`An Old Man, Grave and Reasonable'

Among my most reliable teachers is Mike Gilleland, proprietor of Laudator Temporis Acti, who more than anyone else inhabiting the blogosphere’s bookish precincts introduces me to new books, most of them quite old. Last week he posted two passages from The Prayse of Private Life by Sir John Harington (1561-1612), which its editor describes as “less a translation than a treatise inspired by Petrarch’s De Vita Solitaria.” What attracted me was the notion of praising private life, particularly in an age like ours when public life – that amalgam of government, business, technology and media – has grown omnivorous. I’m reading the edition Mike cites -- The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington, together with The Prayse of Private Life, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930). In his introduction McClure writes: 

“Although Harington follows Petrarch’s plan and in many of his chapters paraphrases the original, there is much in his essay that is his own. Lacking the gaiety and sprightly wit that distinguishes much of his earlier writing, The Prayse of Private Life reveals the author as an old man, grave and reasonable, who found in Petrarch’s treatise much that his busy and disappointing life had convinced him was memorable.” 

Harington’s life at the epicenter of Elizabethan intrigue, where he was known as the queen’s “saucy Godson,” was bruising. He was a courtier forever in trouble, a wit and satirist, a poet, translator of Orlando Furioso and inventor of Britain’s first flush toilet. He was also author of an epigram-- 

“Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?

 Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” 

--from which John A. Stoner took the title of his 1964 bestseller, None Dare Call It Treason. It’s one of the few books I can remember my father owning and reading. The Prayse of Private Life is most notable for its tone, one I’m tempted to call sagacious. Instead, I’ll defer to McClure’s “grave and reasonable,” a rare mingling of qualities. Gravity most often is accompanied by unreasonable humorlessness, and reasonableness untempered by gravity and good humor is dull. Harington sounds sober-minded and seasoned, like Montaigne, by his experience of the world (original spellings retained): 

“Tumultuous companie and busines by all endeavor I shoone [shun]: yet so, as if necessitie doe drawe me to the Cittie, I have learned to be solitarie amides the multitude: and in the greatest tempest, I knowe howe to save my selfe in the haven of Solitude. Such is my resolucion grounded upon experience, and supported with authoritie of Auntient Authors: whose opinion is that silence and solitude do make the minde free. I need fewe thinges and desire not muche.”

`Culture Is Not Neglected Amid Such Prosperity'

Like a Midwestern accent and knowledge of one’s mortality, the past never goes away. For some of us, it grows more vivid with time, and more insistent in the amount of consciousness it occupies. As the present recedes, the past advances and the future remains a blank. This should not be confused with soft-headed nostalgia, and may help to explain why Charles Lamb, at age fifty-four, writes in a letter: “Damn the age; I will write for antiquity!” 

In light of recent events in Cleveland, my home town, I reread the novelist Herbert Gold’s “Cleveland: Inflation on the Erie,” an essay/travelogue from 1951, the year before I was born. Gold was born in the city in 1924, four years after my mother, three years after my father. He writes about Cleveland in the prosperous postwar era, when it was the sixth-largest city in the nation. Now it’s forty-fifth. Even Columbus is more populous, a pride-wounding truth. In a passage that invites envy, skepticism and laughter, Gold writes: 

“It is the world’s center of paint manufacturing, and it is said to contain the largest Hungarian settlement outside the city limits of Budapest, but it is chiefly remarkable for its wealth and its stability. Newspapers estimate that Cleveland had among the largest average family incomes of the great American cities last year—about six thousand dollars.” 

Later, Cleveland became a ready-made punch line for comics. In 1954, there was the Sam Sheppard case. In 1966, the Hough Riots. In 1969, the Cuyahoga River caught fire. Three years later, the mayor’s hair caught fire. Clevelanders learned to scorn kneejerk defensiveness and embrace with pride the absurdity of the city. After years away from Cleveland, Gold’s tone has grown snide and he joins the chorus of mockers: 

“Culture is not neglected amid such prosperity. Cleveland’s little-theater groups, symphony orchestra, chamber-music societies, art museum, zoo, and sandlot baseball leagues are known throughout our commuting world, from Painesville on the east to Lorain on the west, and—in justice it must be added—even beyond. Ballet, opera, and stag movies all have their enthusiasts.” 

He gets nastier: 

“The Mad Killer of Kingsbury Run—here reverently given his complete title—whose capture has been announced and then retracted  to the accompaniment of scandals  in the sheriff’s office and accusations of police brutality, is occasionally resurrected by the newspapers during slow days in  the cold war.” 

As the crow flies, the house on Seymour Avenue on Cleveland’s Near-West Side, where three women were imprisoned for a decade, is about six miles north of the house where I grew up and where my brother and his family still live. I know the neighborhood because of its proximity to one of the city’s glories, the West Side Market. Late in the summer of 1976, a friend and I tramped through the neighborhood on the way back from the central library on Superior Avenue downtown. On our backs were knapsacks filled with books. That, and the length of our hair, attracted the attention of a Cleveland police officer, who stopped and asked to see what was in our packs. He was polite and so were we. Books, I think, surprised him more than pot. As we resumed our walk home, we saw a storefront church with a poster on the window – “Kung Fu for Christ” – and we laughed and laughed.

`Comfortably Settled in an Arm-Chair, Reading'

One insufficiently noted aspect of the New Puritanism (which, by the way, cohabitates cozily with the Old Hedonism) is the imposition of health-seeking obligations on every formerly innocent pastime. One no longer merely eats. One must, in the ungrammatical words of the advertizing slogan, “Eat healthy!” As a recent email from the health-insurance company informed me: “Eat your way to good health and happiness!” I would prefer to eat because I’m hungry and because the food in front of me looks tasty. 

Even the simple pleasures of walking have been moralized. The same email instructed me: “You have an obligation to your heart. Take it out for a walk!” This is offensive in at least three ways: 1.) It presumes to tell me how to run my life. 2.) It treats me like a not particularly bright child. 3.) It uses an exclamation point. In “Going Out for a Walk” (And Even Now, 1920), Max Beerbohm calls the Volksmarschers and their propagandists “walkmongers.” Beerbohm’s essay dates from 1918, suggesting that today’s didactic walkers had their precursors in his day’s “physical culturalists.” He writes, almost a century ago: 

“People seem to think there is something inherently noble and virtuous in the desire to go for a walk. Any one thus desirous feels that he has a right to impose his will on whomever he sees comfortably settled in an arm-chair, reading.” 

Beerbohm died on this date, May 20, in 1956, at age eighty-three.

`With Unusual Satisfaction'

We spent the day helping a friend and her daughter move out of their house and into an apartment. The sky was cloudless and the thermometer topped ninety degrees. It was the first time this year I felt the heat radiating off sidewalks, cars and building. The day before, professionals with a truck had moved the heavy stuff, including her recently tuned spinet piano. During a break from hauling boxes, she sat on the bench, riffled through sheet music and played Handel’s “Sarabande,” the “Moonlight Sonata” and Für Elise. She’s had a rough time of late and seemed utterly absorbed in her music. When she finished she turned around to look at me and said, “The acoustics are really good in here. That was satisfying.” 

James Boswell, who died on this date, May 19, at age fifty-four in 1795, writes in his London Journal (1950) on Feb. 2, 1763: “I read, wrote, and played on my violin with unusual satisfaction.” In a footnote to this sentence, the editor, Frederick Pottle, points out: 

“It must seem rather odd that Boswell has not previously mentioned the fact that he could play the violin, or that he had a violin with him. At various times in his life he played the violin, the flute, and the bass viol, but probably none of them very well, for there is no record of his playing with others. He loved to sing, and had a good ear and a good voice.” 

Our friend does play well. Above her piano on the wall hangs a framed black-and-white photograph of her thirteen-year-old daughter playing the bass clarinet.

`An Exponent of Character'

I watched my boss looking up at something outside the office window. When I rapped on the glass and shrugged my shoulders in the “What gives?” gesture, she waved me outside. In the tree next to our building, twenty feet above the ground and almost level with the second-floor windows, is a large (at least eighteen inches in diameter), raggedy-looking nest of sticks, dry grass, leaves and scraps of plastic. No bird is visible, though the occupant must be sizeable, larger than a blue jay or Northern mockingbird; perhaps one of the great-horned owls on campus. This is speculation, and I thought of that passage in Finnegans Wake: “But enough of greenwood's gossip. Birdsnests is birdsnests.” In the first chapter alone, Joyce weaves a thousand avian allusions, including “a parody’s bird” (paradise bird, or bird of paradise). My knowledge of birds is a parody (parroty?) of an ornithologist’s. 

Regardless, I recommend that you read and savor America’s Other Audubon (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012) by Joy M. Kiser, who tells the story of Genevieve “Gennie” Jones and her family who researched, wrote, painted and published Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio. In 1876, at the World’s Fair in Philadelphia, Gennie saw hand-painted engravings from John James Audubon’s Birds of America. She resolved to complete Audubon’s project by painting the nests and eggs he left out. Back in Circleville, Ohio, her brother collected the nests and eggs, her father (a physician) paid the publishing costs, and Gennie and a friend learned the art of lithography. Gennie died of typhoid fever in 1879 at the age of thirty, before the project could be completed. Her family and friends labored another seven years to finish her dream. Go here to see Gennie’s painting of a wood thrush’s nest holding four blue eggs. Here is an excerpt from the accompanying test: 

“The nest was taken from a haw tree in a damp wood without much undergrowth. The light, fluffy leaves of the foundation, the mossy branches and emerald foliage, the boggy earth and rank grass beneath, together formed a picture beautiful and rustic, a fitting symbol of the quiet wood, the drear repose in which this brilliant songster so much delights.” 

About ninety copies of the lithographs were produced, most of which have vanished. Among the subscribers in 1886 were former President Rutherford B. Hayes and Teddy Roosevelt, who was still a student. One set was on display in 1995, when Kiser went to work as a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. She spent fifteen years researching the project and interviewing descendants of the Jones family members. Her book is large format, eleven by thirteen inches, so the reader can study the reproductions and notice the details. You can note that the branches have been neatly separated from their trees, probably with a saw or large knife. In the painting of the “Quail-Bob-White” nest, built on the ground and holding eight white eggs, you can recognize four red clover flowers. For the volume’s epigraph, Kiser uses a passage from the introduction Howard Jones, Gennie’s brother, wrote for Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio: 

“In their eggs the birds center their whole existence. They work unceasingly and intelligently for a place where they can lay them, and guard them with their lives. Thus the nest, aside from its expression of ingenuity, skill, and patience, becomes an exponent of character.”

`What Lewd, Naked and Revolting Shape is This?'

The copy of A Little Treasury of American Poetry I borrowed from the library was tied with a dirty white ribbon and bow, like a gift from a shabby-genteel friend. That’s almost the way I think of its editor, Oscar Williams (1900-1964), a forgettable poet but memorable anthologist. I bought my copy in paperback almost fifty years ago. It and others edited by Williams (A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, Immortal Poems of the English Language) served as my Introduction to Poetry. The library copy is signed by its former owner, the literary critic and scholar Frederick J. Hoffman, and dated July 9, 1948, the year of its publication. The cover has detached from the binding and been repaired with white medical tape. In his introduction, Williams intones a familiar lament: 

“For poetry should be the expression of the whole people, not a private matter. Unfortunately, the American public, like some other modern publics, does not care for, nor understand serious poetry. Moreover, the special audience for poetry even among, let us say, those who have gone through college, is incredibly small.” 

One wishes to raise his hand and ask: “And why shouldn’t it be?” Williams’ selection reflects the triumph of Modernism. He includes Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (heavily annotated by someone in pencil) and Canto I, Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Hart Crane’s The Bridge. A century after Modernism first stirred, and putting aside for the moment their literary worth, these poems remain heavy going, even (perhaps especially) for “those who have gone through college.” Such work could never be as broadly popular as that written in the nineteenth century by Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell and Holmes, who, in Williams’ judgment, “produced only watered-down versions of English verse,” that was “by serious standards…second-rate.” 

Williams divides his anthology into three sections: “American Indian Poetry” (eleven pages), “The Chief Poets from Colonial Times to the Present Day” (719 pages, from Anne Bradstreet to Delmore Schwartz) and “Poetry of the Forties” (113 pages). Immodestly, Williams includes eight of his own poems in the second section and five by his wife, Gene Derwood, in the third. One sample from Williams’ “The Seesaw” will suffice: 

“Divine seesaw! Ply thy twin ways of higher!

The valley of the grave upholds the stars.” 

On second thought, this, from “Shopping for Meat in Winter,” is too good not to share: 

“What lewd, naked and revolting shape is this?

A frozen oxtail in the butcher’s shop

Long and lifeless upon the huge block of wood

On which the ogre’s axe begins chop chop.” 

I wish I could remember my reaction to this stuff back in 1965. Did I read it straight or suspect parody? Probably the former. I was naïve and unschooled, and very much in thrall to what Flannery O’Connor called litachur. Even if a poem was pretentious and boring, I wouldn’t have admitted it for fear of sounding dim and unsophisticated. Williams the anthologist offered me the start of an education. In particular I was taken by E.A. Robinson, Louise Bogan and W.H. Auden, as well as a poem by Karl Shapiro, “Scyros,” that I still like but don’t claim to fully understand. Williams did all that any decent teacher can do. He opened the book and pointed at the page.

`One Which Makes the Heart Run Over'

What if Johnson had never met Boswell? What if they had detested each other on sight? What if Boswell had stayed in Scotland as his father wished or died young of the clap or the D.T.s, or at the hands of an irrate husband? What would we remember of either man? Readers know them with familial intimacy, and their absence from our literary and moral inheritance is unimaginable. But without the other, who would disappear? Clearly, Johnson’s reputation is fittest for survival. Without Boswell, we would still have the “Life of Swift,”  “London: A Poem” and The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia for our pleasure and consolation. 

Two-hundred fifty years ago today, on May 16, 1763, Boswell met Johnson for the first time in Tom Davies’s Bookshop in Russell Street, Covent Garden, London. Johnson was fifty-three and already a formidable literary eminence, author of The Dictionary of the English Language; Boswell, at twenty-two, was a lawyer from Scotland given to drinking and whoring. Their time together was brief but Boswell used it well, turning great stretches of his journal into a repository for Johnsoniana. They never met during Boswell’s Grand Tour from August 1763 to March 1766. For most of the next eighteen years of Johnson's life, Boswell remained in Edinburgh and Johnson stayed in London, Oxford or Lichfield. In the fall of 1773 they spent eighty-three days touring Scotland and the Western Islands, their longest time together. During the twenty-one years of their friendship, scholars have calculated they shared company for fewer than one-thousand days.

Macaulay famously thought it “immoral” that so great a book as the Life of Johnson should be authored by such “a great fool.” For Macaulay, Boswell was an idiot savant of literature, a moral leper who somehow turned himself into a writer of genius. Macaulay’s censure postponed a proper assessment of Boswell’s achievement for more than a century.  The discovery of Boswell’s journals in the 1920s and 1930s, and the publication of the London Journal 1762-1763 in 1950, followed by subsequent volumes in the series, sparked an ongoing reassessment. In A Life of James Boswell (1999), Peter Martin writes: 

“At first, the journals appeared to confirm the nineteenth-century perception of Boswell as a compulsive womanizer, drinker and gambler, a habitual gallant who only seemed happy when acting the fool. But readers soon began to see him as a highly complex figure, someone they thought they understood and with whom they were prepared to travel the extra mile. His honesty, sincerity, geniality, sensitivity, and desire to become a better human being are partly responsible for this change of perception. His journals also show him to be a conscientious and talented writer. Perhaps most importantly, they reveal the degree of mental suffering he endured for most of his lifetime.” 

He was, in short, Johnson writ small. There’s a well-known passage in the Life of Johnson still disputed by scholars. The attribution is ambiguous. Is Johnson or Boswell the speaker?: 

“We cannot tell the precise moment when a friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindness there is at last one which makes the heart run over.” 

I savor the confusion. How appropriate that so fine an observation on the nature of friendship might have been written by either friend. It sounds like Johnson, who came to love and understand his young, wayward friend. In “What Johnson Means to Me” (Samuel Johnson After 300 Years, 2009), the poet David Ferry writes: 

“Johnson is, to my mind, in his prose and in his verse, one of the masters of pity, unsentimental pity founded on his awareness of our situation in a universe we cannot fully explicate; and it is founded on his awareness that our limitations, our vulnerability, are what we, all fellow creatures, share, the actualities of our natures and of our circumstances. In thinking of Johnson’s writing, pity is a name for looking steadily at things. The evidence is everywhere in him, in the Ramblers, in The Vanity of Human Wishes, in the `Life of Pope,’ in the Tolstoyan severity and sympathy of the `Life of Savage,’ his Hadji Murad.”