'Will Your Birds Be Always Wingless Birds'

A questionnaire sent to Louis MacNeice in 1934 – that “low dishonest decade” was big on sending questionnaires to writers – asked, “Do you take your stand with any political or politico-economic party or creed?” The Irishman replied: “No. In weaker moments I wish I could.” Never a nihilist and never a true believer in anything, unlike many of his fellows, MacNeice remained immune to politics and other systematic modes of thought, whether aesthetic, religious or philosophical. He distrusted dogma. Don’t confuse this with indifference. 

I’ve been reading MacNeice seriously for several months. Despite his well-known associations with Auden and other poets, he impresses me as one of nature’s “isolatoes,” to adopt Ishmael’s word. There’s nothing pathological about his solitariness as a poet and man. He was social and certainly enjoyed female company. But he seems not to have needed the conventional shoring of belief. “My sympathies are Left,” he wrote elsewhere in the Thirties,” but not in my heart or my guts.” When writers define themselves by their politics, they risk peddling themselves like prostitutes.

 

In the nineteen-fifties, MacNeice wrote “To Posterity” (Visitations, 1957), a poem strangely prescient of our diminished world:

 

“When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards

And reading and even speaking have been replaced

By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you

Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste

They held for us for whom they were framed in words,

And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,

Or will your birds be always wingless birds?” 

 

When the world is no longer “framed in words,” when the best eyes and ears of the past are no longer consulted, when we presume to confront the world in all our arrogant solitude, what remains?  A weirdly mutated world of “wingless birds.” Without words, grass is no longer “green” but something less. We have betrayed not only the visual world but our precious cultural inheritance.

 

Even writers, people we persist in believing ought to be independent thinkers, defying the herd, happily join the herd. Another poet, Louise Bogan, answered yet another questionnaire, this one prepared by the editors of Partisan Review in 1939 and collected in A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005). More than eighty years ago she writes near the end of the same decade as MacNeice, one not unlike our own. Its dogmas too are metastasizing:

 

“The true artist will instinctively reject ‘burning questions’ and all ‘crude oppositions’ which can cloud his vision or block his ability to deal with the world. All this has been fought through before now: Turgenev showed up the pretensions of the political critic Belinsky; Flaubert fought the battle against ‘usefulness’ all his life; Yeats wrote the most superb anti-political poetry ever written. Flaubert wrote, in the midst of one bad political period: ‘Let us [as writers] remain the river and turn the mill.’”

'Relief, Joy, or Nostalgia'

“Of course, no one simply reads, or rereads, a given book. One reads a certain edition at a specific time in one’s life, and the particular book’s smell, typeface, and paper can be as much a part of the experience as one’s physical and emotional circumstances.” 

I used to think this sort of thing was drippy sentimentality, a wallow in a make-believe past. Now it’s nearly an everyday occurrence. For books – good books -- my memory hasn’t seriously faded. I don’t think of Lolita. I think of the Crest Giant paperback I bought in 1968 from James Books in Parma, Ohio, and read on my parents’ porch that summer.   

The passage at the top is from Tess Lewis’ review/essay “Once Is Not Enough: Rereading and Remembering,” published in the Autumn 2002 issue of The Hudson Review. Lewis is a fairly tough-minded reader. She quotes Nabokov’s well-known declaration in his Lectures on Literature (1980): “One cannot read a book, one can only reread it.” In fact, almost the only books worth reading are the ones you will want to read a second time, at least. Lewis writes:

“Pace Nabokov, you never do read the same book twice, and the betrayal of earlier selves and the  flirtation with possible new ones that rereading occasions can bring relief, joy, or nostalgia as much as it can piquancy.”

In 1888, three years before his death, Melville self-published John Marr and Other Sailors in an edition of twenty-five copies. The title poem is prefaced with a brief prose passage that is almost a short story. I was exchanging thoughts the other day with a reader about Willa Cather’s prairie novels and “John Marr” came to mind. Marr is a former sailor who “settles down about the year 1838 upon what was then a frontier-prairie, sparsely sprinkled with small oak-groves and yet fewer log-houses of a little colony but recently from one of our elder inland States.” Which in turn recalls a passage from “Loomings,” Chapter 1 of Moby-Dick: “Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies . . .”

I first read “John Marr” in the Penguin paperback Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories (1970), purchased in a bookstore in Savoy during my first visit to France. On the title page I wrote my name followed by “7-24-73 Chambéry.” The pages are browning but after half a century the book remains intact and perfectly (re)readable.

Lewis’ essay begins as a review of Wendy Lesser’s Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering (2002) – the first book I ever ordered from Amazon. The book arrived at our house in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., on a rainy day and was ruined. They promptly replaced it and I was impressed. I had interviewed Lesser two years earlier in Berkeley for a freelance newspaper story I was writing.

All of this is confirmation of my conviction that all books are one book, as Borges told us long ago.

'Well-known Types of Miracle'

It’s grim out there and getting grimmer. Two poems encountered on the same day delivered a touch of buoyancy. The first was originally written in Russian by Vladimir Nabokov on May 6, 1923: 

“No, life is no quivering quandary!

Here under the moon things are bright and dewy.

We are the caterpillars of angels; and sweet

It is to eat from the edge into the tender leaf.

 

“Dress yourself up in the thorns, crawl, bend, grow strong—

and the greedier was your green track,

the more velvety and splendid

the tails of your liberated wings.”

 

Nabokov was living in what turned out to be permanent exile. The Bolsheviks had seized Russia in a coup d’état. Lenin was busy murdering kulaks, among other innocents. The previous year, Nabokov’s father had been murdered, and he writes a touchingly hopeful poem. He suggests we may metamorphose into angels. The other poem is by John Wain from his 1961 collection Weep Before God (1961):

 

“This above all is precious and remarkable.

How we put ourselves in one another’s care,

How in spite of everything we trust each other.

 

“Fishermen at whatever point they are dipping and lifting

On the dark green swell they partly think of as home

Hear the gale warnings that fly to them like gulls.

 

“The scientists study the weather for love of studying it,

And not specially for love of the fishermen,

And the wireless engineers do the transmission for love of wireless,

 

“But how it adds up is that when the terrible white malice

Of the waves high as cliffs is let loose to seek a victim,

The fishermen are somewhere else and so not drowned.

 

“And why should this chain of miracles be easier to believe

Than that my darling should come to me as naturally

As she trusts a restaurant not to poison her?

 

“They are simply examples of well-known types of miracle,

The two of them,

That can happen at any time of the day or night.” 

 

Yes, people on occasion are capable of exercising the good, despite the barbarism flourishing around them. A decade or so ago I read Wain’s Sprightly Running: Part of an Autobiography, published in 1962. Later he would publish a good biography of his mentor, Dr. Johnson. In the memoir he describes his wartime years at Oxford:

 

“When I should have been running forward to embrace life, I was digging a fortification against it. With every reason for optimism, I became a stoical pessimist. Samuel Johnson was my favourite author, my moral hero; Boswell and The Rambler were constantly open on my table. Johnson reflected my mood exactly, because he put into dignified and resounding prose the sense of stoical resistance against hopeless odds.”

 

He continues:

 

“I would murmur to myself. As if they were lyrics poems, sombre fragments of his lay sermons. 'Life is everywhere a state in which there is much to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.’ [Rasselas, Chap. 11] 'So large a part of human life passes in a state contrary to our natural desires, that one of the principal topics in moral instruction is the art of bearing calamities.’ [The Rambler #32] But it was not his gloom alone that made Johnson a hero to me. It was his tragic gaiety.”

 

[The Nabokov poem is translated by Brian Boyd and Dmitri Nabokov, and collected in Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (eds. Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, Beacon Press, 2000).]

'It Is Wonderful to Be a Writer'

I met the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld in 1987 on the same day I met Raul Hilberg and Cynthia Ozick. I had read Appelfeld’s first novel, Badenheim 1939 (1978; trans. 1980), several years earlier and found it disturbing in an unexpected way. The action takes place on the cusp of the Holocaust. Its Jewish characters are oblivious to what’s coming. We know, they do not.

Appelfeld’s mother was murdered in 1941 when the Romanian Army retook his hometown after a year of Soviet occupation. He and his father were deported to a forced labor camp in Romanian-controlled Transnistria. He escaped and for three years hid in the forests of Ukraine. He later became a cook in the Soviet Army. In 1946 he arrived in Palestine, two years before Israel became a nation.

Based on my brief conversation with Appelfeld at a Holocaust conference, I could never have guessed the events he had endured more than forty years earlier. He was soft-spoken, laconic, avuncular. Physically, he reminded me of my step-grandfather. He was short and round yet oddly powerful looking, like an aging boxer. I liked him and went on to read another four or five of his novels. He died in 2018 at age eighty-five.

In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel, she notes that Appelfeld does not blame pre-war Jews for weakness and self-hatred, a common accusation. He replies:

“No, I do not blame them. I like them because I like weakness. I’m a lover of weakness, human weaknesses, I mean. People have a lot of weaknesses, and I am nourished by their weaknesses.”

This seems irrational and even self-destructive. Appelfeld could not have survived the Holocaust had he been weak. Wachtel asks why he loves weakness and he replies:

“Because a weakness is humane. To hate yourself is humane. You love the non-Jew; it’s humane. I understand why you love the non-Jew. . . . So, I don’t blame, because I know where all this comes from.”

There’s a cult of strength – and not merely among the Nazis -- that readily turns into bullying and savagery. Humans are not good at regulating strength. We tend to overdo it. In evolutionary terms, those who are strong – physically, emotionally, intellectually -- are likelier to survive, and Appelfeld is not advocating extinction. I think he is expressing a literary, not necessarily a moral preference. He understands his characters and knows they will do foolish things. In this, he reminds me of George Eliot and Henry James, who often feel sympathy for their people. I think of Catherine Sloper in James’ Washington Square. Later in the same interview, Appelfeld says:

“Well, it is wonderful to be a writer, because I am a woman and I am a child. I’m an elderly man and I’m a non-Jewish person. A writer has to be devoted totally to the person he is writing about.”

[The Wachtel interview can be found in Encounter with Aharon Appelfeld (Mosaic Press, 2003), edited by Michael Brown and Sara R. Horowitz.]

'Everything is Singing, Blooming and Sparkling'

In a May 4, 1889 letter to his friend and editor Alexi Suvorin, Chekhov complains of taking no interest in “reviews, conversations about literature, gossip, successes, failures, high royalties,” and adds:

“[I]n short, I’ve become a damn fool. My soul seems to be stagnating. I explain this by the stagnation of my personal life. It’s not that I’m disappointed or exhausted or cranky; it’s just that everything has grown less interesting. I’ll have to light a fire underneath myself.”

Chekhov wrote almost six-hundred short stories in his forty-four years, not to mention plays and thousands of letters. Some of the early stories are trifling, little more than anecdotes written quickly for publication in newspapers. In 1889, he was just entering his mature and most prolific period. Chekhov was not by nature a depressive, nor was he given to self-pity. One senses an element of mock-misery that he could share only with a close friend.

Chekhov is writing from Sumy (heavily damaged in the early days of the 2022 Russian invasion) in northeastern Ukraine on the Psel River. He begins the letter by telling Suvorin he has just returned from “the hunt: I was out catching crayfish.” What follows is a paean to spring, beginning:

“Everything is singing, blooming and sparkling with beauty. By now the garden is all green, and even the oaks are covered with leaves. The trunks of the apple, pear, cherry and plum trees have been painted white to protect them from worms. All of these trees have white blossoms, making them look strikingly like brides during the wedding ceremony: white dresses, white flowers and so innocent an appearance that they seem to be ashamed of being looked at.”

That image reminds me of Guy Davenport’s closing lines in his essay on Eudora Welty, “The Faire Field of Enna” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981):

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

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

Chekhov is no mystic or Transcendentalist. He’s too much the realist, the physician, to fall for nature sentimentalism, but he retains a powerful aesthetic sense – not a combination of traits we associate with most of the great Russian writers. He shifts tone in the paragraph cited above:

“Nature is a very good sedative. It gives a person equanimity. And you need equanimity in this world. Only people with equanimity can see things clearly, be fair and work. This, of course, applies only to intelligent and honorable people; selfish and shallow people have enough equanimity as it is.” 

In closing, Chekhov writes to Suvorin: “Well, God grant you health and all the best.”

[The translators of the letter are Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky (Letters of Anton Chekhov, 1973).]

'A Dull Night in a Buffalo Hotel'

When writing journalism, H.L. Mencken occasionally practiced what I think of as an informal form of Impressionism. He would organize isolated bits of description, usually snapshots of people, without explicit narration or formal structure. The effect, sometimes satirical, was panoramic, a small-scale version of what John Dos Passos would do in his U.S.A. trilogy. The risk, of course, would be artiness, a pretentious exercise in the merely clever. Mencken manages to avoid this failing in part because of his comedic sense combined with poignancy. In 2006 I wrote about it in connection with his “Suite Américane” (Prejudices, Third Series, 1922). 

He tried something similar with another suite, this one titled rather banally “People and Things” (Prejudices, Fourth Series, 1924). This excerpt is taken from the first of five sections, “The Capital of a Great Republic”:

 

“The chief correspondent of the Toomsboro, Ga., Banner in the Senate press-gallery.... The stenographer to the assistant chief entomologist of the Bureau of Animal Industry.... The third assistant chief computor in the office of the Naval Almanac.... The assistant Attorney-General in charge of the investigation of postal frauds in the South Central States.... The former wife of the former secretary to the former member of the Interstate Commerce Commission.... The brother to the wife of the chargé d’affaires of Czecho-Slovakia.... The bootlegger to the ranking Democratic member of the committee on the election of President, Vice-President and representatives in Congress....”

 

The effect is to make fun of bureaucracy, of course, but it also subverts the vanity of human wishes. They are often the sort of people nicely characterized by a psychiatrist in T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (1949):

 

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

 

The fifth section is more personal as suggested by the title, “The Shrine of Mnemosyne.” One suspects these are snapshots recovered from Mencken’s personal experience:

 

“The little town of Kirkwall, in the Orkney Islands, in a mid-Winter mist, flat and charming like a Japanese print.... San Francisco and the Golden Gate from the top of Twin Peaks.... Gibraltar on a Spring day, all in pastel shades, like the back-drop for a musical comedy.... My first view of the tropics, the palm-trees suddenly bulging out of the darkness of dawn, the tremendous stillness, the sweetly acid smell, the immeasurable strangeness.... The Trentino on a glorious morning, up from Verona to the Brenner Pass.... Central Germany from Bremen to Munich, all in one day, with the apple trees in bloom.... Copenhagen on a wild night, with the Polizei combing the town for the American who upset the piano.... Christiania in January, with the snow-clad statue of Ibsen looming through the gloom like a ghost in a cellar.... The beach at Tybee Island, with the faint, blood-curdling rattle of the land-crabs.... Jacksonville after the fire in 1902, with the hick militiamen firing their machine-guns all night.... The first inauguration of Woodrow, and the pretty suffragette who drank beer with me at the Raleigh.... A child playing in the yard of a God-forsaken town in the Wyoming desert.... Bryan’s farewell speech at the St. Louis Convention in 1904.... Hampton Court on Chestnut Sunday.... A New Year’s Eve party on a Danish ship, 500 miles off the coast of Greenland.... The little pile of stones on the beach of Watling’s Island, marking the place where Columbus landed.... The moon of the Caribbees, seen from a 1000-ton British tramp.... A dull night in a Buffalo hotel, reading the American Revised Version of the New Testament.... The day I received the proofs of my first book.... A good-bye on an Hoboken pier.... The Palace Hotel in Madrid.”

 

I find this unexpectedly poignant, as the randomness of memory often is, despite Mecnken’s shots at such familiar targets as President Woodrow Wilson and perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.

'I’d Be the Man Dares Clearly Sing'

I have no musical talent apart from a sometimes annoying gift for remembering lyrics, and not always the good stuff. I know all the words to a radio jingle for a car dealer in Cleveland, circa 1964, among other clutter. A related symptom is the long-lasting earworm. Much of this past Sunday was devoted to the Phil-Spectorized Righteous Brothers, with an emphasis on Bobby Hatfield stretching the word “baby" across, by my count, seventeen syllables. In addition, I sometimes compose a spontaneous score, heavy on the rhythm, to lines published as poetry, not songs. 

R.L. Barth has sent me the manuscript to a collection, In Civvies: A Half Century of Epigrams, written between the mid-1970s and the late 1980s. As the title suggests, most of these poems are unrelated to Vietnam, where Bob was a Marine serving as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in 1968-69. He hopes to publish them soon. Preceding the text of In Civvies as a sort of dedicatory epigraph is “Hoisting a Glass”:

 

“Here’s to the masters of the epigram:

Martial, Ben Jonson, Landor, Cunningham.”

 

Here is Bob's “Preferences”:

 

“I’m tired of the Homeric.

Just give me Robert Herrick.”

 

This might serve as a sort of “answer poem” or sequel to Bob’s "Reading the Iliad," In my case, I sang it rather ridiculously to the revised tune of “We’ll Follow the Old Man” as performed by Bing Crosby & Co. in White Christmas. Continuing the Herrick theme, here is Bob’s “His Response”:

 

“When as the roof’s a-tottering,

I’d be the man dares clearly sing;

But tell me, Herrick, tell me where

I might find tunes to rout despair.”

 

The first two lines are adapted from Herrick’s “His Desire”:

 

“Give me a man that is not dull

When all the world with rifts is full;

But unamaz’d dares clearly sing,

Whenas the roof’s a-tottering:

And, though it falls, continues still

Tickling the cittern with his quill.”

 

As "I’d be the man dares clearly sing" suggests, back to music: a cittern is a stringed instrument in the lute family and a quill is the plectrum used to strike the strings. Much of Herrick's work is eminently singable and Swinburne called him “the greatest song writer ever born of English race.” Along with originals, Bob includes translations of ten epigrams from the Latin of Martial and one dedicated to the Roman poet, “To Martial”:

 

“After your death, Pliny wrote praising you

For genius, satire, wit, and candor too.

Now, take this note across the centuries:

Tribute from one of your lesser legatees

Who, Pliny-like, would also recommend

Your poems, you—good company, good friend.”

 

Bob has edited editions of Yvor Winters’ poems and letters, and he dedicates “The Jeweler” to the memory of Winters:

 

“Each facet, sharp and bright,

Despite the turning hand

Immersed in the pure light,

Divides light, band from band.”

 

Winters wouldn’t have approved of my predilection for singing poems, though I try to keep it to myself. He writes in his essay “The Audible Reading of Poetry” (The Function of Criticism, 1957):

 

“A formal reading which avoids dramatic declamation will necessarily take on something of the nature of a chant. This kind of reading itself has dangers, however, for the reader may carry the procedure so far as to appear precious, and worse, he may deform syllables in the interests of what he considers musical intonation, much as a musical composer will draw syllables out or hurry over them in setting a poem to music.”