Anecdotal Evidence

`Some Books Are Lived'

2012-02-25T00:01:00.003-08:00

Slowly, books are taking over my rented room, making it habitable. Next to the armoire is a two-shelf television table on wheels where I shelve about seventy-five volumes, the essential heart of my library, most of which is still boxed in a storage unit in Seattle. On top of the armoire facing my bed is a small television I’ve never turned on, now serving as a bookend. Next to it are the books that greet me first thing in the morning – two volumes of Keats’ letters, the Life of Johnson, three volumes of Shakespeare, Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm and the second volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters, among others. Behind them are stacked recent acquisitions, some still unread – Timothy Murphy’s poems, Whitaker Chambers’ Witness, the fiction of Francis Wyndham, a pile of Civil War and Lincoln books.

On the floor next to my bed and on the night table are piles of my books mixed with others from the library. The overflow has migrated to the closet shelves, sharing space with sweaters, CDs and my shoeshine kit. If my room were buried in a lava flow and entombed for centuries, archeologists, if any were interested, could reconstruct sizeable swathes of my sensibility, if not a detailed biography. Books are evidence of the trail we blaze through life, the cul-de-sacs and way stations. In “Voluminous,” an essay prompted by the need to move his library, Leon Wieseltier writes:

“This is the other variety of significance that attaches to books, the subjective sort, which transforms them into talismans. Many books are read but some books are lived, so that words and ideas lose their ethereality and become experiences, turning points in an insufficiently clarified existence, and thereby acquire the almost mystical (but also fallible) intimacy of memory. In this sense one’s books are one’s biography.”

We might assemble a small anthology of essays devoted to moving books and culling them. Pieces by Walter Benjamin and Joseph Epstein come to mind, and are evidence of the centrality of books to the identities of dedicated readers. The earliest book in my room – that is, the first I acquired – is a Bible and dates from 1961. My Pensées is a faded, much annotated Penguin from ten years later, as is one of my copies of The City of God. A paperback King Lear and a collection of Melville’s short fiction, too brittle to read, I picked up in France in 1973.

Wieseltier’s choice of “talismans” is good. None of the books I’ve cited is valuable. Without longtime familiarity they would be throwaways. Instead, they are suffused with memory. More accurately than my résumé, they trace the subterranean course of my life, the often embarrassing thoughts only I know. Gone and in some cases forgotten are all the books I’ve read and given away, or sold, or otherwise lost, though they hover around the over-stocked shelves. As Wieseltier puts it:

“We are regularly sustained by what is gone.”

`An Aesthetic Problem in Reading the Arts'

2012-02-24T00:01:00.012-08:00

“Plants, like people, are given names by which they may be known. All names are made up of two parts, the genus, which corresponds to the family name such as Smith and Jones, and the species, which corresponds to our customary baptismal names, as John and Mary.”

That’s as concise and folksy an explanation of binomial nomenclature as I’ve ever read. The author is Ellen D. Schulz, writing in the foreword to her Texas Wild Flowers: A Popular Account of the Common Wild Flowers of Texas. This compact, pleasingly weighty volume (ideal for pressing flowers) was published in 1928 by Laidlaw Brothers of Chicago. In the Fondren Library I found an almost pristine circulating copy with an inscription on the front endpaper: “Harris Masterson Jr., Austin 9/10/28.” Schulz’s foreword goes on:

“Better known are the common names, similar to nicknames, which are convenient for use because they are more easily remembered by those not educated in botanical terminology. Spanish dagger expresses more than Yucca treculeana and blue-eyed grass more than Sisyrinchium augustifolium.”

One admires the clarity of the prose, the fine balance of phrases, and Schulz’s respect for the precision and poetry embodied in Latin and common names, respectively. The index to her 505-page book is lengthy – thirteen triple-columned pages – because the Latin and common names are listed together. In this case redundancy is a virtue. Like Adam, we name things, and taxonomy is democratic to the extent that anyone can name a flower. Whether the name is recognized by others is less certain.

Consider the Spanish dagger. I’ve always called it yucca (“of Carib origin,” the Oxford English Dictionary unhelpfully reports) and see it every day in landscaped yards around Houston. Schulz supplies other common names – Don Quixote’s lance and pita – and I’ve heard it called Spanish bayonet, in keeping with the cutlery theme. Under the heading of “General Information,” Schulz writes:

“This yucca is well named for besides being a veritable arsenal of weapons, it has gone through time with a reputation quite as bold and harmless as the Don Quixote of mediaeval [sic] fiction.”

She adds another two paragraphs of folklore, Anglo and Mexican, and includes this nugget:

“In pioneer days when economy played its part in daily living, the blossoms were gathered in quantities and cooked and prepared like cabbage, or made into most delicious pickles.”

What I most enjoy about reading Texas Wild Flowers, besides the brute data any good field guide ought to supply, is Schulz's assumption that basic botany is of interest to everyone. She dumbs down nothing and takes for granted, because you are reading her book, that you’re at least as fascinated by the subject as she is. How flattering that is to a reader.

In 1963, Guy Davenport edited The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz, a selection from the Swiss-born professor-naturalist’s voluminous writings. In his introduction, later collected in The Geography of the Imagination (1981), Davenport writes:

“Louis Agassiz assumed that the structure of the natural world was everyone’s interest, that every community as a matter of course would collect and classify its zoology and botany. College students can now scarcely make their way through a poem organized around natural facts. Ignorance of natural history has become an aesthetic problem in reading the arts.”

`The First Obvious Evidence of Spring'

2012-02-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

“The yellow cinquefoil; the delicate `innocent,’ half blue, like skim milk, with a thread-like stem; the hepatica in the woods, touched with purple at the heart; the false Solomon’s seal on woody banks, and jack-in-the-pulpits growing in hundreds along the watercourses in pastures…”

For almost twenty years in upstate New York, because I don’t wear a watch and seldom look at a calendar, I relied on a more ancient but reliable timepiece – the cycle of seasons. Not just sunlight and precipitation but the beneficiaries of those gifts, the flowers, birds, and trees. Among my mentors was Ruth Schottman, an Austrian-born biologist and author of Trailside Notes: A Naturalist's Companion to Adirondack Plants. She helped me begin to think of the natural world as a long, ever-unfurling scroll of interconnected events, as rhythmically reliable as a healthy heartbeat. [Go here and here to see photo galleries of New York wildflowers.]

Late in winter, with snow still on the ground, we awaited such early, sadly-named “ephemerals” as bloodroot, spring beauties, skunk cabbage and hepatica, “touched with purple at the heart.” The passage quoted above is from Journey Around My Room (1980), a fragmented autobiography assembled by Ruth Limner from the unpublished notebooks of the poet Louise Bogan. Her record of wildflowers, certainly made in summer and probably in the Northeast, dates from 1959 or 1960. I admire its lyrical formality like a passage in a well-written field guide, much preferable to rhapsodic effusions. I prize descriptions like this now that I live in Texas, a very different jumble of ecosystems and species, most of them still alien to my internal clock. Thoreau boasted he could pinpoint the precise day of the year just by looking at a clearing in the woods around Concord. In his journal entry for March 10, 1853, he writes:

“At the end of winter there is a season in which we are daily expecting spring. Methinks the first obvious evidence of spring is the pushing out of the swamp willow catkins…then the pushing up of the skunk-cabbage spathes.”

Bogan was a great admirer of Thoreau, in particular his Journal. Her biographer, Elizabeth Frank, writes:

“For years she had found pleasure and solace in Thoreau’s prose and observations. Passages in which Thoreau charted heat and cold, shadows and tints, patterns and configuration, sounds and rhythms found their way into her notebooks. The infinite variation of his firm, flexible sentences, his rich, yet common English vocabulary, all seemed endlessly inventive and alive to her. And the man’s life – his loneliness and ecstasies – moved her, sometimes, to tears. She found joy in simply copying his words down, writing once next to a cluster of transcription: `spent a whole Sunday afternoon transcribing these extracts. The sound of the sea: alternate cloud & light. Peace. Happiness.’”

The thrill of seeing and identifying wildflowers, especially in winter and early spring, is comparable to coming upon excellent prose, such as Bogan’s and Thoreau’s, and reading it at leisure.

`They Always Serve a Poor Relation'

2012-02-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

When a house goes on the market and the owners have already moved out, realtors sometimes decorate the vacant space with furniture and pictures to give it that cozy, lived-in look. The house we have our eyes on – corner lot, plenty of trees, the closest neighbor a Methodist church – is rather eclectically decorated. In one of the bedrooms hang framed, black-and-white photographs of Audrey Hepburn, circa Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In the dining room hangs an oversized oil painting of a bewigged string quartet, circa Louis Quatorze. On the granite countertop, arranged on a crystal platter, we spied a round of Camembert and two bunches of grapes, all polystyrene. A convincingly genuine-looking plastic laptop computer, lid open, sits on a desk in the hall.

In the kitchen, a small chest of drawers upholstered in red velvet caught my eye. On it were three objects, two of them books – Two Little Girls in Blue (2006) by Mary Higgins Clark and volume one of James Clavell’s two-volume Noble House (1981). Orphaned volumes trigger pangs of sadness, though I’ve never sampled the late Mr. Clavell’s oeuvre.

Next to the books was a statue of a seated monkey, about ten inches tall. He wore a red fez, smoking jacket and pince-nez. His legs were crossed and in his lap was a wordless open book. He resembled a hirsute Sydney Greenstreet. I was expecting a Darwin parody but the likelier object of the put-down, if one was intended by the artist, is The Reader -- abstracted, a little effete, putting on airs, but still fundamentally a monkey. Not a bad likeness, considering.

Charles Lamb was a superb essayist and, at his best, a mediocre poet, but just as simian sculpture has its charms, so do third-rate poems. Here is the final stanza of Lamb’s “The Men and Women, and the Monkeys.”

“The slights and coolness of this human nation

Should give a sensible ape no mort’fication;

’Tis thus they always serve a poor relation.”

`What Others Have Sensed Only Inchoately'

2012-02-21T00:01:00.000-08:00

“I must say that since I have begun writing these essays I have never been pressed for a subject; and so long as I continue to write them, I suspect I never shall be pressed. Part of this has to do with America. Rich in so many things, America is richest of all in things to write about. For the familiar essayist in America every day is like Christmas morning in a wealthy and loving Christian home; subjects, like gifts, are strewn about everywhere.”

This cheery reminder and goad to gratitude is taken from Joseph Epstein’s preface to his first collection of essays, Familiar Territory: Observations on American Life, published in 1979. It’s the last of his twenty-two books I have read, finally picked up after reading his most recent, Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit (2011). Epstein ranks with Arthur Krystal, Cynthia Ozick and Marilynne Robinson as one of our best working essayists. The unlikely alignment of those names and the array of subjects they address suggest the unlimited elasticity of the form.

Epstein’s spirit is Montaignean – curious, friendly, skeptical, witty and formidably well-read – a quality virtually extinct among contemporary writers. He’s a raconteur of the essay, blessed with good taste, a natural with a style at once conversational and bookish, the happy opposite of stuffy, strident, provocative or drily academic (despite having taught for almost thirty years at Northwestern University). From books and life he has accumulated an over-stuffed warehouse of jokes, anecdotes and learning. He’s constitutionally conservative – that is, appreciative, mindful of lasting values -- but seldom descends into the merely political.

The passage quoted above is what excites me. It’s too long for an effective motto, but I might adopt it as the tutelary apothegm of Anecdotal Evidence. I’ve never been able to work up sympathy for writers who complain of blockage or lack of inspiration. Just look around. The world is forever hurling material at us. Our job is simply to pay attention and catch it, hardly a difficult task in the United States which amounts to a baroque sideshow of attractions. Elsewhere in his preface Epstein writes:

“With a point of view [which he rightly distinguishes from a mere collection of opinions] all but the most recondite subjects belong to the familiar essayist, whose range is precisely as wide as his interests.”

I don’t always agree with Epstein’s judgments. He is flabbergastingly wrong about Saul Bellow, though much of his disapproval seems rooted in the souring of their one-time friendship, and he overrates Theodore Dreiser. It’s his point of view I find amenable, not always his opinions. His essays are almost never dull, even in patches, and he usually accomplishes his objective as spelled out in the preface:

“In the end the true job of the familiar essayist is to write what is on his mind and in his heart in the hope that, in doing so, he will say what others have sensed only inchoately.”

Isn’t that one of the main reasons we go on reading literature?

`Dare I Say It, Wisdom'

2012-02-20T00:01:00.000-08:00

“The notion of reading as a hobby to one for whom it is very nearly a way of life is comically absurd.”

In fact, one reads life and lives books. To call this an intersection is misleading. For dedicated readers, a more accurate spatial analogy might be the sort of transparencies one sees in anatomy textbooks – muscles, bones, circulatory system – one after another overlaid on the outline of the human form. Only in the abstract can each system be looked at in isolation. In aggregate, they, like all the books we’ve ever read, whether fondly remembered or long forgotten, form an unfathomable whole.

“Anyone—and I exclude only Ludwig Wittgenstein from this proposition—who reads a sentence has to make the following little check on it: 1. Is it clear? 2. Is it (grammatically, semantically, logically) correct? 3. Is it interesting? 4. Is it true? 5. Is it (charming bonus) beautiful? And then, if he or she is a writer, three further questions arise: 1. How was it made? 2. Could it be improved? And 3. What, for my own writing, can I steal from it?”

Serious readers, like serious writers, are serious editors. If, while reading something good, a sentence, phrase or word sounds inappropriate, like a wrong note in music – a “clam,” in jazz parlance – I ask: Am I missing something? Is the failure mine or the writer’s? I reread the passage. If the failure is mine, I make a silent apology; if the writer’s, a note. Either way, I learn something as reader and writer. A culinary analogy is helpful: Too much salt? Too little? Overcooked? Underdone? Try again.

“Along with the love of style, I read in the hope of laughter, exaltation, insight, enhanced consciousness, and dare I say it, wisdom; I read, finally, hoping to get a little smarter about the world.”

For “read” substitute “live.” Does the sentence still make sense? Does it jibe with your experience? For this reader/writer/editor, that is a perfect sentence.

[The passages quoted above are drawn from “The Pleasures of Reading,” an essay by Joseph Epstein collected in Narcissus Leaves the Pool, 1999.]

`Some Kind of Mildly Discommoded Bird'

2012-02-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

I have a weakness for writers who are irreducibly themselves, anomalies without precedent, sports of nature without spawn. They are unselfconsciously eccentric (is anything so tiresome as willful eccentricity?). Their numbers are few and most are not of the first rank. They write with take-it-or-leave-it insouciance and we read them with gratitude, blithely unmindful of fashion and critical orthodoxy. Among them are Charles Lamb, Max Beerbohm and Aldo Buzzi. In their company is a poet unlike any other writer I have consistently admired for most of my reading life. Here, from a poem, is how she renders suicide:

“Have a suitable drug under string and label
Free for every Registered Reader’s table.
For the rest of the gang who are not patriotic
I’ve another appeal they’ll discover hypnotic:
Tell them it’s smart to be dead and won't hurt
And they’ll gobble up drug as they gobble up dirt.”

In the first of her three novels, the narrator reads Phèdre and says:

“Racine is very serene, very severe, very austere and simple…And this tragedy is also very bracing…very strong and very inevitable and impersonal.”

And this, said by our author during an interview in 1963:

“Nobody knows who one is, but oneself feels who and what one is not.”

We can confidently assume that such words and thoughts had never in human history been previously formulated, and there are hundreds more like them. All are odd and unlikely yet right. None is uttered for the sake of attention-seeking outlandishness. This poet worked her little plot according to her notion of husbandry, and some of us still reap the harvest more than four decades after her death. Her friend the American poet Jonathan Williams said of Stevie Smith:

“She always suggested some kind of mildly discommoded bird—perhaps a jackdaw with a touch of Weltanschauungangst or Zeitmerz.”

[Go here to see a photograph of Smith taken by Williams in 1966. Williams also writes about the great film Stevie, starring Glenda Jackson as the poet.]

`Ought Him Selfe to Bee a True Poem'

2012-02-18T00:01:00.000-08:00

For the first time in six years I have reread Brand Blanshard’s On Philosophical Style (1953), one of the first books I wrote about at Anecdotal Evidence. In memory, Blanshard’s essay retained a skeptical optimism about the possibility of communicating ideas clearly and invitingly in prose. What I had forgotten was just how skeptical some of his conclusions are. For instance, he describes Macaulay as “the most unfailingly lucid writer in the history of English literature,” then goes on:

“…you cannot tell the truth in Macaulay’s style. In satisfying his passion for clarity, he allows himself to omit shades and qualifications that are there in the facts, but would smudge his sharply edged lines if he were to put them into his picture. His style is the embodiment of his mind, and his mind, with all its learning, its delight in learning, and its extraordinary gift of communicating both, is a mind that moves on the surface of things and shies away instinctively whenever it perceives a depth or feels a mystery.”

In other words, even clarity can be a flaw. While I still believe muddled obscurantism driven by politics, narcissism or simple incompetence is a more common fault among writers than too much clarity, Blanshard’s conclusion stings a little. He pushes me to recognize my occasional unwillingness to smudge the “sharply edged lines” I’ve drawn. Decades of newspaper writing should have purged me of cutting corners and showing off with verbal filigree, but a writer can’t be too critical. Self-indulgence is an occupational hazard. Blanshard goes even further:

“The defects in Macaulay’s mind forced themselves into his manner, and showed that the only way to amend that remarkable style was to be a better mind and a better man.”

A flawed style is a moral failing. In the tug-of-war between beauty and truth, the former can never be permitted to trump the latter. Prettiness at the expense of truth is a form of self-seduction, like a Siren singing to a Siren. Discipline is daunting. Blanshard writes:

“The more perfectly one’s style fits the inner man and reveals its strength and defect, the clearer it becomes that the problem of style is not a problem of words and sentences merely, but of being the right kind of mind.”

Blanshard then quotes part of a sentence from Milton’s great 1642 pamphlet “Apology for Smectymnuus”:

“…he who would not be frustrated of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought him selfe to bee a true Poem…”

Here is the rest of the sentence, not quoted by Blanshard:

“…that is, a composition, and patterne of the best and honourable things; not presuming to sing high praises of heroick men, or famous Cities, unlesse he have in himselfe the experience and the practice of all that which is praise-worthy.”

`Beauty Ever Ancient, Ever New'

2012-02-17T00:01:00.000-08:00

At the request of Timothy Murphy, the Dakota Institute sent me Hunter’s Log and Mortal Stakes / Faint Thunder (both 2011), three new collections of his poems in two volumes. Murphy is a formal master who gives accessibility a good name. He writes poetry for grownups who miss the days when serious readers considered poetry a part of their birthright as literate people. You can sit down with his poems and actually read them, line by line, page by page, without getting bored, irritated or offended. His editor-in-chief at the Dakota Institute Press, Clay S. Jenkinson, in his foreword to Mortal Stakes, says the best thing you can say about a poet: “He has no interest in writing inexplicable poetry.”

The adjective is carefully chosen. When reading Murphy’s poems you won’t feel patronized or proselytized, and will almost assuredly find pleasure in their concision, precision and music. You’ll know the experience, rare in contemporary poetry, of a thoughtful person talking to you with the utmost care and clarity. He writes unapologetically devotional poems and a few that make you laugh out loud. You won’t find self-regarding obscurity or chopped-up prose passing for poetry, but you will learn things about the real world. Murphy shares his enthusiasms, among which are guns, dogs, birds, the weather, whiskey (formerly), John Donne and Anthony Hecht. Here is “Missouri Breaks”:

“I am a trespasser on treeless ground,

home to the sharptail and the furtive hun,

and here the tallest thing for miles around

is a small hunter shouldering his gun.

“A blooded dog quarters the feral rye,`

and my body’s long quarrel with my mind

is silenced by a landscape and a sky

legible as a Bible for the blind.”

Sharptails are grouse. Huns are Hungarian partridges. Both are game birds and Murphy, who is sixty years old, has hunted since childhood. He lives in North Dakota. Here is “Confessiones 10.27.38” (“—after St. Augustine”):

“Wrongly thinking that beauty lay without,

blindly I cast about.

How late did I begin

to realize your beauty lay within.

To one deprived of sight

you said Let there be light,

and to my deafened ear

you called, you cried! hoping that I might hear.

I thirsted, hungered, yearned.

You touched me, and I burned.

How late I came to you,

Beauty ever ancient, ever new.

How late I came to you.”

And here is “V.I.P. Lounge,” a praise song for some of Murphy’s poetic forebears:

“The most exclusive anteroom in Hades

caters to those who wrote well in their eighties:

classical poets, Pindar and Sophocles

exchanging shop talk with Simonides.

“Hardy and Frost, Francis and Hope are there.

Scovell, Virginia Hamilton Adair

And Janet Lewis, sharing a pot of tea,

Raise their cups, praising Mnemosyne.

“The Goddess turns Her back on the elect

To greet a new arrival, Anthony Hecht,

Who takes his place among the Greats in Hell.

Would I could live as long or write so well.”

On Thursday, the day after Murphy’s books arrived in the mail, I read this interview with Richard Rodriguez, author of the memoir Hunger of Memory (1982) and the essay collection Days of Obligation (1992), among other books. Despite the obvious differences, Rodriguez reminds me of Murphy. Both men are gay. Both are seriously Roman Catholic. Both revere tradition. Both might be called cultural outsiders who don’t cultivate “Outsider” status, who reject the poseur trappings of culturally sanctioned bohemia. Both have refused the claims of “identity politics” and write as individuals. Here is Rodriguez:

“The most ancient notions of writing propose that the writer is more passive than active. The writer waits until the graces (or grace) flows through him. The writer awaits inspiration. The writing which Monday was so sluggish is suddenly free on Tuesday. How to explain it? St. Thomas Aquinas says that writing is a kind of prayer, leaving oneself open, utterly vulnerable, to inspiration or God. That feels right to me.”

`Marvel at Sagacious Wit'

2012-02-16T00:01:00.000-08:00

Published in the March issue of First Things is a curious poem by a writer new to me, Joseph S. Salemi, preceded by lines from Catullus:

“quam magnus numerous Libyssae harenae

lasarpiciferis iacet Cyrenis.”

Here is “All Gone”:

“Silph-bearing Cyrenaica, said a poet,

Alluding to a plant now long extinct.
The coastal plain of Libya could grow it
And nowhere else. The herb had a distinct
Fragrance of rosy fennel, with a whiff
Of spiciness, as if the gods had planned
To grace this stretch of desert with one gift
That made up for the scorpions and sand.

“The helpless herb fell victim to our tastes—

Human greed soon harvested it all.
The fields of sylph turned into barren wastes
Where sunbaked serpents writhe, and lizards crawl.
The last surviving stalk was sent to Rome
Where Nero ate it with a golden spoon.
Meanwhile, back in the plant’s ancestral home,
Saharan death spread northward, dune by dune.”

Silphium is a real plant with a complicated history. As to the lines by Catullus, they come from the seventh of the Lesbia verses, from a sequence Charles Martin calls the “courtship poems” (Catullus, 1992). Here is Martin’s translation, with the lines quoted by Salemi italicized:

“My Lesbia, you ask how many kisses

Would be enough to satisfy, to sate me!
--As many as the sandgrains in the desert
Near Cyrene, where Silphium is gathered,
Between the shrine of Jupiter the sultry
And the venerable sepulcher of Battus!
--As many as the stars in the tacit night
That watch as furtive lovers lie embracing:
Only to kiss you with that many kisses
Would satisfy, could sate your mad Catullus!
A sum to thwart the reckoning of gossips
And baffle the spell-casting tongues of envy!”

In his translation, The Poems of Catullus (2005), Peter Green renders the pertinent lines like this:

“Match them to every grain of Libyan sand in

silphium-rich Cyrene”

In a note to the poem, Green describes silphium as “a famous heal-all in antiquity” and the principle export of Cyrene. It was used to treat indigestion, baldness, sore throat, warts, dropsy and gout, and as an aphrodisiac, a contraceptive and an abortifacient. Catullus didn’t randomly choose his herb. On my first reading of “All Gone,” I took silphium to be a spice or seasoning for the table, not a reputedly powerful pharmaceutical. The story of Nero’s consumption of the “last surviving stalk” is drawn from Pliny’s Naturalis Historia.

What to make of the poem? Is it an ecological morality tale? A plea for conservation and biodiversity? An allegory on recent events in Libya? What do the editors of First Things make of silphium’s reputed medicinal qualities? I can’t answer these questions, but all of them are part of the reason I like this plain-spoken but hardly transparent poem. The final line is hauntingly ominous, and it left me intrigued enough to find more poems by Salemi. (Go here and here.) I liked “In One Ear,” which is prefaced by an entry from James Boswell’s London Journal dated June 4, 1763: “In the Strand I picked up a little profligate wretch and gave her sixpence”:

“Boswell listened, Johnson talked.

Then the Scotsman went and walked

London's alleyways and mews
Seeking trollops from the stews.
All that weighty, sage advice
From the Doctor, without price,
Never made the slightest dent
On a youth whose natural bent
Drew him towards the rankest sluts—
Brains were trumped by churning guts.
Such are humans. At the best
We may listen, be impressed,
Marvel at sagacious wit—
Then go act as we see fit.
Mind and will stay far apart;
Reason does not touch the heart;
Impulse shatters logic's chain;
Argument goes down the drain.
Aristotle's books slam shut
When we are in heat or rut.”

Boswell had met Johnson for the first time less than three weeks earlier, on May 16. Besides writing the greatest biography in the language, Boswell was treated at least seventeen times for venereal disease. Salemi can be a provocatively funny poet, blurring the line between light verse and heavy satire. Here is “The New Third Reich”:

“The Belgians, with their beer and clogs—

A perfect blend of Krauts and Frogs.
They pass their laws and flex their muscles
High up on a perch in Brussels.”

And here, to offend those left unoffended, is Salemi’s “To an Earsplitting Unitarian Chapel Choir”:

“Full-throated, loud, big-bottomed female choir

Thundering in a menopausal key,
Whose earnest hymns swell upwards, ever higher,
Above a pew-renting liberal bourgeoisie,
Rapt in triumphant vagueness, you aspire
To be a church while leaving all thought free;
You hunger for that transcendental fire
(Though without Virgin, Saints, or Papacy).

“Half the assembly’s atheist, and dreams
Of no fulfillment beyond earthly life;
Each week the minister concocts new schemes
Involving power, money, someone’s wife.
When your religion is a mere charade
Hymns should be less emphatic, and more staid.”

`Unloose Them with My Pen'

2012-02-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

Words die, and some deserve resuscitation. Consider bodgery, chosen by David Crystal for inclusion in The Story of English in 100 Words (Profile Books, 2011) precisely because it was stillborn. Crystal writes:

“The history of English contains thousands of words that never made it—coinages invented by individual writers that simply didn’t catch on.”

This useful word gets a single citation in the Oxford English Dictionary. Thomas Nashe asks in Strange Newes (1592): “Doe you know your owne misbegotten bodgery?” The OED defines it as “botched work, bungling,” and suggests it may be a variant of botch. Crystal doesn’t say so, but bodgery is hardly an orphan. The OED includes the verb bodge, “to patch or mend clumsily,” and the noun bodge is “a clumsy patch; a botched piece of work.” Most of the citations date from late in the sixteenth century, though bodger as an adjective shows up in Australia – “inferior, worthless; (of names) false, assumed” – after World War II. (Here is yet another meaning.)

The word echoes its meaning – dodge, hodge-podge, botch, scotch – one proof of its worthiness. It rings in the names of Joe Gargery and the Artful Dodger. Nashe’s prose is exuberant and impolite. He revels in sound and sense. His English, like Shakespeare’s, is irresistibly malleable, like moist clay. On Tuesday I edited a 26-page paper on the removal of debris after natural disasters. The prose was dry and crumbly like old adobe, “botched work, bungling,” as Pound wrote of “a botched civilization.” Nashe writes in Strange Newes:

“If idle wits will needs tie knots on smooth bulrushes with their tongues, faith, the world might think I had little to attend if I should go about to unloose them with my pen.”

`A Man of Fire-New Words'

2012-02-14T00:01:00.000-08:00

Fire-new: The word is new to me – fire-new, in fact – but I knew its meaning: “Fresh from the fire or furnace (obs.); hence, perfectly new, brand-new” (Oxford English Dictionary). In theory, this morning’s newspaper, a hot-from-the-oven pizza and a newborn baby are fire-new (and all commonly delivered). In the Guardian, Robert McCrum, the biographer of P.G. Wodehouse (who died on this date, St. Valentine’s Day, in 1975), describes Shakespeare as the word’s coiner. The OED confirms this by giving him the first citation, from Richard III. The speaker is Queen Margaret: “Your fire-new stampe of honour is scarse currant.”

Shakespeare also uses it in King Lear, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Twelfth Night. A web site mentioned by McCrum describes the word as “a metaphor taken from the art of the blacksmith,” though the OED has nothing to say in the matter. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable reports: “Originally applied to metals and things manufactured in metal which shine. Subsequently applied generally to things quite new.” Surely fresh-baked bread and ceramics can be literally described as fire-new.

It’s a new word compounded of old, familiar words, a good thing to remember when reading Shakespeare. His vocabulary is vast (31,534 words, 14,376 used once) but not exclusively arcane or archaic. High school students traditionally make a fuss about his language, but Shakespeare routinely makes old words fire-new. On St. Valentine’s Day, of all days, consider Sonnet XXX, in which not a single word is obscure, even to twenty-first century readers:

“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:

Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,

For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,

And weep afresh love's long since cancelled woe,

And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:

Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,

And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er

The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,

Which I new pay as if not paid before.

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.”

Laura Demanski has described Keats’ “To Autumn” as “a perfect and magical piece of writing,” and the same can be said of Sonnet XXX. Shakespeare uses, of all things, legal imagery in the opening lines, which meld, unavoidably in English, with Proust. Scholars note the allusion to “Wisdom of Solomon” in the Old Testament Apocrypha: “For a double griefe came upon them, and a groaning for the remembrance of things past.” The sonnet is gem-studded, and all readily understood: “death’s dateless night,” “fore-bemoaned moan.” Of the poem’s 116 words, ninety-two are of one syllable. The antecedents to “losses” in the final line are “many a thing I sought,” “precious friends” and “many a vanished sight,” and all are “restor’d” and our “sorrows end.”

In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Biron calls Armado “A man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight.”

`Fight is Flavor, Stinging a Spice'

2012-02-13T00:01:00.000-08:00

The bayous of Houston are storm sewers, 2,500 miles of concrete-lined ditches that keep a flat city from turning into swamp. For now, the drought has abated and water flows again. On Sunday, driving along T.C. Jester Boulevard near my neighborhood, I saw a great white egret standing in the stream. The bayou is twenty-five yards wide at this point and a good ten yards below street level. For five or six seconds the bird was visible, long enough for me to see it was standing on one leg in the middle of the shallow stream as though in a swamp, waiting for fish or frogs.

The bird’s appearance in the urban river, so white against gray, is heartening. Life, tougher than sentimentality, adapts. Fish and frogs flow in once-dry concrete rivers. Les Murray narrates “Cattle Egret” (Translations from the Natural World, 1992) in the first-person plural from the bird’s point of view:

“Our sleep-slow compeers, red and dun,
wade in their grazing, and whirring lives
shoal up, splintering, in skitters and dives.
Our quick beaks pincer them, one and one,
those crisps of winnow, fats of air,
the pick of chirrup—we haggle them down
full of plea, fizz, cark and stridulation,
our white plumes riffled by scads going spare.
Shadowy round us are lives that eat things dead
but life feeds our life: fight is flavor,
stinging a spice. Bodies still electric play for
my crop’s gravel jitterbug. I cross with sprung tread
where dogs tugged a baa-ing calf’s gut out, fold on fold.
Somewhere may be creatures that grow old.”

`Unmoved by Praise or Scorn'

2012-02-12T00:01:00.001-08:00

The photographs, promised by Helen Pinkerton, arrived. Two are black-and-white 8-by-10 glossies shot in 1962 by José Mercado of the Stanford New Service. The first, of Yvor Winters, is taken from the front and slightly to the left of its seated subject, who looks forward, as though ignoring the camera. He wears a suit jacket, probably gray or blue, white shirt and dark patterned tie. Behind him, out of focus, are books on shelves and a window full of sunlight. Winters holds a pipe in his right hand, the stem almost touching his sealed lips. His forehead appears bunched in thought and he is not smiling. The picture seems to confirm Charles Tomlinson’s assessment of Winters in 1959:

“The dignity and dimension of the man unmistakably communicated themselves, as did a capacity for friendship, rather than friendliness. Winters showed no desire to please, but, as in his urging to try a particularly fine wine, he was eager to share what he deemed best.”

In the other photograph, also taken by Mercado at Winters’ home in Palo Alto, probably the same day, the poet has moved outdoors. He’s dressed the same and is holding a pipe. Behind him is an out-of-focus tangle of branches and leaves. To his left stands his wife, the poet and novelist Janet Lewis. She wears an open-collared print dress and a necklace of what look like large pearls. Her hair is pulled back and fastened behind her head. Winters looks off-camera, eyes squinting in the sun. His face is softened into what might be a muted smile. Lewis is looking at her husband, with a smile slightly less ambiguous than his. Winters turned sixty-two that year; Lewis, sixty-three.

One thinks: These are serious people, though not humorless, who understand each other and have little interest in impressing others. One also thinks of the first line of Winters’ “To a Portrait of Melville in My Library”:

“O face reserved, unmoved by praise or scorn!”

Helen also encloses a color snapshot of Geoffrey Hill and the late poet Elizabeth Jennings taken in June 1953. Hill turned twenty-one that month. I would never have recognized the poet who now looks like King Lear. He’s smiling. His hair is full and dark. He wears a salmon-colored shirt and what I think is a black cravat about the size of a lobster bib. He looks happy.

As a bonus, Helen includes a chapbook with these words printed on its pale blue cover: “SAMUEL JOHNSON LL.D.” The title page, across from an engraving of Johnson based on a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, reads:

“Dr. Johnson on Reading, Conversing, and Writing;

being a keepsake

issued on the occasion of

an exhibit of books and manuscripts

marking the 200th anniversary of the passing of

SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.

and featuring the collection of

Francis A. Martin, Jr.

Stanford University Libraries

Louis R. Lurie Rotunda, Cecil H. Green Library

October 28, 1984 – January 15, 1985”

Reprinted inside is The Adventurer #85, published Aug. 28, 1753, in which Johnson writes:

“To understand the works of celebrated authors, to comprehend their systems, and retain their reasonings, is a task more than equal to common intellects; and he is by no means to be accounted useless or idle, who has stored his mind with acquired knowledge, and can detail it occasionally to others who have less leisure or weaker abilities.”

[Go here to see a photo of Winters taken during the same session as those described above, plus a brief remembrance of Winters by his former student, the poet Kenneth Fields.]

`A Depth of Shared Experience'

2012-02-11T00:01:00.000-08:00

I’m rereading Verlyn Klinkenborg’s first and still-best book, Making Hay (1986), devoted to precisely what its title says on farms in the upper Midwest and Montana. It opens memorably at a dance in a VFW hall in Luverne, Minn., “twelve miles east of South Dakota, ten miles north of Iowa,” and proceeds to describe the machinery, agronomy and culture of hay. Klinkenborg was raised on an Iowa farm and writes at least partially from inside his subject, sometimes about members of his family who farm. He’s no dilettante but works from an informed and sympathetic distance.

Years ago, as a newspaper reporter inspired by Klinkenborg’s book, I spent a summer periodically visiting a dairy farm in Saratoga County, N.Y., describing the hay crop and the family that depended on it. The experience confirmed my belief that farmers, even the most laconic, are among the best talkers. Few are given to romanticizing their livelihood and most are constitutionally allergic to bullshit, the metaphoric sort. They live too close to the soil and weather, and the vagaries of the economy, to prettify things or make a lot of excuses. It’s an unforgiving way to earn a living, and whining gets them nowhere. In his first chapter, Klinkenborg writes:

“The scene at the VFW renews the sensation you get as you drive across Midwestern farmland. However the terrain tips and rolls, however the fences and runoffs mark a field, whether the soil carries soybeans, sorghum, corn, oats, or alfalfa, the black earth has only one purpose: getting the crops up.”

I’ve also been reading the poems of Timothy Murphy, a farmer who lives in the Dakotas. In his work I hear a farmer’s bluffness and stoicism. I like his “Elsewhere” (Very Far North, 2002), and everyday see its lesson confirmed:

“A goose in the yard yearns for a barn,

and the penned bird, to go free.
The returning salmon yearns for the tarn,
from which its fry will flee.

“Elsewhere…what is the lasting charm

for the creature in misery?
A fisherman longs for the land-locked farm
its tenant would trade for the sea.”

Never content with our lot, never grateful for our gifts, we gaze longingly and resentfully at the other guy – this is human nature, a state of aggrieved entitlement, most recently and loudly embodied by the Occupy crowd. Samuel Johnson anatomized it in The Rambler #63:

“That all are equally happy or miserable, I suppose none is sufficiently enthusiastical to maintain; because though we cannot judge of the condition of others, yet every man has found frequent vicissitudes in his own state, and must therefore be convinced that life is susceptible of more or less felicity. What then shall forbid us to endeavour the alteration of that which is capable of being improved, and to grasp at augmentations of good, when we know it is possible to be increased, and believe that any particular change of situation will increase it?”

Spoken like a true (eighteenth-century) farmer. In an interview in the euphoniously named Shit Creek Review, Murphy is asked if he has a “perfect reader” in mind when he writes. After acknowledging some of the poets he admires and would like to please, he says:

“…I value the farmers who read my farm poems, the hunters who read my hunting poems. They can’t read as poets would, but they have a depth of shared experience the poets lack.”

That hits home. How long is it since you’ve read a poet, or any writer, who possessed “a depth of shared experience” with his subject and his readers? You’re likely to learn more about the facts of life and death, and hear more good hard-headed sense, from a farmer. Murphy’s “Failures of Promise” is collected in The Deed of Gift (1998):

“A flock of crows
found a road-killed ewe

frozen in the snow.
A drowsy bear
dragged a leg-shot deer
to its deadfall lair.
The lamb in the ewe
and the fawn in the doe
were devoured unborn,
and November snows
buried the standing corn.”

`A Purely Personal Inventory'

2012-02-10T00:01:00.000-08:00

Across more than forty years, my fiction-to-nonfiction reading ratio has radically reversed. When young I always had several novels going because I had a lot of catching up to do, my critical tastes were still amorphous and my timing was superb. Bellow and Nabokov, among others, were generous with their gifts in the sixties and seventies. Those were exciting, bountiful years to be young and discovering literature.

Why the change? I don’t know. Some of the satisfactions I once found in fiction – human drama, moral complexity, memorable language – I now find more reliably elsewhere, in poetry, history and biography. One of good fiction’s chief virtues, the way it encourages self-forgetting as we inhabit the lives of others, is often better accomplished in other forms.

Terry Teachout has assembled a list of “the ten American novels I most wish I'd written.” By that criterion, you can’t argue with the list, which would be like arguing about one’s choice off the breakfast menu. It’s a form of autobiography, a Rorschach test for sensibility. Terry writes:

“This is a purely personal inventory, reflective only of admiration, love, and--if a reader who has no gift whatsoever for the writing of prose fiction can use the word--identification.”

It’s Terry’s final quality that interests me here. Some of the books on my list are tours de force of technique and verbal pyrotechnics, but in each I find a character, or several characters, or situations that supply an empathetically contrasting template for my life. Here are my “ten American novels I most wish I’d written”:

Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956)

Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918)

Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903)

Janet Lewis, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941)

William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980)

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952)

Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children (1940)

John Williams, Stoner (1965)

I limit myself to one title per writer, so some choices are iceberg tips, meant to represent a novelist’s body of work, the embarrassment of riches they’ve left us. Do I really mean to snub The Portrait of a Lady, Lolita and Herzog? The only title common to my list and Terry’s is Maxwell’s, and I almost chose Time Will Darken It. Some will quibble that Stead, though she lived in the United States for about a decade, was in fact an Australian-born cosmopolitan. True enough, but her greatest novel is set in Washington, D.C., and all of its major characters are Americans. She knew us, so I grandfather her into my list.

Here is perhaps the most telling reason for choosing these novels: Four of the ten I have reread in the last twelve months, and all I have reread uncounted times.

[David Myers weighs in. Terry returns to the subject.]

`I Read Slowly, Richly, Not to Say Juicily'

2012-02-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

Here’s a lament heard ad nauseum among readers, or at least among people who enjoy being perceived as readers: “So many books, so little time.” It’s an anxiety – or pose – I’ll never share. One makes time for what is important. As we season as readers, we grow ruthlessly jealous of our time. We resent bad books as time-wasters and don’t waste even more time worrying about the opinions of those who tell us what we ought to read. We’re left with three options: We can read a new book, or a previously unread old book, or we can reread a book that has already proven itself reliable. The third choice has been definitively stated (with tongue somewhat in cheek) by Hazlitt in “On Reading Old Books”--

“I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire ever to read at all”

–and by Nabokov in “Good Readers and Good Writers” (Lectures on Literature):

“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”

There’s nothing musty or reactionary about such readers. A new book is a crapshoot, especially in our literary age. As dedicated readers of middle age or older, we’ve surely read most of the best that has already been written, and made up our minds about it. Reading is not a scavenger hunt, with a list of items to be collected like trophies. There’s no quota system. Reading good books is simply one of several ways we complete ourselves and become who we are. It’s selfish and civilized. George Lyttleton puts it like this in a May 2, 1957, letter to Rupert Hart-Davis (The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters, Vol. 2):

“I love re-reading. Each night from 10.30 to 12 I read Gibbon out loud. I read slowly, richly, not to say juicily; and like Prospero’s isle the room is full of noises—little, dry, gentle noises. Some matter-of-fact man of blunt or gross perceptions might say it was the ashes cooling in the grate, but I know better. It is the little creatures of the night, moths and crickets and spiderlings, a mouse or two perhaps and small gnats in a wailful choir, come out to listen to the Gibbonian music—`Twenty-two acknowledged concubines and a library of 62,000 volumes attested the variety of his inclinations’—what sentient being, however humble, could resist that?”

I once read Whitman aloud in the bathtub, until my neighbor upstairs pounded on the floor. Lyttleton is describing the charm of bedtime rereading, the cozy autonomy of one book, one lamp, one reader. In his answering letter, Hart-Davis asked who Gibbon was writing about. On May 9, Lyttleton replied:

“That Gibbon sentence describes the emperor Gordian whose `manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father.’ Then comes the sentence I quoted, which ends: `and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former [“concubines”] as well as the latter [“62,000 volumes”] were designed for use rather than for ostentation.’”

On May 12, Hart-Davis replied:

“I daresay that Gibbon’s broad blade carved out his meaning with more force and exactitude than did the bending rapiers of latter-day swordsmen.”

I’m repeatedly impressed by the ready wit and learning of both correspondents, but especially Lyttleton (age seventy-four in 1957). Many weeks they exchanged two letters each. Lyttleton often makes my favorite sort of literary allusion, one that is unannounced, that pleases and flatters attentive readers and goes harmlessly unrecognized by others. Here it is the Keatsian “wailful choir.” In four sentences Lyttleton alludes to Gibbon, Shakespeare and Keats – and whatever else I’m missing -- without breaking a sweat and without showing off.

`No Greater Pleasure Than That'

2012-02-08T00:01:00.000-08:00

“What, in the last resort, is there to be said for February? A positively whoreson month surely, and why did that admirable adjective ever drop out of the language? Or, for the matter of that, the superb Chaucerian verb to `swink.’ It wouldn’t do in the welfare state of course, though no doubt good men do swink in the fields and coalpits.”

The author is George Lyttleton, retired teacher and housemaster at Eton, writing on Feb. 23, 1956, to his former student, the publisher and editor Rupert Hart-Davis (The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters, Vol. 1). The passage distils the charm of their correspondence – vivid prose, unflagging wit, lightly deployed learning and common sense. Lyttleton was seventy-three when he wrote this letter, Hart-Davis forty-eight when he received it.

As a native Northerner, I always enjoyed February with its promise of a thaw late in the month, a teasing preview of spring. For a few days you could smell the earth, buds formed, birds rallied. February in Houston corresponds roughly to April or early May in Ohio and upstate New York.

Whoreson, a veteran of the late fourteenth century and now judged “archaic,” is ripe for revival. The Oxford English Dictionary reports it comes to us “after Anglo-Norman fiz a putain.” The first definition is an elegant act of lexicological circumspection: “The son of a whore, a bastard son; but commonly used as a coarse term of reprobation, abuse, dislike, or contempt; sometimes even of jocular familiarity.” Shakespeare used it thirty-nine times (ten times in Henry IV, Part 2 alone, five of them supplied by Falstaff). Sterne used it in Tristram Shandy (“Ambition, and pride, and envy, and lechery, and other whoreson passions.”) and Keats in a letter (“It was so whoreson a Night that I stopped there all the next day.”) In his Feb. 26 reply, Hart-Davis writes:

“February is indeed a whoreson month, and I share your regret at the disappearance of that admirable epithet. Its current American counterpart, sonofabitch (often abbreviated s.o.b.) is a poor substitute [though I like the Southern variant, “sumbitch.”].”

In a footnote, Hart-Davis defines swink as “to toil,” which the OED fleshes out as “To labour, toil, work hard; to exert oneself, take trouble.” It’s from the Old English, a straight borrowing – swincan – and even shows up in Beowulf: “Git on wæteres æht seofon niht swuncon.” Chaucer is the OED’s twelfth citation, from The Hous of Fame (1384): “Hit maketh alle my wyt to swynke / On this castel to be-thynke.” The Dictionary doesn’t cite it but Chaucer uses the same rhyme in “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” in The Canterbury Tales:

“As help me God, I laughe whan I thynke

How pitously a-nyght I made hem swynke.”

The OED offers an additional “obscure” definition of swink from the sixteenth century: “To drink deeply, tipple.” Robert Greene in Mourning Garment (1590) wrote: “That one Darius a great King, being dry, was glad to swincke his fill of a shepheardes bottle.”

Lyttleton and Hart-Davis had such learning at their fingertips. We do too, digitally speaking, but how many of us take advantage of it? And how many are able to share it so entertainingly? Lyttleton begins a May 9, 1956, letter to Hart-Davis like this:

“The breakfast table this morning had the best of all objects—far better even than a dish of salmon kedgeree, or a headline in the Times saying the atom bomb had been abolished, or that the price of coal was down—viz a fat little parcel of books. And the contents of those books! Exactly the sort of literature I love—comments wide and deep on men and things and books by a wise man who knows how to write. Life has, at all events at 73, no greater pleasure than that.”

`Where Word with World is One'

2012-02-07T00:01:00.000-08:00

"To name is to know and remember."

For some, the appropriate linkage of word and thing is deeply satisfying, like arranging the books on one’s shelves. Learning the name of something comes as a relief. We domesticate the world that way, minimize the alien and welcome something new into our home. Other species and some fellow humans don't bother with such fussiness. For them, perhaps, the world is enough.

This week already I’ve learned that chelonian is an adjective referring to turtles and raith a noun meaning one quarter of a year, three months (how nice that it’s homonymous with wraith). The first I’ll use or at least come across in my reading and recognize. The latter will probably remain suspended but admired, like a bug in amber.

In high-school English I learned the difference between jocose and jocund, and in Latin that celerity is a useful variation on rapidity or speed. Such things make English not redundant but nuanced. Synonyms are wonderful but seldom precise. No one would describe a fire truck as rubicund, and probably not even scarlet. We recognize dullards by their flashy and inappropriate use of synonyms. Deploying them properly, given the bounty of our language, is akin to perfect pitch in music.

The line quoted above is from Dana Gioia’s “Words” (Interrogations at Noon, 2001). The link includes a Spanish translation of the poem, "Palabras," by José Emilio Pacheco. Here is the poem in English:

"The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

"And one word transforms it into something less or other –
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

"Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper –
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

"The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always –
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon."

The fifth line in the first stanza restates Herman Hupfeld’s immortal “A kiss is still a kiss.” The word-minded are world-minded, and moved to praise daylight and daylight, so close to delight and delight. In the final lines of “Games Two” (Ceremony and Other Poems, 1950) Richard Wilbur writes:

“Silence will take pity
On words. There are
Pauses where words must wait,

Spaces in speech
Which stop and calm it, and each
Is like a gate:
Past which creation lies
In morning sun,
Where word with world is one
And nothing dies.”

`Sudden Fits of Inadvertency'

2012-02-06T00:01:00.000-08:00

While my laptop hovered in a persistent vegetative state this past weekend, an angry and, not surprisingly, anonymous reader complained that I had recently misidentified a species of wildflower. By now I ought to be accustomed to the ferocity of online fault-finders, in particular when the matter is trivial. I dutifully double-checked the plant, a field guide and several online sources, and stand by my original identification. I also encourage readers who detect legitimate errors to inform me immediately. A blog is strictly an amateur operation when it comes to quality assurance. I want to get it right, so readers’ help is always appreciated.

I’ve been rereading The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters, published in six volumes between 1978 and 1984. George Lyttleton (1883-1962) was a longtime housemaster and English teacher at Eton. Rupert Hart-Davis (1907-1999) was a publisher and editor, probably best remembered for editing the Collected Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962). Hart-Davis had been Lyttleton’s student at Eton in 1925-26. The men met again at a dinner party in 1955, and started a regular correspondence that continued until Lyttleton’s death in 1962.

For book lovers, reading the Lyttleton/Hart-Davis letters is like eating peanuts: It’s difficult to stop after just one or two volumes. I learned of them ten years ago from Michael Dirda, who rightly described them as “the most delightful bedside books of our time.” These letters of two formidably bookish men are never dry, pretentious or academic. They share literary loves and hates, and much good gossip, but also their lives. The growing bond of trust and affection between Lyttleton and Hart-Davis across volumes is like a slowly growing friendship or love affair in a lushly expansive novel. Here is Lyttleton, in a passage that reminded me of my perturbed reader:

“Do you ever get things quite wrong? Because here is the perfect defense: `What is obvious is not always known, what is known is not always present. Sudden fits of inadvertency will surprise vigilance; slight avocations will seduce attention. And casual eclipses of the mind will darken learning.’ Isn’t it perfect? Johnson, of course.”

Lyttleton quotes from the “Preface” to A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), with its characteristic tone of mingled humility and audacity. Lyttleton's letters are peppered with casual references to Johnson’s life and work. In this context, such allusions are never stuffy or deployed in a show-off manner. They amount to the small talk of civilized men. In 1960, Hart-Davis suggests his former teacher reread The Bridge at San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder. Lyttleton replies to his junior by twenty-four years:

“I shall certainly read San Luis Rey again. I remember greatly liking it, and it is high time for a re-reading—on the whole life’s greatest pleasure.”

`Homelier, but More Durable'

2012-02-05T11:03:00.001-08:00

Unlike art, the best conversation is spontaneous, never outlined or plotted. Earnestness and other species of dullness -- people with a plan -- are the enemies of good conversation. When the right people meet, they spark like flint and steel, recalling the old expression "court and spark." Good talk sparkles.

A blog is conversation on the screen, cunningly deployed electrons. It begins one-sidedly, and as such invites blowhards, but good talkers attract good listeners who, if encouraged, become good talkers in their own right. In sum, that is the history of Anecdotal Evidence, which started life six years ago today. In his poem "Fifty-ninth Street" (Peru, 1983), Herbert Morris, apropos of Henry James, refers to "that complication / of discipline and passion we call art." AE is less than art, more than conversation and seldom less than passion-driven.

Now I have some notion of how a near-death experience feels. Anecdotal Evidence disappeared for about four hours on Saturday. I don't know why, or why it returned. The experience was humbling -- six years of daily commitment erased. I was prepared to accept it would never return, Lazarus-like, and ready to start from scratch with another post, this one, number 2,401. Then my laptop came down with a virus, crippling all conversation, and it's still in the shop. The message is clear: Keep working. If you have something worthwhile to say, you'll find a way to say it. (I write this on a Fondren Library computer, as the text of an email to myself.) Charles Lamb writes in "New Year's Eve," "A new state of being staggers me," and goes on:

"Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself -- these things go out with life?"

No, all lives on so long as writers and readers happily coexist. Who are the readers of Anecdotal Evidence? Most live in contented anonymity. A few have become true, albeit virtual friends -- Helen Pinkerton, Dave Lull, Nige and David Myers, among many others. The rest are dead in the banal sense -- Dr. Johnson, Yvor Winters, Charles Lamb. In 1829, when a sonnet he had written was rejected by a magazine editor, Lamb writes, "Damn the age; I will write for antiquity!"

Lamb's some-time friend William Hazlitt wrote a fine testimonial to him in The Spirit of the Age (1825):

"He would fain 'shuffle off this mortal coil'; and his spirit clothes itself in the garb of elder time, homelier, but more durable. He is borne along with no pompous paradoxes, shines in no glittering tinsel of a fashionable phraseology, is neither fop nor sophist. He has none of the turbulence or froth of new-fangled opinions. His style runs pure and clear, though it may often take an underground course, or be conveyed through old-fashioned conduit pipes. Mr. Lamb does not court popularity, nor strut in gaudy plumes, but shrinks from every kind of ostentatious and obvious pretension into the retirement of his own mind."

`A Transport of Cordiality'

2012-02-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

The almost unrelieved tedium of this month’s Poetry is momentarily interrupted by “Momentary,” an A.E. Stallings poem:

“I never glimpse her but she goes

Who had been basking in the sun,
Her links of chain mail one by one
Aglint with pewter, bronze and rose.

“I never see her lying coiled

Atop the garden step, or under
A dark leaf, unless I blunder
And by some motion she is foiled.

“Too late I notice as she passes

Zither of chromatic scale—
I only ever see her tail
Quicksilver into tall grasses.

“I know her only by her flowing,

By her glamour disappearing
Into shadow as I’m nearing—
I only recognize her going.”

What is this creature? “Links of chain mail,” “Aglint with pewter, bronze and rose,” and “lying coiled” suggest a snake and her scales. Other details seem to agree – sun basking, quicksilver, flowing. Could “Zither of chromatic scale” echo the slither of a snake through grass? “Chromatic scale” certainly has extra-musical connotations. Briefly I considered a butterfly for the iridescence of its wings (covered with scales). Prompting questions seems to be Stallings’ point. How, she asks, do we identify and describe the elusive? The poem is a riddle.

“Momentary,” especially the final line, recalls Dickinson’s poems, in which the familiar is often made gnomic, and vice versa, and common words suggest something else. One of the few poems published in her lifetime (and titled by an editor “The Snake”) is “A narrow Fellow in the Grass,” another sort of riddle. The final lines are famously, teasingly cryptic:

“Several of Nature’s People

I know and they know me –

I feel for them a transport

Of Cordiality –

“But never met this Fellow

Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.”

`Upon the Tongue of My Friend'

2012-02-03T00:01:00.000-08:00

One morning in 1815, a twenty-year-old law student and admirer, Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795-1854), showed up unannounced at Charles Lamb’s door with a gift of fruit. Lamb returned the favor by introducing Talfourd to William Wordsworth, effectively launching the young man’s career. He joined the staff of London Magazine and wrote for other periodicals. He became a barrister, a jurist and in 1835 a Member of Parliament. Talfourd befriended Charles Dickens, who dedicated the 1837 edition of The Pickwick Papers to him, and based the character Tommy Traddles in David Copperfield on his friend.

On Aug. 9, 1815, the day of Talfourd’s gift-bearing visit, Lamb writes to Wordsworth:

"There is something inexpressibly pleasant to me in these presents. Be it fruit, or fowl, or brawn, or what not. Books are a legitimate cause of acceptance. If presents be not the soul of friendship, undoubtedly they are the most spiritual part of the body of that intercourse. There is too much narrowness of thinking in this point. The punctilio of acceptance methinks is too confused and straitlaced."

Chief among Lamb’s gifts, literary and otherwise, is generosity of spirit. He possessed a gift for gift-giving as well as a gift, far rarer, for gift-receiving, one I have never mastered. I’m as greedy as the next man but my “punctilio of acceptance” has always been “confused and straitlaced,” though I’ve haltingly learned to say “Thank you” and leave it at that. Lamb turned the gift of a pig from Coleridge into his best-known essay, “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig,” in which he says:

“I am one of those, who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind) to a friend. I protest I take as great an interest in my friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper satisfactions, as in mine own. `Presents,’ I often say, `endear Absents.’ Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door chicken (those `tame villatic fowl’), capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue of my friend.”

Lamb ranks among the supreme celebrators of food and drink in the language. In his March 9, 1822, letter of thanks to Coleridge for the gift of the pig, Lamb tells the tale of the “sixpenny whole plum-cake” given him as a boy by his aunt. As he carries home the treat, young Lamb meets “a look-beggar, not a verbal petitionist”:

“…in the coxcombry of taught-charity I gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt’s kindness crossed me – the sum it was to her – the pleasure she had a right to expect that I – not the old impostor – should take in eating her cake – the cursed ingratitude by which, under the colour of Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, I wept, and took it to heart so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like – and I was right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and proved a lesson to me ever after. The cake has long been masticated, consigned to the dunghill with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper.”

Among his other gifts, Lamb was a shrewd psychologist and practitioner of applied ethics.

`The Honey of That Old Discipline'

2012-02-02T00:01:00.000-08:00

Seasoned readers have learned to wait for happy convergences among the books they’re reading. Against the Darkening Sky is Janet Lewis’ third novel, published in 1943 and set in Depression-era California, in the Santa Clara valley. Mary Perrault and her husband have four children and live in respectful balance with the natural world, devotedly tending their gardens and orchards. In the novel's first sentence, Mary sits on the front steps admiring her flowers. In the first chapter, she treats a rash on her neck with an infusion made from wormwood leaves picked in a nearby field, and gathers fallen plums for a visiting friend:

“Their feet sank a little in the loose ground, for the orchard had been plowed in order to kill the weeds, and no grass was growing under or between the small trees. It was a household orchard, not a commercial one; -- two fig trees, an early peach and a late-ripening one, long red plums, a quince tree loaded with heavy furred green fruit, and the tree with the little round yellow plums for which Mrs. Perrault was looking. The leaves and the fruit were dusty.”

Mary represents a traditional, endangered, largely self-sufficient way of life, one rooted in practical knowledge handed down by family and friends, not unlike the domestic routine established by Lewis and her husband, Yvor Winters, at their modest home in Los Altos. Mary is a PTA mother, not a precursor to the nature-romanticizing counterculture. Love, tradition and a willingness to work hard, not ideology, sustain her and her family. Late in the novel, thinking of her children, Mary condemns “the incoherent civilization, the moral wilderness emerging from the physical wilderness.”

At the same time I’ve been reading selections from Poly-Olbion, a poem of almost 15,000 lines written by Michael Drayton (1563-1631). It’s a survey of the geography and history of Great Britain composed in alexandrine couplets. As poetry, it’s often clunky, veering close to prose, but the subtitle suggests both its grandiosity and charm: A Chorographicall Description of Tracts, Rivers, Mountains, Forests and other Parts of the Renowned Isle of Greate Britaine with intermixture of the most Remarquable Stories, Antiquities, Wonders, Rarityes, Pleasures, and Commodities of the same: Digested in a Poem.

Drayton lovingly catalogues the birds (“even the echoing Ayre / Seemes all compos’d of sounds.”), flowers, fish and trees of Great Britain. Like Mary Perrault, he damns the destruction of the natural world, in particular the trees:

“Foreseeing, their decay each howre so fast came on,

Under the axes stroak, fetcht many a grievous grone,

When as the anviles weight, and hammers dreadfull sound,

Even rent the hollow Woods, and shook the queachy ground.”

And this:

“Joves Oke, the warlike Ash, veyn'd Elme, the softer Beech,

Short Hazell, Maple plaine, light Aspe, the bending Wych,

Tough Holly, and smooth Birch, must altogether burne:

What should the Builder serve, supplies the Forger's turne;
When under publike good, base private gaine takes holde,

And we poore woefull Woods, to ruine lastly solde.”

Drayton notes that many trees have been cut down and burned to smelt iron:

“These yron times breed none, that minde posteritie,

Tis but in vaine to tell, what we before have been,

Or changes of the world, that we in time have seen;

When, not devising how to spend our wealth with waste,

We to the savage swine, let fall our larding mast.

But now, alas, our selves we have not to sustaine,

Nor can our tops suffice to shield our Roots from raine.”

Late in Against the Darkening Sky, when Mary Perrault attends a funeral, her thoughts also turn to the corruption of values:

“There was hardly anything about a funeral such as this which she did not dislike, small items which summed up a discreet commercialism. Yet, it was not entirely the fault of the morticians....The fault lay in the lack of faith, the lonely and independent lives--every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost--the shifting communities whose constant change made it impossible for anyone to live as she had lived as a girl, in a community as in the center of a family.... It was the loss of faith that grieved her the most. About her own children, growing up in this world, could they have, as she now had, security of faith without a literal belief in the things which she had been taught as a girl? All the honey of that old discipline was now hers, distilled in many precious and life-giving phrases, but how could she convey to [her daughter] Melanie what these phrases now meant to her?"

`In My Heart Is Locked the Singing Flame'

2012-02-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

I rent a room from a friend here in Houston and her cat has adopted me, a magnanimous gesture. Cookie permits me to brush and feed her and clean the litter box. Her ancient sister, Lucy, died in November after ailing for a long time. I came home one evening to find her stretched out and stiff in the bath tub, a lump of bones and fur. I wrapped her in burlap and dug a hole in the backyard. After filling it in I covered the otherwise anonymous grave with a paving stone.

Most of us treat only pets as individuals with histories and personalities, selves with their own discrete autonomy, the way we sometimes treat other humans. Farm people do this too with livestock, I imagine, and perhaps biologists, zookeepers and circus folk. Otherwise, an animal, especially in the wild, is a type, a representative of its species, interchangeable with all its fellows. And yet, memory preserves a few individuals – a pileated woodpecker methodically stripping an elm stump of bark, a Cooper’s hawk scouting a cemetery in Schenectady when the temperature was minus-sixteen degrees, a snapping turtle I moved with the help of a high school kid from the middle of a road next to the Erie Canal.

You might object that I’m not remembering individuals so much as what they did, some memorable action they took. Perhaps. I’m not above anthropomorphizing. But each encounter was protracted, and each animal was aware of my presence and endured it. We reached a rare trans-species rapprochement, with some measure of trust on both sides. I spent much of an afternoon watching the woodpecker from a log where I sat, twenty yards away. I didn’t go so far as to name him, but I came to know his style, enough to speculate about his temperament. That was more than twenty years ago and he’s more vivid in memory than most of my teachers in college.

I remembered the woodpecker when I encountered a yellow warbler – surely among the most piercingly beautiful of birds -- in a poem by Leslie Monsour, “Indelibility” (The Alarming Beauty of the Sky, 2005):

“A whistle in the palm outside my window
Announced a yellow warbler perched there like
A feathered spark, a sun-flake with a pinto
Wing. I saw it flicker, burn, then spike
The air in take-off. Gone. And yet the bird
Remains. The world outside is not the same,
With shifting shadows, air and time disturbed;
But in my heart is locked the singing flame.”

`This More Delicate Belle of the Swamp'

2012-01-31T00:01:00.000-08:00

Spring arrived in Houston shortly after 8 o’clock Monday morning, when the sky was blue and almost free of clouds, and the air warm enough to turn my thoughts to germinating seeds. I had an appointment with a post-doc in bioengineering but I was early, so I took off my jacket and took my time.

On the far side of campus, literally in the shadow of the Texas Medical Center, I passed through a low, marshy pocket I had never visited before, where shade has kept it moist even through the drought. Thousands of cars pass daily, as do students, patients and joggers. Nearby are the soccer stadium, tennis courts and baseball diamond, but here is one of those in-between places left over when we've finished paving everything else. Misleadingly, it’s judged “vacant.”

Two rabbits retreated into the tall grass as I approached. A pigeon working the bare patch along the sidewalk stayed put. A Northern mockingbird perched in a newly planted sapling, and below, near the wettest spot, grew a patch of lanceleaf tickseed (Coreopsis lanceolata). The yellow, daisy-like flowers reminded me of the “fringed orchis” (probably Platanthera psycodes) Thoreau jealously savored in his journal on June 9, 1854:

“It is remarkable that this, one of the fairest of all our flowers, should be one of the rarest,--for the most part not seen at all. I think that no other but myself in Concord annually find it. That so queenly a flower should annually bloom so rarely and in such withdrawn and secret places as to be rarely seen by man! The village belle never sees this more delicate belle of the swamp.”

Coreopsis is not so rare as Thoreau’s orchid, except when we choose not to see it. I mentioned my discovery of the flower blooming in January to the bioengineer, a recent transplant from Cambridge, Mass., where Thoreau graduated from Harvard in 1839, and she was polite. Spring, after all, is almost two months away. Thoreau carries on about his fringed orchis:

“How little relation between our life and its. Most of us never see it or hear of it. The seasons go by to us as if it were not. A beauty reared in the shade of a convent, who has never strayed beyond the convent bell. Only the skunk or owl or other inhabitant of the swamp beholds it. In the damp twilight of the swamp, where it is wet to the feet. How little anxious to display its attractions! It does not pine because man does not admire it. How independent on our race! It lifts its delicate spike amid the hellebore and ferns in the deep shade of the swamp. I am inclined to think of it as a relic of the past as much as the arrowhead, or the tomahawk I found on the 7th.”

`Always, the Past is Heard'

2012-01-30T00:01:00.000-08:00

One notices the changes first – the new white window casings, the branch missing from the post oak, the spinning pinwheel stuck in the ground by the sidewalk. Only then does the scene’s familiarity sooth, a little, the shock of change. Without knowing I remembered them, I recognized the bend in the roof, the brown shingles and black fence. The past returns with a pang we have no right to regret. It’s like longevity: We want to live forever but don’t want to grow old. We want to revisit the past but avoid the ache of its pastness.

Our former neighbors invited me to lunch. They live across the street from the house we bought in 2004 after leaving New York and moving to Houston. Our sons were almost four and not yet two. Now they’re eleven and nearly nine. It’s the first house they remember, the template against which they will measure every subsequent house. All their memories are happy, as best I can judge. Our cat adopted us here. Michael learned to ride a bicycle on this street. This blog started here almost six years ago. I planted lemon and key lime saplings in the backyard. On Easter morning seven years ago another post oak leaned against the side of the house, and a crew worked until after dark taking it down.

The couple who bought the house from us almost four years ago still lives there, and they’ve had a child of their own, triggering in me a shameful flash of resentment, as though they were vandals or thieves. Then I remember the old lady from whom we bought the house. Her husband had recently died and she was moving to be closer to her son and his family. She and her late husband had bought the house new in 1955, and she lived there for almost half a century. Her flowers, chosen so at least one species in the yard was blooming every day of the year, are still blooming.

Clive Wilmer conducted a series of interviews with fellow poets for BBC Radio 3 from 1989 to 1992, and the transcripts were published as Poets Talking (Carcanet, 1994). In his talk with C.H. Sisson, Wilmer notes one of Sisson’s poems ends with the line “Only the past is true.” He asks, “Could we begin by looking at your poetry in the light of that discovery?” and Sisson answers:

“Well, the future is imaginary, the present is happening and that only leaves the past to be true; and it leaves the past as, in a sense, all of a piece. Once a thing is done, it belongs to the past.”

In one of Sisson’s great late poems, “In the Silence,” he writes:

“In every spoken word,
Always, the past is heard.”

`Dedicate the Attention So to One Small Thing'

2012-01-29T00:01:00.000-08:00

Frank Wilson reminds us that Saturday was the 787^th birthday of St. Thomas Aquinas and commemorates the date with a sentence he attributes to the philosopher:

“All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.”

The passage about the “unius muscae,” drawn from Expositio in Symbolum Apostolorum, humbles our pretensions to understanding by summoning the humblest of creatures. The fly is small, ubiquitous and scorned. Only entomologists lavish attention on it. A man could devote a lifetime not to Drosophila as a biological abstraction but to a fly as an individual, and still know ignorance. We learn enough to swat one when it lights on the dinner plate but not enough to envy the compound eyes or marvel at the elegance of its architecture, as the poet-priest Thomas Traherne (1636-1674) did in The Kingdom of God:

“The Creation of Insects affords us a Clear Mirror of Almighty Power, and Infinite Wisdom with a Prospect likewise of Transcendent Goodness. Had but one of those Curious and High Stomached flies, been Created, whose Burnisht, and Resplendent Bodies are like Orient Gold, or Polisht Steel; whose Wings Are So Strong, and Whose Head so Crowned with an Imperial Tuff, which we often see Enthroned upon a Leaf, having a pavement of living Emrauld beneath its feet, their contemplating all the World…the Infinit Workmanship about his Body the Marvellous Consistence of his Lims, the most neat and Exquisit Distinction of his Joynts, the Subtile and Imperceptible Ducture of his Nerves, and Endowments of his Tongue, and Ears, and Eyes, and Nostrils; the stupendious union of his Soul and Body, the Exact and Curious Symmetry of all his Parts, the feeling of his feet and the swiftness of his Wings, the Vivacity of his quick and active Power...”

Traherne could have rhapsodized the anatomy of any creature, but the smallest suited his purposes. The earliest practical microscopes appeared during his life. For the first time, men could observe in detail the multiplicity of worlds previously invisible, “the most neat and Exquisit Distinction of his Joynts.” The first microscopic description of living tissue appeared in 1644 -- in Giambattista Odierna's L'occhio della mosca (The Fly's Eye).

In her 1930 poem “Lines to a Kitten” (Poems 1924-1940, 1950), Janet Lewis memorably describes her cat as a “Morsel of suavity.” It sits on her knee and intently watches a fly from six feet away:

“Only the great

And you, can dedicate

The attention so to one small thing.”

`Poetry is Form'

2012-01-28T00:01:00.000-08:00

It looks less like a pamphlet of poems by one of the last century’s great poets than a modest tract from a Bible society. The pale green cover is made of card stock and is turning lichen-brown around the edges. The publisher is The Tryon Pamphlets of Tryon, N.C. On the back cover are small announcements for other pamphlets in the series -- Happy Farmers by John Crowe Ransom and Psyche in the South by R.P. Blackmur. Each costs 25 cents, as does the book in hand: Before Disaster by Yvor Winters. An online dealer is selling it for $275.

The 26-page booklet published in 1934 contains a four-page prose foreword and twenty-one poems, including some of Winters’ best and best-known -- “To a Young Writer,” “On Teaching the Young,” “Elegy on a Young Airedale Bitch Lost Two Years Since in the Salt-Marsh” and “Before Disaster” (subtitled “Written early in the winter of 1932-33,” when Hitler was coming to power). The copy I have, bound in cardboard covers, is from the Fondren Library. A label at the front says the book was a “Gift of George G. Williams September 1954.” It hasn’t circulated in sixteen years.

Before Disaster consolidates Winters’ evolution from early free-verse Imagism to his mature work, traditional in meter and rhyme. He’s a rare poet who matured in the best sense, abandoning youthful avant-garde pretensions to evolve a sensibility that crafted poetry for adults, poetry that lasts. In his foreword Winters writes:

“I cannot grasp the contemporary notion that the traditional virtues of style are incompatible with a poetry of modern matter; it appears to rest on the fallacy of expressive form, the notion that the form of the poem should express the matter. This fallacy results in the writing of chaotic poetry about the traffic [as opposed to “Before Disaster”]; of loose poetry about our sprawling nation [Whitman, Crane]; of semi-conscious poetry about semi-conscious states…Poetry is form; its constituents are thought and feeling as they are embodied in language; and though form cannot be wholly reduced to principles, there are certain principles which it cannot violate.”

Almost eighty years after Winters wrote them, the words are more bracing and probably more futile than ever, an implicit call to seriousness, good sense, respect for tradition and dedication to craft. Rolfe Humphries begins his review of Before Disaster in the February 1935 issue of Poetry with this admission:

“This attractively-priced paper pamphlet will beguile you into more study than you bargain for.”

`As If It Had Made Up Its Mind to Stay'

2012-01-27T00:01:00.000-08:00

Two mornings in a row I observed the silhouette of a puffed-up, ample-breasted bird perched in a shrub outside my office window. The branch bobbed in the wind fifteen feet over the sidewalk. Featureless in the early-morning murk, the robin-sized bird remained as impassive as a duck decoy. The second day I walked outside and confirmed he was a robin, Turdus migratorius (not what you think: turdus is Latin for “thrush”). He reminded me of a small pen-and-ink sketch I bought many years ago in an Indiana antiques shop: “Round Robin.”

Where I grew up in Ohio, the robin was a seasonal alarm clock, an early herald of spring we started looking for in February. Not so in Texas. B.C. Robison writes in Birds of Houston (Rice University Press, 1990):

“…in southeast Texas it is a harbinger of the deep winter. The bird starts moving into the Houston area in December, and it remains fairly numerous through March. Robins begin to migrate back north in April, and by late summer they are seldom seen in the city.”

By repute, the robin is the gentlest of birds, an honorary dove, at least to humans, though I’ve watched them pull meters of earthworm from the lawn. Between 1824 and 1826, John Clare composed a series of “Natural History Letters” (The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, edited by Margaret Grainger, 1983) to his friend James Augustus Hessey. Among them is a lengthy description of a robin he befriended as a boy growing up in Helpston:

“…in winter it will venture into the house for food & become as tame as a chicken—we had one that usd [sic] to come in at a broken pane in the window three winters together I always knew it to be our old visitor by a white scar on one of the wings [del. which might have been an old wound made by some cat] it grew so tame that it would perch on ones [sic] finger & take the crumbs out of the hand…it would never stay in the house at night tho it would attempt to perch on the chair spindles & clean its bill & ruffles its feather & put its head under its wing as if it had made up its mind to stay”

`The Annual Wreckage'

2012-01-26T00:01:00.000-08:00

The storms that blew through Houston on Wednesday started a day earlier as afternoon fog, skies like dirty milk and rising temperatures through the evening. That ominous sense of nature behaving in counterintuitive ways. A muggy chill. At dawn, muted yellow light and the stink of ozone and sewage. Wind pushing dry leaves along the pavement, making scratching sounds. Among them tumbled in the street near my car not tumbleweed but an uprooted, shrub-sized pokeweed. The lovely and toxic purple berries were gone but the racemes and leaves held on. I put it in the trunk to look at later.

Pokeweed is a poet’s dream, too pat an emblem for something – sustenance and poison, beauty and danger. An opportunist, flourishing where soil is disturbed, adaptable as a cockroach. Whitman finds it in a gone-to-seed pasture without hinting at its toxicity: “And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.” There’s much to admire in weeds, their tenacity and refusal to hew to human wishes. Amy Clampitt likes and respects them in “Vacant Lot with Pokeweed” (The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt, 1997):

“Tufts, follicles, grubstake
biennial rosettes, a low-
life beach-blond scruff of
couch grass: notwithstanding
the interglinting dregs

“of wholesale upheaval and
dismemberment, weeds do not
hesitate, the wheeling
rise of the ailanthus halts
at nothing--and look! here's

“a pokeweed, sprung up from seed
dropped by some vagrant, that's
seized a foothold: a magenta-
girdered bower, gazebo twirls
of blossom rounding into

“raw-buttoned, garnet-rodded
fruit one more wayfarer
perhaps may salvage from
the season's frittering,
the annual wreckage.”

The poem is a patchwork of harmonious fragments, like weeds in vacant lots. “Weeds do not / hesitate.” The “wayfarer” ("some vagrant") is a mockingbird or cardinal, at once harvesting and sowing.

`Eager to Share What He Deemed Best'

2012-01-25T00:02:00.000-08:00

Yvor Winters died on this day in 1968, a year of turmoil and grief, at the age of sixty-seven. His great poem “On a View of Pasadena from the Hills” concludes:

“The driver, melting down the distance here,
May cast in flight the faint hoof of a deer
Or pass the faint head set perplexedly.
And man-made stone outgrows the living tree,
And at its rising, air is shaken, men
Are shattered, and the tremor swells again,
Extending to the naked salty shore,
Rank with the sea, which crumbles evermore.”

Charles Tomlinson, the English poet born in 1927, visited Winters at his home in Palo Alto in December 1959, and recounts the meeting in “Beginnings” (Some Americans: A Personal Record, 1981):

“…the striking thing about Winters’s conversation that day was its lack of precisely that quality of ratiocinative abstraction that he professed to admire in poetry. His talk consisted of a celebration of the concrete: Californian wines, Californian trees and the shapes of their leaves, local topography and the changes the vicinity had undergone, the habits of airedales [sic], the migration of birds, the kinds of birds that visited Palo Alto, the distinguishing peculiarities of the older Californian culture.”

In other words, the world he knew and cherished. Tomlinson admits to feeling apprehensive about meeting this “reputedly unaccommodating man,” but concludes:

“The day was an entire success. The dignity and dimension of the man unmistakably communicated themselves, as did a capacity for friendship, rather than friendliness. Winters showed no desire to please, but, as in his urging to try a particularly fine wine, he was eager to share what he deemed best.”

`Godfather to an Insect'

2012-01-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

“They will have enough to do without having to memorize Latin declensions.”

The author is James S. Miller, and he’s defending the world’s poor overworked biologists. There’s something embarrassing about the dean and vice president for science of the New York Botanical Garden carrying on so in public. Bilingual whining is still whining. Imagine Darwin or some other sturdy Victorian conducting himself in so undignified a fashion. As of Jan. 1, the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature has discarded its requirement that botanists provide a Latin description of a new species. No word on whether fauna will follow flora. Compare Miller’s display with a 1943 poem, “On Discovering a Butterfly,” by Vladimir Nabokov, lepidopterist:

“I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer—and I want no other fame.

“Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.

“Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.”

Nabokov gave Latin genus and/or species names to twenty butterflies and moths. Other lepidopterists have bestowed thirty-nine names that allude to Nabokov or one of his books. Some of the latter are obvious: Itylos pnin, Nabokovia ada, Paralycaeides shade; others, more recondite: Leptotes delalande, Leptotes krug, Madeleinea nodo. Nabokov’s best-known godchild is Lycaeides melissa samuelis, the Karner blue butterfly, the endangered species he immortalized in 1943 and re-immortalized in 1957 in Pnin:

“A score of small butterflies, all of one kind, were settled on a damp patch of sand, their wings erect and closed, showing their pale undersides with dark dots and tiny orange-rimmed peacock spots along the hindwing margins; one of Pnin’s shed rubbers disturbed some of them and, revealing the celestial hue of their upper surface, they fluttered around like blue snowflakes before settling again.”

Almost uniquely, Nabokov took sublime zest in both butterflies and words. Though otherwise luxuriantly multilingual, his Latin was purely functional, a biologist’s “taxonomic Latin.” Its precision reflects the genius of binomial nomenclature, the system devised by Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) that permits the particular to take its rightful place in the general. In An Autobiography (1913), Theodore Roosevelt writes:

“My first knowledge of Latin was obtained by learning the scientific names of the birds and mammals which I collected.”

That was my experience as well. Among the first I learned, even before formally studying Latin: Acer saccharum (sugar maple) and Passer domesticus (house sparrow). In The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (2010), Douglas Brinkley tells us Roosevelt as a boy studied Linnaeus’ Species Plantarum and Systemae Naturae. He writes:

“By the time Theodore Roosevelt was growing up, scientists and explorers seeking glory ranged far and wide in the remote wilderness, racing to discover organisms that could be named after themselves.”

Brinkley cites a passage by Nancy Pick in The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (2004):

“The Linnaean system eliminated the confusion of having, for example, a butterfly called the mourning cloak in the United States, the yellow edge in Canada, and the Camberwell beauty in Britain. People all over the world, whatever their language, can understand Nymphalis antiopa.”

Or could, until recently. The point is, no one would wish to eliminate the profusion of common names for plants and animals. They constitute a form of folk poetry, one of the glories of English. But neither should we eliminate the more rigorous poetry of Latin plant descriptions. The world always outstrips our capacity to adequately describe it.

[Go here for Curious Taxonomy and here for a blogger at Scientific American defending the elimination of Latin “diagnoses” of new plant species.]

`This I Find Unbearable'

2012-01-24T00:01:00.000-08:00

You have to admire a reader equipped with sufficient enterprise to find something amusing in so dreary and obnoxious a writer as Jean-Paul Sartre. Mike Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti quotes two characters discussing Hell in the Frenchman’s 1944 one-act No Exit (Huis Clos):

“GARCIN: Are there books here?

“VALET: No.”

The only infernal torment more insidiously cruel would be a library consisting exclusively of L'idiot de la famille and Saint Genet, comédien et martyr. Forty year ago, my professor of 18th-century English literature read aloud in class a characteristically opaque passage from Sartre’s L'étre et le néant devoted to the subject of holes. She tried valiantly not to laugh, but soon all of us were giggling. She and Mike read Sartre in the only spirit I find palatable.

The prospect of a bookless life (or death), however, is genuinely frightening. In 1997, at the age of eighty-eight, William Maxwell published an article in the The New York Times Magazine in which he writes:

“…when people are dead they don't read books. This I find unbearable. No Tolstoy, no Chekhov, no Elizabeth Bowen, no Keats, no Rilke. One might as well be –”

The dash abruptly interrupts Maxwell’s thought, then he resumes in a more enthusiastic vein:

“Before I am ready to call it quits I would like to reread every book I have ever deeply enjoyed, beginning with Jane Austen and Isaac Babel and Sybille Bedford’s The Sudden View and going through shelf after shelf of the bookcases, until I arrive at the autobiographies of William Butler Yeats.”

Even sadder than a bookless eternity is voluntary booklessness in this life. We inhabit an age of bookish wish fulfillment. If you can think of a volume, you can probably get your hands on it, often free of cost. Think of digitalized texts and interlibrary loan. Think of life without Amis, Boswell and Chekhov, without Xenophon, Yates and Zweig.

`You Can Refute Culture Only With Culture'

2012-01-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

Over Christmas I read Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar by the Soviet critic Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (1893-1984), a great admirer of Laurence Sterne and of Sterne’s other great admirer, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. He relates an anecdote about his friend the Tolstoy scholar Boris Mikhailovich Eichenbaum (1886-1959). One winter morning during the 872-day siege of Leningrad, Eichenbaum walked to Radio House, the government broadcasting studio on Rakova Street near Nevsky Prospect, and asked if he could address the German army. Here is an excerpt from his broadcast:

“I am an old professor. My son Dmitri is at the front. My son-in-law was killed. I live with my wife, daughter, and grand-daughter in a single room and write a book about Tolstoy. You know him--he is the author of War and Peace. I know you are afraid of Tolstoy—you have read his book about victory after defeat.

“I left my desk with frozen ink to come here and tell you I despise you. You can refute culture only with culture. We have cannons too—you can’t prove anything with cannons. You can’t destroy our culture, you can’t break into our city.”

It’s an act of principled defiance from a man almost sixty years old. Eichenbaum was no conventional Soviet propagandist. The weapon he brandished was carefully chosen – Tolstoy’s account of Napoleon’s defeat by the Russian winter, the Russian people and his own hubris, one-hundred thirty years earlier. In a sense, Eichenbaum was wrong – you can prove a lot with cannons. What stuck in memory was his off-hand mention of frozen ink – if literal, a measure of the hardships Soviet civilians endured; if figurative, an emblem of the writer’s impotence before savagery. And yet, Eichenbaum never stopped writing. After the war, this champion of true Russian culture was hounded by the Soviet authorities for his “rootless cosmopolitanism” – that is, for being a Jew.

Eichenbaum’s frozen ink reminded me of a passage in A Voice from the Chorus, Andrei Sinyavsky’s account of the seven years he spent in a Soviet forced labor camp. Near the conclusion, he writes:

"I dreamed of the paper I am now writing on as of an open field or a forest: oh to be able to lose myself in it, to take off and run on breathlessly and, without reaching the end or even the middle, put down somewhere at the edge or in a corner just a few rapid lines. . ."

Unlike many lesser writers, Sinyavsky refused to let the blankness of the page intimidate him. Rather, it serves as a spur to his imagination, to the one thing that makes a writer a writer:

"You need paper to lose yourself in its whiteness. Writing means diving into a page and coming up with some idea or word. Blank paper invites you to dip down into its artless expanse. A writer is like a fisherman. He sits and waits for something to bite. Put a blank sheet of paper in front of me and, without even thinking, let alone understanding why, I am sure to be able to fish something out of it."

These paper-and-ink linkages came to me while reading a very un-Russian text, Thoreau’s journal, more than two-million words that ceased only when the writer could no longer lift his pen and dip it into the ink bottle. One-hundred fifty-five years ago today, on Jan. 23, 1857, Thoreau writes:

“The coldest day that I remember recording, clear and bright, but very high wind, blowing the snow. Ink froze.”

Shklovsky writes of Eichenbaum:

“Eichenbaum had a great ability to see anew each time he read something. He spent endless hours reading without rushing through, and after being persuaded by his discovery, he labored on it as though his work had just begun.

“His index cards never got stale.”

`Where Civility Encounters Nature'

2012-01-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

As with everything else, I’m a dedicated dilettante when it comes to mathematics. I play with it for amusement, for the sense of limbering up mentally, stretching under-used muscles and setting off the resulting rush of intellectual endorphins. I’ve never recognized the silly left brain/right brain distinction. For years I read Scientific American mostly for Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” column. I still need help calculating percentages but recreational math is a lark, like music.

Clive Wilmer makes the math/music linkage in “A Baroque Concerto,” subtitled “to Edgar Bowers, at 70”—that is, in 1994. Actually, he lets Bowers, his friend and fellow-poet, make the connection. The sonnet is collected in New and Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012):

“`Pure mathematics!’ That’s what you exclaimed

Across the polite applause to me, enthused

By a forgotten opus hardly famed

In its own time or place. Not being used

To seeing you moved and vulnerable then brought
Another harmony into my head,
The divisions of your verse, its metres taut,
Drawn from the order trusted to the dead.

“A love of the abstract…yet you evoke,

Through poignant scenes of Europe sketched in youth,

An order that’s the sharper for the smoke;

“And, later on, make your locality—

The golden coastline where civility

Encounters nature—witness to the truth.”

In a note to his sonnet, Wilmer rightly calls Bowers, who died in 2000, “one of the great poets of modern times.” The “poignant scenes of Europe,” Wilmer says, refer to poems in Bowers’ first collection, The Form of Loss (1956), “which draw on his experiences as an American soldier in Germany at the end of the Second World War.” “Your locality,” he says, is a reference to a sequence of poems from the nineteen-eighties, “Thirteen Views of Santa Barbara” (1989, included in Collected Poems, 1997), about “civic order and the natural environment in Southern California.”

At its best, poetry, like music, is a species of mathematics. What is prosody but respectful attention paid to the music of numbers? William James, of all people, in an 1879 lecture observed, “The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.” And an acute description of the poetic practice of Edgar Bowers: “witness to the truth.” In “Numbers,” from the sequence titled “Mazes” in Collected Poems, Bowers writes:

“Though the order of real numbers seem enough

For astronauts, as it seemed once for him

Who, from an apple’s sudden fall, inferred

A universe at poise; though business men,

Through all the sums from nine to zero, add

And multiply their hopes and fears; and though
Musicians, when they play duets and trios,
Be satisfied with their Pythagoras,
Each of them, should he contemplate desire,
Its spins and its velocities, its racy
Particles and unlinear lines, will need
Imaginary numbers.”

`Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-Doux'

2012-01-21T00:01:00.000-08:00

I thanked Mike Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti for posting “A Greek Botanical Catalogue.” In return I sent him Yvor Winters’ “Time and the Garden,” which includes catalogues of fruit-bearing plants and seventeenth-century English poets, and told Mike, “I’m a sucker for lists.” He replied:

“I don't know much about the origins of writing, but weren't some of mankind's earliest writings lists and inventories? Lists, possibly the earliest literary genre. The second book of the Iliad is one big list. Whitman is of course the great poetic list-maker.”

The appeal of lists or catalogs is the impression they give of bounty and comprehensiveness, whether serious or comic. A list can be grand, as when Homer dutifully names the twenty-nine Achaean contingents, their geographic origins and forty-six captains, and tallies 1,186 ships. The effect can also be boastful and inadvertently comic, as in “Song of Myself,” which frequently threatens to turn into a blowhard's catalogue of catalogues. In “Jubilate Agno,” Christopher Smart wrote virtually nothing but lists, including the sublimely moving section called “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.”

A list can be brief, musical and deftly somber, as in Edgar Bowers’ “The Mountain Cemetery”:

“The enormous, sundry platitude of death
Is for these bones, bees, trees, and leaves the same.”

The effect can be comic, as in the final lines of Swift’s “Description of a Shower”:

“Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood.”

In The Dunciad, another tour de force of cataloguing (the practice seems suited to satire), Pope gives us a list of competitive theatrical effects, designed to bring in the crowds:

“Gods, imps, and monsters, music, rage, and mirth,
A fire, a jig, a battle, and a ball,
Till one wide Conflagration swallows all."

And, of course, Belinda’s mock-epic toilet in “The Rape of the Lock”:

“The Tortoise here and Elephant unite,
Transform'd to Combs, the speckled and the white.
Here Files of Pins extend their shining Rows,
Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux.”

As this catalogue of poetic catalogues swells to dangerous proportions, let’s return to Mike Gilleland who asks in his email: “On lists, have you read Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists? I haven't, although it's on my `list’ of books to read.”

Mine, too, Mike, thanks to you.

`Ciphering Out How the Grass Grew'

2012-01-20T00:01:00.000-08:00

While writing about the usefulness of pocket knives, Gene Logsdon at The Contrary Farmer recalls a favorite pastime:

“As boys, we used our knives mainly to play a game we called `mumblety-peg.’ (I have a hard time believing this, but Merriam-Webster says the first known use of that word, mumblety-peg, was in 1647, and that it first referred to what the loser in the game had to do— pull a peg out of the ground with his or her teeth.)”

In Cleveland we knew the game as “mumbley-peg,” one of thirty-seven variant spellings recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary. Rules vary. We played by balancing the point on the tip of the index finger and flipping the knife so it stuck in the ground, sometimes aiming at a circle scratched in the dirt. Skill was required but the real attraction was the potential for injury to self and others. The romantic allure of knives is strong among boys, and owning one confers a heady sense of adultness. I keep a Swiss Army knife in the glove compartment.

The OED entry is a veritable encyclopedia of cutlery folklore. The word derives from an archaic usage of “mumble,” “to bite or chew with toothless gums,” confirming the derivation Logsdon cites. The Dictionary specifies that the loser is “required to draw out of the ground with the teeth a peg which has been driven in with a certain number of blows with the handle of the knife.” As boys, we bypassed etymology and imposed no such penalty, though Iona and Peter Opie describe it in Children’s Games in Street and Playground (1969):

“In former times it was the victor’s privilege to drive a peg into the ground with as many blows of his knife-handle as the loser required additional throws to complete the game; and the vanquished, by way of penance, had to pull the peg out of the ground with his teeth.”

Children live by ritual and an Old Testament sense of justice. The detail of matching pounds to the peg to the number of fumbles sounds right, though we never played it that way. It reminds me of a passage in Thoreau’s journal from late summer 1850 that may refer indirectly to mumblety-peg:

“There was a cross-eyed fellow used to help me survey,--he was my stake-driver,--and all he said was, at every stake he drove, `There, I should n’t like to undertake to pull that up with my teeth.’”

Characteristically, Thoreau follows up with this: “It sticks in my crop. That’s a good phrase. Many things stick there.”

The OED gives ten citations for “mumblety-peg” dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, including one from “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” a humorous piece Mark Twain published in 1870 in The Galaxy magazine: “If anybody caught him playing ‘mumble-peg’ by himself, after the age of sixty, he would immediately appear to be ciphering out how the grass grew.”

Sinclair Lewis used it in Main Street (1920): “While you're playing mumblety-peg with Mrs. Lym Cass, Pete and me will be rambling across Dakota.”

On my own I discovered that Charles Courtney Curran (1861-1942), whose customary subject was diaphanous ladies, painted “Mumblety Peg” in 1885. Eleven years later, Twain published Tom Sawyer, Detective, in which he mentions the game in the first paragraph:

“The frost was working out of the ground, and out of the air, too, and it was getting closer and closer onto barefoot time every day; and next it would be marble time, and next mumbletypeg, and next tops and hoops, and next kites, and then right away it would be summer and going in a-swimming.”

I enjoy seeing the continuity of the game across centuries, appealing as it does to primal boyish instincts. Some scholars see a game of mumblety-peg between two boys in the lower right corner of Peter Bruegel the Elder’s Children’s Games (1560). The guy on the left clearly holds a knife pirate-style between his teeth, and the one on the right seems to be protesting. Either they’re playing the game or about to rumble. The way we played as kids, it was sometimes difficult to tell the difference.

`The Something That You Say'

2012-01-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Not a poet in America today could match Virgil. Few, if any, of us historians could write with the flair and judgment of a Tacitus. But how would we know that — or care — if we did not read?”

We wouldn’t, of course, and do not. Reading ought to humble us, not swell us with self-satisfaction. “Reading is not a means of self-affirmation, but of self-denial.” We, readers and writers alike, are neither novel nor unprecedented: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” Of course, we would have to read to know that thought, and to know it’s so. Seldom do the unread read themselves well, though having read much is no guarantee of self-knowledge.

“Regress — material, intellectual, and moral — can be as common as progress, if each new generation proves a poor custodian of the laws, behavior, knowledge, and learning inherited from those now gone.”

On the day I read Victor Davis Hanson’s sober elegy, Clive Wilmer’s New and Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012) arrived in the mail. He titles a brief poem “To George Herbert”:

“Time and again I turn to you, to poems
In which you turn from vanity to God
Time and again, as I at the line’s turn
Turn through the blank space that modulates –
And so resolves – the something that you say.”

Wilmer’s placement of “the line’s turn” is witty and humble, as is “turn / Turn,” in which some of us hear another wayward allusion to Ecclesiastes. The word “conversation” has lately been debased, turned into a feel-good token, but Wilmer, like any good writer, carries on a conversation with the good writers who preceded him. “The something that you say”: All is vanity, not excluding pretensions to originality.

“Nothing that we experience has not happened before; the truly ignorant miss that, hypnotized by sophisticated technology into believing that human nature has been reinvented in their own image.”

Wilmer titles another recent poem “Shakespeare” (“In Memoriam: E.E.I.”):

“I must have been just eight – it was 1953 –
When in some parlour of my mind he pulled a chair out
Like a book from a packed shelf, then sat down and got going.
Fifty-eight years have passed and he hasn’t finished talking
Nor I listening. My father was already dead,
My mother’s now been dead for thirty years. Who else
Have I got to know like him, learnt more from, loved more freely?”

Oliver Hardy, Father and Son

2012-01-18T00:01:00.000-08:00

On this date in 1892, Oliver Hardy, né Norvell Hardy, was born in Harlem, Ga. In 1910, age eighteen, he moved to Milledgeville, Ga., later the home of Flannery O’Connor. In 1952, on Hardy’s sixtieth birthday, another ample-figured comic actor, Curly Howard, né Jerome Lester “Jerry” Horwitz, died of a stroke in Los Angeles. Hardy died five years later, on Aug. 7, 1957.

Hardy’s father, Sgt. Oliver Hardy, enlisted at age nineteen in the 16th Georgia Infantry, took part in sixteen engagements and was wounded at the Battle of Antietam, on Sept. 17, 1862, the single bloodiest day in American military history. More than 23,000 men were killed, wounded or went missing.

Among the more conventionally rousing poems Melville included in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) is “The Victor of Antietam,” a celebration of Gen. George B. McClellan: “The one-armed lift the wine to you, McClellan, / And great Antietam's cheers renew.” President Lincoln was less enthusiastic. He issued his Emancipation Proclamation five days after the battle, and six weeks later removed McClellan, an emancipation opponent, from his command.

Sgt. Oliver Hardy died three days before Thanksgiving in 1892, ten months after the birth of his son, the future partner of Stan Laurel. History is a small, often intimate place.

`Read the Book of Scattered Lives'

2012-01-17T06:01:00.000-08:00

Scouting for likely neighborhoods Monday morning, south and west of downtown Houston, I noticed a ranch-style house with two live oaks in front and the most orderly looking yard sale I’ve ever seen extending from the garage, down the driveway to the street. It looked like an outdoor Sears Roebuck, with chrome-covered racks of men’s and women’s clothing arranged on hangers by type of apparel, neat rows of shoes and a dining room table polished to a gloss with six chairs, centerpiece and candles. A price tag hung from each item. I parked, wondering if I should wipe my shoes before entering, and remembered Tom Disch’s “Garage Sale” (Dark Verses & Light, 1991):

“Once someone thought he’d want to read this book,
And here’s a chess set minus just one rook;
A Sunbeam toaster sans its cord; the Life
Of Who’s-It by his unforgiving wife.
Como singing `Dance, Ballerina, Dance’;
The buttons off a hundred shirts and pants;
A rug unfaded where a bed has been
With traffic patterns marked in olive green.
There are few takers, though the prices cry,
`Remember, stranger, someday you must die.’”

A wooden chess set was set up on a board on a butcher-block table in the garage – all four rooks present – and beside it sat an old man in chinos, short-sleeve Madras shirt buttoned to the throat, sleeveless sweater and pristine running shoes. His regimental mustache was white and neatly trimmed and his white hair stood up almost straight. He didn’t smile. But for the gold-rim glasses, he looked like Dashiell Hammett, tall and cool. “Morning,” he said, nodding carefully.

I moved across the spotless garage floor to a card table of books, mostly paperback thrillers arranged by size and held up with bookends. Both hard covers were Modern Library – the unlikely hybrid of Donne and Blake (a “Giant” I owned as a kid), and The Poetry of E.A. Robinson (1999), edited by Robert Mezey. “My wife’s,” said the old man as I looked at them. “She reads poetry?” I asked. “Never understood it myself,” he said, and paused before adding, “She’s gone now.” He had priced the books at one dollar each. I only wanted the Robinson but gave him two dollars and took both volumes.

The Blake/Donne is scuffed but intact. The Robinson is as pristine as the old man’s shoes except for four lines in “Calverly’s” underlined in pencil on page 59:

“No fame delays oblivion
For them, but something yet survives:
A record written fair, could we
But read the book of scattered lives.”

`Onto a Small Flat Canvas'

2012-01-16T00:01:00.000-08:00

“I am an elderly man in a straw hat
Who has set himself the task of praising God
For all this welter by setting out my paints
And getting as much truth as can be managed
Onto a small flat canvas.”

“Devotions of a Painter” (The Transparent Man, 1990) is a marvel of blank verse, an undramatic dramatic monologue and an artistic credo by Anthony Hecht. Today, “devotion” most often suggests romantic loyalty, fidelity to a spouse or friend. The word carries religious connotations, as in a prayer or other private act of worship – etymologically, a vow of allegiance. Hecht hints at these meanings and others.

He refers to a statement attributed to John Constable (1776-1837) by C. R. Leslie in Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, Composed Chiefly of His Letters (1843). In reply to “a lady who, looking at an engraving of a house, called it an ugly thing,” the painter said:

“There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, — light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.”

Late in the poem, Hecht piles up images of wealth – “crushed jewel,” “oily golds,” “immense loose change,” “moldering gold,” culminating in “corrupted treasures” in the final lines:

“I am enamored of the pale chalk dust
Of the moth’s wing, and the dark moldering gold
Of rust, the corrupted treasures of this world.
Against the Gospel let my brush declare:
“`These are the anaglyphs and gleams of love.’”

Hecht reverses, without blasphemy, Matthew 6:19-20: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.”

The artist – painter, poet – transmutes the ugly and transitory into something beautiful and lasting. An anaglyph is a stereoscopic photograph in contrasting colors. When viewed through corresponding filters, it creates the impression of a three-dimensional image:

“…getting as much truth as can be managed
Onto a small flat canvas.”

Hecht was born on this date in 1923 and died Oct. 20, 2004.

`Eternity Is Here'

2012-01-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos by John Shade is a literary novelty with serious intent, a treat for seasoned readers of Nabokov’s novel. Gingko Press of Berkeley has extracted the 999-line poem by the fictional John Shade, printed it in chapbook format with facsimiles of the index cards on which Shade (like his creator) composed his poem, and a booklet with essays by Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd and poet R.S.Gwynn. All of this is handsomely boxed and illustrated by Jean Holabird, who conceived the project. Earlier, Holabird created Vladimir Nabokov — Alphabet in Color, a visual realization of the novelist’s much-celebrated synesthesia.

Beyond its novelty appeal, the project’s serious intent is its defense of “Pale Fire” as a poem and Shade/Nabokov as a poet. Boyd writes in his essay: “We have not paid Shade and his poem the respect, the care in reading, they deserve.” When I first read Pale Fire in high school more than forty years ago, the critical consensus seemed to be that the poem was little more than doggerel, a pretext on which to hang Charles Kinbote’s mad reading. I was confused because I liked the poem, starting with its instantly memorable opening couplets:

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.”

I was also moved by the sad story of Hazel Shade, the poet’s daughter, and even then I could hear echoes, admiring or parodic, of Pope, Eliot and Frost. For me, a teenager drunk on literature, the poem and surrounding apparatus seemed like great fun. In his essay “`And if my private universe scans right’: `Pale Fire’ and Its Creative Context,” Gwynn considers the unpromising state of American poetry half a century ago when Nabokov published his novel – the confessional school, Beats, and so forth. Gwynn writes:

“Nabokov was a spirited observer of and sometime combatant in various literary skirmishes, and I contend that `Pale Fire’ represents a counterpoise between the academic orthodoxy of Eliot and the assault of the poetic barbarians who Nabokov doubtless felt were at the gates. Its full stature as a poem of its times has not, I feel, been appreciated, for it has often been seen by critics as merely another Nabokovian conceit, a literary `excuse’ for Kinbote’s fantastic commentary.”

Gwynn goes on to make an intriguing suggestion: Nabokov may have modeled Shade, at least in part, on the poet-critic-teacher Yvor Winters. The novelist and his wife Véra met Winters and his wife, the poet and novelist Janet Lewis, in 1941 (the year Lewis published her finest novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre). Nabokov had come to teach Russian literature and creative writing at Stanford University, where Winters had arrived as a graduate student in 1927 and would remain as a professor until his retirement almost forty years later. Gwynn describes their “cordial social relations,” and suggests why they may have remained friends:

“…they were both fluently multi-lingual, both somewhat displaced in their respective academic departments, both politically liberal but aesthetically conservative, and both firmly married to lifelong partners. Both also wrote important treatises on English prosody. Like Nabokov, Winters made statements about his contemporaries that were sometimes brutally candid, and he did not hesitate to refer to the shortcomings of fellow writers with whom he was personally friendly, among them Hart Crane, Allen Tate, and Malcolm Cowley.”

Gwynn devotes three pages to his conjecture, judging Winters “a plausible choice” as a model for Shade: “The most striking confluence between the real poet and fictional one is to be found in their scholarship and use of meter and form.” Winters, he notes, became “a serious metricist who worked in the couplet, quatrain, and sonnet until the end of his career. The heroic couplet became his form of choice, and some of his best poems employ it.”

Gwynn quotes lines from a poem Winters composed around 1930, “The Marriage,” and cites others. In one of the last poems Winters ever wrote, “A Song in Passing,” dating from the early nineteen-fifties, I hear echoes of the themes Shade/Nabokov will weave into “Pale Fire” a decade later:

“Where am I now? And what
Am I to say portends?
Death is but death, and not
The most obtuse of ends.

“No matter how one leans
One yet fears not to know.
God knows what all this means!
The mortal mind is slow.

“Eternity is here.
There is no other place.
The only thing I fear
Is the Almighty Face.”

It's a comfort to think of two literary masters of the last century becoming friends, and remaining so in the fictional realm. Gwynn concludes:

"It is easy to see why Nabokov may have found [Winters] compatible both socially and aesthetically, and I have little doubt that some elements of John Shade's life and biography honor the memory of this encounter of like minds."

`Wild Civility'

2012-01-14T00:01:00.000-08:00

Clive James covers much ground in a small space in “Technique’s Marginal Centrality,” and surely that’s part of his message – deft, understated mastery earned through discipline. James combines a serious theme, nicely condensed in his title, with casually broad learning, sharp wit (the Yoko Ono crack is priceless) and anecdotal ease, deploying a remarkable range of reference from Hokusai to Herrick:

“…the general assumption that beginning poets had to put in their time with technical training, like musicians learning their scales, is everywhere regarded as out of date. This near-consensus is wrong, in my view, but you can see why it prevails. And it does have one big advantage. Though a poet who can’t count stresses and syllables might write mediocre poetry, there is a certain kind of bad poetry that he won’t write.”

That James’ essay shares space in the January issue of Poetry with precisely the sort of bland, prosy, under-crafted or non-crafted poems he indicts (excluding some by David Ferry and A.E. Stallings) is an irony sweet to savor. Writing verse is rapidly becoming a lost art, like making a dovetail joint or a good meatloaf. Earlier this week, at a site devoted to the art of gnomonics – making sundials – I found a fitting passage from an essay written in 1940 by Hilaire Belloc:

“Civilization loses its treasures by an unconscious process. It has lost them before it has appreciated that they were in the way of being lost; and when I say 'its treasures' I mean the special discoveries and crafts of mankind."

Surely that includes poetry, though not all the loss is unconscious. Many are forthright about writing, reading and admiring bad poetry. Because the stuff is so easy and slipshod, non-poets crank it out like sausage. James notes the “clear division between poets who are hoping to achieve something by keeping technical considerations out of it, and other poets who want to keep technique out of it because they don’t have any.” Writing poetry is the most difficult task I have ever undertaken, and I stopped trying long ago. I don’t have the chops. I learned only enough technique to “count stresses and syllables,” never enough to conceal it.

James makes an acute point when he notes that Pope gets credit for perfecting couplets, though Herrick “invent[ed] the possibilities.” In the final lines of “Delight in Disorder,” Herrick writes:

“A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.”

Like most apprentice poets, many of whom never retire, I couldn’t achieve that note of “wild civility.”

`Memorability and Concision'

2012-01-13T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Phillips, whose touch harmonious could remove
The pangs of guilty pow'r, and hapless love,
Rest here distress'd by poverty no more,
Find here that calm, thou gav'st so oft before.
Sleep, undisturb'd, within this peaceful shrine,
Till angels wake thee, with a note like thine.”

In his welcome appreciation of Samuel Johnson the poet, Clive Wilmer praises the seldom-anthologized “An Epitaph on Claudy Phillips, a Musician” as a “moving tribute.” In his biography of Johnson, David Nokes identifies Phillips as a Welsh violinist. The never-wealthy poet wishes for the impecunious musician, Nokes says, “a glimpse of posthumous bliss after which both must, if only occasionally, have dreamt.” Johnson’s virtues as a man – compassion, clear-sightedness, outrage at injustice – double as writerly virtues. The elegy and epitaph, poetic tributes and memorials, came as natural impulses to Johnson. Nokes writes:

“As he entered his fourth decade his prospects seemed distinctly gloomy. The men he had cherished for their enlivening wit were either dead like Ford or gone like Savage, and what memorials would ever record them? In the [Gentleman’s] Magazine he turned to epitaphs, which became a favorite subject for him since `every man may expect to be recorded in an epitaph.’ The pyramids of Egypt were epitaphs. Erected by the pharaohs in attempts to preserve their own memory; but `the best subject for epitaphs is private virtue…exerted in the same circumstances in which the bulk of mankind are placed.’ In that conviction he thought not only of the epitaphs of famous men, like Newton, but of Claudy Phillips and even Epictetus, a beggar, cripple, and a slave, remembered as `the favourite of heaven.”

Remembering the praiseworthy dead is among the obligations of the living. Contrasting Johnson’s style with that of Pope’s, Wilmer writes:

“Where Pope is waspish, mordant and suavely elegant, Johnson is grave, compassionate and severe. His poetic style has the same sturdy eloquence as his prose and has been praised for observing the prose virtues, though this should not blind us to his poetic qualities, above all memorability and concision.”

Wilmer includes several of Johnson’s poems and excerpts from others. Go here for the complete text of “London: A Poem,” and here for “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” his masterpieces as a poet.

`I Love the Music Fine'

2012-01-12T00:01:00.000-08:00

Dave Lull sent me a link to “Pickin’ and Trimmin’,” a video by Matt Morris about a barbershop in Drexel, N.C., where musicians gather in the back room to play blue grass and old fiddle tunes. The barber, Lawrence Anthony, has been cutting hair for sixty years. Of the musicians he says “These fellas are independent,” and one of the players says: “I love the music fine. It’s my friend.”

The confluence of haircutting and music making is not without precedent. In 1866, Thomas Hicks (1824-1890) painted The Musicale, Barber Shop, Trenton Falls, New York, now in the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. The painting appeared on the cover of a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, accompanied by a brief article about Hicks by Dr. Thomas B. Cole.

Hicks was the younger cousin of Edward Hicks, the Quaker painter best known for The Peaceable Kingdom (1826). This portrait of harmony in creation is almost a visual transcription of Isaiah 11:6-8:

“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,
The leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
The calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze;
Their young ones shall lie down together;
And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play by the cobra’s hole,
And the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den.”

All three works, with allowances made for historical and artistic change – Morris’ video and the paintings by the Hickses – might be titled The Peaceable Kingdom. Fred Chappell was born in Canton, N.C., not far from Drexel, and served for five years as the Poet Laureate of North Carolina. In Midquest (1981), his masterwork of homecoming and harmony, Chappell includes “The Peaceable Kingdom of Emerald Windows,” in which he imagines spending eternity with Gilbert White, William Bartram, Colette and “rare Ben Franklin.” In the poem, a boy cutting hay says:

“Barn is home. Home is heaven.”

[Drexel is about fifty miles south of Deep Gap, the home of flatpicking guitarist Doc Watson.]

`Etymological Opaqueness'

2012-01-11T00:01:00.000-08:00

I met a friend for lunch who, when I arrived, was reading her new ebook. I’d never seen one before and asked if I could hold it to get a sense of its heft. She’s an Orthodox Christian and her book has internet access, so she was reading the Dynamic Horologion and Psalter – a guide to the Daily Offices and other devotional services of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The word was new to me but I worked a fast etymology and guessed that horologion is from the Greek and means “Book of Hours.”

After lunch I checked the Oxford English Dictionary and confirmed my hunch. The dictionary leaves out horologion (my spell-check software also doesn’t recognize it) but includes more than a dozen etymologically related words with multiple meanings, such as horology, “the art or science of measuring time,” and horologic, a word I learned as a kid in connection with morning glories: “Of a flower: Opening and closing at certain hours.”

In my book bag was a volume I had just taken from the campus library: An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) by Anatoly Liberman. Among other things, words are tools. When I use a tool – say, a belt sander -- I like to know how to use it properly, so no one gets hurt. More to the point, I enjoy knowing some of the history packed into words, what Emerson called their “fossil poetry.” That makes etymology a branch of paleontology, or better, archeology, a sifting through strata. Each word echoes with many words, and a good writer learns to orchestrate the echoes, though even experts don’t hear all of them. Liberman writes in the introduction to his dictionary, which traces the origins of fifty-five words across 360 pages:

“The common denominator of all fifty-five words is their etymological opaqueness. The solutions offered here are, of necessity, controversial. If the history of bird, cockney, slang, and the rest were less troublesome, their etymology would have been discovered and accepted long ago.”

Liberman devotes almost five double-column pages to so mundane a word as bird, proving it’s not mundane after all (fuck, incidentally, merits ten pages). When looked at with such intensity, words we use casually, even carelessly, come to resemble densely packed stars of meaning. On Monday, Nige devoted a post to the 101st birthday of Gypsy Rose Lee and used another word new to me – espieglerie. As he puts it: “What charm, what finesse, what espieglerie - what a dame!”

The OED gives us “Frolicsomeness, roguishness,” and cites an 1816 usage by Sir Walter Scott: “A pretty young woman with an air of espieglerie which became her very well.” The other usage dates from 1852, when Francis Edward Smedley writes: “Which act of un-English-woman-like espiéglerie must be set down to the score of a foreign education.” Both refer to women, the first with approval, the second with xenophobic distaste.

The root is French, espiéglerie: “mischievousness, impishness, roguishness; piece of mischief, prank.” But the French is borrowed from the name of the trickster figure in German folklore, Till Eulenspiegel, the source of Strauss’ tone poem. In Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610), Till makes his first appearance in English literature as “Howelglas” – that is, owl glass or, roughly, Eulenspiegel.

`The Lightning Teased Again'

2012-01-10T00:01:00.000-08:00

I got water in my shoes on Monday while navigating a flooded street on the way to the library, not a problem I’ve had since returning to Houston. I squeaked my way through the shelves. Back in the office I wrung out my socks, draped them over the back of a chair and stuffed my shoes with paper towels. I haven’t worked barefoot in years.

Texas had its driest year on record in 2011. The statewide average rainfall was 14.88 inches. Across the last century, Texas averaged 27.92 inches of rain per year. On Saturday I drove past a small city park that until several months ago was a dense grove of loblolly pines. The drought killed them and the city cut them down. Now it’s as flat and bare as a parking lot.

We woke to lightning and distant thunder Monday morning, but we’ve been teased so often I ignored the fuss. I was already on campus when rain started falling in earnest. Winds pushed it through the cloistered walkways between buildings, and through my window I could see it moving horizontally. Some areas got 4.5 inches of rain in a few hours. Soon, each tree stood in a puddle like a fancy swizzle stick in a big cocktail. Birds and squirrels disappeared. Grass turned green again and I could smell the earth.

Over the weekend I learned of the death of Marion Montgomery at the age of eighty-six in November. He was a poet, novelist and critic who taught at the University of Georgia for more than thirty years. He was a man of the South, a traditionalist and a serious Roman Catholic. Last year I read his two-volume work about his friend Flannery O’Connor, Hillbilly Thomist (McFarland & Co., 2006). Here is the title poem in his first collection, Dry Lightning (University of Nebraska Press, 1960):

“`If…if it don’t rain soon,’ he said
And kicked his foot in the dust to finish out the threat.
The grey puffs settled on his shoes,
Cracked like the bottom where corn sagged

“`If it don’t rain soon…’
A hot breeze rustled in the field,
On beyond the line of hills dry lightning raised a noncommittal glow.
`If it don’t rain…’
The lightning teased again.”

[Go here to read an interview with Montgomery.]

The Other Coleridge

2012-01-09T11:01:00.000-08:00

The daughter of one famous writer, Anne Fadiman, writes about the son of another, Hartley Coleridge, in “The Oakling and the Oak.” Read his “To a Cat,” which concludes:

“The world would just the same go round
If I were hang'd and thou wert drown'd;
There is one difference, 'tis true, --
Thou dost not know it, and I do.”

`They Are There Again'

2012-01-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

Hard-headed Yankee pragmatism. It’s the sort of thing Robert Frost might have said, and probably did, though Thoreau said it first, in his journal entry for Nov. 11, 1850, where it stands alone, a self-contained paragraph without thematic context. Annotators suggest it might refer to an 1849 dairyman's strike in parts of New England, when milk was suspected of being watered down. I file it on the common-sense shelf with Dr. Johnson’s refutation of Bishop Berkeley.

I thought of Thoreau’s one-liner when reading Richard Wilbur’s “Hamlen Brook.” The speaker prepares to drink from the stream when he sees “A startled inchling trout / Of spotted near-transparency.” The fish flits among stones and fallen leaves. Dragonflies skim the surface. He sees reflections of clouds and birches on the water. He never takes that drink but asks: “How shall I drink all this?” and answers with the final stanza:

“Joy’s trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.”

Here, Wilbur reads the poem and comments: “So many things are perceptible at once.” Creation’s supply is bottomless. The joy-minded – the attentive and grateful – are “dumbstruck” with nature’s bounty. Thoreau’s trout is the end of something; Wilbur’s, only the beginning. Late in 1816, recently turned twenty-one, Keats completed an untitled poem known by its first line, “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill.” Leigh Hunt reports the poem was “suggested by a delightful summer-day, as [Keats] stood beside the gate that leads from the Battery on Hampstead Heath into a field of Caen Wood.” Keats’ celebration of nature’s profligacy reads like a young man’s word-drunk precursor to Wilbur’s poem:

“…swarms of minnows show their little heads,
Staying their wavy bodies 'gainst the streams,
To taste the luxury of sunny beams
Temper'd with coolness. How they ever wrestle
With their own sweet delight, and ever nestle
Their silver bellies on the pebbly sand.
If you but scantily hold out the hand,
That very instant not one will remain;
But turn your eye, and they are there again.”

`Both Screen and Gateway'

2012-01-08T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Each of her pieces is both an assemblage of brightly colored bits and a naturalistic rendering of the world around us. Is the truth to be found in the fragments or the whole, the materials or the narrative content, the ancient religious and cultural subjects she draws upon or the familiar intimacy of the contemporary men and women she portrays?”

Both, of course, and all. Mary McCleary’s work eludes reductive commentary. Though often dense with text, her collages don’t come with annotations. Even her titles tease. Getting her allusions doesn’t ensure you get her. Viewing the works of some artists once exhausts them, like knock-knock jokes, the sort kids love.

I saw an exhibit of her collages in October (see here and here), and felt anxious about the time. I wanted to linger with each before moving on to the next, but didn’t have all day. I tried to stifle the urge to interpret and pigeonhole, knowing such impulses are defensive, intended to defang what disturbs. I sensed McCleary’s collages judging me, weighing my prideful pretensions, the way I felt more than forty years ago when a high-school English teacher loaned me her college anthology of short stories. That’s how I first encountered Flannery O’Connor – “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

The passage quoted above is from Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age (ISI Books, 2011) by Gregory Wolfe, who devotes a chapter to McCleary, as he does to Geoffrey Hill, Evelyn Waugh and Marion Montgomery, among others – prestigious company. Wolfe notes the frequency with which McCleary applies toy eyes to the surfaces of her collages. The eyes, he writes,

“intimate that there may be an unseen presence—an order of grace and truth—hidden in the very fabric of being. Those eyes may be interpreted as full of judgment, especially when the subject of the painting is sin and folly, but they can also be interpreted as symbolic of an ordered love that transcends our fallen world and encompasses it. The grid [of eyes] is both screen and gateway.”

As Wolfe notes, McCleary’s collages are neither didactic nor preachy. They embody what O’Connor called “the moral sense and the dramatic sense.” They tell engaging stories, usually in media res, and provoke laughter. McCleary is very funny, as is O’Connor. And like another Catholic writer, she revels in paradox, defined by Chesterton as “truth standing on its head to gain attention.”

`A Curious Remedy for Present Cares'

2012-01-07T00:01:00.000-08:00

“I cannot profess to be a genuine collector of books, I know nothing of positive bibliography; small books, I call octavos, and large ones quartos. Folios I seldom carry home, out of a growing sympathy with my weary body. But so far as my preferences in size and weight are satisfied, I am a willing rescuer of books.”

This is Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) in his essay “Bringing Them Home” (The Mind’s Eye, 1934), writing in a tone of disingenuously attractive modesty. In his biography of the poet, Barry Webb devotes a chapter to “Book Collecting,” and says Blunden “was never without the company of books.” Webb reports he “sought solace” in Charles Lamb and Paul Verlaine in the trenches during the Great War. He was a bibliophile and reader, identities that don’t always overlap, never a book-snob. Nor was he greedy. He routinely shipped review copies to a Japanese friend and culled unwanted volumes from his collection. Book rescue was a critically altruistic impulse in Blunden, who was instrumental in restoring or maintaining the critical reputations of William Collins, Lamb, John Clare and others. Webb writes:

“He collected for two reasons: to build up a `working’ library and to rescue volumes he felt others would ignore. He believed that an adequate library of English literature could be established without paying more than sixpence a volume in 1920 – a price he allowed to increase to two shillings and sixpence in 1930 and ten shillings in 1950 – and by this means he created a library of 10,000 volumes by 1965.”

I’ve known collectors who never part with books, regardless of their literary value. Theirs is a warehouse aesthetic. The volume of their volumes is a source of pride, and any dreck will do if it fills out the shelves. Hoarders are not collectors. The largest personal library I’ve ever seen was also the most comprehensive, tastefully selected and well-used. It was, in Blunden’s sense, a “working library,” not a vanity project to impress visitors. From the owner I borrowed and came to value books by Tacitus, Thomas Traherne, Madison Jones, Sergey Aksakov, Nikolai Leskov, Thomas Kinsella, Konstantin Paustovsky, Sherwood Anderson, V.S. Pritchett and Edward Dahlberg.

Webb dutifully logs the contents of Blunden’s “working library” – 39 Chaucer volumes, 200 Shakespeare, 50 Milton, 40 Dryden, 70 Pope, 75 Swift, 90 Johnson, 150 Coleridge, and so on. Also, the “`rescued’ minor poets,” hardly known by modern readers – eight editions of Charles Churchill, seventeen of Samuel Rogers, twenty-eight of Christopher Smart, twenty-five of William Collins, ten of Francis Quarles, eighteen of William Barnes, twenty of Edward Young.

Blunden also collected books for their bindings and typography – an admiration I share, though I don’t think I’ve ever purchased a volume solely for its design. He acquired Lamb’s Milton and Byron’s copy of The Rolliad, copiously annotated most of his books (in pencil), and left inscriptions in books owned by other people, often without telling them. His existence, in short, was thoroughly bookish – not a bad thing in a man so gentle and good-natured. His friend, the formidably well-read Rupert Hart Davis, called Blunden “the most accomplished book-hunter I have ever known.” To his credit, Blunden was not a packrat or dilettante, but read and reread what he collected. In “Bringing Them Home” he writes:

“The resourcefulness of those who have made books through the centuries often makes me forget the serious business of reading, and a book comes home simply because it took my eye in some way. Later on, I endeavour to square accounts by examining the author’s share, and in this way I have made the acquaintance of far too many hands.”

Blunden’s personal library remains intact at Ohio University. This is his poem “In a Library” (Choice or Chance, 1934):

“A curious remedy for present cares,
And yet as near a good one as I know;
It is to scan the cares of long ago,
Which these brown bindings lodge.
In black print glares
The Elizabethan preacher, heaping shame
On that ubiquitous gay hell, the stage;
And here’s another full of scriptural rage
Against high Rome. Fie, parson, be more tame.
This critic gnashes his laborious teeth
At that, whose subtlety seems no such matter;
This merchant bodes our economic death,
The envoy hastens with his hard-won chatter;
Age hacks at youth, youth paints the old town red—
And in the margin Doomsday rears his head.”

`The Glance, the Pause, the Guess'

2012-01-06T00:01:00.000-08:00

To be emotionally moved by a poem, especially one written as late as 1937, comes as a happy and wistful surprise. We’ve grown accustomed to flat affect or hysteria in poetry, two sides of one dull coin, and hardly recognize the quiet emotional power once expected of first-rate verse. Here is “Lonely Love,” one of four poems by Edmund Blunden chosen by Philip Larkin for inclusion in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse (1973):

“I love to see those loving and beloved
Whom Nature seems to have spited; unattractive,
Unnoticeable people, whose dry track
No honey-drop of praise, or understanding,
Or bare acknowledgement that they existed,
Perhaps yet moistened. Still, they make their world.”

“She with her arm in his—O Fate, be kind,
Though late, be kind; let her have never cause
To live outside her dream, nor unadore
This underling in body, mind and type,
Nor part from him what makes her dwarfish form
Take grace and fortune, envy’s antitone.

“I saw where through the plain a river and road
Ran quietly, and asked no more event
Than sun and rain and wind, and night and day,
Two walking—from what cruel show escaped?
Deformity, defect of mind their portion.
But I forget the rest of that free day of mine,
And in what flowerful coils, what airy music
It led me here and on; these two I see
Who, loving, walking slowly, saw me not,
But shared with me the strangest happiness.”

Probably nothing is so difficult to write about well, with delicacy and precision, as human disability, a subject irresistible to lazy, sentimental writers. The devastating line in Blunden’s poem of muted devastations is “Deformity, defect of mind their portion.” Blunden uses “portion” in its unmodern sense. Today it refers almost invariably to food preparation or diet, as in “portion control.” Blunden’s usage suggests “A person's lot, destiny, or fate,” as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, which cites Milton:

“Such place Eternal Justice has prepared
For those rebellious; here their prison ordained
In utter darkness, and their portion set.”

Blunden writes not of disability but of love and its astonishing persistence. He writes of the couple as subject like the rest of us to Fate, not as genetic victims or medical oddities: “Still, they make their world.” To feel pity and then stop feeling, judging pity to be an obligation fulfilled, is self-congratulatory, costs nothing and can prove devastating (see Stefan Zweig’s 1939 novel Beware of Pity). Blunden takes the next brave, empathetic step and shares in the couple’s “strangest happiness.” In Edmund Blunden: A Biography (1990), Barry Webb quotes the first section of “Lonely Love” and writes:

“Edmund’s distance from the world of modern literature was part of his distrust and fear of the aggressive – either in personality or on the page. His instinct was always to look towards the lyrical, the hidden, the forgotten – an expression of his philosophy of following `the glance, the pause, the guess.’”

`Wondrous in Themselves'

2012-01-05T00:01:00.000-08:00

In his BBC interview Geoffrey Hill reads brief excerpts from Section 26 of his most recent collection, Clavics (Enitharmon Press, 2011). All of its poems are typographically shaped, rather like George Herbert’s “Easter Wings.” Here are the lines Hill reads:

“As to the ant when chance disturbs the State,

Divisions huge, minute, crude, delicate,

Like egg-and-spoon

White grub – rice grain –

She works her reach

With pitch and stretch,

Staithed in that giant crèche.

No metaphor.

The butterflies, high flyers on high winds;

Invisible to us they plane and soar

Beyond our minds’

Troubled conventioning and do not err.”

The ant’s appearance brings to mind those rare, coherent lines in Pound’s “Canto LXXXI”:

“The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry…”

In his Literary Essays, Pound writes, in a passage pertinent to Hill’s late work: “Poetry is a centaur. The thinking word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties.” Clavics is the most willfully difficult of Hill’s books, but the butterflies signal a rare “radiant gist,” to borrow William Carlos Williams’ phrase from Paterson – an illuminated moment in the murk.

Odd to think of butterflies as invisible. We value their colorful flitting and evanescence, and their attraction to comparably brilliant flowers. If butterflies possessed the bulk and solidity of, say, cows, would we still cherish them? They are, with birds, the most visually appealing of animals, and part of the appeal is their diminutive fragility. And yet, for Hill, they move “Beyond our minds’ / Troubled conventioning and do not err.” This echoes my private mythology, composed as a boy lepidopterist: Butterflies represent beauty, delicacy, toughness and mutability. Consider Hill’s ant: “huge, minute, crude, delicate.” I saw a fritillary on campus less than two weeks before Christmas.

Thanks to Nige I’m reading The Butterfly Isles (Granta, 2010), in which Patrick Barkham recounts his lifelong love of the insect and his quest to see all fifty-nine species native to Britain in a single year. In his introduction Barkham writes:

“Wondrous in themselves, for their own will to survive, butterflies are also colourful canvasses for all our projections.”

`Their Flawless Shambles'

2012-01-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

“I allowed my love of the comedians to get into my work.”

This is spoken in a recent BBC interview by Geoffrey Hill, who in The Triumph of Love (1998) lauds Laurel and Hardy for “cutting, pacing, repacing / their flawless shambles.” They are, in other words, fellow craftsmen, like the great poets, with a sense of anarchy rooted in strict form and discipline.

Hill’s reputation among careless readers is for Miltonic solemnity. He is dismissed, when assessed at all, as “a solemn, dry-as-dust intellectual,” as he tells the interviewer, Stephen Smith. He claims to be, rather, “a rip-roaring fantasist.” One senses Hill, who turns eighty in June, is putting on Smith and his interviewer’s tone of self-impressed portentousness. Hill out-condescends Smith by wearing an impish mask, rather like Stan Laurel.

The poet agrees with Smith that future scholars of his work should consider his debt to comedians, including Ken Dodd, an English comic previously unknown to me. Hill says, “I leave a lot of heavy hints, the way a comic will seem to stress the grammatically unimportant word.” As the Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, Hill says with a visage like Father Mapple’s ("in the hardy winter of a healthy old age”), he hopes to perform “one-thousandth as well as Ken Dodd.”

In April 2009, Dodd unveiled a bronze statue of Laurel and Hardy in Ulverston, Cumbria, the birthplace of Arthur Stanley Jefferson, better known as Stan Laurel, and home of the Laurel and Hardy Museum.

[Hill was knighted this week, an honor never granted Stan Laurel.]

`A Little More, Please'

2012-01-03T00:01:00.000-08:00

Waiting for me on my return to Houston:

Cool, dry weather with a promise of frost.

A Hank Williams medley on the radio.

A semi-flat rear tire on the car, laptop and email troubles, sub specie aeternitatis.

The first Spanish I’ve heard in two and a half weeks, spoken at the deli counter in Kroger’s: “Un poco más, por favor.”

Three books in the mail, including a collection of poems for review shipped from England.

A red sunset. Any sun at all, in fact, after seventeen days in the state of Washington, where I did, however, see a double rainbow last week, albeit briefly.

A Christmas card from Helen Pinkerton with a photograph by André Kertész, “Washington Square, Winter” (1954), on the front.

The January issue of First Things, containing a review by Paul Kane of Les Murray’s new collection, Taller When Prone, and a new poem by him, “The Death of Isaac Nathan, 1864,” which starts like this:

“‘Stone statues of ancient waves

tongue like dingoes on shore

in time with wave-glitter on the harbor

but the shake-a-leg chants of the Eora

“are rarely heard there any more

and the white man who drew their nasals

as footprints on five-lined paper

lies flat away up Pitt Street,

“lies askew on gravel Pitt Street.”

`To Keep the Narrative Going Along'

2012-01-02T00:01:00.000-08:00

Back to Houston today after two and a half weeks in the rain. Travel once felt like discovery, something new around every corner. Some of that sense of adventure remains, but travel also means leg cramps and proximity to witless conversation. Departures spell sadness, the glum knowledge that something has concluded and assumed its place in memory, so I always fortify myself with buoyancy wherever I can find it, just as I pack my suitcase. In the car on Saturday I heard Sinatra’s recording of Jerome Kern’s “The Way You Look Tonight,” lyrics by Dorothy Fields:

“Some day, when I'm awfully low,
When the world is cold,
I will feel a glow just thinking of you...
And the way you look tonight.”

This is not world-weary Sinatra, nor Sinatra the swaggering hedonist, but a character more seasoned, more tempered and more like the rest of us. It’s a great recording, superior even to Fred Astaire’s, Billie Holiday’s, Benny Goodman’s and Peggy Lee’s, but for me the song belongs to Erroll Garner, king of buoyancy. This recording dates from 1949.

Garner represents a species of artist nearing dodo-like extinction. Above all, he wants to please listeners, not baffle or intimidate them. His aim is pleasure. He titled a 1956 album The Most Happy Piano. Garner reminds us that jazz is about the joyful, painful and unexpected -- that is, life. Whitney Balliett titled his profile of Garner “Being a Genius,” and while describing the pianist’s appearance, hints at the source of his appeal:

“Garner was short and was shaped like a wedge. He had fullback shoulders and long arms. His hands were rangy and long-fingered and loose. They moved like thieves on the keyboard. He wore his hair patent-leather style, and he had a narrow face and a beaked nose. He looked like a pirate. He had a blue-black beard and a huge brush mustache and heavy lidded eyes. When he played, his music was refracted through his face and body. His body kept time. He gave ecstatic smiles, popped his eyes, made `O’s with his mouth, and peered crazily at his sidemen, his eyes half shut with delight. All the while, he issued a stream of loud basso-profundo rhythmic grunts.”

“Ecstatic.” “Delight.” On Sunday, while preparing for today’s flight and puttering around the house, I listened to Garner, actively listened, not as one plays background music to fill the silence. What Kingsley Amis says of Henry Fielding can justly be said of Garner:

“Apart from his wit, and, I think, attractive though sometimes heavy irony, he seems to be very concerned not to bore the reader, to keep the narrative going along.”

Garner died on this date in 1977 at age fifty-three.

`That It Serves Another's Good'

2012-01-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

Work is solace, even raking leaves, scrubbing the tub or assembling a blog post. Measureable results – leaf-free lawn, white enamel, clean prose – always satisfy. One of the pleasures of journalism is the built-in discipline of working within tight constraints. It’s two-thirty, the editor says: “I need that story, fourteen inches, three-source minimum. By four o’clock.” No excuses, no negotiating, just do it. With time, the good writer becomes his own editor, his own keeper of deadlines, just as a good editor prays for his own obsolescence.

While researching The Life of Kingsley Amis (2006), Zachary Leader discovered an untitled, unpublished poem in the writer's archives. Amis was a workhorse – twenty-five published novels, seven poetry collections and much else in forty-some years. For Leader to express surprise at Amis wishing to “serve another’s good” is ridiculous. Few twentieth-century writers so consistently supplied readers with laughter and bullshit-proof integrity. Here’s the portion of Amis’ poem that impresses me:

“There once was an answer:
Up at the stroke of seven,
A turn round the garden
(Breathing deep and slow),
Then work, never mind what,
How small, provided that
It serves another's good.”

Yes, work is solace, but more importantly it “serves another’s good.” A writer, if gifted and disciplined, educates, edifies, clarifies, angers, challenges and/or amuses. Good writers don’t write in mirror-covered rooms (nor on the public square). In those final lines, Amis suggests in thirteen words what it took Samuel Johnson nineteen to distil definitively:

“The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”

`Many Are Disappointed'

2011-12-31T00:01:00.000-08:00

Four men bicycle across the English countryside. One of them, Harry, has plotted their route to a tavern along an old Roman road. They dream of beer and the youngest, Bert, of women. Ted, the oldest and the only married man, “said all he hoped was that the Romans had left a drop in the bottom of the barrel for posterity.”

The tavern is a tea shop. The hostess, “a frail, drab woman, not much past thirty, in a white blouse that drooped low over her chest,” explains that she doesn’t sell beer. The nearest pub, The Queen’s Arms, is ten miles away in Handleyford, a town the men have already bicycled through. They are disappointed, almost angry, and Ted thinks:

“Ease up, take what you can get. `Queen’s Arms’ – he remembered looking back. The best things are in the past.”

Not the thoughts of a young man. The story is V.S. Pritchett’s “Many Are Disappointed.” In nine pages, the English Chekhov delineates six characters, including the young daughter of the hostess. Almost nothing happens. The title is spoken by the woman:

“`You don’t sell beer,’ said Bert. He looked at the pale-blue-veined chest of the woman.

“`No,’ she said. She hesitated. `Many are disappointed,’ she said, and she spoke like a child reciting a piece without knowing its meaning. He lowered his eyes.”

“The best things are in the past.” “Many are disappointed.” Thoughts appropriate for the bottom of the year. Tonight is Amateur Night, when non-drinkers drink, a difficult night of revelry for many. The lonely grow lonelier. Desolate celebrators will wake with sick heads. A time to beware of the cozy seductiveness of the past and the disappointments we already plot for the future. Charles Lamb, no stranger to disappointment, was certain the best was in the past:

“No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference.”

`To Lay His Axe at the Root'

2011-12-30T00:01:00.000-08:00

To make room for a $11.3-million, three-story parking garage, the public library has cut down two dozen sycamores and tulip trees planted by its landscapers little more than a decade ago. Tulips are among the loveliest trees, particularly when their leaves turn buttery yellow in autumn. Their trunks are models of rectitude and in the spring the blossoms have a citrus-like fragrance. They please every sense except, perhaps, taste.

On this day one-hundred sixty years ago, Thoreau watched the dismantling of a 100-foot pine at the bottom of Fair Haven Hill. Though disapproving of arborcide, even Thoreau is caught up in the drama and suspense of waiting for the giant to fall:

“There now comes up a deafening crash to these rocks, advertising you that even trees do not die without a groan. It rushed to embrace the earth, and mingle its elements with the dust. And now all is still once more and forever, both to eye and ear.”

My wife began reading Walden this week and after the first chapter said, “He’s a little self-centered, isn’t he? It’s all about him.” True enough. More than most writers, Thoreau requires us to learn how to read him properly, an education in which he both assists and hinders. He can be tiresome, especially if read as a philosopher, social commentator or literal autobiographer. He often writes like a Yankee prig. He’s best as a comedian and close observer of the natural world. Had they met him, most of his admirers would quickly have found him insufferable. At his best he’s a pure writer, an almost peerless arranger of words. It’s the self-righteous snottiness that’s most difficult to swallow. Both qualities mingle in the pine passage from his journal:

“A plant which has taken two centuries to perfect, rising by slow stages into the heavens, has this afternoon ceased to exist. Its sapling top had expanded to this January thaw as the forerunner of summers to come. Why does not the village bell sound a knell? I hear no knell tolled. I see no procession of mourners in the streets, or the woodland aisles. The squirrel has leaped to another tree; the hawk has circled further off, and has now settled upon a new eyrie, but the woodman is preparing to lay his axe at the root of that also.”

By noting the absence of mourners, Thoreau is really saying: “Only I, among all the citizens of Concord, am sensitive enough to mourn the passing of a tree.” Adolescent posturing is embarrassing in a man of thirty-four, even in the privacy of his journal.

"What These Can Only Memorize and Mumble'

2011-12-29T00:01:00.000-08:00

My friend in Juba, South Sudan (“the world’s newest nation,” he reminds us), assumed I had read “Grandeur of Ghosts” by Siegfried Sassoon, a poet I know mostly by reputation, not experience. My friend’s taste in poems is reliably good and this one he calls “a keeper.” I read it the same day I learned of someone who compared reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead to “watching paint dry” (a stupid judgment and a cliché, facts not unrelated). Here is “Grandeur of Ghosts”:

“When I have heard small talk about great men
I climb to bed; light my two candles; then
Consider what was said; and put aside
What Such-a-one remarked and Someone-else replied.

“They have spoken lightly of my deathless friends,
(Lamps for my gloom, hands guiding where I stumble,)
Quoting, for shallow conversational ends,
What Shelley shrilled, what Blake once wildly muttered ....

“How can they use such names and be not humble?
I have sat silent; angry at what they uttered.
The dead bequeathed them life; the dead have said
What these can only memorize and mumble.”

The only way to speak of great writers is humbly, with gratitude, which doesn’t mean uncritically. Sassoon proposes not ancestor worship or genuflecting before someone’s canon but good manners, good sense and openness to the notion that we are small people inhabiting a small and rather mediocre backwater in history. We are desperately in need of instruction. Some of our forebears, Sassoon’s “deathless friends,” forgot more than we’ll ever know. To ignore them is discourteous and suicidal.

The cult of the new is self-regarding and delusory, though it forms the unexamined rationale for most bookchat (“small talk about great men”), online and elsewhere. David Myers often suggests a ten-year moratorium on critically examining works of literature. If enforced, a good ninety percent of the bookish blogosphere would evaporate in a yoctosecond, a happy prospect. Look at it common-sensibly: Little written in any era is worth reading. The past is a hell of a lot bigger than the present. Even if we dwelled in a Golden, not Leaden Age, most books worthy of our time would have been written decades or centuries ago. In his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau exhorts us to “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all” (every reader’s most dire anxiety, save blindness).

By the way, all of Shelley and most of Blake are unreadable. And I’m not overly fond of Sassoon.

`Blown Up in a Steam Masheen'

2011-12-28T00:01:00.000-08:00

One could dedicate a life to remembering the dead. Their numbers never dwindle. They remain as we knew them, fixed like photographs. Perhaps remembering them, celebrating some and condemning others, is an apprenticeship, wishful training for our own demise. If I remember the pre-deceased (a delicious obituary word made current since I wrote my first obit more than thirty years ago about a man named Miller, first name forgotten), am I likelier to be remembered? Probably not, but think how much life we already spend behaving in such a way as to ensure our remembrance, ill or fond. No “unvisited tombs” for us.

On Tuesday we remembered Osip Mandelstam and Charles Lamb. Today, it’s Maurice Ravel, Theodore Dreiser, Fletcher Henderson and Sam Peckinpah (death endorses diversity). Lamb wrote to P.G. Patmore (father of the poet Coventry Patmore, you may remember) on July 19, 1827:

“I am so poorly, I have been to a funeral, where I made a Pun, to the consternation of the rest of the mourners, and we had wine. I can’t describe to you the howl which the widow set up at proper intervals. Dash [Lamb's dog] could, for it was not unlike what he makes.”

Lamb, you’ll remember, laughed at Hazlitt’s wedding. He meant no disrespect; or rather, disrespect from Lamb was a compliment. Genealogy says otherwise, but I’ve always suspected an Irish branch in the Lamb family tree. He was on to something with his hybrid of stoicism and comedy as a formula for facing death – and life. Later in his letter, Lamb briefs Patmore on his friends’ conditions:

“Procter has got a wen growing out of the nape of his neck, which his wife wants him to cut off, but I think it rather an agreeable excrescence: like his poetry, rather redundant. Hone has hang’d himself for debt. Godwin was taken up for picking pockets. Moxon has fal’n in love with Emma, our nut-brown maid. Becky takes to bad courses. Her father was blown up in a steam masheen. Coroner found it `Insanity.’”

The only true item in this litany concerns Moxon, the editors tell us, but do we really care? Would we otherwise remember Becky’s father and his “steam masheen?”

`I Shall Never Like Tripe Again'

2011-12-27T00:01:00.000-08:00

Characteristically, in the last letter he ever composed, written five days before his death on Dec. 27, 1834, Charles Lamb enquired of Mrs. George Dyer about the whereabouts of a misplaced volume:

“I am very uneasy about a Book which I either have lost or left at your house on Thursday. It was the book I went out to fetch from Miss Buffam’s, while the tripe was frying. It is called [Edward] Phillip’s Theatrum Poetarum: but it is an English book. I think I left it in the parlour. It is Mr. Cary’s book, and I would not lose it for the world. Pray, if you find it, book it at the Swan, Snow Hill, by an Edmonton stage immediately, directed to Mr. Lamb, Church-street, Edmonton, or write to say you cannot find it.”

That same day, Dec. 22, while on a stroll, Lamb tripped, fell and landed on his face. A modern biographer, Lord David Cecil, describes the aftermath: “He was taken back bruised and bleeding. A day or two later alarming symptoms began to show themselves.” Lamb had contracted erysipelas, an acute streptococcal infection. Because of the resulting reddening of the skin, the condition is known as ignis sacer (“holy fire”) and St. Anthony’s fire. One of Lamb’s friends, Thomas Talfourd, hurried to see him. Cecil reports:

“He found Lamb not apparently suffering but half-conscious and murmuring unintelligibly. Soon he fell asleep and died.”

Another soul, one of millions, who could have been saved with a regimen of antibiotics. Lamb was fifty-nine. Five months earlier, Coleridge, his friend since they met as schoolboys at Christ’s Hospital, had died. Wordsworth was convinced the shock hastened Lamb’s death. Lamb’s eulogy is heartbreaking:

“When I heard of the death of Coleridge, it was without grief. It seemed to me that he had long been on the confines of the next world, that he had a hunger for eternity. I grieved then that I could not grieve; but since, I feel how great a part he was of me. His great and dear spirit haunts me. I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or books, without an ineffectual turning and reference to him. He was the proof and touchstone of all my cogitations.”

Since 1796, Lamb had cared for his matricidal sister Mary, who periodically had to be removed to a madhouse in Islington. Mary was entering another bad spell when her brother suffered his fatal fall. She lived until 1847.

“St. Charles” may be pushing the matter, but Lamb strikes me as an exemplary human being. He wrote like an angel and dedicated his life to caring for Mary. Yes, he drank to excess, a pastime he extolled in letters and essays, but he seems never to have been malicious or gratuitously hurtful. Count, if you can, the writers who still make us laugh after almost two centuries. In the final sentences of that final letter about the missing book, Lamb writes:

“I am quite anxious about it. If it is lost, I shall never like tripe again.”

`Mendelian Exuberence'

2011-12-26T00:01:00.000-08:00

A superior Christmas haul: The Baboons of Hada: Selected Poems by Eric Ormsby, Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos by John Shade, Ben Jonson: A Life by Ian Donaldson and a 10-DVD Laurel and Hardy collection. The other stuff is practical and not worthy of mention.

We were invited by the in-laws to a Christmas brunch, and while there a windstorm blew across the city. The streets and lawns were festooned with garlands of fir, pine and cedar. The air was scented with pitch, and our hands crusted with it after we cleaned up the yard. We carried the fragrance indoors, petting the cat so he could spread the Yuletide cheer, and my fingers are sticking to the keys. Without deploying the word, Ormsby suffuses the day and his poem with Christmas wonder in “Microcosm”:

“The proboscis of the drab grey flea
Is mirrored in the majesty
Of the elephant’s articulated trunk. There’s a sea
In the bed-mite’s dim orbicular eye.
Pinnacles crinkle when the mountain-winged, shy
Moth wakes up and stretches for the night.
Katydids enact the richly patterned light
Of galaxies in their chirped and frangible notes.
The smallest beings harbor a universe
Of telescoped similitudes. Even those Rocky Mountain goats
Mimic Alpha Centauri in rectangular irises
Of cinnabar-splotched gold. Inert viruses
Replicate the static of red-shifted, still chthonic
Cosmoi. Terse
As the listened brilliance of the pulsar’s bloom
The violaceous mildew in the corner room
Proliferates in Mendelian exuberance.
There are double stars in the eyes of cyclonic
Spuds shoveled and spaded up. The dance
Of Shiva is a cobble-soled affair –
Hobnails and flapping slippers on the disreputable stair.
Yggdrasils
Germinate on Wal-Mart windowsills.”

By fractal correspondence, each conifer sprig is a tree. Its pitchy oils hold terpenes, reacting with air molecules to form particles called aerosols – the smell of Christmas. The aerosols turn water vapor, visible as mist and fog, into clouds. The clouds cool the Earth, drop their rain and nurture the firs, pines and cedars.

“The smallest beings harbor a universe
Of telescoped similitudes.”

`Where the Torn Bracken Lies'

2011-12-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

For almost half a century Jean Burden (1914-2008) was the poetry editor of Yankee magazine, a publication my mother subscribed to and one seldom prized by the cognoscenti. I enjoyed its Farmer’s Almanac folksiness and reminders of New England’s rural past, mingling maple syrup and granite. Robert Frost was born in California and fixed New England in smoky amber. Burden lived and died in California and polished the homely jewel. After her death Poetry published one of her poems in memoriam in its September 2008 issue:

“This much we do without thought,
without eyes:
it is a wood to be gone through at night
with no road to follow,
with no light

“We know no more than what our hands can touch,
but put one foot before the other,
surely, forest-wise,
feeling where the reed is bent,
where the torn bracken lies.”

I hear echoes of Frost’s best-known poem but mostly I hear a quiet allusion to Dante’s “una selva oscura” (“a forest dark,” in Longfellow’s English). The metaphor of life as a journey through dark woods is hardwired into some of us. Think of dreams and the Brothers Grimm. For our ancestors, a primal woodland signified lumber and plentiful game as well as savages, brigands and “no road to follow.” Maine-born Longfellow gives us “the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

Burden suggests we’re not the first to venture through this forest. We merely remain attentive, maintain momentum, follow the almost-invisible path blazed by others – the bent reed, the broken fern. As in life, so it is in writing. None of us is the first down this path. Guideless, we cover much ground without progress, wandering in diminishing circles, living

“…the arrogant conviction that we can do without models (both aesthetic and moral), because our place in the world is supposedly so exceptional and can’t be compared with anything. That’s why we reject the aid of tradition and stumble around in our solitude, digging around in the dark corners of the desolate little soul.”

[The quoted passage is from Zbigniew Herbert’s “Animula,” from Labyrinth on the Sea, in The Collected Prose 1948-1998.]

`With Nothing But New Words'

2011-12-24T00:01:00.000-08:00

Seventy-three years ago this week, Osip Mandelstam was starving, sick and out of his mind in the frozen transit camp at Vtoraya Rechka near Vladivostok, where he had been transported for “counter-revolutionary activity.” He was a Jew, a poet and a citizen of Western Civilization. He was buried in a common grave and his brother was notified of his death three years later. We think he died Dec. 27, 1938.

Even before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West, the poet’s widow Nadezdah Mandelstam, in her 1,100-page memoir (published in English as Hope Against Hope, 1970, and Hope Abandoned, 1974), chronicled Stalin’s industrial-scale erasure of blameless people, among whom was her husband. During those years of putative détente, Clarence Brown translated The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (1965) and in 1973 published Mandelstam, the first study in English of the poet. In 1974, Brown and W.S. Merwin translated his Selected Poems. Reading these books in 1974 was like discovering a new continent, one whose existence had been elided from history. In the words of Arthur A. Cohen (in Osip Emilievich Mandelstam: An Essay in Antiphon, 1974) he was “the greatest and most difficult poet of modern Russia.”

In “Mandelstam” (One Thousand Nights and Counting: Selected Poems, 2011), Glyn Maxwell describes a devotion to Mandelstam and his work that recalls my own:

“Knowing no word of his I embrace his every
word. They're all there is. He died for only
them. I imagine the obstinate syllables
of his name like a bothering hand on the lapels
of Stalin now and then. I imagine him
having it brushed away. Neither of them
strikes me as caring greatly about the dull
ache the other makes elsewhere in his skull,
not even when those closest to them come
wondering What are you going to do about him?

“Only a slow accrual of discomfort
can do it, and only at night at a point where hurt
and thought converge and clarify the future
with nothing but new words, whether a line
begun forever or one jotted sentence.”

For Guy Davenport in “The Man Without Contemporaries” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), it also comes down to words, the next word:

“Mandelstam wrote anywhere and everywhere. We can scarcely begin to realize his world in which the pencil stub and the three pieces of paper you have is all the pencil and all the paper you are ever going to have.”

`The Season of Mirth and Cold Weather'

2011-12-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

One strives haphazardly after charity, good will and a bright festive spirit. These are the moral amenities of the season, a joy to recognize in others, a trial to achieve in one’s self. Even Charles Lamb, who with Dickens is the writer I most readily associate with the happy observance of Christmas, found the task difficult. In a Dec. 23, 1822, letter to his friend Bernard Barton he writes:

“Christmas, too, is come, which always puts a rattle into my morning skull. It is a visiting, unquiet, unquakerish season. I get more and more in love with solitude, and proportionately hampered with company. I hope you have some holidays at this period. I have one day,--Christmas Day; alas! too few to commemorate the season. All work and no play dulls me. Company is not play, but many times hard work. To play, is for a man to do what he pleases, or to do nothing,--to go about soothing his particular fancies.”

One commiserates with Lamb, especially in his characterization of the season as “visiting, unquiet, unquakerish.” Later in the same letter he asks Barton “where I could pick up cheap Fox's Journal?” Barton was a Quaker, a poet and writer of hymns, a serious fellow fortunate to have so unserious a friend as Lamb. That same year, Charles Lamb published in London Magazine the essay he was born to write, “A Few Words on Christmas”:

“Oh! merry piping time of Christmas! Never let us permit thee to degenerate into distant courtesies and formal salutations. But let us shake our friends and familiars by the hand, as our fathers and their fathers did. Let them all come around us, and let us count how many the year has added to our circle. Let us enjoy the present, and laugh at the past. Let us tell old stories and invent new ones--innocent always, and ingenious if we can. Let us not meet to abuse the world, but to make it better by our individual example. Let us be patriots, but not men of party. Let us look of the time--cheerful and generous, and endeavour to make others as generous and cheerful as ourselves.”

Like all of us, Lamb was a fractured soul. He longed for solitude and preached Yuletide bonhomie. He was no hypocrite, merely a man. In “A Few Words” he asks, “And what is Christmas?” and supplies his own answer:

“Why, it is the happiest time of the year. It is the season of mirth and cold weather.”

`P Raises His Head, Fixes the Audience'

2011-12-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Age and physique unimportant.”

The stage direction is repeated three times, applied to three of the four characters in Beckett’s brief play Catastrophe, written and first performed in 1982. We never see the fourth character, Luke, “in charge of the lighting,” though he speaks two lines offstage. When I heard of Vaclav Havel’s death on Sunday, I thought of the play, dedicated by Beckett to the Czech playwright and dissident, then in prison. After his release in 1983, Havel returned the favor, dedicating his play The Mistake to Beckett.

“Age and physique unimportant”: Under the Czech communists – or Cuban, or North Korean, or any utopians – everything about the individual is unimportant. Reckoned by totalitarian logic, the collective, an abstraction, is the only reality; the individual, the only reality, is a pernicious abstraction. In Catastrophe, a stringent parody of theater and governance, the Director (D) and his assistant (A) manipulate the Protagonist (P) as he stands mutely on a stage. Until the final stage direction, he remains as malleable as clay in the sculptor’s hands, a motor to be tinkered with at the whim of the mechanic, “the engineer of human souls.”

In the play-within-a-play, A asks if P should wear “a little . . . gag?” D replies: “For God's sake! This craze for explicitation! Every i dotted to death! Little gag! For God's sake!”

Throughout the play, P’s head has hung submissively downward, and P and A arrange his hands and clothing as though he were a man-sized doll. In Catastrophe’s most grimly funny line, D says: “Could do with more nudity.” Beckett conceals the play’s muted hint of hope between brackets, in the final stage direction:

“[Pause. Distant storm of applause. P raises his head, fixes the audience. The applause falters, dies.
Long pause.
Fade-out of light on face.]

Beckett died in Paris on Dec. 22, 1989, age eighty-three, as Ceauşescu delivered his final speech in Romania and the Brandenburg Gate reopened in Berlin. Seven days later, Havel was elected the last president of Czechoslovakia by the nation’s Federal Assembly. Shortly after the first of the new year I reminded Guy Davenport, in a letter, of Beckett dedicating Catastrophe to Havel. Davenport, who had met the Irishman and corresponded with him, replied:

“Beckett was not a political man. He was a compassionate man.”

`Its Intrusion, Its Siege, Its Intense Presence'

2011-12-21T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Whoever comes here with the palette of an Italian landscape painter will have to abandon all sweet colors. The earth is burnt by the sun, parched from drought, it has the color of bright ash, sometimes of gray violet or violent red.”

The Texas Forest Service reports as many as half a billion trees have died as a result of the state’s “unrelenting drought.” The species hardest hit in Harris County – that is, Houston – is the loblolly pine, a native of the Southeast, a tall, scrappy-looking tree that resembles a bottle brush. More than 5,000 dead trees, most of them loblollies, have already been cut down in Memorial Park. This greenest of cities has grown two-tone, with unbecoming bald patches. Loblolly means “mudhole” or “mire.”

“The landscape is not only before your eyes but beside you, behind you, and you feel its intrusion, its siege, its intense presence. Tall trees are rare; occasionally a lofty oak – the Zeus of trees. Clumps of greenery cling to the slopes, small bushes stubbornly struggling to survive. On the roads, on gentler hills, the wild olive tree with its slender leaves mobile as fingers, silver-green underneath. Low against the earth, thyme and mint—the aromas of heat.”

In “Attempt at a Description of the Greek Landscape” (Collected Prose: 1948-1998), Zbigniew Herbert writes of the Mediterranean world he loved and honored. For him it represented the root of civilization, the harsh, dry garden of our culture. As a Pole who survived Nazis and Stalinists to practice his craft, he knew humans can flourish in arid, unpromising landscapes, just as they can wither in well-watered places.

`The Tug and Its Barges Will Sink With Us'

2011-12-20T00:01:00.000-08:00

In the Dec. 27, 1941, issue of The New Yorker – published less than three weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the issue on the newsstands Christmas Day – appears a “Talk of the Town” piece, a feature customarily breezy, feuilleton-like and as was the magazine’s custom, printed anonymously. The author was Wolcott Gibbs, for more than thirty years one of the magazine’s reliable warhorses. The piece appears in Backward Ran Sentences (Bloomsbury, 2011), a generous selection of Gibbs’ work edited by Thomas Vinciguerra. Gibbs starts his thirty-line “casual” with characteristic (of the magazine, of Gibbs) indirection:

“Christmas, of course, is an anachronism in New York. It belongs to non-converted brownstone houses and gaslights and streets banked high with snow, to a day when there were still suburbs on Manhattan Island. The perpendicular city has no place for it.”

The tone is familiar, nostalgia vying politely with au courant fashion, a muted protest against modernity. Only slowly does the author’s true subject become apparent. Not once is Hitler mentioned, nor the impending fall of the Philippines and Indochina to the Japanese, yet the war suffuses each sentence like incense at High Mass. Gibbs, who loved Long Island and lived for years on Fire Island, quietly echoes Fitzgerald: “The picturesque past is attached to the thrusting present, like a barge to a tug, moving at a constant interval with it through time.” No preaching, no rabble-rousing, no sentimental appeals. The even tone, never strident, never slips. Gibbs turns on his own metaphor:

“When we try to imagine the times and the people who will look back on the grotesque complexity of New York in 1941 and say Christmas was really Christmas in those simple, far-off times [I have the eerie sense he is speaking here directly to us, not to an abstract “readership”], our mind rejects the whole impossible picture. The terrible unborn who are going to remember us as quaint and cheerful figures in an old daguerreotype are as unthinkable to us as men from Mars [the single false, hackneyed phrase in the piece, despite the then-recent Welles/Wells allusion]. We give them up. In fact, we give up the entire complicated analogy; as far as we’re concerned, the tug and its barges will sink with us. In the final perspective of history, it may well be that you are enjoying a nice, old-fashioned Christmas right here and now. We leave you with this thought, for whatever comfort you may find in it, but it sounds like lunacy to us.”

Always tonally agile, Gibbs mastered many voices. The writer who occasionally rises to near-sublimity was also a gifted parodist, film and theater critic, and “humorist” (a dicey designation). Gibbs begins “The Man and the Myth,” published Dec. 22, 1928, with a line that made me laugh out loud: “Santa Claus was born in Latvia on May 8, 1831.”

Collecting Gibbs (1902-1958), whose reputation has evaporated, is a welcome act of literary reclamation. Jacques Barzun called him “a man of courage.” He was a contemporary of A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell at The New Yorker. They rank among the greatest American writers in any genre. Gibbs is a lesser figure but a reminder of the magazine’s glory years, roughly 1940 through the early nineteen-sixties. He holds up better than such better-known colleagues as Thurber, Benchley, Parker and Perelman. Before Backward Ran Sentences, the only Gibbs I had read was More in Sorrow, the collection he was reading in proofs when he suffered a fatal heart attack.

The New Yorker in its most recent incarnation reflects the nation around it – self-absorbed, politically strident, smitten by celebrity, ultimately trivial. Worse, most of it is badly written. Gibbs’ nimbleness and clarity are long gone. The magazine’s tug and barge sank a long time ago.

[Go here to read a review of the Gibbs anthology by one of his literary descendants, Joseph Epstein.]

`Happy in Himself'

2011-12-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

“I'm one of those readers who love old and sometimes half-forgotten books and who do a lot of rereading, one of those who shun best sellers and can't understand their fellow travelers opening shiny volumes that they bought 10 minutes earlier in an airport bookstore.”

Adam Zagajewski transcribes my thoughts during the flight from Houston on Friday. I spent most of the five hours rereading Richard Yates’ A Good School (1978). My seatmate, a woman of about my age, divided her time between playing solitaire on her laptop and reading what appeared to be fiction on another handheld device. I’m guessing, of course, because she didn’t encourage conversation (fine by me) and because I could see blocks of text on the screen, short declarative sentences, many in dialogue form. Among our fellow passengers, also engaged in “opening shiny volumes,” she had much company. In his novel, set in an Eastern prep school in the nineteen-forties, Yates refers to “the tireless, self-renewing business of horsing around.”

Zagajewski is among the fifty readers who, on Saturday, told the Wall Street Journal “what they enjoyed reading in 2011.” Especially enticing are the titles suggested by Richard Holmes (the great Coleridge biographer) and Marilynne Robinson (soon to publish a collection of essays appropriately titled When I Was a Child, I Read Books). Zagajewski selects the Scottish poet John Burnside who, he says, “creates a world in which dreams and realities mix up, and yet we recognize in his verses our thoughts, aspirations and reveries.” In the first stanza of “The Good Neighbour,” Burnside describes one sort of reader:

“Somewhere along this street, unknown to me,
behind a maze of apple trees and stars,
he rises in the small hours, finds a book
and settles at a window or a desk
to see the morning in, alone for once,
unnamed, unburdened, happy in himself.”

`The Friendly Fat of Days'

2011-12-18T00:01:00.000-08:00

The plane took off from Houston at 7 p.m. (CST) Friday when the sky was already a light-absorbing blue-gray, and for five hours we unsuccessfully chased the sun and landed in unambiguous night in Seattle just before 10 p.m. (PST). On Wednesday the sun will rise here at 7:55 a.m. and set at 4:20 p.m. Later that night, at 9:30, when the axial tilt of the North Pole is furthest from the sun (23° 26'), we will, without feeling a thing, pass the winter solstice, and so begin the longest night of the year.

On both Wednesday and Thursday we will know eight hours, twenty-five minutes and 17 seconds of day – that is, sunlight, the skim-milk sort that reaches us west of the Cascades. On Friday, the cycle resumes and we’ll enjoy an additional six seconds of day. Calendars and clocks come down to fine calibrations of angularity, and without effort or knowledge our lives conform to planetary motions, until one day we leave the grand cycle behind. Among the sonnets in John Updike’s Americana and Other Poems (2001) is “December Sun”:

“December sun is often in your eyes,
springing a foliage of lashy rays
and irritating dazzle, to replace
the foliage now stripped from all the trees.
The planet rolls and tilts beneath our feet;
the tilt obscurely works to clip the day
a minute shorter; coldness infiltrates
the web of sticky seconds and we freeze.

“The year! We’re chained to it as to a wheel
that breaks us, but so slowly we don’t feel
a thing except at sunset, or sunrise,
when shallow angles form a kind of knife
that slices through the friendly fat of days
and bares the clockwork guts that make us die.”

[Go here to read all of John Donne's "A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day, cited by Helen Pinkerton in her comment.]

`He Is Nothing of Any Thing'

2011-12-17T00:01:00.000-08:00

Boswell reports that Johnson is characteristically common-sensical, with a moral twist, when it comes to holiday observances:

“Christmas might be kept as well upon one day of the year as another; but there should be a stated day for commemorating the birth of our Saviour, because there is danger that what may be done on any day, will be neglected.”

Johnson here is less concerned with ecclesiastical niceties than with human nature. We procrastinate (see The Rambler #134). I have Christmas presents yet to buy, eight days before the big day, but here is a fitting and convenient way to assuage Johnsonian anxieties: Samuel Johnson Christmas ornaments. I’m partial to the Hodge, made of “high quality porcelain”:

“Instantly accessorize bare wall-space with our Hodge Ornament (Oval) Oval Ornament. Makes great room or office accessories, fun favors for birthday parties, wedding or baby shower Ornaments, or adding a unique, special touch to gift-wrapped packages. Comes with its own festive red ribbon for hanging. Hang 'em up!”

Also tempting are “Daddy’s Little Lexicographer” and the cucumber ornament, with an inscription edited down from this passage in Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides:

“It has been a common saying of physicians in England, that a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.”

But I’ve settled my mind on the ornament inscribed “A man may be so much of every thing that he is nothing of everything.” This comes late in Boswell’s Life, when Johnson is seventy-four and a year away from death. Here is the full passage:

“I shall here insert a few of Johnson’s sayings, without the formality of dates, as they have no reference to any particular time or place.

“‘The more a man extends and varies his acquaintance the better.’ This, however, was meant with a just restriction; for, he on another occasion said to me, `Sir, a man may be so much of every thing, that he is nothing of any thing.’”

Prudent words. Well-roundedness, like open-mindedness, has its limits. In small type, J.V. Cunningham’s epigram might almost fit on a cheery Christmas ornament:

“This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained
Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.”

`An Appreciation of Close-work'

2011-12-16T00:01:00.000-08:00

“A comparatively modern word: not found before 17th cent.”

So says the Oxford English Dictionary of canny, a word written more often than spoken, at least in the U.S., though its first cousin, uncanny, is a Madison Avenue word, pretentious hyperbole. With canny I think clever, competent, crafty, up for the task, shrewd. Richard Stark’s Parker is canny, a con man and ex-con. Odysseus is the model of canniness and cunning. Lawrence I. Lipking writes in his life of Samuel Johnson:

“Actually Johnson never set foot on Grub Street. Yet he enjoys identifying with Odysseus, the canny hero who is never more dangerous than when he masquerades as nobody [“μή τις,” as he tells Polyphemus].”

Canny connects with can (“know how to”) and ken (“knowledge”). Among the more obscure definitions is “Of humour: Quiet, sly, ‘pawky’,” a meaning “used by English writers as characteristic of Scottish humour.” Sly is good, foxlike, dissembling. The title of the American poet Campbell McGrath’s “An Irish Word” refers to canny. Here are the opening stanzas:

“Canny has always been an Irish word
to my ear, so too its cousin crafty,
suggesting not only an appreciation of close-work,
fine-making, handwrought artistry,

“but a highly evolved reliance on one’s wits to survive,
stealth in the shadow of repressive institutions,
`silence, exile, and cunning,’ in Joyce’s admonition,
ferret-sly, fox-quick, silvery, and elusive.”

Sticking with Joyce for the moment, canny shows up three times in Finnegans Wake, most suggestively in a phrase that reverses the initials of the novel’s protagonist, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker:

“Ear canny hare for doubling through Cheeverstown they raced him, through Loughlinstown and Nutstown to wind him by the Boolies.”

“Ear, can he hear?” Anyone can play this game. Canny scholars have built careers around it. Joyce advised in the Wake: “Wipe your glosses with what you know.”

`The Great Hearsay of the Past'

2011-12-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

Guy Davenport writes in “The Concord Sonata,” his mingling of essay and story collected in A Table of Green Fields (1993):

“We lose not our innocence or our youth or opportunity but our nature itself, atom by atom, helplessly, unless we are kept in possession of it by the spirit of a culture passed down the generations as tradition, the great hearsay of the past.”

“The Concord Sonata” is a meditation on that cryptic passage in Walden in which Thoreau recounts his loss of “a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove,” and his long search to recover them. Davenport glosses “this beautiful parable” with the help of a passage written by the Confucian philosopher Mencius (372-289 B.C.) that Thoreau may have read.

The scholarly acuity of Davenport’s conclusion doesn’t concern me here, though I’ve spent decades pondering the teasing multiplicity of meanings Thoreau packs into so small a space. Rather, it’s the sentence quoted above, in particular “the great hearsay of the past,” that haunts me the way Thoreau haunted Davenport. In his next sentence Davenport writes: “Thoreau was most himself when he was Diogenes.” It’s this embodiment of tradition, of being most ourselves when we enter the thought of another, an act of sympathetic imaginative projection, I find most interesting and, finally, at my age, comforting and true. Davenport describes Diogenes as “an experimental moralist” – a precise characterization of Thoreau.

When young, each of us is Adam. We mistake ignorance for vision and sincerity for truth. We’re taught from every direction and remain proudly unteachable. Age, of course, confers no guarantee of remission from this state. Old fools are nearly as common as young ones. Without a living tradition, an elective affinity with the past, we vaporize, “atom by atom, helplessly.”

This meditation on “the great hearsay of the past” started not with Davenport, Thoreau or Diogenes, but James Boswell, something he reports in his Life of Johnson:

“I mentioned that I was afraid I put into my journal too many little incidents. Johnson: `There is nothing, Sir, too little for a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.’”

`Content to Be My Guest'

2011-12-14T00:01:00.000-08:00

The Christmas season officially arrived at 7:12 a.m. (CST) Tuesday when I heard Louis Armstrong on the car radio “talking to all the kids from all over the world at Christmas time” – that is, reciting Clement Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” better known as “T’was the Night before Christmas.”

Away from my kids, Christmas had thus far felt abstract, like Election Day. Tinsel and trees went on sale in the drugstore before Halloween, when three holidays (including Thanksgiving) shared shelf space, but that didn’t count. Snow in Houston is a rumor. Houses on my street have been decorated, but most are strung with white lights, a Unitarian custom more sepulchral than festive.

Later in the day I was reading Clive James’ Unreliable Memoirs (1979), his first book of autobiography, when I happened upon another reminder of the season:

“The Christmas beetles and cowboy beetles held jamborees around the street-lights, battering themselves against the white enamel reflectors and falling into the street. They lay on their backs with their legs struggling. When you picked them up they pulsed with the frustrated strength of their clenched wing muscles.”

The Christmas beetle was new to me, a six-legged jewel native to James’ birthplace, Australia. Some thirty-five species belong to the genus Anoplognathus and earn the common name by entering the adult stage of their life cycle at Yuletide. Despite their beauty, they’re deemed pests because of their bottomless appetite for eucalyptus foliage. They are creatures of the antipodal summer solstice, corresponding to our June bugs.

After a little searching I found another Australian poet, Les Murray, had included a poem titled “Christmas Beetle” in his first collection, The Ilex Tree (1965):

“From the cool night this glossy stranger came,
Attracted by the candle’s yellow flame,
Blundering in jerky flight around our room.
Dazed by the light his bronze wings noisily fanned,
And lest he burn into an odorous fume
I caught and held him prickling in my hand
And threw him back into his home, the night.
A pebble dropped and then whirred into flight.”

I like Murray’s sense of seasonal hospitality. Many would swat a bug into a smear on the wall. Instead, the poet takes him safely home. The final phrase puns, appropriately, on “word into flight.” Christmas is about homecoming, or at least finding a home. Among the most eccentric Christmas poems I know is Marianne Moore’s “To Pierrot Returning to His Orchid,” which is addressed to another sort of arthropod, a spider, and closes like this: “You are here; apparently / Content to be my guest — Say so. / It is Christmastime.”

`The Circus and Menagerie Combined'

2011-12-13T00:01:00.000-08:00

The squirrels on campus have grown sleek and fat like landlocked otters, and I’ve taken to filling my jacket pockets with peanuts to keep them looking prosperous. They’ve become spoiled and have learned to gather in packs when they see me coming. They sit upright, looking expectant, paws extended in gestures of entitlement, aping their human cousins, waiting for a handout.

Campus is home to two species -- eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) and eastern fox squirrels (Sciurus niger). The fur of the latter is brownish-gray, like the hair of an aging redhead. It’s the largest North American squirrel and the most common around Houston.

They’re brazen. Some will take a peanut from my hand. Others wait for me to throw it. They’re roguish, grabbing one peanut, darting to conceal it under dead leaves and running back for another. Then one of his colleagues snatches the hidden nut and the first guy runs after him, sometimes with another nut already in his mouth. I’ve seen four peanut-stuffed squirrels spiraling up the trunk of an oak, furious with greed, though it looks like courtship playfulness to us.

Thoreau enjoyed the company of squirrels and recognized the role they play in oak propagation. In a fascinating journal entry from Sept. 4, 1851, one that suggests how his writing mind worked, Thoreau first likens us to squirrels, then squirrels to us:

“In the summer we lay up a stock of experiences for the winter, as the squirrel of nuts,--something for conversation in winter evenings. I love to think then of the more distant walks I took in summer.

“At the powder-mills the carbonic acid gas in the road from the building where they were making charcoal made us cough for twenty or thirty rods.

“Saw some gray squirrels whirling their cylinder by the roadside. How fitted that cylinder to this animal! `A squirrel is easily taught to whirl his cylinder” might be a saying frequently applicable. And as they turned, one leaped over or dodged under another most gracefully and unexpectedly, with interweaving motions. It was the circus and menagerie combined. So human they were, exhibiting themselves.”

Thoreau refers to the Acton Powder Mill in Concord where gun powder was manufactured. In his journal entry for Jan. 7, 1853, he describes the aftermath of an explosion at the factory that killed three workmen. The 1851 passage is playful but already with a hint of danger. The gaseous form of carbonic acid is an odorous but nontoxic byproduct of gunpowder production, here stored in iron cylinders. The squirrels spin on them like unknowing clowns.

`Whoever Owned It Before Me'

2011-12-12T00:01:00.000-08:00

On Saturday I watched the 1987 movie version of 84, Charing Cross Road and then stayed up too late reading the book by Helene Hanff (1970) on which it's based – a multi-media first for this reader. The film, nicely acted by Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins, is modest and quietly moving, and Bancroft’s wordless scene near the end, in which her character reflects on what she has lost and what she might have had, wrung a few tears out of this jaded admirer of the Terminator films.

The movie seldom strays far from the letters exchanged by Hanff, a New York City writer and lover of antiquarian books, and Frank Doel, the chief buyer for a book dealer in London, between 1949 and 1968. The two never meet, and the film more than the book hints at a nascent stirring of epistolary romance. The scene in which Doel sits in his office reading a love poem by Yeats, though quite lovely, has no counterpart in the book.

Could a comparable friendship happen today? “Love is multiform,” John Berryman writes in “Canto Amor,” but could it endure in an age of online book dealers and PayPal? The technology of book acquisition has changed more since 1987, when the movie appeared, than it had in the preceding four decades. Hanff mails cash to London, where a bookkeeper enters her account balance by hand in a ledger like Bob Cratchit – or Charles Lamb at the British East India Company.

In her first letter to Marks & Co., Booksellers, written Oct. 5, 1949, Hanff requests essays by Hazlitt, Stevenson and Leigh Hunt, and a Latin Bible. Today, I could have them all by midweek and never touch a human being, even digitally. I’m not succumbing here to nostalgia. We’ve lost something, yes, but gained much. Most of us in Hanff’s place seek books, not a friend, and I don’t necessarily want to meet the person who fetches a volume for me off a shelf in the Amazon.com warehouse. But I might.

Interestingly, the book and movie offer little evidence that Frank Doel is anything more than a desultory reader. He’s a knowledgeable, conscientious tradesman. The only thing we see him read, other than letters and invoices, is the Yeats poem. Unlike Hanff, he never romanticizes books and reading. In the fourth of her letters reproduced in the book, Hanff writes:

“I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to `I hate to read new books,’ and I hollered `Comrade!’ to whoever owned it before me.”

`The List Would Fill the Book'

2011-12-11T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Talking, drinking, and smoking go better together than any three other pleasant things upon this earth. And they are best enjoyed in company, which is almost as much as to say they are not best performed at home.”

I love conversation (with the proper company), no longer drink, and never smoked, but otherwise heartily endorse Arthur Ransome’s prescription in Bohemia in London (1907) for a civilized gathering. The English are better at this sort of thing than we Americans. Perhaps it’s our inveterate one-upmanship. Especially among men, conversation soon turns competitive and boastful, often in an un-playful manner. As one person speaks, the other treads water, waiting to rebut what his friend hasn’t yet finished saying. Conversation with women is always easier and usually more interesting.

Ransome suggests we adjourn to a coffee-house or tavern: “Get you and your company into a cosy room, with a bright fire and a closed door, where you may be free before the universe.” Freedom: that’s the essential ingredient for a successful kaffeeklatsch or kegger of conversation. No censors or dullards, no scripts, no policing for political correctness. What I’m describing is an exclusionary democracy, where the First Amendment applies only to those already admitted to the club. Ransome channels Charles Lamb:

“Then may your words express the mood you feel, the liquor hearten you, and the smoke soothe you in argument; and if with that you are not happy, why, then, the devil fly away with you for a puritanical, melancholiac spoilsport, whom I would not see with my book in his hands, no, not for four shillings and sixpence on the nail.”

There are such places. One is literature. Another is its anteroom, the more bookish precincts of the blogosphere. I work for a university and so have few opportunities to meet happily well-read, well-spoken people. Instead, I look to the blog roll on the left. No excuses for dull company accepted. Ransome writes:

“What an illustrious company is ours: Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Herrick, Congreve—the list would fill the book.”

`Buying Groceries Instead of Buying Dreams'

2011-12-10T00:01:00.000-08:00

A quick pass through the campus “bookstore” where I purchased two hooded sweatshirts as Christmas presents, was, as always, dispiriting. The book department consists of six shelves of publications by faculty and staff. Some are heavily technical, and I’m not qualified to judge their worth. The one title I’ve actually read was written by a friend but I can recommend it without bias. (In conversation, the author has described the Fugitive poet Donald Davidson, who figures in her Vanderbilt chapter, as “a stone-cold racist.”) The rest, having bypassed remaindering, await pulping.

Just that morning I had read the excerpts from Bohemia in London posted by Mike Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti. I had never read Arthur Ransome but was intrigued enough to get the book from the library. It’s the first American edition, published in 1907 by Dodd, Mead & Company. I found the passage in “The Bookshops of Bohemia” where Mike left off, and resumed reading:

“There is something more real about this style of buying books than about the dull mercenary method of a new emporium. It is good, granted, to look about the shelves of a new bookshop, to see your successful friends and the authors you admire outglittering each other in smart, gold-lettered, brilliant-coloured bindings; to pick up pretty little editions of your favourite books—what pretty ones there are nowadays, but how sad it is to see a staid old folio author compelled to trip in a duodecimo--; all that is pleasant enough, but to spend money there is a sham and a fraud; it is like buying groceries instead of buying dreams.”

For book lovers and dedicated readers, Ransome’s chapter is a respite from the looming loss of literacy. With approval he quotes Lamb on reading. He describes Charing Cross Road as “the only street whose character is wholly bookish,” and writes:

“By these shops alone are there always a crowd of true bookmen. There are the clerks who bolt their lunches to be able to spend half an hour in glancing over books. There are reviewers selling newspaper copies. There are book-collectors watching for the one chance in ten thousand that brings a prize into the four-penny stall. There are book-lovers looking for the more frequent chance that brings them a good book at a little price, or lets them read it without buying it.”

`And You Don't Know Chickadees?'

2011-12-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

On a Monday morning about a month ago I entered the engineering quadrangle and observed a great hole in the air. All that remained of a forty-foot water oak (Quercus nigra) was a low stump and a scattering of wood chips. Over the weekend a grounds crew had erased the great tree, leaving a hint of their motives: at the heart of the stump, filling half of its four-foot diameter, was a gaping wound of rot extending eighteen inches into the ground. The tree had been ailing and an earlier crew had already trimmed away the dying branches. It came as no surprise, especially as our eight-month drought persists, but there’s always sadness when a giant falls.

In her final book of poems, Silence Opens (1994), Amy Clampitt concludes “Green” with these lines:

“Petals fall, leaves hang on all
summer; chlorophyll,
growth, industry, are what they hang
on for. The relinquishing

“of doing things, of being occupied
at all, comes hard:
the drifting, then the lying still.”

A failing tree, like a failing person – “The relinquishing / of doing things” – is hard to watch, and most of us some day will learn the lesson with varying degrees of aptitude. Thursday morning I watched six freshmen demonstrate a tree-watering system they had devised in their introduction to engineering design class. Their design was simple and elegant – a ten-foot length of PEX bent into a circle for fitting around a tree trunk, a connector and two ball valves. They calculated the optimal size for drilling spray holes (.043 inches) and their spacing (10 centimeters). After three prototypes it works beautifully, and the university arborist is interested in adopting their design.

All this greenery – 4,200 trees (minus one) and shrubs representing eighty-eight species on 295 acres – makes the campus an inviting way station for birds, migratory and otherwise. On the way to the library at lunch on Thursday, I heard the crisp tapping of a woodpecker high in a post oak. I had to stand and wait until he moved into sight before I could identify him as a downy – small, white-bellied and fuzzy-looking. I’ve learned that an earth-science professor leads an almost daily birding walk on campus, and I hope to join him. The group has observed 111 species since September, and at least 15 of them were first-time sightings.

In an essay that started as a 1986 lecture, “Predecessors, Et Cetera,” Clampitt recalls a stay at Yaddo, the artists' retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., when she saw “a fair number of nuthatches and tufted titmice, and lots of chickadees.” (I lived two miles from Yaddo, and can confirm her list.) She asks, “Does anybody here not know chickadees?”

One day, as she’s walking around the grounds with another Yaddo resident, she mentions the chickadees. “What are those?” the other writer asks, and Clampitt writes:

“Well, that did give me pause. If the writer had been a poet, I think I might have said, `Man, you call yourself a poet and you don’t know chickadees?’ But he wasn’t, and I didn’t.”

`Not Another Best-of-the-Year List'

2011-12-08T16:47:00.000-08:00

David Myers at Literary Commentary asked some of us to contribute to his “Not Another Best-of-the-Year List.” The company is excellent, including Joseph Epstein, Terry Teachout, Ruth R. Wisse and David himself.

`Immune to Certain Social Conventions'

2011-12-08T08:08:00.000-08:00

By the time a writer is given a newspaper column, in most cases that means his work is no longer readable. Exceptions are few. The first columnist whose work I awaited with eagerness was Eric Hoffer. His “Reflections” was syndicated in U.S. newspapers, including The Cleveland Press, from January 1968 to April 1970 – my high school years. I read the columns, clipped them and pasted them in a scrapbook. From them I moved on to Hoffer’s books, in particular The True Believer, and I suspect Hoffer, a longshoreman by trade, was among the reasons I became a newspaper reporter.

The work of another columnist, Thomas Sowell, never attracted me until I read his piece eight years ago on Hoffer, who I sensed had been virtually eclipsed from cultural memory. Sowell distilled Hoffer’s vision and used his insights to presciently diagnose the ebbing “Occupy” fad:

“People who are fulfilled in their own lives and careers are not the ones attracted to mass movements: `A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding,’ Hoffer said. `When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.’”

Now Kevin D. Williamson has written a fine essay/review devoted to Sowell at Commentary:

“One of the great and brilliant things about Thomas Sowell is that he, like most nerds, appears to be simply immune to certain social conventions. This is a critical thing about him—because the social conventions of modern intellectual life demand that certain things go studiously unnoticed, that certain subjects not be breached, or breached only in narrow ways approved by the proper authorities.”

The same might be said of Hoffer.

`Cauterized, Chipper, Astute'

2011-12-08T00:01:00.000-08:00

In some people, appearance and deportment conspire to suggest an animal, a zoological reflection of their truer selves. Jimmy Cagney is a pug and Samuel Beckett a hawk. Likewise, some animals suggest human types, a linkage known at least since Aesop. Eric Ormsby toys with avian allegory in “Some Birds”:

1
“Observe that heron’s hyperbolic stride,
the sinister way in which it seems to glide
on underwater rollerblades until
it halts and leans to peep across the sill
of the cattails and hypodermics its kill –
speared bullfrog or a bream. The great blue
is terrible and righteous when it pierces,
a marshy critic with a malice-javelin
deflating the fat white bellies of its catch.
I loath, yet am infatuated with, that heron.

2
“The gallinules will shame me for my ponderous
approach to life. They have a buoyant levity
as they paddle plumply on the rank canal.
I hope to apply against my debacles
their aqueous placidity. Their horned feet
trundle the muddy depths to keep afloat.

3
“Anhinga rookeries with their
brash, almost crackly chatter
set my arm-hairs on edge and give me
the gags,– that putrescent glitter
of fish-skin against gray twig,
under the leisurely parade of
self-important cumulus, leaves a
tufted taste in the mouth.”

All three are indigenous to Ormsby’s native Florida and the American Southeast, and all, even the heron, are faintly exotic birds but familiar human types. The giveaway with the great blue heron is “a marshy critic with a malice-javelin.” Whether book reviewer or office colleague, we know him – biting in a machine-like way, predatory, mean for the sake of meanness. “Hypodermics” as a verb is nice, suggesting euthanasia, viciousness masquerading as mercy. All of us know the sort, “terrible and righteous when it pierces.” The final line acknowledges our fascination (a form of envy?) with the type.

Ormsby gives gallinules a more admiring treatment. They are as we wish to be -- “buoyant levity” and “aqueous placidity.” They “trundle the muddy depths to keep afloat,” not avoiding the troublesome murk we prefer to ignore. Despite their seeming equanimity, ornithologists tell us the purple gallinule “usually retreats quickly under cover if disturbed,” and their voice is characterized as “a gruff `kruk-kruk-kruk-kruk.’”

For Ormsby, the anhinga is a more ambiguous figure, heron-like but less nasty, its doubleness signaled by its common names -- water-turkey and snake-bird. Audubon describes it as “indefinitely gregarious,” yet the poet is almost sickened by its appearance: “putrescent glitter.” Audubon admires the anhinga’s cunning and grace, which go unmentioned by Ormsby:

“[It] is the very first of all fresh-water divers. With the quickness of thought it disappears beneath the surface, and that so as scarcely to leave a ripple on the spot; and when your anxious eyes seek around for the bird, you are astonished to find it many hundred yards distant…”

With Ormsby I share a north/south binocular vision. The north is plain and even harsh; the south, flamboyant and sometimes corrupt. A native of Florida, the poet lived for decades in Canada, now in England. I’m Ohio-born, a long-time resident of upstate New York, living in the sub-tropics of Houston. Ormsby anatomizes three water-dwelling birds of the South, but may reveal more in another bird poem, a northern one, “To a Bird in Winter” (Time’s Covenant, 2006 ):

“Thicket-whisperer, you
Cherish austerity,
Your small claws blue
Beneath the raggedy

“Habit of subzero
Song. And you will
Tutor me, flit-hero,
Accentual icicle,

“Prophet-minor of cold-
Crunched twigs and nettle-
Skeletons; your bold
Coal-chip pupil settles

“On me, where I follow
You, farther into hiddenness,
Aswarm in the swallow
Villas now left summerless.

“Remembrance of the sun
Glitters your retices;
Icy octaves bangle your dun
Beak that curettes crevices.

“Cauterized, chipper, astute,
You concentrate the frigid waste
In fierce fluff, my modest flute
That whistles to the holocaust.”

For Ormsby we coin a new job description: ornithological/Theophrastian maker of verses.

`In the Smithy of My Soul'

2011-12-07T00:01:00.000-08:00

An Irish-born professor and former dean of engineering, Michael Carroll, celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday on Tuesday, and we organized a party for him in one of the lab buildings. He’s a mechanical engineer but has also written two plays, both of which have been staged, and has composed crossword puzzles for the New York Times and various magazines. He’s a word lover and storyteller, and grew up speaking English and Irish. He loves Flann O’Brien (Keats and Chapman in particular) and is the only person I’ve known who has read An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth) in the original.

The graphic designer and I put together a birthday card. On the front is a picture of Thurles, the town where Michael was born in North Tipperary, with Breithlá sona duit! (“Happy birthday!”) bridging the River Suir. Inside we inscribed Saol fada chugat! (“Long life to you!”). The same blessings appear on the birthday cake, in icing.

Several months ago Michael stopped by my office to talk about a story I was writing. He interrupted our digressions-within-digressions to ask if I remembered a passage in Joyce, something about “the smithy of my soul.” I did, for personal reasons, and I referred him to Chapter 5 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

I read A Portrait in ninth grade and had marked the passage. Its romantic grandiosity echoed in my adolescent bosom. A few years later, as a college freshman, I saw the sentences on a poster under a photograph of a young man with a guitar standing like Stephen Daedalus on the strand, gazing at the snotgreen sea. I bought it and taped it to the wall in my dormitory room.

On the back of the card, in a minute typeface, we added the phrase Tá m'árthach foluaineach lán d'eascanna. In English that’s “My hovercraft is full of eels,” which I knew Michael, a Monty Python enthusiast, would understand. What a blessing it is to have friends who get your jokes.

`That Is About Enough'

2011-12-06T00:01:00.000-08:00

I spend most hours of most days alone, in the company of a cat, which is not at all the same as being alone. Like most of her species she is imperious and opportunistic. She is aggressively affectionate, especially when I’m trying to write, when she’ll walk across the keyboard, back arched, tail twitching, and perform a feline variation on the surrealist pipe-dream of automatic writing. Then she’ll snub me with frosty hauteur. Like Jeoffrey, she moves with “elegant quickness.”

In short, she is company, the sort I prefer when living two-thousand miles from my family. My thoughts on company are distilled in Les Murray’s poem of that name (from Lunch and Counter Lunch, 1974):

“Where two or three
are gathered together, that
is about enough.”

A comic variation on Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Murray’s poem echoes my allergy to collectives, whether rock concerts or anything bearing the prefix “Occupy.” Sharing Murray’s title is one of Beckett’s prose works, Company (1980), in which at one point he might be speaking of a cat:

“Crawling on all fours. Another in another dark or in the same crawling on all fours devising it all for company. Or some other form of motion. The possible encounters. A dead rat. What an addition to company that would be! A rat long dead.”

Beckett captures the uneasy, compromising nature of much company:

“Better hope deferred than none. Up to a point. Till the heart starts to sicken. Company too up to a point.”

Boswell reports Johnson saying of Jeoffrey’s master, the mad poet Christopher Smart:

“I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else.”

`The Keats Brothers'

2011-12-05T04:16:00.000-08:00

My review of The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George by Denise Gigante appears in Issue #26 of The Quarterly Conversation.