimpse a mullein by the weed-
Whacked border of the parking lot,
Invisible though so conspicuous
Beyond the stuttering whiteness of the flood-
Lit asphalt, or poplaring a sewer-pipe…”

Lampman seems a modest poet drawn to modest subjects. His gift is for phrases – “A moment's golden reverie,” “A semblance of weird joy,” “A nameless and unnatural cheer, /A pleasure secret and austere.” That couplet suggests how I’m feeling about Lampman’s poems. Here is “In November (1),” a sonnet and altogether more conventional poem, but one that also recalls – or predicts – the poems of Robert Frost:

“The leafless forests slowly yield
To the thick-driving snow. A little while
And night shall darken down. In shouting file
The woodmen's carts go by me homeward-wheeled,
Past the thin fading stubbles, half concealed,
Now golden-gray, sowed softly through with snow,
Where the last ploughman follows still his row,
Turning black furrows through the whitening field.
Far off the village lamps begin to gleam,
Fast drives the snow, and no man comes this way;
The hills grow wintry white, and bleak winds moan
About the naked uplands. I alone
Am neither sad, nor shelterless, nor gray,
Wrapped round with thought, content to watch and dream.”

`Almost Isolated, Strongly Individual, Things'

2009-11-02T00:01:00.000-08:00

As a newspaper reporter I was occasionally dragooned into collaborating on projects with other reporters. Editors love projects – tedious assemblages of stories, graphs, photos and sidebars inflicted on readers for days or weeks on end. The driving engine behind such things is the vanity of writers and, even more so, editors. It’s their bid for seriousness (“We’re just as good as book writers!”), though the unsung heroes of any newsroom remain the drudge-reporters who cover cops, courts and city hall, feeding the beast daily, often without a byline, performing genuinely thankless work. In practical terms when I collaborated with other reporters we wrote little collaboratively. We shared reporting not prose, and I disliked even that arrangement. That’s how bloggers are born.

In literature, few collaborations are remembered – Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare and perhaps Middleton and Fletcher, Conrad and Ford. Their rarity speaks to the genuine implausibility of serious writers collaborating. Few things are so indelibly individual as poems, plays and novels. I had never before thought of the Life of Johnson as a collaboration between its subject and James Boswell but that’s how Hilaire Belloc sees it in “Boswell” (collected in The Silence of the Sea, 1940):

“There are collaborations in all the history of writing. Some few have proved fruitful...the most subtle collaboration of all, the most creative, is the collaboration between the writer and his subject. That collaboration Boswell enjoyed abundantly. What landscape was to Milton, what urban eccentricity was to Dickens, what the mathematic was to Pascal, that the personality of Samuel Johnson was to James Boswell. It fed, it invigorated, it moulded, it provided full purpose. The chances are that no one else could have played Johnson’s part, and very probably, almost certainly, no one else could have played Boswell’s part in the arrangement. Whereon hangs an interesting side issue: `What are the chances, one in how many million, of such a juxtaposition?’”

Judging from subsequent literature, the chances are zero. Their collaboration, in the strict sense of two writers sharing the job of writing, was no collaboration at all, though Johnson was a willing participant and much of the final text consists of his words, written and spoken. The match was unlikely and no one, most of all Johnson and Boswell, could have foreseen the result.

Boswell mingled drinking and whoring with naiveté and priggishness. In many ways he was not an attractive character, and only periodically interesting in his own right. His was an unformed personality who, in his journal, exhorted himself to “be Johnson.” Without Johnson he would never have become Boswell. He was, when they met, 22; Johnson, 53 – a father-son arrangement that drove Boswell’s “presumptuous task” (his words in the first paragraph of the Life). As Johnson’s second-greatest biographer, W. Jackson Bate, reminds us:

“Many readers assume that he was constantly in Johnson’s presence. But during the twenty-one years he knew Johnson, the total number of days spent in Johnson’s company amount to 325, plus another 101 during their trip to Scotland and the Hebrides in 1773.”

In his Boswell essay, Belloc places the Life in the greater context of English literature and touches on the sheer unlikely peculiarity of the book and the eccentric-friendly literary tradition in which it exists:

“I know not how it is with other national literatures, but certainly it is a mark of English writing that it throws up almost isolated, strongly individual, things which stand out not like a work of art or a perfection, but like a personality; so that we may compare the landscape of English Letters, surveyed over the last three centuries, to one of those countrysides in which the heights form no continuous chain, but stand individually, each alone.”

Consider The Anatomy of Melancholy and Religio Medici; Traherne's Centuries of Meditation; Tristram Shandy; Johnson’s own Life of the English Poets; Charles Lamb; the poems of Christopher Smart, John Clare, William Blake and Basil Bunting – to cite only the most gifted eccentrics. Great books and writers, some among my favorites, and not a collaborator in the bunch.

`Take Up One Leaf and See'

2009-11-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

While raking leaves I thought about the beautiful specimen James Marcus posted last week at House of Mirth. Its motley symmetry gives it the look of a stylish Rorschach test. Consider that trillions like it, each unique, are falling across the Northern Hemisphere. Hilaire Belloc noticed such things. In “The Autumn and the Fall of Leaves,” an essay collected in Hills and the Sea(1906), he writes:

“The colour is not a mere splendour: it is intricate. The same unbounded power, never at fault and never in calculation, which comprehends all the landscape, and which has made the woods, has worked in each one separate leaf as well, they are inconceivably varied. Take up one leaf and see.”

Nature is profligate and capricious. Comparing it to a machine betrays a profound poverty of imagination. No human hand could paint such a leaf as James found. Were a painter to make the attempt, the result would be charmless and tacky, pure kitsch. Fallen from trees, plastered to sidewalks, the result is touchingly useless beauty. To reduce such beauty and its audacious lack of utility to evolutionary advantage is as witless as a Marxian analysis of a chess game. Beauty always exceeds necessity. Look at leaves, snowflakes and sea shells – unique beyond calculation, and why? Paul Valery wrote in his great essay on aesthetics “Man and the Sea Shell”:

“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.”

Valery finds an unexpected kindred spirit in Samuel Johnson. Boswell reports that he and Johnson dined on March 31, 1772, with General Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican patriot exiled in London. The conversation moved from the naturalness of marriage to aesthetics:

“We then fell into a disquisition whether there is any beauty independent of utility. The General maintained there was not. Dr. Johnson maintained that there was; and he instanced a coffee cup which he held in his hand, the painting of which was of no real use, as the cup could hold the coffee equally well if plain; yet the painting was beautiful.”

As reported by Boswell, the next subject of conversation at General Paoli’s was “the strange custom of swearing in conversation.”