Anecdotal Evidence

Happy Birthday, Thomas Berger

2009-07-20T07:50:00.000-07:00

Today we celebrate the 85th birthday of Thomas Berger, one of the funniest writers in the language. He remains best known for the third of his 23 novels, Little Big Man (1964), but I’m probably fondest of Vital Parts (1971), Sneaky People (1975) and The Feud (1983). Berger has always denied he is a humorist but rather a novelist of manners like one of his writing heroes, Anthony Powell. Berger’s prose, like Powell’s, is flexible, never self-consciously arty. He’s a master of the American demotic, a lineal descendent of Twain at his best – that is, Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. I wish someone would collect the movie reviews Berger published in Esquire in 1972-73. Few writers have given me so much raw pleasure.

For a taste of Berger, go here and read selections from his correspondence with the novelist Zulfikar Ghose. Here’s a sample:

“I hadn’t remembered that Pound disparaged Shaw and I don’t think I ever heard your opinion, but I’m delighted to hear that you both find him trivial. I agree. Shaw has always seemed a journalist and not really a literary man. It’s his tendentiousness, I think, that keeps him trivial. He’s always out to solve social problems—the sure sign of a superficial practitioner.”

`The Proof was Always on the Page'

2009-07-19T10:46:00.000-07:00

Good health spoils us. A bad cold is less suffering than irritation. Why me? Why not? In Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement, Richard Brookhiser writes:

“But nothing comes unmixed. Age brought the trials of age, to Bill and, indirectly, to his colleagues. His hearing began to go. He helped it depart by firing a pistol out his bedroom window in Stamford at the geese on his lawn.”

Humor helps. Of Al D’Amato, Brookhiser writes: “A gross being, he could be funny.” I remember Irving Howe calling D’Amato a “chowderhead,” Three Stooges-style.

Brookhiser dedicates Right Time, Right Place to Terry Teachout and writes of him:

“Terry was a little reserved, a little anxious, bursting with attention, eager to show how much he knew. None of us ever needed persuading of that; the proof was always on the page.”

Just writing that, I feel better.

`The Whole Structure of Polite Living'

2009-07-18T08:58:00.000-07:00

I read most of Evelyn Waugh’s work in my teens and early 20s, largely because he was cited by critics as a precursor of the “Black Humor” school of American writing that came to prominence in the nineteen-sixties – Barth, Heller, Pynchon & Co. I’ve never lost my taste for grim comedy, and now I understand that Barth and the others were never a school and were not particularly good writers, but my admiration for Waugh has grown with the years.

For some reason I didn’t read Sword of Honour, his World War II trilogy, until 1984. It’s one of those books vividly tied in memory to a place: I started reading it in the bathtub of the apartment I was renting in Richmond, Ind.:

“When Guy Crouchback’s grandparents, Gervase and Hermione, came to Italy on their honeymoon, French troops manned the defences of Rome, the Sovereign Pontiff drove out in an open carriage and Cardinals took their exercise side-saddle on the Pincian Hill.”

That’s the novel’s first sentence, and I still find its mingling of private lives with the sweep of history rather breathtaking. But what I recall most intensely from that first reading a quarter-century ago is how smitten I was by the beauty and clarity of Waugh’s prose, which Graham Greene likened to “the Mediterranean before the war, so clear you could see to the bottom.” If one can learn to write well by reading well, Waugh is the finest of mentors.

What a pleasure it is to discover a previously unknown piece of work by Waugh. Jim Shelden, on the blog of The Virginia Quarterly Review, introduces “The Rough Life,” first published in the VQR in 1934. Follow the link to the essay itself, and sample sentences like this:

“For there must have been a time in everyone’s experience—more than one in mine—when a conversation about some amenity of life—cookery for example—has been rudely interrupted by a stern voice from another world. `Well I can tell you the best meal I ever had. Arrowroot biscuits, rather mouldy at that, and cocoa made in an old cigarette tin. We’d done twenty-six miles safari that day, on foot, through elephant grass—two of my bearers down with dengue, etc. . . . That meal tasted better than anything I ever hope to eat in Europe.’ Crash! The whole structure of polite living lies in ruins.”

In lucid words Waugh captures a personality-type we all recognize (today, they leave such comments on blogs) and makes us laugh. Those are some of the reasons – satire and humor (not always the same) – I reread Waugh, in particular the travel books and Sword of Honour. An anecdote:

For six months in 2002-2003, I read nothing but books by and about Henry James as I wrote my senior thesis on that writer. I had returned to college 30 years after dropping out and finally earned my B.A. in English literature in May 2003. The first book I read after my quarantine with James was Sword of Honour (the second and third, respectively, were Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz).

`Strong Writers with Quirky Minds'

2009-07-17T07:07:00.000-07:00

I came of age during the Age of Magazines when my family, not notably bookish, subscribed to piles of them – Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report. My mother read women’s magazines -- McCall’s, Better Homes and Gardens -- and dutifully clipped the recipes. As a teenager I added Esquire and The New Yorker to the heap. And Mad, the first issue of which came out the month I was born – October 1952.

I can date moments in my life by fondly remembered Time covers – Nabokov when he published Ada and The Band when they put out their second album. We looked for Ted Key’s “Hazel” cartoon on the back page of the Post and Norman Rockwell’s covers before we were informed they were kitschy. Magazines were an American habit, a ritual, a tacit means of organizing one’s weeks and months – all of which now feels quaint and long-ago.

Earlier this week my wife brought home the July 20 issue of Newsweek, and I realized I hadn’t looked at a weekly news magazine in decades, not even while waiting for the dentist. I found my indifference vindicated. I have no interest in politics, celebrities and most of popular culture, the subjects dominating the magazine’s pages. The “Books” section devotes a photo and 57 lines of copy to the late David Foster Wallace and his ironically titled Infinite Jest. Most damning is the universal blandness of the writing – machine prose. I compelled myself to sample a bit of everything, smorgasbord-style, and nothing gave me the momentum to read beyond the second or third sentence.

A magazine aimed at adult readers (admittedly, a narrow demographic) must be organized around the quality of its writers. Think of The New Yorker of the nineteen-fifties and early -sixties, when Liebling, Mitchell, Maxwell, Nabokov, Perelman, Balliett, J.F. Powers, Welty and Cheever graced its pages – a reader’s paradise. Such things will never happen again, of course, for many reasons, not least because three of the magazines I mentioned above ceased publication ages ago. Richard Brookhiser, a senior editor at National Review, recently published Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement, in which he offers a common-sense prescription for magazine excellence:

“A magazine must find strong writers with quirky minds and let each have his head. Their obsessions give a magazine life, and the cacophony of their different obsessions gives it variety. Readers look to favorite magazines for features – elements that stand out like landmarks and that create, then fulfill, expectations. The easiest way to generate features is by using design elements and graphics – pie charts, naked women – though the best way is to build features around writers.”

`A Congeries of Essences'

2009-07-16T06:59:00.000-07:00

A 40-percent-off coupon lured me to a second-hand bookstore where the kids burrowed in the comic books and I wandered the desert without expectations. Instead I found a cheap, mint-condition copy of Guy Davenport’s Twelve Stories, the sampler selected from three of his eight books of fiction and published in 1997. I never bothered to buy it because I already own most of his books, but the coupon and markdown made it irresistible.

Only at home did I discover the bonus: Tucked inside the back cover was Davenport’s New York Times obituary, published Jan. 7, 2005, three days after his death. It’s a cut-and-paste assemblage of banalities by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and includes an intriguing bit of creative writing: “the novel `Bicycle Rider’ (1985).” No such book exists and Davenport never published a novel under any title. However, his second collection of stories, published in 1979, was titled Da Vinci’s Bicycle, which Lehmann-Haupt refers to elsewhere in the obit. Bicycle is a fiction in the other sense, ontologically speaking.

Why does a reader care enough to tear a writer’s obit from a newspaper and fold it into one of the writer’s books but not enough to keep the book on the shelf and refrain from selling it? Did the obit spark his interest in Davenport but the book, once open in his hands, disappointed or baffled him? The vagaries of readers are unfathomable. In his “Postscript” (ever the Latinist) to Twelve Stories, Davenport writes:

“The imagination sees with the eyes of the spirit; the maker, finished with his making, must then see what he has done, like the reader, with corporeal eyes. Thoreau on an afternoon in 1852 when he had been looking at birds, trees, cows, squirrels, and flowers for hours raged that he had no words for the music he felt in every muscle of his body.

“To see that Thoreau could achieve a spiritual music in words you have only to look at any page he wrote. His frustration is the habitual anguish of all writers. A congeries of essences must find a form, and the form must be coherent and harmonious.”

Perhaps Davenport alludes to the entry from Thoreau’s journal dated Sept. 28, 1852:

“I find the hood-leaved violet quite abundant in a meadow, and the pedata in the Boulder Field. Those now seen, all but the blanda, palmata, and pubescens, blooming again. Bluebirds, robins, etc., are heard again in the air. This is the commencement, then, of the second spring. Violets, Potentilla, Canadensis, lambkill, wild rose, yellow lily, etc., begin again.

“A windy day. What have these high and roaring winds to do with the fall? No doubt they speak plainly enough to the sap that is in these trees, and perchance check its upward flow.

“Ah, if I could put into words that music which I hear; that music which can bring tears to the eyes of marble statues, to which the very muscles of men are obedient.”

`As a Drop of Dew Contains the Sky'

2009-07-15T07:14:00.000-07:00

In the first chapter of his new book, Beauty, Roger Scruton reviews the ancient arguments over beauty being “the object of a sensory rather than an intellectual delight.” He notes that “aesthetics” as a modern word was derived by Kant from the Greek aisthesis, meaning “sensation.” Scruton concludes that a comprehensive definition of beauty, despite its centrality to human experience, may be beyond human reckoning:

“A beautiful face, a beautiful flower, a beautiful melody, a beautiful colour – all these are indeed objects of a kind of sensory enjoyment, a relishing of the sight or sound of a thing. But what about a beautiful novel, a beautiful sermon, a beautiful theory in physics or a beautiful mathematical proof?”

Scruton pursues his toughest example, the novel, the beauty of which cannot be reduced exclusively to its sound (as a poem might be, though he doesn’t address this). In fact, a novel of pure sound (not even Finnegans Wake meets that definition) would not be a novel at all but a freak, a stunt, and probably unreadable in any conventional sense. Scruton continues:

“In appreciating a story we certainly are more interested in what is being said than in the sensory character of the sounds used to say it…a novel is directed to the senses – but not as an object of sensory delight, like a luxurious chocolate or a fine old wine. Rather as something presented through the senses, to the mind.”

The distinction is crucial and, at least to this reformed aesthete, convincing. And which writer of fiction does Scruton select to bolster his case?

“Take any short story by Chekhov. It does not matter that the sentences in translation sound nothing like the Russian original. Still they present the same images and events in the same suggestive sequence. Still they imply as much as they say, and withhold as much as they reveal. Still they follow each other with the logic of things observed rather than things summarized. Chekhov’s art captures life as it is lived and distills it into images that contain a drama, as a drop of dew contains the sky. Following such a story we are constructing a world whose interpretation is at every point controlled by the sights and sounds that we imagine.”

In his memoir, Gentle Regrets, Scruton describes Shakespeare’s plays as “works of philosophy – philosophy not argued but shown.” Beyond argument, this is true, and Chekhov’s stories are philosophy in a similar sense. His characters, unlike Dostoevsky’s and other Russian writers’, are never mouthpieces for their author’s religious or political hobbyhorses. His stories, like Shakespeare’s plays, never argue but show. Though his linguistic palette is circumscribed, Chekhov’s prose, like Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry, has a plainness and lack of ostentation that survives the inevitable blood-letting of translation. Its lucidity, modesty and attention to detail are beautiful. As Nabokov says in Lectures on Russian Literature:

“…Chekhov managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was.”

`A Valuable Delusion'

2009-07-14T07:18:00.000-07:00

I hope some enterprising editor assembles a collection of the scattered, unsystematic writings of Richard Diebenkorn. The result may amount to no more than a pamphlet but based on the stray samples of the painter’s prose I’ve happened upon, Diebenkorn’s aphorisms are tonic for the intellect, rooted in experience and never theoretical. That one man should possess exceptional gifts in painting (he’s one of the finest 20th-century American artists) and writing seems terribly unfair to the rest of us. In an essay introducing Richard Diebenkorn: Figurative Works on Paper (Chronicle Books, 2003) the painter Barnaby Conrad III quotes a note found in Diebenkorn’s studio after his death in 1993:

“Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.”

The first two sentences are a platitude and a truism, respectively. Few artists worthy of attention know every move in advance. Most accomplishment – this seems particularly true of writing – tempers rigor with serendipity, planning with improvisation. We’re back to the etymology of essay – “to try,” “to attempt.” The beauty lies in the third sentence – learning to recognize and capitalize upon a “valuable delusion.”

I happened to read Conrad’s essay the same day I began reading Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (1950). His subject is, Knox (1888-1957) admits, “elusive,” and his title amounts to “a cant term, pejorative, and commonly misapplied, as a label for a tendency.” He refers to the schismatic nature of belief in the context of Roman Catholicism – the sometimes fruitful friction between “the charismatic and the institutional.” Thus, Knox examines Montanists, Donatists, Anabaptists, Quakers, Jansenists, Quietists, Methodists and other species of dissenters.

Knox was ordained an Anglican priest in 1912, converted to Roman Catholicism five years later, and was ordained a priest in that faith in 1918. As such, he might be presumed a disapproving chronicler of “enthusiasts.” But something happened over the 30 years Knox worked on his masterwork. He explains in the introduction:

“…when the plan of this book was first conceived, all those years ago, it was to have been a broadside, a trumpet-blast, an end of controversy…here I would say, is what happens inevitably, if once the principle of Catholic unity is lost! All this confusion, this priggishness, then pedantry, this eccentricity and worse, follows directly from the rash step that takes you outside the fold of Peter!”

Certainty, to use Diebenkorn’s phrasing, did not come. Instead, Knox followed a “valuable delusion”:

“…somehow, in the writing, my whole treatment of the subject became different; the more you got to know the men, the more human did they become, for better or worse; you were more concerned to find out why they thought as they did than to prove it was wrong.”

This is admirable less as “tolerance” or “open-mindedness” – Knox remained a stout-hearted Catholic and priest – than as generosity of spirit, sympathetic imagination and something like Keats’ notion of “Negative Capability.” It also makes Enthusiasm compulsively readable, as it would not have been had it degenerated into a denunciatory screed. What could be more attractive than a writer with a first-rate mind examining, with empathy and scholarly care, ideas he personally does not embrace?

`My God, My God, What a Writer!'

2009-07-13T06:29:00.000-07:00

I’ve written before about Shelby Foote’s literary tastes as expressed in his letters to lifelong friend Walker Percy, but a recent reading of C. Stuart Chapman’s Shelby Foote: A Writer’s Life (2003) fills in some of the human context. Among fiction writers, Foote most admired Proust and Chekhov. Proust he first read as a teenager, and followed a ritual of rewarding himself after completing each of his own books with a rereading of À la recherche du temps perdu.

Chekhov, like Percy, was a doctor. Both suffered from tuberculosis, Chekhov fatally. In 1989, when Percy was already being treated for the cancer that would kill him the following year, Foote found it difficult to address his friend’s illness directly. Chambers writes:

“Foote even struggled with what to say to his dying friend, and as always, denial was his better form of valor. Even though Percy had little problem talking about his illness [unlike Chekhov], Foote’s letters continued to focus on artistic issues, even while his friend grew sicker.”

Thus, Foote, in one of his final letters to Percy, extolled Chekhov’s stories and urged his friend to read them:

“My God, my God, what a writer! How he does it is a mystery you cant [sic] solve by analyzing it – he just does it; does it out of being Chekhov…he landed running and never looked back, a highly individual man with his own particular fond absurdity that enabled him to see it in others when he wrote about them.”

Chambers writes: “Almost insensitively, Foote droned on, talking about a number of Chekhov stories; but by the end of the letter, it became clear that contained within his monologue on Chekhov’s talent lay his cryptic efforts to reach out to his friend.”

Chambers is wrong about Foote’s near-insensitivity. Foote and Percy met in 1930 and had been each other’s closest friend for almost 60 years. Though dramatically different temperaments, they understood each other better than many spouses. Percy took no offense at his old friend’s literary foot-dragging, and probably welcomed the letter’s enthusiasm for something other than his imminent mortality. Foote urged him to read “The Bishop,” written in 1902, two years before Chekhov’s death, and continued in his letter:

“He was researching dying while he wrote it; that is, he was dying himself, and Lord, Lord, what a job he did. It takes the mystery out of dying, makes it almost an ordinary occurrence, and in the course of doing it, makes dying more of a mystery than ever.”

Percy read “The Bishop” (which I wrote about here) and replied: “It’s all you say. Nothing short of miraculous.” Fully understanding his friend, Percy saw himself in the character of the dying bishop and writes: “The Bishop is in poor shape, dying in fact.” In a remarkably tactful gesture, Percy the Roman Catholic says of the story to Foote the agnostic: “What’s so good about it is that it doesn’t matter in the least that Chekhov was, apparently, an unbeliever.”

Percy died on May 10, 1990. Ten years later Foote wrote an introduction to Anton Chekhov: Longer Stories from the Last Decade, published by the Modern Library. In it he writes:

“Moreover, like most good writers, his work is even better on rereading, since then you can better appreciate how he goes about getting where he's going. Often, after a stretch of such rereading, I wax enthusiastic beyond all bounds. (Like Hemingway, I sometimes play the fool, but in the opposite direction.) Walker Percy and I shared this reaction, and once, in the course of a discussion, I asked him if he had read `In the Ravine.’ He said he hadn't, and I said: `I'd rather have written “In the Ravine” than Moby-Dick.’ His eyebrows rose at this, as well they might, but he went home and read that great last long story-in which all the author's talents seem to be gathered together as naturally as a hand closing into a fist-and wound up in a state of exaltation similar to my own. Echoing Nabokov on Chekhov's near-miraculous combination of the funny and the sad, he shook his head in wonder. `I don't know how it can be so pitiful and funny,’ he wrote me later. `I have to laugh out loud.’”

Foote died June 27, 2005.

Catalpa

2009-07-12T06:47:00.000-07:00

In 1969 I bought a paperback titled The Poem in Its Skin, edited by Paul Carroll. I found it in a department store, when such places still had book departments. It collected the work of American poets then entering middle age -- Ashbery, Merwin, Ginsberg, James Wright, John Logan, among others. I was not yet 17, my tastes were fluid, and I couldn’t distinguish gold from pyrite but I knew what I liked, even if only a single stanza:

“The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven't learned
A blessed thing they pay you for.
The blossoms snow down in my hair;
The trees and I will soon be bare.”

This is the opening of “April Inventory,” from Heart’s Desire, the first poem by W.D. Snodgrass I read. The reason it thrilled me was botanical, not poetic (I’m certain I had no idea what the poem was about). As a kid I already loved the northern catalpa (Catalpa speciosa) for its gaudy white flowers in spring and long, bean-like seed pods in summer. We knew catalpas as “cigar trees,” and kids enjoy masquerading as adults. I was pleased on Saturday by Nige’s celebration of this elegantly gaudy tree:

“The catalpas are in full bloom in London now. In the right setting this is a fine tree, in a slightly showy and exotic way, with its huge leaves and great trusses of white blossom, followed by long hanging pods (hence its other name, the Indian bean tree).”

Nige also notes “catalpa” is a “fine musical word,” and Plants and Their Names: A Concise Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 1995) reports the name is from catawba, “the North American Indian word for this plant.” I knew that word from Catawba Island, on the Lake Erie shore west of Cleveland. It’s part of the main land, not an island, but nearby is Kelleys Island, where I spent summers with my grandparents. I accept the etymology but catalpa to my ears has a Mediterranean sound – Latin or Italian – and I like the stress on the second syllable, lending the word a pleasing, symmetrical bell-like ring: ca-TAL-pa. It’s a rare word/thing that gives pleasure on multiple levels, even the olfactory, and even in memory:

Fifteen years ago I worked briefly as a copy editor on the graveyard shift for a newspaper in upstate New York. I would leave the office between midnight and 1 a.m. and follow the Mohawk River back to my apartment, often spying the furtive blur of a coyote along the road. I had to stop at a dogleg intersection where my headlights, in May, illuminated a house-sized catalpa in glorious bloom. I looked forward every morning to seeing that glowing revelation, which always reminded me of the story Guy Davenport tells at the conclusion of his essay about Eudora Welty, “The Fair Field of Enna”:

“An anecdote about Faulkner relates that once on a spring evening he invited a woman to come with him in his automobile, to see a bride in her wedding dress. He drove her over certain Mississippi back roads and eventually across a meadow, turning off his headlights and proceeding in darkness. At last he eased the car to a halt and said that the bride was before them. He switched on the lights, whose brilliance fell full upon an apple tree in blossom.

“The sensibility that shapes that moment is of an age, at least, with civilization itself.”

`Booklight and Kitchen Light'

2009-07-11T07:04:00.000-07:00

In an e-mail Bill Sigler refers to Fred Chappell as “the literary version of my uncle in the hills of Western North Carolina,” and quotes a passage from one of my favorite poems, Chappell’s book-length Midquest:

“These are the flower-worlds with all
the visionary petals shriveled away.

“Please hold my hand, may we
go down now, home?
Where booklight and kitchen light
furrow the silence?”

Near the end of the poem, Chappell’s stand-in, Old Fred, is speaking to his wife. The moment is central to the poem, to Chappell’s vision, and to my understanding of our place in the world. We’ve had a peek at Chappell’s Appalachian Paradiso. Now it’s time to go home. Even mystics, sooner or later, return. We need the sustenance: “booklight and kitchen light.”

A previous mention of Midquest prompted at least one reader to buy a copy, the happiest possible byproduct of criticism.

`A Green Thought in a Green Shade'

2009-07-10T06:51:00.000-07:00

The garden at my kids’ school is remarkably tidy and secure. It’s surrounded by a chain-link fence and the vegetables, fruits and flowers, except for squash and grapes, grow in horse troughs of galvanized steel. The paths are covered with crushed gravel, and there’s even a portable outhouse. Next to it is a coffin-shaped plastic chest for storing the hose, shears and other supplies, all tidily stowed and secured with a combination lock. I volunteered to take care of the garden for a week.

We go early in the evening. For six weeks greater Seattle has had no measurable rainfall, and none is expected until at least next week. The boys sample nasturtium blossoms – it’s not about the flavor, which is peppery, but the novelty of eating flowers – and go to work on the playground while I pull out the hose, soak the garden and think about Marvell: “What wondrous life is this I lead!”

Red-leaf lettuce, broccoli, two kinds of beans, corn, peas, tomatoes, strawberries, carrots -- none is quite ripe. Nothing to nibble. I’m outdoors but the garden feels like a greenhouse -- laboratory conditions, no herbivores, antiseptic. This is how, I think darkly, they arrange gardens in Belgium. I resist the urge to pull the token weeds. Let them thrive. Fred Chappell, too, has titled a poem “The Garden,” which begins “The garden is a book about the gardener.” If so, this gardener, if I’m reading the text rightly, is prim, at least a little neurotic. Later in the poem, Chappell flips the equation: “The gardener is a book about her garden.” I’m the only male among the garden volunteers. How do I read that? Further on Chappell writes:

“Her thoughts set down in vivid greenery,
The green light and the gold light nourish.
Firm sentences of grapevine, boxwood paragraphs,
End-stops of peonies and chrysanthemums,
Cut drowsy shadows on the paper afternoon.”

The best part of gardening is the easy mindlessness. I water and weed without thinking. Or I think about Marvell:

“Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.”

`The Arithmetic of Compassion'

2009-07-09T06:49:00.000-07:00

Stalin is widely assumed to have said “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic,” though scholars can’t agree on the authenticity of the quotation. Its Wildean cynicism has always seemed too mannered, too polished, for the thug from Georgia, and who can imagine the “one man” whose demise Stalin might have honored as tragedy?

Morbid fascination led to me recall Stalin’s quip. I visited a Communist blog, which led me to another, and another, into a moral vortex. The technical quality of the writing varied, from rabid to academically congealed to eerily civilized and grammatically correct, but the themes remained consistent: Capitalism, imperialism, the United States and Israel -- bad; Marx, Muslims, the proletariat, sometimes Lenin, sometimes Mao, one time Stalin – good. I’m not as naïve as I was a few years ago but the experience was like learning the smallpox bacillus had spontaneously reappeared in the human population. The nadir, or one of the deeper nadirs, came when a self-described Marxist-Leninist mutated Stalin’s formulation and said the death of “Palestinian civilians” was a “tragedy” and the death of Israelis was a “necessity.”

A man who knew the blessings of the worker’s paradise first-hand, whose life was cut short by it, was Zbigniew Herbert, who at least had the satisfaction of outliving the Soviet Union. I wonder if he had Stalin’s one-liner in mind when he wrote “Mr Cogito Reads the Newspaper” (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter):

“On the front page
a report of the killing of 120 soldiers

“the war lasted a long time
you could get used to it

“close alongside
the news of a sensational crime
with a portrait of the murderer

“the eye of Mr Cogito
slips indifferently
over the soldiers’ hecatomb
to plunge with delight
into the description of everyday horror

“a thirty-year-old farm labourer
under the stress of nervous depression
killed his wife
and two small children

“it is described with precision
the course of the murder
the position of the bodies
and other details

“for 120 dead
you search on a map in vain

“too great a distance
covers them like a jungle

“they don’t speak to the imagination
there are too many of them
the numeral zero at the end
changes them into an abstraction

“a subject for meditation:
the arithmetic of compassion”

It sounds like a grotesque joke: How many Israeli deaths does it take for a Marxist-Leninist to calculate “the arithmetic of compassion?”

`Something Straight and Simple'

2009-07-08T06:27:00.000-07:00

In our hotel room at Lake Chelan, on the wall across from our bed, hung what appeared to be a reproduction of a painting by Richard Diebenkorn. There was no signature and the frame was sealed to the wall so I couldn’t examine the back, but it looked convincingly like a painting from the “Ocean Park” series – irregular pastel grids, like landscapes viewed from the air. It resembled this. I assume it was either a Diebenkorn reproduction or an anonymous ripoff of his style. Either way, I enjoyed its company.

Since returning home, while reading more about Diebenkorn and looking at his paintings, I came across two sentences reportedly scrawled on a scrap of paper and found in the artist’s California studio after his death in 1993, age 70. I haven’t documented the source but even if it’s apocryphal it’s intriguing and worthy of contemplation – like the painting in the motel room:

“I seem to have to do it elaborately wrong and with many conceits first. Then maybe I can attack and deflate my pomposity and arrive at something straight and simple.”

These are not the words of a young man. They have none of the willfulness, self-indulgence and impatience of youth, even brilliant youth. They reflect a full life’s experience, its dead ends, flops, erasures, detours, the inevitable depression and self-loathing, at least in passing – but not defeat or surrender. We could learn from them, especially from “elaborately wrong,” which is how many of us wrote and lived when young, congratulating our daring and individuality while slavishly serving the Zeitgeist.

At Lake Chelan I was reading the poems of Janet Lewis and her husband, Yvor Winters. The latter’s “To a Young Writer” seems apposite, in particular the final quatrain:

“Write little; do it well.
Your knowledge will be such,
At last, as to dispel
What moves you overmuch.”

Knowledge (experience) tempers emotional over-indulgence -- “What moves you overmuch.” The risk, of course, is over-compensation in the other direction, turning cold and sterile. In his note to the poem in The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters, R.L. Barth points out the poem was dedicated to Achilles Holt (1911-1993), a poet, fiction writer and student of Winters’. Barth writes: “Holt’s writing career ended relatively early with the onset of severe mental illness.” Yet he lived to the age of 82.

For what it’s worth, Diebenkorn, Lewis and Winters lived much of their lives in California, though none was a native, and all were associated with Stanford University.

`The Art of Surprise'

2009-07-07T06:34:00.000-07:00

It’s July in Helkovo, a dusty resort town in Russia, where Pavel Matveyitch Zaikin steps off the train with others, “mostly fathers of families,” Chekhov tells us. He is “perspiring, red in the face, and gloomy.” Zaikin is a lawyer, joining his wife and son at their summer villa. We know him from Gogol and Dickens – an irritable little man whose only pleasure is complaining. “I maintain, sir,” he tells a fellow traveler (dressed in “ginger trousers”), “that summer holidays are the invention of the devil and of woman.”

Only Petya, his 6-year-old son, is home. His wife, Nadyezhda [Hope] Stepanova, and her friend, Olga Kirillovna, have gone to rehearse a play. Petya collects insects and is full of questions about gnats. In a brilliant image, Chekhov has Petya give his father a box out of which comes the sound of buzzing and scratching:

“Opening the lid, he saw a number of butterflies, beetles, grasshoppers, and flies fastened to the bottom of the box with pins. All except two or three butterflies were still alive and moving.”

Pavel Matveyitch has already made his son cry and called him “a horrid little pig.” When he asks Petya who taught him to pin insects, he answers it was his mother’s friend. “Olga Kirillovna ought to be pinned down like that herself!...It’s shameful to torture animals,” he says.

The mother and her friend return in the company of two men who are also in the play. Pavel Matveyitch complains when she wishes to serve them “vodka and savouries.” Alone in his study he drinks tea and eats “a whole French loaf,” though he takes no pleasure in food or drink, nor does he kiss or embrace his wife and son. He feels no jealousy about the actors rehearsing with his wife and staying overnight in their villa -- merely irritation. His son asks more questions about insects and Pavel Matveyitch tells him to shut up. Finally, in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, he walks outside and meets “Ginger Trousers,” his companion on the train, who says, “I am enjoying Nature.” His mother-in-law and nieces have arrived, and he is happy. “And you, too,” he asks, “are enjoying Nature?” Pavel Matveyitch agrees that he is and asks Ginger Trousers if he knows where he can find a tavern.

“Ginger Trousers raised his eyes to heaven and meditated profoundly.”

That’s how “Not Wanted” (in the Constance Garnett translation) concludes inconclusively. The pleasure of the story is in Chekhov’s ability to keep the pot simmering without bringing it to a boil. We’ve all felt like Pavel Matveyitch, and some of us have spoken the way he speaks to his wife and son. He’s not a bully or sadist. He’s quietly, undramatically unhappy, and Chekhov quietly, undramatically balances misery with comedy.

In 2006, theater/film critic Steve Vineberg delivered a lecture, “The Art of Surprise,” at the College of the Holy Cross, later published in The American Scholar. He writes:

“The art I love most dearly emerges from an acknowledgement that we’re none of us pure of either mind or heart. It’s the art of mixed tones—buffoonery mixed with regret, as in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro; comic absurdity mixed with heartache, as in Chekhov’s stories; salvation that appears improbably out of despair, as in Shakespeare’s King Lear, or when all hope is lost, as in The Winter’s Tale. It’s the art of surprise, which can only come from the unpredictable—and what I mean by `unpredictable’ isn’t the preposterous (like the twists in M. Night Shmalayan’s movies) but the turn you don’t expect just because it’s so true to life, and life is never predictable, yet when you see it or hear it you think, `Of course.’”

When Pavel Matveyitch, instead of flying into a rage, merely fumes and sputters; and when he rants at his son and apologizes, then rants again; and when he wanders sleeplessly into the summer night, and asks for directions to a tavern and gets profound meditation instead of an answer – that is the surprise that does not surprise, artifice fashioned so subtly as to seem indistinguishable from life: “Of course.”

In his final book, Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, completed when he was 88 years old, Viktor Shklovsky writes:

“Chekhov is the most desperate of all writers , he is the most straightforward one.

“He doesn’t want to soften, loosen the threads of life, he doesn’t want to be capable of bending them to make a false happy ending.”

`There is No Nothingness'

2009-07-06T06:17:00.000-07:00

“Nature has no nothing. To feel that it has is what we call the devil, the enemy. In Blakean words, our predicament is that we can exist and still not be, for being requires an awakeness from the dream of custom and of ourselves. The self is by nature turned outward to connect with the harmony of things. The eyes cannot see themselves, but something other. The strange and paradoxical rule of nature is that we are fullest in our being by forgetting our being. To love nothing is to be nothing, to give is to have.”

These sentences by Guy Davenport come near the conclusion of his essay about the American poet Ronald Johnson. Despite repeated tries I’ve been unable to share Davenport’s enthusiasm for Johnson’s work. It leaves me cold. I would never have made even a second attempt to enjoy and understand the poems had a critic other than Davenport spoken so admiringly of them. Even in disagreement, he’s a critic – a reader and teacher – one listens to and learns from. The passage above, which seems quite remarkable in its spirited refutation of solipsism, the postmodern epidemic, is almost an aside, a digression in what is, after all, merely a book review. Davenport could afford to be profligate with his gifts.

The paragraph jibes with everything I know about Davenport the man, his generosity, casual kindness and availability to others. It also resonates with his familiar themes and sources, Herakleitos in particular. Davenport translated the fragments left by the pre-Socratic thinker (in Herakleitos and Diogenes, 1979; later included in 7 Greeks, 1995), and much of his work is suffused with what he calls the “astuteness and comprehensiveness of [Herakleitos’] insight into the order of nature.” One fragment says: “The unseen design of things is more harmonious than the seen.”

The passage from the Johnson essay reminds me of J.V. Cunningham’s “For a Woman with Child”:

“We are ourselves but carriers. Life
Incipient grows to separateness
And is its own meaning. Life is,
And not; there is no nothingness.”

The choice of a pregnant woman is astute. At no other time is our moral connectedness to the separateness of another so dramatized: “we are fullest in our being by forgetting our being.” Having a child ought to signal the beginning of the end of self-absorption in both mother and father. The entry of a child into the world forever changes that world. Davenport says, “Nature has no nothing;” Cunningham, “there is no nothingness.”

Elsewhere, Davenport writes that Cunningham’s poems “are as well made as wristwatches.”

`Style is the Leaves of the Tree'

2009-07-05T06:54:00.000-07:00

I don’t know anyone who reads the work of William Gerhardie (1895-1977), an Anglo- Russian writer of the remarkable generation that included Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. Edith Wharton was among his champions. Gerhardie was born in St. Petersburg, where he served as a British military attaché during World War I and witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution. His best novels – Futility, The Polyglots – have Russian characters, settings and themes. In 1923 he published Anton Chekhov: A Critical Study, the first book not written in Russian devoted to that writer. I wrote about it here.

Now I’m reading Memoirs of a Polyglot, published in 1931 when the author was 36. Gerhardie has a gift for distilled portraiture, for comedy and for treating his remarkable life as nothing out of the ordinary – not in a spirit of false modesty (the book’s first sentence is “Yesterday, at dinner, it suddenly occurred to me what a fine fellow I was.”), but rather in the manner of his master, Chekhov. Another of his incidental gifts is for off-the cuff literary criticism. In describing the departure of a British general with whom he served in Petrograd, Gerhardie writes:

“I was so attached, so devoted to the man that when I was alone in the street I hurried against the biting blizzard, which blinded me as I tore on, and sobbed. And if you think it `unmanly’ of me, let me tell you that the `larme facile’ is again in the fashion. All true humorists, moreover – Dickens, Gogol, Chekhov, Mark Twain, Proust, [Arkady Timofeevich] Averchenko, to name only a few at random – are lachrymose by the natural balance of things.”

The transition from personal anecdote to critical assessment is seamless and shrewd. For Gerhardie to place Proust among the humorists is inspired, and must have surprised his early readers. In the nineteen-twenties, while at Oxford, Gerhardie wrote most of Futility and the Chekhov study, and resisted pressure from classmates to become a Communist. After describing a Red friend’s proselytizing, and his later reconversion to democratic principles, he writes:

“Just as every political party considers itself a `centre-party’ threatened by revolutionaries on the left and reactionaries on the right, so every young writer tends to think his talent is compounded from the choicest ingredients. One hopes – and on what little ground! – that one incorporate the lucid sanity of a Bertrand Russell, without any of his liberal smugness; the bitter incisiveness of Bernard Shaw, without his sterility; the rich humanity of H.G. Wells, without his splashing-over; the analytical profundity of Proust, without his mawkish snobbism; the elemental sweep of D.H. Lawrence, without his gawky bitterness; the miraculous naturalness of Chekhov, without that sorry echo of the consumptive’s cough; the supreme poetic moments of Goethe unimbedded in the suet-pudding of his common day; the intimations without the imbecility of William Wordsworth; the lyrical imagery of Shakespeare, without his rhetoric; the pathological insight of Dostoevski, without his extravagant suspiciousness; the life-imparting breath of Tolstoy, without his foolishness; Turgenev’s purity in reproducing nature, without his sentimentalism; the lyrical power of Pushkin, without his paganism; the elegiac quality of Lermontov, without his `Byronism’; the humour and epic language of Gogol, without his provincialism; the spirit of Voltaire, without his tininess; the human understanding of Dr. Johnson, without his overbearingness; the dash of Byron, without his vanity; the faithful portraiture of Flaubert, without his tortuous fastidiousness. The list could be prolonged.”

There’s much here to quibble with (I’ll take Shakespeare’s rhetoric any day) but if a young writer or reader were to pursue each of Gerhardie’s observations – read the texts and come to his own conclusions – he would possess the rudiments of a first-rate literary education. That seems even less likely than it was in Gerhardie’s day. And here is what he writes in the middle of an assessment of H.G. Wells:

“…there is but one thing an original artist has in common with another – originality…style is the leaves of the tree. No tree, no leaves. A writer’s style is the measure of his personality, and cannot be acquired consciously. It shows unmistakably what you are: gives you away for what you are.”

`What Salutes of Cannon and Small Arms!'

2009-07-04T06:47:00.000-07:00

One-hundred fifty-four years ago today, Walt Whitman published 12 untitled poems and a preface in an edition of 795 copies at a Brooklyn print shop owned by two Scottish immigrants, the brothers James and Andrew Rome. Within two weeks Emerson, one of Whitman’s many inspirations, praised Leaves of Grass as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.” In later editions, Whitman mentions Independence Day – the birth of the nation, the birth of his book -- in “Song of Myself,” Section 15, near the conclusion to one of his catalogs, this one celebrating Americans of every stripe, from opium-eater and “quadroon girl” to the president:

“The floor-men are laying the floor, the tinners are tinning the roof, the masons are calling for mortar,
In single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers;
Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather’d, it is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannon and small arms!)
Seasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground...”

My favorite among Whitman’s evocations of July, without mention of the national holiday, can be found in Specimen Days, “A July Afternoon by the Pond”:

“The fervent heat, but so much more endurable in this pure air—the white and pink pond-blossoms, with great heart-shaped leaves; the glassy waters of the creek, the banks, with dense bushery, and the picturesque beeches and shade and turf; the tremulous, reedy call of some bird from recesses, breaking the warm, indolent, half-voluptuous silence; an occasional wasp, hornet, honey-bee or bumble (they hover near my hands or face, yet annoy me not, nor I them, as they appear to examine, find nothing, and away they go)—the vast space of the sky overhead so clear, and the buzzard up there sailing his slow whirl in majestic spirals and discs; just over the surface of the pond, two large slate-color’d dragon-flies, with wings of lace, circling and darting and occasionally balancing themselves quite still, their wings quivering all time, (are they not showing off for my amusement?)—the pond itself, with the sword-shaped calamus; the water snakes—occasionally a flitting blackbird, with red dabs on his shoulders, as he darts slantingly by—the sounds that bring out the solitude, warmth, light and shade—the quawk of some pond duck—(the crickets and grasshoppers are mute in the noon heat, but I hear the song of the first cicadas;)—then at some distance the rattle and whirr of a reaping machine as the horses draw it on a rapid walk through a rye field on the opposite side of the creek—(what was the yellow or light brown bird, large as a young hen, with short neck and long-stretch’d legs I just saw, in flapping and awkward flight over there through the trees?)—the prevailing delicate, yet palpable, spicy, grassy, clovery perfume to my nostrils; and over all, encircling all, to my sight and soul, and free space of the sky, transparent and blue—and hovering there in the west, a mass of white-gray fleecy clouds the sailors call `shoals of mackerel’—the sky, with silver swirls like locks of toss’d hair, spreading, expanding—a vast voiceless, formless simulacrum—yet may-be the most real reality and formulator of everything—who knows?”

`A Sullen Growl of Resentment'

2009-07-04T06:43:00.000-07:00

On the way home from Lake Chelan we drove through or near towns and villages with such names as Gold Bar, Entiat, Winesap, Grotto, Skykomish, Index, Sultan, Chumstick, Wilderness, Verlot and Robe. One of the joys of travel in the United States is the surreal poetry of its place names, the history of which, Names on the Land, was written by George R. Stewart. As we passed through Dryden, Wa., I wondered: Could it be named for John Dryden (1631-1700), author of these rousing lines from “Mac Flecknoe”:

“All human things are subject to decay,
And, when fate summons, monarchs must obey.”

When we stopped for the traffic signal in Dryden, I noticed we were waiting at the intersection of Dryden Avenue and Johnson Road. Surely, this was no coincidence. The early settlers of North Central Washington must have been stout-hearted readers. With more time I might have found Donne Drive or Pope Lane. Instead, at home, I returned to Samuel Johnson’s “Life of Dryden” and this insightful encomium:

“With his praises of other and of himself is always intermingled a strain of discontent and lamentation, a sullen growl of resentment, or querulous murmur of distress. His works are undervalued, his merit is unrewarded, and he has few thanks to pay his stars that he was born among Englishmen.”

`More Richly Seen'

2009-07-03T06:50:00.000-07:00

John Muir the man -- the naturalist and explorer -- has always seemed more compellingly substantial than Muir the writer. His prose is workmanlike and unmemorable. His need to report what he knew -- and he knew a lot -- outweighed his gift for articulating it in an artful fashion, however humbly. His best books -- The Mountains of California and The Grand Cañon of the Colorado -- are indifferent as prose but even an undistinguished stylist, Janet Lewis suggests, can furnish our imaginations. In “For John Muir, a Century and More After His Time,” she meditates on how a writer’s vision can become as vital and real as our memories of personal experience: “…all these / In memory, both mine and borrowed, doubly rich are grown, / Till I can hardly tell his treasure from my own.”

Deep readers recognize the déjà vu-like sensation. The “mind’s eye” is creative, unreliable and opportunistic, and claims the work of others as its own. During my first visit to Paris, in 1973, I recognized people and scenes from Proust none involving rats). I’ve seen Hemingway’s “Big, Two-Hearted River” in Ohio, Indiana and upstate New York. Lewis superimposes childhood memories of Wisconsin, scenes of the Sierra Nevadas in Muir’s books and her own experience of those mountains as a longtime resident of California:

“These I truly know
That I have seen with my own eyes, and yet
There merges with them an unreckoned crowd
Of things more richly seen…”

Here at Lake Chelan I see a desert-like landscape already familiar from Lewis’ poems. Her novels mingle with my memories of two visits to France. Yet another reason for reading is to experiment with immense elasticity of the imagination. How much can it hold? Of Muir (and more) Lewis writes:

“Moments of wisdom and intenser sight.
And these I owe to one
Who built his campfire on the canyon rim,
Who woke at dawn, and felt surrounding him
The mind of God in every living thing,
And things unloving.”

`In the Still Sunshine'

2009-07-02T06:26:00.000-07:00

After the mountains, some streaked with snow, we drove through a grass-covered piece of Nebraska grafted onto central Washington, and then through a valley of vineyards and fruit trees along the river. The mountains around Lake Chelan are soft and brown with dry grass that looks like sand from a distance. The sky is a blue bowl and the landscape reminds us of Baja California. Fifteen years ago my wife worked for a year in Barcelona on a Fulbright, and she says this place looks like Spain but for the absence of olive trees. Instead, we have apples, peaches, cherries and apricots.

At the urging of David Myers I read Janet Lewis’ austerely beautiful novel The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941) and have moved on to The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron (1959). I’m also rereading The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis and feel as though I have discovered a clairvoyant sister. Her poems echo the landscape around us. Here is a late one -- Lewis lived from 1899 to 1998 -- “Dios No Se Muda”:

“Doves call in the orchard where
Arbutus and magnolia replace
Cherry and nectarine
And the heavy peach.
Everything changes, Saint Teresa reminds us,
Save the presence of God.
I could name tree after tree
That has grown in this earth.
Borne its sweet fruit in sequence
In accord with the loving hand
That planted it and vanished.
What presence embraces me now
In the still sunshine?”

In his notes, R.L. Barth tells us Lewis took her title from a poem by Santa Teresa de Ávila (1515-1582), as translated from the Spanish by Lewis‘ husband Yvor Winters:

“Nothing move thee;
Nothing terrify thee;
Everything passes;
God never changes.
Patience be all to thee.
Who trusts in God, he
Never shall be needy.
God alone suffices.”

`The Man from Scotland'

2009-07-01T06:10:00.000-07:00

I should have known that “dunce,” by a comically cruel mischance of etymology, derives from the name of John Duns Scotus, one of the subtlest and most lastingly interesting of Church thinkers. As my ninth-grade Latin teacher used to say, my learning is “laced with lacunae.” Waiting in the optometrist’s office on Tuesday, I was browsing in The Private Lives of English Words (edited by Louis G. Heller, Alexander Humez and Malcah Dror, 1984), looking for words other than pandemonium coined by poets, when I happened on the “dunce” entry. The editors feebly term the etymology “ironic.”

Duns was born around 1265, possibly in Duns, a village in Berwickshire, Scotland. He never called himself “Scotus,” as Heller & Co. note:

“The Scotus, often mistakenly believed to be part of the philosopher’s name, is actually a Latin epithet used by those outside the British Isles to identify him as the man from Scotland.”

Duns was a theologian and Franciscan, and earned the title “Doctor Subtilis” for the acuity of his thought. His was among the earliest generations of Church thinkers to attempt an integration of the “pagan” philosophy of Aristotle into Christian thought. The editors explain that his followers were known as “Duns men, “a phrase with a wholly favorable connotation of reasoning both clever and sophisticated.” However,

“…the students were not the equal of the master, and by gradual stages such phrases as Duns men, Duns prelate, Duns learning acquired new connotations signifying `petty sophistry’ and `caviling purely for the sake of arguing.’ Eventually this degenerated into meaning `acting like a fool.’”

It’s Duns’ notion of the haecceity of a thing – its thisness, not its whatness (its quiddity) – that most interests me, as it did Hopkins and J.V. Cunningham (a Jesuit and a lapsed Catholic). It can’t be said either poet coined the word but both frequently turn the concept to their own purposes. Here is Cunningham’s “Haecceity,” dating from 1943:

“Evil is any this or this
Pursued beyond hypothesis.

“It is the scribbling of affection
On the blank pages of perfection.

“Evil is presentness bereaved
Of all the futures it conceived,

“Wilful and realized restriction
Of the insatiate forms of fiction.

“It is this poem, or this act.
It is this absolute of fact.”

Here Cunningham uses haecceity in such a way that Duns would hardly recognize it. The poet writes of “Haecceity” in his essay “The Quest of the Opal” (from The Collected Essays of J.V. Cunningham):

“The subject of that poem was metaphysical evil, evil as a defect of being. Any realized particular, anything which is this and not that and that, is by the very fact evil. For to be this is to exclude not only any other alternative but to exclude all else in the universe. Perfection is in possibility, in the idea, but that which is realized, specific, determined, has no possibilities. It is precisely this and nothing else at all. It is lacking in all the being of the universe other than its own particularity. The more realized a thing is the greater its defect of being; hence any particular choice is as such evil though morally it may be the best choice.”

In a 1940 poem, “The Metaphysical Amorist,” Cunningham cites Duns as a possible way to resolve Plato’s idealism and Hume’s “sensationalism.” Here is the final stanza:

“Plato! you shall not plague my life.
I married a terrestrial wife.
And Hume! she is not mere sensation
In sequence of observed relation.
She has two forms—ah, thank you, Duns!—,
I know her in both ways at once.
I knew her, yes, before I knew her,
And by both means I must construe her,
And none among you shall undo her.”

This is not what Duns had in mind. For more on the subject, read Timothy Steele’s invaluable edition of The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, including the introduction and commentary.

`The Big Words Fail to Fit'

2009-06-30T06:35:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday we leave for a brief vacation at Lake Chelan, our first trip east of the Cascades. Judging from photos, the setting is alpine and elemental – water, stone, trees. With the boys we’ll hike, swim, eat, read and celebrate Michael’s ninth birthday.

The lake is glacier-fed and even in summer hypothermia-inducing. Its average depth is 474 feet; its deepest, 1,486. I like to research the places we visit, and dig up facts like this. I like to know the flora, fauna and human history. That’s how I learned of a school bus accident in November 1945 that left 15 students and their driver dead in icy Lake Chelan. Such a story is the stuff of cheap novels – and life. Now the lake, regardless of its undeniable beauty, will not look the same as I had expected before reading about the crash.

I thought of D.J. Enright’s “On the Death of a Child,” in which he writes “The big words fail to fit.”

`A Strong Influence When I Was Young'

2009-06-29T06:36:00.000-07:00

Today we remember Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi, born on this date in 1798, in Recanati, Italy. The great Italian poet after Dante, he was a heroic reader, a solitary, a cripple and hunchback (like Pope and Kierkegaard), and a voluptuary of pessimism. So expert a witness as Schopenhauer said Leopardi’s understanding of life’s futility and misery had “a diverting and stimulating effect” on him. Leopardi’s reputation in the English-speaking world seems minimal though I recall Iris Origo’s Leopardi: A Study in Solitude with fondness. In a 1958 letter to his friend Con Leventhal, Samuel Beckett says Leopardi “was a strong influence when I was young (his pessimism, not his patriotism).”

In Section CXL of The Triumph of Love, Geoffrey Hills writes:

“A se stesso: of Self, the lost cause to end all
lost causes; and which you are not (are you?)
so hopeless as to hope to defend. You’ve
what? Leopardi for the New Age? Mirageous
laterite highway – every few miles
a clump of vultures, the vile spread.
Fama/Fame [It. – ed.] [Hill’s insertion]: celebrity and hunger
gorging on road-kill. A se stesso.”

“A se stesso” – “To Himself” - is the title of a poem by Leopardi translated by Beckett, who mentions it several times in his only extended work of criticism, Proust. The epigraph to that volume is drawn from the same poem: “E fango è il mondo” – “The world is mud.”

Savor this line from Leopardi’s Pensieri, usually translated as Thoughts, and thus a close cognate (and spiritual cousin) of Pascal’s Pensées. This was translated by the American poet W.S. Di Piero:

“We can be sure that most of the people we appoint to educate our children have not been educated. Yet we assume that they can give something they have not themselves received, and that this is the only way one can get an education.”

Based on my recent four and a half months in public school classrooms, little has changed in two centuries.

`A Classical Isle of Sanity'

2009-06-28T06:44:00.000-07:00

“I was twenty-four and trying to live authentically in the Present. I had no idea that I wasn’t, that I was simply living in some benign erasure of the past. But I was lucky. In Zbigniew I had found a friend who was almost a classical isle of sanity.”

The late Larry Levis was a middling poet with supreme good fortune in friends. As a young man, he served as Zbigniew Herbert’s chauffeur when the Polish poet taught at UCLA in 1970-71, and he describes their unlikely friendship in “Strange Days: Zbigniew Herbert in Los Angeles.” The Herbert he renders confirms the impression formed by those of us who know him only through his words. He is surpassingly modest and thoughtful, indelibly European, cultured, a bemused alien in the Southern California of Charles Manson and the Eagles. It’s touching to know Herbert (who never learned to drive) and his wife Katrina bought a 1960 Ford Fairlane in Los Angeles, and chilling when the poet remembers the only time he drove an automobile:

“`It was after a meeting of the Underground. The boy who drove for me was waiting in the car. But dead. The Nazis shot him. Just one shot, a style they had. I came out later . . . I saw him. I had to learn fast. I pushed the boy over to other side of car seat. I drove. Just one time. With the dead boy beside me. I drove.’”

Levis wrote a poem about the experience, “For Zbigniew Herbert, Summer, 1971, Los Angeles,” and here’s “Sequoia” (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter), one of the rare traces of California that shows up in Herbert’s work:

“Gothic towers of needles in the valley of a stream
not far from Mount Tamalpais where in the morning and
evening thick fog comes like the wrath and passion of the ocean

“in this reservation of giants they display a cross-section of a tree the coppery stump of the West
with immense regular veins like rings on water
and someone perverse has inscribed the dates of human history
an inch from the middle of the stump the fire of distant Rome under Nero
in the middle the battle of Hastings the night expeditions of the drakkars
panic of the Anglo-Saxons the death of the unfortunate Harold is told with a compass
and finally right next to the beach of the bark the landing of the Allies in Normandy

“the Tacitus of this tree was a geometrician and he did not know adjectives
he did not know syntax expressing terror he did not know any words
therefore he counted added years and centuries as if to say there is nothing
beyond birth and death nothing only birth and death
and inside the bloody pulp of the sequoia”

In the glory of a New World tree, the largest in the world, Herbert perceives the abattoir of Old World history – “the bloody pulp of the sequoia.” There’s a wistful quality to Levis’ remembrance. Partly it’s the madness of those years, and being young, and remembering them in middle age. It’s Levis not meeting Herbert again, and the uncertainty of communications between East and West during the Cold War. Saddest of all is knowing that Levis died in 1996 at the age of 49, and Herbert died two years later, age 73.

`Chipped Off the Latin'

2009-06-27T06:45:00.000-07:00

When I encounter the word “scruple” in print (rather often) or conversation (almost never) I think of “At the Grave of Henry James,” in which Auden addresses the “Master of nuance and scruple, / Pray for me and for all writers, living or dead…” Auden means this, of course, as praise, though modern usage suggests there is something neurotic about scrupulosity, something repressed or thwarted and probably “curable” with therapy.

The family of my 8-year-old’s closest school friend is Indian, from the Punjab region, and they are Sikhs. I took Michael to their house for a play date on Friday and met the boy’s paternal grandparents. The grandfather is tall, with a military bearing – very erect and straight-shouldered, yet relaxed and kindly. I thought of Umr Singh in Kipling’s story “A Sahib’s War.” Over tea I confessed my ignorance and asked many questions about Sikhism, and my host answered patiently. I was interested in particular in what distinguishes his religion from Hinduism and others. At one point he said, “We believe in truthful living. We have many scruples about how we live.”

I think of “scrupulous” as the opposite of careless or impulsive. “Painstaking” is the one-word synonym that comes to mind, and a little digging shows my thinking is grounded in good etymology. “Scruple” dates in English, by way of French, from the 16th century. The Latin root is scrupulus, meaning “uneasiness, anxiety, pricking of conscience,” from scrupus – a sharp stone or pebble. In other words, scruples are like having a stone in your shoe. In his Dictionary, Samuel Johnson defines “scruple” as “Doubt; difficulty of determination; perplexity; generally about minute things.” And consider Joyce’s “agenbite of inwit.”

To have many scruples about how we live seems, as the Sikh says, like an excellent way to live – and write. Writing involves a thousand minute decisions about sound and sense, taking many pains. Judging from “Scruples” (from The Calligraphy Shop, 2003), Ben Downing understands:

“Chipped off the Latin for
`small sharp stone,’ they are
those irritants that get
into our shoes and sting
our feet until we stop,
stoop, and dump them out.”