`The Vital Part of Any Doing'

“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'

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'

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'

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'

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'

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'

“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'

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.”