TGIF is POETS for those without initiative. Make it happen. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Wallace Stevens started late. His first poetry collection held an impressive, by debut poetry collection standards, eighty five titles, but when the book, Harmonium, was published in 1923, its author was in his early forties. He’d had time to backlog.

I covered Stevens’s morning routine—composing in his head as he walked to his office at Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company—in this space three years ago. In Harmonium, he wrestles with how he should see the world. Should he be grounded in the rational or loose in the imagination? The question is posed piecemeal and never resolved.

I remember when Donna Tartt’s A Secret History came out. My mother’s kitchen table review was that it’s a great book, but she put all she’s ever learned and considered into it and she won’t have anything else to say for five to ten years. That was in 1992. Tartt’s second book came out in 2002. Stevens spends a great deal of energy trying to sort himself. He wrote sparingly through the 20s, not writing regularly again until 1933 and not publishing another bound volume until Ideas of Order in 1936. Harmonium received harsh reviews. Mark Van Doren dismissed him from the genre by writing in The Nation, per Wikipedia, that Stevens’ wit “is tentative, perverse, and superfine; and it will never be popular.” There were nice things written too, but the negatives weighed on him. Maybe he, like Tartt in Mom’s pinning, spent his store. Maybe the critics brushed him back. Maybe he had to reconcile vers libre with actuary tables.

Reception wasn’t all bad. Van Doren was an influential guy, but I’d trade three of his rookies for one of Harriet Monroe’s base cards. Her approval was paramount. In the incunabular days of Poetry, she wrote, per Wikipedia:

“[T]here was never a more flavorously original poetic personality than the author of this book. If one seeks sheer beauty of sound, phrase, rhythm, packed with prismatically colored ideas by a mind at once wise and whimsical, one should open one’s eyes and ears, sharpen one’s wits, widen one’s sympathies to include rare and exquisite aspects of life, and then run for this volume of iridescent poems.”

That should have buoyed him. He should have also been inured to charges of nonsense. He’s famously hard to decipher, threads his poems with an idiosyncratic symbolism and teases those who tried to put together a key, and prizes sound and fluidity over communication. He knew he was being problematic.

Edmund Wilson wrote of Stevens, “Even when you do not know what he is saying, you know that he is saying it well.” I don’t know that readers of this first book came so disposed to indulge though he certainly earned trust over a career. Stevens kept his notebook scribblings. Some of those aphorisms and begun thoughts were published as the section “Adagia” in the posthumous collection Open Posthumous in 1957. Among them: “Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully,” and “A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.”

That should be liberating; license to read for the joy of sound. He mocks the code breakers’ claims that in his poetry blue signals imagination and red reality, but then right there on the pages, repeated for all to see, is blue heralding imagination and red meaning reality. Instead of liberation, we get humility. Approach the poems knowing something is meant, but not necessarily something comprehensible. Most have straightforward elements while hinting there is more. Is there? Sometimes yes. I think. Maybe always. Have fun with it.

The Plot against the Giant
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

First Girl

When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker, I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.

Second Girl

I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.

Third Girl

Oh, la … le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.

There is everything innocent about the above poem, but if you were ever a middle school boy, you’ve already giggled at three women trading plans to bring down something large. Read that Stevens hid erotic meaning in some of his poems—“never inadvertently crude,” his friend Marianne Moore wrote of him, leaving me to wonder if she meant he was occasionally advertently crude—and know that sometimes his poems are just a cigar, and you’re left wondering who’s the dirty one? Is it the poet? Am I being puerile? Get to the line with “labials” and “gutturals” and I’m off the rails. I’m not imagining things. The nuns can’t have been right.

“The Place of Solitaires” is safely said to be about the aims of Stevens’s idealized poet. He’s to stir the imagination. He tells us this without reference to blue, which has to infuriate the code breakers. Green, which is mentioned, purportedly means “the physical.” No matter the color scheme, he prizes motion. Ideas don’t stand still. If my reading is correct, the poet’s goal is better served conveying images and concepts in transition to give a sense of the whole rather than trying to render a moment in precision. A poem is not a photograph and requires a mindset to compose.

The Place of the Solitaires

Let the place of the solitaires
Be a place of perpetual undulation.

Whether it be in mid-sea
On the dark, green water-wheel,
Or on the beaches,
There must be no cessation
Of motion, or of the noise of motion,
The renewal of noise
And manifold continuation;

And, most, of the motion of thought
And its restless iteration,

In the place of the solitaires,
Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation.

There’s a longer poem, broken into six Roman numeralled parts, called “The Comedian as the Letter C,” in the middle of Harmonium. It’s about Crispin, a poet searching for his place. He starts in Bordeaux, travels to the Yucatan, Florida, and ends up in North Carolina. In the early 1900s there was a school of poetry known as Local Color. Stevens wasn’t much of a fan. Locality Writers felt it was important to tie themselves to a region. It wasn’t just poets. William Faulkner is a prime example. “Comedian” is the poet rejecting that he’s tied to his place and in his travels, finding that there isn’t a place. At the same time, he considers his figurative place as a member of society. There are obvious parallels between Crispin and Stevens, the poet and insurance man. He lives in the imagination and in reality. To which, if either, does he belong?

He doesn’t satisfy himself with an answer, but claims advantages to not knowing. He’s not lost in the imagination or bound to reality. He can exist in either and see both from an outside perspective.

It purified. It made him see how much
Of what he saw he never saw at all.

Romantic notions can grow stale, but he was in and out. There were no Pevensies yet to compare himself to, but withdrawing to reality left a longing and a quickening. Lucy longed to return to Narnia, loving it with an intensity she may not have had she stayed. Did those without quotidian lives allow the fantastic to fade? For Stevens, the place of solitaires retained a sense of risk.

All dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged.
But let the rabbit run, the cock declaim.

In Part VI, Crispin settles and has a family. His travels are done, Byronic shirts and waistcoats put away. Is he still a poet?

Because he built a cabin who once planned
Loquacious columns by the ructive sea?

The question nags.

Anecdote of Men by the Thousand

The soul, he said, is composed
Of the external world.

There are men of the East, he said,
Who are the East.
There are men of a province
Who are that province
There are men of a valley
Who are that valley.

There are men whose words
Are as natural sounds
Of their places
As the cackle of toucans
In the place of toucans.

The mandoline is the instrument
Of a place.

Are there mandolines of western mountains?
Are there mandolines of northern moonlight?

The dress of a woman of Lhassa,
In its place,
Is an invisible element of that place
Made visible.

Harmonium is not all existential struggle. Far from it. Even in his ennui he’s playful. Louis Untermeyer called him “childish.” Gorham Munson dubbed him “a dandy.” That stuck. Twenty years later Yvor Winters argued that dandy didn’t cover it. He suggested “hedonist.” I think Stevens was funny.

from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is just that. Some were funny, like the above. Some flippant. Others sublime or reverent. The next is numinous if you went to a thesaurus looking for a synonym for “sublime” but with a shade towards mystery.

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

He loved to mention birds; palm trees too, but birds. There are peacocks, grackles, toucans, hawks, falcons, and flamingos. Obviously, blackbirds. That’s from a quick flip back through. There are more. He gets on a phoenix kick in his later work, but not yet in Harmonium. I have no idea what the code breakers make of all that.

There is no resolution to his predicament at the end of the book. He doesn’t know how to go forward. He eventually figured out a path, but whether he went back to writing having resolved his dilemma or having made peace with its nagging, I don’t know.

Stevens ends Harmonium with his mind set one way, a moment later set another, and again.

The Wind Shifts

This is how the wind shifts:
Like the thoughts of an old human,
Who still thinks eagerly
And despairingly.
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
The wind shifts like this:
Like humans approaching proudly,
Like humans approaching angrily.
This is how the wind shifts:
Like a human, heavy and heavy,
Who does not care.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Welcome once again to POETS Day, where we usher in Henry Ford’s greatest creation – the weekend – a few hours ahead of schedule by embracing the ethos of the day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Life’s too short for work, and nobody’s gonna notice if you hoof it mid-afternoon.

***

TS Eliot titled the third of his Four Quartets “The Dry Salvages” after a rock formation off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a fishing village and seaside retreat where the St. Louis based Eliot family spent their summers when the poet was a boy. Dry Salvages derives from an original French name for the formation transformed by time, mishearings, and local accent. Eliot tells us in a parenthetical preceding the poem, “presumably les trois sauvages,” Anglicized over time but, he instructs, “pronounced to rhyme with assuages,” so not as yet a fully English subject.

As with all of the Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages” manages competing images presenting a theme. There’s a great deal going on and a great many ways to spend a thousand words on an aspect without touching on any number of other aspects. In this poem, the opening and recurrent image is that of water. The river is present, flowing, perceptible action. The sea is unknowable depths. Water rises from the sea, rains and forms oceans and back to the sea. The sea is the past and the future. We cannot know which or guess at more than the surface. The river is with us, changing in the moment. It is present. The idea permeates.

This poem deals with transition and our perception of it. “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Quartets, considers the cycle binding past, future, and present, that we are trapped in change, “Desire itself is movement,” a stillness central to the circular cycle of time and motion is the incomprehensible begotten God, and our hoped-for ecstasies or perceptions of the divine. In the second, “East Coker,” Eliot presents generational cycles, shows that as men we are limited to experience what time allows, and concludes that to be near God we must live every moment in concentration, though no revelation is guaranteed. A life of contemplation and worship may be well and good for saints and mystics, but what, asks the speaker in “The Dry Salvages,” about the rest of us? What of a plumber or farmer who makes possible the generational churning? How are they to attain communion?

In answer, Eliot invokes Krishna, Mary, and Jesus.

In the epic Mahabharata, the warrior Arjuna asks Krishna what he must do in battle to be victorious. Russell Elliott Murphy, in his Critical Companion to T.S. Eliot, explains that in the ancient Sanskrit text, Krishna responds “Think of me,” because “the teaching is that one becomes one with ’whatever sphere of being / The mind of man may be intent [on] / At the time of death.’” With that in mind, Eliot plays with Heraclitus’s observation that “No man steps in the same river twice,” to introduce the idea that we are forever lost, or possibly dying moment to moment. With every change we are a different person. What we were ceases to be. I am not the same person I was when I began this thought because now I am a person who has begun this thought.

As with the two poems before, the third section of “The Dry Salvages” takes place in a train or a subway. In this incarnation, the train ride, in a few lines described as an ocean voyage, is the fixed present in a never ending journey from past to future, a transition from what you were to what you will be.

from Part III of The Dry Salvages
TS Eliot (1888-1965)

You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! Not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station.
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think “the past is finished”
Or “the future is before us.”

We were never in the past. We remember it, but we are not the person who was anymore. We will never be in the future. That is for someone who remembers us, but is more. No matter how we struggle, we’re forever of the moment, bracketed by a past and a future that we, as we are, cannot be a part of. We’re reminded of the limitations spelled out in “Burnt Norton,” that we are trapped by time. We’re analogous to generations as spoken to in “East Coker.” We are neither our ancestor nor our progeny. We are here.

Let me be a goofy fan for a moment: “That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here,” is, to me, among his most memorable lines. He uses “that” instead of “the” in the line “You are not the same people who left that station.” It’s a nice touch. There’s a distance implied. A person who just left might say “the station.” “The” connects as it is specific—the one known to the speaker—where “that” suggests a station observed. The person who was there is in the past, the present can only look back. Eliot is in the details.

Another passage that stands out, this one from Part II, laying the ground for the section above:

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the later a partial fallacy,
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.

All the struggles and adaptations, the leaps forward and retreats, the dead ends explored, all of the mechanics of natural selection led to man as we are now and enlivened with niche beasts our populated world. Everyone knows that the process is ongoing but we don’t consider that we’ll one day be primitive. Or if we do, as an “of course” set in a distant and ignorable future. But here we are on the train.

In answer to the main question: The plumber and the farmer must live in the moment. The average person possessed of the same need for meaning and communion as the saint but lacking the drive or pressed with competing priorities should attend to their role in the pattern. Being only in the present, attend to the present; each personal incarnation at a time in its time; do his part to make the past and anticipate the future.

Eliot ends the poem in Part V with,

For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realized;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.

Eliot recalls Part IV of “Burnt Norton” where the speaker asks if man rejects God and sets himself as supreme, will “Fingers of yew be curled / Down on us?” If man is the end all be all, what happens when man is gone? Does the universe cease? Will yew roots—the yew stands as a symbol of the churchyard—grow downward towards your grave? If so, by what power? By what will once yours is gone? How well thought out is your blasphemy?

Here, the yew presages a sort of immortality. Eliot insists there is something greater if we cleave to it. Like Arjuna, we will be victorious. We take part in the cycle as one man in generations and one being in a divine plan. Fixed in the present, our part is forever now.

The primary appeal to Mary comes in Part IV, which is a short prayer for safety for those at sea. The appeal is presaged in Part II in the passage below with the reference to Jesus as “the calamitous annunciation,” the occasion of the eternal in contact with time and our salvation. In the six stanzas leading to the lines including “superficial notions of evolution,” man’s lot is described as “In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,” and “forever bailing.” He is adrift and in a struggle he will not see end.

Here, Eliot shows he is a master of form. Man is part of a pattern, a working greater than himself. He can’t always see that. His life is short and the pattern weaves long. Eliot gives us this plight in these six stanzas set as a modified sestina. Classically, a sestina has six stanzas of six lines each with the final word of each line repeating as the last word of a different line in the next stanza cascading to a set pattern. In Eliot’s sestina, the last words of each first line rhyme rather than repeat, as is so with second lines, third, etc. without cascading. There’s no recognizing a pattern from looking at a single stanza. To do so requires a long view. The form embodies the thematic assertion. It’s poetry.

from Part II of The Dry Salvages

Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable-
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind’s tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.

We have to think of them as forever bailing,
Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
Not as making a trip that will be unpayable
For a haul that will not bear examination.

There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of the one Annunciation.

This is not an Evangelical poem, but it is inescapably Christian as it is an attempt to comprehend great mysteries by one raised in a Christian tradition. Murphy writes “Suffice it to say, for Eliot at least, those values and beliefs, when the inform any work of literature, do so not in order to indoctrinate or proselytize the prospective reader but because they form a part of the author’s actual life experience.” All must be considered from Eliot’s perspective. So death in a moment is not absolution from individual responsibility. That he warned us off with “superficial notions of evolution” as “a means of disowning the past.” Death is a curtain we cannot pass back through, a metaphor for a barrier. In that light, there is clarification. We are not the person we were a moment ago but we are not reborn sinless and pure. We are the creator writ small of both and all past and all coming momentary accumulations of our experiences. We are in need of salvation.

CS Lewis used the Tao as a stand in for a shared morality (let Eastern philosophers, hacky sack mystics, and Lewis scholars unite and mob me for the simplicity.) He was making a point arrived at through Christianity, but one he felt should be shared and could be similarly embraced by those of any faith. As a laurel, he reached outside his faith for a word to show the concept was not exclusive. So does Eliot pull Krishna. In that sense, it may be Evangelical, if at a slant. It is a reasoning process.

For the full text of the poem, click here.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Will was a ready-made friend assembled off-site and brought in as a palliative by my parents. Mom and Dad made us move. There was no consultation. The new house wasn’t that far from the old neighborhood from their perspective, but they had a Buick. I knew the distance by a twelve-year-old’s bicycle reckoning. My old friends were a crow’s fly mile away now but there were obstacles. Cahaba Road’s ups and downs, Montclair’s traffic, and a well perimetered country club enforced isolation. All my friends were there and I was stuck here. Will’s dad used to work with my dad and lived a few blocks away from our new place. They signed us up for the same soccer team.

It worked. Will was, and is, a good guy. I’m friends with his older brother Kevin, too. That last part wasn’t the case until much later. Kevin didn’t take to me at first. That wasn’t my fault. Our school went grades five through twelve. Kevin was a high school senior and Will and I were in sixth and seventh grade, respectively. Kevin had spent the summer tuning, buffing, and otherwise worshiping his powder-blue late sixties Mustang. The car was a showpiece, but in a muscular way, and would have ushered in a new age of Kevin high school ascendancy as he drove past the lower lot, slowly circled past main entrance, and eased into a reserved senior parking place. But his mom told him he had to drive me and Will to school with him every morning. We didn’t figure in the triumph.

The first morning he picked me up, I was told to get in the back with Will. Kevin glared at us. “I don’t hear a fucking word out of you two. Got it?” and Blaupunkt-ed The Producers’ “She Shelia” to crisp ear-shattering eleven. That was our morning every day for a month.“I don’t want to…” and Blaupunkt Producers followed by “Piece by Piece” by The Tubes. The woofers thumped my braces. We only lived a mile and a half from school so I never found out what mixed tape magic followed at the three spot.

Come early October, I bailed and decided to skateboard for the rest of the year. As a result, I met a ton of older kids. Damn near every student en route to school would slow and ask if I wanted a ride. I was in seventh grade, but a minute’s worth of vagabond travel a day in this or that upperclassman’s car in the morning and seniors would pass by me and my friends in the halls with a “Hey, Ben.” I was known by older kids. I felt cool. I also picked up on schedules and knew when to thank for but refuse a ride because “it’s a nice day” if there was a better chance of hitching along with Jenny of the tight sweaters and large chest. She had blond hair and a comfy red BMW 318i. There was a spell where she dated a fellow senior who drove a cherry red late sixties Mustang—not quite the equal of Kevin’s—and he was covetous, I guess, because on mornings when he drove her to school they’d zip right by. She’d wave as they passed. That’s something. I endured their short affair and slipped back into accepting the kindness of less attractive strangers. I was thrilled when they broke up. She ended up at Harvard. Her kid and mine have been in a few plays together. Unbelievably nice person.

Outside of situations where having a younger brother and his dork friend spoiled a summer’s worth of garage work and distracted from acid washed sunglasses, Kevin was a pretty good guy to hang around with. The summer following our move to the neighborhood, I went off to camp with Will and another guy named Will from the other end of the street. Kevin was one of the councilors. The three of us would sign up for all Kevin-led trips and activities because he treated us like lieutenants.

Near the end of the month long session, you’d go off in groups of ten to twenty with three or four councilors for a two night, three day delve into the woods, in one direction or another, to cook hot dogs on the end of a stick and maybe put your arm around a girl’s shoulders by the camp fire. Kevin led a hike to a waterfall, a trickle, really—we were expecting some grand Niagara-like wall of noise and spray the way they talked it up—dropping nine or ten feet into an icy cold swimming hole. Somehow, he arranged it so the Wills and I got horses. We needed to ride up ahead and scout or some nonsense. I don’t know how he conned the administration, but we had four saddled and two packed. Will, Will, and I did almost all of the unnecessary galloping across open spaces.

One night I almost kissed a girl named Heather. Her friend, a girl named Mickey who smoked, told me Heather liked me and I should give it a try. I did put my arm around her at the campfire and we decided to go together for the remainder of the term until we all went home, which was maybe four days.

As an aide-de-camp-councilor, I helped screw together the scaffold to set over the fire. On that, we set metal grills for burgers and steaks at night and iron skillets for messy eggs and bacon in the morning. My proximity to power impressed Heather. It was a good gig.

One morning, Kevin, who is now a chef in adulthood, made a spectacular amount of bacon and a resulting spectacular amount of grease. After he pulled bacon and set it in buffet pans, he poured a half a pot of coffee in to the smoldering skillet, making a few pops and a lot of steam. Everyone but Heather and me was off fighting about line-cutting at the folding table buffet. He called us over, pulled us into conspiracy. “You want to try this.”

He tossed a bit of butter in and stirred. Next, he pulled a bag of white bread from the mess box, took a few pieces and passed it to us. We all dipped and ate. Heather didn’t like it. There were cracks that would have shown had we not gone our separate ways. Kevin called it red eye gravy and I thought he invented it.

More than a few red eye recipes claim to be original or authentic. I don’t believe there’s an original recipe. Cooks deglaze with liquid. A pan sauce made from coffee and grease was inevitable and doubtless discovered on every trail and through every pass since Sufi monks invented jitters in the 15^th Century, or whatever other story of the first brewed coffee is ascendant of a moment.

Camp Mountain Lake went to hell a few years after I left. The place shut down and was abandoned. A Facebook page popped up so old campers were able to trade snapshots from endless summers. A few intrepid alums explored the old site and posted archaeological pics of overgrown cabins and barely recognizable boathouses. Someone bought it a few years ago, redid and repaired the place, and reopened as a glamping compound. Hipsters got it.

Below is red eye gravy made at home by older people with air conditioners. Full stop. Hipster takeover of my former camp is coincidental and not to be extended metaphorically to besmirch the recipe.

Gentrified Camp Mountain Lake Red-Eye Gravy

• 1 shallot, minced

• 2-3 cloves garlic, minced

• 8 oz. Pancetta, diced

• handful flat leaf parsley, chopped

• 2 cups coffee, or more as needed

• chicken stock, if needed

• unsalted butter, as needed

• flour, all-purpose is fine

• optional: some heat – pepper flakes, cayenne, Tabasco, habanero – whatever you like and however much you choose

Finely chop the shallot, garlic, and parsley.

Set a skillet over medium-high heat. Get it good and hot, add pancetta and make grease.

Cook the pancetta until it’s ready to eat. If you’re not a frequent pancetta cooker, it doesn’t take much. You’re basically browning cubes of bacon so firm it up and let it develop some darker colors—a little char is nice. Add the shallot, and continue, stirring everything around now and then for thirty seconds. Add the garlic and continue stirring for thirty more. Pour in the coffee, let half or so boil away. Sometimes I add chicken stock if the coffee is too astringent, sometimes I don’t. Make that call yourself. Throw in the parsley and whatever heat, if any, you prefer. I used a pinch of cayenne and added a pinch more after tasting at the end.

I’ve gotten lazy with roux and that’s made a difference in my life. I used to fret over ratio, wonder if this or that calls for toasted flour, and overall make like I’m fete-ing Cajun royalty rather than trying to get whatever’s in front of me to stick to the back of a metal soup spoon. Now I put a few pats of butter on a cutting board, pour a little flour over it, and mash it with my thumb. It’s a little more involved than I make it sound. There’s pinching with one or two other fingers, but that’s about it.

I don’t care how much pseudo-roux I make as long as it’s enough. Take a few chips or flakes of roux and whisk it in. Repeat until it looks thick enough. After that, taste for salt and pepper and serve.

This was great over chicken thighs but not terribly photogenic. Here it is in glory with a polenta cake.

Upscale campfire grub. Yell “Come and get it!” and dance a chuckwagon cookie jig while dressed like Fred Astaire.

The work week’s nearly over; barely a few hours left. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done between now and quitting time. Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Maxwell Bodenheim didn’t end well. There’s a sense in here and there bios that he was doing just fine, a near toast of a borough, and then things went south. That’s not quite right. He started south. Somewhere in between, he made a name of himself. That there was a high point is tribute to his talents, and given my assessment, the disposition of time allowing for his inconsistent deployment of those talents. He wasn’t a good guy: cantankerous, woman beating, and salacious. That last I forgive.

Maxwell Bodenheim didn’t begin well. He was born in Hermanville, Mississippi, far left of geographical state center, about where Louisiana’s laces would droop, but not near enough the river to expect growth. It was a timber yard with a railroad stop and an Episcopal church. His family moved to Chicago when he was seven or eight where he discovered and delighted in trouble.

Booted from high school, he joined the army, punched an officer, went AWOL, and spent a year in military prison. Once out, he did some migrant work before heading back to Chicago. I’m not sure when he started writing poetry, but around this time he got noticed. His work was picked up by Poetry, included in anthologies with big names like TS Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, palled around with writers Ben Hecht and Sherwood Anderson, and pinned his name to the eruption of artistic energy known as the Chicago Renaissance.

In the mid 1920s he moved to New York, Greenwich Village in particular. Sometime in his late teens or early twenties he picked up the nickname “Bogey.” As a New Yorker, he dubbed himself “The King of Greenwich Village Bohemians.” There was no recreation or shedding of his past on taking a new title. He was an ass as Bogey and kept on being an ass as Bohemian Royalty. Wikipedia preserves a quote from a 2012 John Strausbaugh Chisler article where the critic writes of Bodenheim’s “haughty, insulting demeanor, and his habit of trying to steal other men’s women right under their noses, got him regularly socked on the jaw and thrown out of bars, soirees and the fauxhemian revels at Webster Hall.”

He fell in love with Minna Schein with whom he had a son and bopped around Chicago, New York, England, and Hollywood. Whether he stole her and got socked for his trouble, I don’t know, but the couple married in 1918. That same year Minna and Myself, his first book of poetry and the one from which all of this week’s selections come, was published. He’d publish eight more plus an anthology and I suppose I should slip in that wrote thirteen novels as well. This early poetry is uneven.

Here are the first two numbered stanzas from the opening poem.

from Minna
Maxwell Bodenheim (1892-1954)

I

Twilight pushes down your eyes
With shimmering, pregnant fingers
That leave you covered with still-born touch.
With little whips of dead words
Silence cuts your lips to a keener red.
Your heart strikes its bed of dark mirth, in death,
And your hands lie over it, guarding the corpse.
Night will soon whisk away this room
But you are already invisible.

II

Your cheeks are spent diminuendos
Sheering into the rose-veiled silence of your lips.
Your eyes are gossamer coquettes
Ringed with the sparkling breath of dead loves.
Your body strays into lanterns of form
Strewing the night within this room….
The light dies; you are still
And spill the frolicing night of your heart
Over the darkness about you, making it pale.

He dives into one metaphor and then another without coming up for air so we have twilight pushing with fingers that are pregnant but have still-born touch. Dead words cut with silence and lips run red and hand protect dead from dark but it doesn’t matter because you’re beyond light. It’s exhausting but impressive if you can pull it off. He comes up winning more often that not, even if it’s tinged by eagerness, as if he’d decided a poet rapid fires imagery and having decided, presses on no matter. There’s not a lot of gear shifting, and when there is, rather than enjoy the moment, I’m exasperated with him for not doing so when he should have at other points.

There are XXVII sections of “Minna,” all a but few of them stand alone stanzas like the above. That length and density make ripe for cliches and recycled poetisms. It’s got a “morning glory face” and its kin, but he generally impresses with, if not originality, original deployment of those cliches even if he speeds—relentlessly—through leaving no opportunity to scrutinize syntax. Not all his metaphors follow logically, but they’re catchy. He not a great poet, but manages more often than not to be enjoyable. On paper.

His novel Replenishing Jessica made headlines as far off as France and Britain. He and his publisher were hit with an obscenity charge that the government couldn’t make stick, so he carried danger as an upsetter and panache as a giant slayer. Bodenheim attracted ardent female fans. One cast-off tried suicide. A second succeeded. A third succeeded and blessed the yellow press by being found with Bodenheim’s picture in her hand. A fourth was killed in a subway accident. Melpomene or Thalia, tragedy or comedy, decreed the love letters he’d written to her be scattered about the train car. Bogey was solid copy. He and Minna didn’t divorce until 1938, so this all happened with her suffering (I assume) at home.

He could be charming.

Change

I came upon a maiden
Blowing rose petals in the air
And catching them, as they fell,
Upon quick fingertips
Her laugh fell lighter than the petals
And dropped little gestures upon my forehead.
I gave her sadness and she blew it up
As she had blown the rose petals:
And it almost seemed joy as her fingers caught it.
But I was only a wanderer plaited with dust,
Who gave her new petals to play with.

I haven’t seen any accusations that he beat any of his three wives other than the last. She prostituted herself and he didn’t like that. I accept that there’s a time in every wife beater’s career when he first lands a punch, but think it’s fair to assume if he hit one, he probably hit the others.

After Jazz age fame Bodenheim became a sot, drenched in alcoholism and reduced to selling scribbled poems for drinks. There’s a sub-genre of anecdote where literary minded sorts pass through Greenwich Village, get annoyed by a transient in a bar, and after telling the guy off are remonstrated by locals: “Do you have any idea who that was?” He was already begging when he met his second wife, Grace. His last novel came out in 1933 and he didn’t publish a bound collection of poetry between 1930 and 1942. There’s mention of odd jobs and inconsistent publication in magazines and newspapers, inclusion in a few anti-fascist and socialist anthologies, but his primary occupation seems to have been stringing drinks together as best he could, all the while insisting on his dignity, his defiance, and refusal to “bootlick.”

After Grace suffered with cancer and died, he met and married Ruth. She was nearly thirty years younger than he was so probably more adaptable to living in parks and flophouses as they did. She, as mentioned, brought in old fashioned money while he panhandled and scribbled. One inspired innovation: he’d sit on a sidewalk with a sign that said “Blind” around his neck.

This next poem was written in 1918, so he’s not referencing his blind beggar scam. It doesn’t carry any foreshadowing, qualify as a coincidence, or rise to irony. Seeing it knowing what he’d come to pokes at me, makes me wonder about when paths diverge and whether we are all of what we do or are we what we are when we are. That ponderousness is nearly supported by the text. Meta is as something else does.

Blind

Blinder than oak-trees in the wind
Endlessly weaving sighs into a poem
To sight,
He sits, the light of one pale purple lantern
Seeping into his dream-hollowed face,
Like floating, transparent words
Pale with unuttered meanings.
He mends a flute and sighs as though
Its shadow leaned heavily upon his heart
And told him things his dead eyes could not grasp.

Another poem that’s poignant in retrospect.

Poet-Vagabond Grown

The dust of many roads has been my grey wine.
Surprised beech-trees have bowed
With me, to the plodding morning
Humming tunes frail as webs of dead perfume,
To his love in golden silks, the departed moon.
Maidens like rose-flooded statues
Have bathed me in the wine of their silence.

But now I walk on, alone.
And only after watching many evenings,
Do I dance a bit with dying wisps of moon-light,
To persuade myself that I am young.

In 1954, he and Ruth made friends with a dishwasher named Charlie Weinberg, who let them spend a night in his apartment. Bodenheim woke up to find either Ruth and Charlie having sex or Charlie raping Ruth. Regardless of which, he objected and consequently was shot and killed by Weinberg who turned on Ruth and stabbed her repeatedly until she died. “I ought to get a medal,” he later said. “I killed two communists.”

His poetry changed over time. The short declaritories of Minna and Myself gave way to longer spindly poems, tetrameter to the eye but lacking meter, single columned free verse indented after short jabs. I don’t have access to any of his vagrant work, but Paul Maher Jr., in his 2019 Please Kill Me article about a 1951 meeting between Bondenheim and Jack Kerouac, writes of Bondenheim,

“He saw no beauty sufficient enough to distill into sonnet form. ‘[B]eauty,’ he explained to Hecht, ‘has become a wounded ignored vagabond; truth dodges wearily through a host of figures pretending to be truth; and imagination is a ghost flirting with tantalizing memories.’”

I can’t help but imagine they were bleak.

Tough Poets Press is making a go of reviving interest in the guy with reprints of a couple of novels and a collection of essays. Project Gutenberg has a few of his works available, but that’s museum curation. He’s largely forgotten. His son, possibly in part out of deserved pique at being named Solbert, kept a distance, was embarrassed by his father’s Bohemian life and disastrous reputation, and died six years after Maxwell.

There’s not much left. He a had a talent for image and metaphor that, with a little discipline, could have made something memorable. Instead, he drank and pissed it all away. Didn’t even get a Mickey Rourke movie out of it.

Death

I shall walk down the road.
I shall turn and feel upon my feet
The kisses of Death, like scented rain.
For Death is a black slave with little silver birds
Perched in a sleeping wreath upon his head.
He will tell me, his voice like jewels
Dropped into a satin bag,
How he has tip-toed after me down the road,
His heart made a dark whirlpool with longing for me.
Then he will graze me with his hands
And I shall be one of the sleeping, silver birds
Between the cold waves of his hair, as he tip-toes on.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

The work week’s nearly finito; barely a few hours left. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done between now and quitting time. Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Ezra Pound was a very good poet but not a master versifier. I think he knew that. “Major Poet” is a term reserved for the greats who define their time and turn swaths of contemporaries into satellites. Yeats is a Major Poet, as is Eliot. “Minor Poet” sounds dismissive, though it’s not. Don’t mistake Minor for bad or run of the mill. Bad or run of the mill poets are called poets. A Minor Poet merits consideration enough have status conferred, to have demonstrated excellence if not tremendous influence.

In his essay “What Is Minor Poetry?,” Eliot picks out Robert Herrick, noting that he shows no “continuous conscientious purpose.” Herrick “is more the purely natural and un-self-conscious man, writing his poems as the fancy seizes him,” and it being Eliot writing, assumes we see and will make our own “gathering his rosebuds as he may” crack. Auden was more pragmatic, declaring that Major Poets have college courses devoted to their work and their work alone while Minor Poets do not. Auden would have made the rosebud joke.

Pound is considered a Major Poet, though as a testament to the fullness of critical criteria. Line for line or poem for poem, he doesn’t compare to his friends Yeats or Eliot. He’s not as fluid in his verse, but he’s dense. His lines are saturated with references and allusion. He’s distinguished by influence, as a man who set a course and guided the development of the art. As an editor, promoter, and anthologist, he did more to shape Modern Poetry than, probably, anyone else of his era. He was blessed with an ear, an eye, and confidence. He looked at The Waste Land, Ulysses, poems by Frost, by HD, Cummings, William Carlos Williams, gave his thoughts on what did and didn’t work, and relied on the genius of the editee to fix the issue. He treated his own work the same, but fixing was a struggle. He spotted flaws he didn’t know how to correct. It must have been maddening.

Frustration set him globetrotting. Pound was born in a small town called Hailey in the Idaho Territory. His family were frontier types with postal appointments, General Land Office, and front-line civic minded organizational interests expected in pioneering hagiographies. His mother wanted to enjoy the results rather than the credit for civilizing and took Ezra East. His father found a job in Philadelphia and there they settled.

He was not without literary stimulation at home. He met William Carlos Williams at U Penn. The two became friends and mutually respected professional contemporaries. I’m not sure under what circumstances he met Hilda Doolittle. She was a classics minded student at Bryn Mawr and he was just returned to Philadelphia from a post graduate program in New York. In any case, he fell for her. For the next few years he pursued an MA in Romance languages, sailed on grants to Spain and France to study jesters and troubadours, and, all the while, publishing here and there, trying on styles, attempting poetic revivals, and pressing himself. America fueled his friend Williams. He saw opportunity to define a national poetics independent of Europe. Pound didn’t want that. The thrill was transforming and advancing the old by making from it something new. He saw America as vulgar, not pretty enough to dance with.

As he writes in the first poem below, he tried America and gave it up at thirty-one though that would men 1916. By that time he’d been living in London for two years, having bounced from Gibraltar to Venice and points between. I assume at the age of thirty-one there was a decision or shift in his thinking that represented a split. He was an American spending time in Europe one day and the next he was an ex-pat. In 1920, he’d decide London constrained him. Paris would later do the same. He may or may not have tired of Rapallo. The US government arrested him for treason after WWII and constrained him less subtly than predominant regional artistic attitudes had, so Rapallo didn’t get a chance for him to tire of it. Prison, St. Elizabeth’s mental ward, and eventual pardon led back to Rapallo and harmlessness, but he was an old man by then, less prone to wandering or running.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Contacts and Life) is Pound’s farewell to England. That’s the new title. Originally it was Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts) but in the 1950 he wrote to his publisher: “Note inversion in subtitle of Mauberley, NOT Life and Contacts but the actual order of the subject matter.” Contacts inform the life, I suppose. “Mauberley” is presented as one poem, though it’s divided into eighteen shorter poems. A great deal has been made of who is speaking when. Mauberley is a failed poet. According to whom you listen, Mauberley is Pound; Mauberley is an aspect of Pound; Mauberley is an independent character resembling Pound only because he served as vehicle for Pound’s concerns. And on and on. Maybe he was Elizabeth I or Francis Bacon. It’s made more confusing by shifts in perspective from one poem or group of poems to the next.

I’m codifying and invoking what I’ll call going forward “Graves’s Maxim,” paraphrased from Robert Graves’s “The Why of the Weather” as “Since no one knows the why of the weather, every poor fool is licensed to try to explain it.” So, my two cents: Mauberley is an aspect of Pound, one which he’s shedding. At times he writes in reflection with regret, at times as an invigorated poet hoping, and at times as an observer. There’s nothing repellent to Pound in the observer or revitalized innovator. It’s the concrete he’s got problems with. The past, the one that happened, didn’t live up. So he distances himself. He gives the past a name and leaves him behind.

The poem was published in 1920, announcing the second of his geographical fixes. Having left the States, he’d done what he could do in England. The Continent, where his troubadours played, held promise.

The cycle begins with a primer from the observer recounting Pound leaving tawdry American origins as prelude to his tawdry English present.

E.P. Ode Pour L’Election de son Seplulchre
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start–

No, hardly, but seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait;

Idmen gar toi panth, hos eni troie
Caught in the unstopped ear;
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.

His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.

Unaffected by “the march of events,”
He passed from men’s memory in l’an trentuniesme
de son eage; the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem.

The following poems decry modern London. It’s a crass, commercial time. Men no longer venerate the classical.

The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.

There’s further commentary on the Pre-Raphealites, popular writers, and drivers of taste.

It’s tempting to mock Pound’s “It’s not me! It’s you!” outbursts at the world for not appreciating his genius, so I do. He’s too precious by half in almost every venture, but he’s daring—damned admirably daring—and possessed of faith that he’s doing something worth doing. I don’t know if his frequent successes fuel his conviction that his failures are not his own, “but for a better audience.” What is clear from his career is that personal fame was not his prime motivation. Certainly he had an outsized ego, but so much of his energy burned promoting what he loved and admired more than for himself. He’s the editor behind The Waste Land, the letter writer insisting Harriet Monroe print Ford, Aldington, and Frost, the fixer bundling clothes for the Joyce children and begging donations for that family so the father can keep writing. He knows what has merit, far better than us. Why don’t we see that? Why do we vex him?

“Envoi (1919)” reveals the poet Mauberley (or not depending on the critic.) The poem is heavy handed in evoking an English lyrical tradition going back to the Elizabethans. It’s peppered with “hadst” and “thou” and critically, references Edmund Waller’s (1606-1687) poem “Song: Go Lovely Rose,” singling that work out from his body by referencing Henry Lawes (1596-1662), who put the poem to song (It sound like an evening with an elderly aunt if you’re curious).

In the poem, Waller argues a shy girl should come out and be seen, that beauty passes, time takes its toll, and her youth is not to be wasted in hiding.

from Song: Go Lovely Rose

Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired;
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

It’s a “seize the day” seduction piece in the vein of Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” but once removed. The speaker is giving advice to a younger man in pursuit of the shy girl. After the above, Waller gets pointed.

Then die! that she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

I’m assuming the suitor didn’t use that part. In short, engage the world and share your beauty or it was never beauty at all. You live only once.

Pound divided poets. On one hand, there were those in whom he noted an “Epicurean receptivity, a certain aloofness, an observation of contacts and auditions.” In others he saw engagement, “kinship to the vital universe.” (Those quotes highlighted by Vincent Miller in his excellent “Mauberley and His Critics.”) Pound prized the latter, but he knew himself. There was too much of the former in him. He was the Imagist. More than most Pound valued “the thing,” a frozen moment. He was trapped, enamored by the static image, caught between the craft of Apollo and verve of Dionysus.

“Envoi (1919)” is in ironic contrast with Waller. Where he calls to bid her come out and live while she can, Pound/Mauberley asks to immortalize her “in magic amber laid.” He’s to make a museum piece of her, trade her vitality for permanence. Done strait faced it’s an assessment of Pound’s faults thus far, of the Mauberley failings he wants to leave behind.

The italics are Pounds and I can’t begin to tell the conflicting opinions as to why he did so. It certainly signals something and the poem is a turning point, though it would be without slant. Some say it announces a speaker distinct from the rest of the poem while others tell me it’s definitely Pound, Mauberley, or written as some outside exemplar or cautionary tale. Feel free to exercise license and explain it.

Envoi (1919)

Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie
And build her glories their longevity.

Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.

Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.

The poem immediately after is titled “Mauberley” and carries the subtitle “1920” to signal a break from what culminated in the preceeding, marked 1919. It begins with the epigraph, “Vacuos exercet in aera morsus,” a line from the Aeneid that translates to “He deals empty bites into the air,” describing dogs chasing elusive deer. Versions of that futility recur in later poems. The Mauberley character gives up, or is in the process of giving up, his ambitions. Pound compares his course as trading attempts at Renaissance etchings to drudge in “Messalina”: flat copies suited for coins—“medallions” becomes the term.

As the cycle goes on, there’s failed love, “social inconsequence,” and escape to Pacific isolation where the poet dies.

Throughout there are references to The Odyssey. There’s the recurring assertion that Flaubert is the speaker’s Penelope, that the literary home and ultimate artistic destination is Europe. In one of the poems decrying the state of England, “Siena Mi Fe’; Disfecemi Maremma,” Pound enlists the poet Lionel Johnson, who died after a fall in a pub, to recall Elpenor, who fell from Circe’s roof and died unnoticed, assumed to have stayed on Circe’s island but later encountered in Hades where he implored Odysseus to go back and give him burial rights. The hero and crew did so and marked Elpenor’s grave with an oar.

And so did Pound to Mauberley, the aspect that continued to haunt his work despite his attempts to exorcize it. Ending the penultimate poem:

Coracle of Pacific voyages,
The unforcasted beach;
Then on an oar
Read this:

“I was
And I no more exist;
Here drifted
An hedonist.”

The final poem has been interpreted as a last failure of the Mauberley persona. Others have it as Pound assessing his career to date. I think it’s Pound doubling down on intentions. It’s defiance. I’m not alone in this. Titled “Medallion” after the lifeless works of Mauberley, he points to Luini whose body of work is considered passable but for the standout “Head of a Girl.” There’s a reference to rising Venus as represented in Reinach’s art history book, Apollo. Exquisite detail, metallic, masterwork.

In his later works Pound ties Aphrodite to topaz. I can’t find a referent. The connection seems to be an invention for his own mythology but it’s one he put to use in the The Cantos and, I’m told, Homage to Sexstus Propertius. Below is its first appearance.

Medallion

Luini in porcelain!
The grand piano
Utters a profane
Protest with her clear soprano.

The sleek head emerges
From the gold-yellow frock
As Anadyomene in the opening
Pages of Reinach.

Honey-red, closing the face-oval,
A basket-work of braids which seem as if they were
Spun in King Minos’ hall
From metal, or intractable amber;

The face-oval beneath the glaze,
Bright in its sauve bounding-line, as,
Beneath half-watt rays,
The eyes turn topaz.

The cold, hard, precise image warms and the eyes show life. It was that there are “eyes” and not “eye” that first clued me towards this poem as Pound gathering power than Mauberley tilting at windmills. Medallions—cameos in my mind—are flat profiles. Earlier Pound writes of Mauberley trying to “convey the relation / Of eye-lid and cheek-bone.” Not “eye-lids” or “cheekbones.” I presumed the subjects were in profile so the mention of eyes in the final stanza of the whole is dramatic. I may be wrong about this. Pound may have envisioned full frontal or three quarter medallions.

If that’s the case and I am wrong, the last line is still a wonder. The eyes are infused with desire, alive. If I’m right, the last verb “turn” carries meaning in addition to “are infused with.” There is action in the image. It’s turning towards us, sparked to life by it’s author.

Pound won’t let go; apotheosis intact. His failures buried, he still has the mission. He will go to Europe, learn, pay homage, and keep plying. “Real Imagism has never been tried.”

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

The work week’s nearly finito; barely a few hours left. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done between now and quitting time. Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

from Fire
Dorothy Wellesley (1889-1956)

(‘Does not our life consist of the four elements?’
—Shakespeare)

The great stone hearth has gone.
An oblong electric tube is set in the wall
Like a cheap jewel.
Men converge no more to fire,
Men are on with the isolation:
The pride of science stands, and the final desolation.

No smoke, no danger, you tell me with veneration:
Much dies with the fire, young man,
More than one generation:
Man has known fire more than one generation.

That’s a tremendous opening. Yeats came across Dorothy Wellesley’s poetry in 1935 while putting together The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892-1935 and had to meet her. According to Kieth Alldritt in his W.B. Yeats: The Man and the Milieu, the great poet was overcome: “My eyes filled with tears. I read in excitement that was more delightful because it showed that I had not lost my understanding of poetry.” Yeats further honored her with commentary in the Oxford Modern Verse introduction, writing “I knew nothing of her until a few months ago I read the opening passage in Horses, delighted by its changes in pace, abrupt assertion then a long sweeping line, by its vocabulary modern and precise.”

It wasn’t to be a long friendship. Yeats died in 1939, but in the short four intervening years, the two became friends and poetic sounding boards. Maybe more. I have no evidence of an affair, but you pick things up. They were “very” close. He made several trips to Wellesley’s Sussex home, Penns in the Rocks. Pointing towards one conclusion: Yeats’s wife Georgie remained at their Dublin Home, Riversdale. She was well aware of what he’d gotten up to on others of his unaccompanied trips, writing to him in a letter, “When you are dead, people will talk about your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, for I will remember how proud you were.” Towards the other: Wellesley, or “Dottie” to the close, shared Penns in the Rocks with her lover Hilda Matheson. I have no idea how modern these Moderns were but when he died in the Hôtel Idéal Séjour in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera, Georgie and Yeats’s final mistress, Edith Shackleton Heald, were bedside, holding his hands. That night, wife and lover took turns holding vigil with Dottie and Matheson.

Before Yeats and Matheson, Wellesley was one of Vita Sackville-West’s flings, which is a far too flippant way of describing a relationship I know only the bare details of, but Sackville-West keeps turning up. As a kid I was told by a friend’s grandmother that her own Bohemian mother, so my friend’s great, once shared an apartment with Amelia Earhart. “Once shared an apartment with Amelia Earhart” is one of those phrases that you don’t notice you’ve heard three or four times until you’ve heard it six or seven times and by then it’s too late to accurately judge ubiquity. I heard it enough times to first think it was a jazz-age version of “my uncle was at Woodstock” before deciding it was a euphemism for lesbianism; not to be taken seriously. It turns out, per Bhamwiki, my friend’s great-grandmother shared an apartment with Amelia Earhart in Abington, Pennsylvania. Now I have no idea what to think.

I’d like to float as a competing euphemism “Gardened with Vita-Sackville West.” From the anonymous biographer at Poetry Foundation:

“A founding member of the National Trust’s garden committee, Sackville-West wrote a weekly gardening column for The Observer and was awarded a Veitch Memorial Medal from the Royal Horticultural Society. She died of cancer at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, where the gardens she created with her husband, writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson, remain open to the public, preserved by the National Trust.”

The Sackville-West affair I know most about was with Mary Campbell, Roy Campbell’s wife. It seems that Mary felt rapturous while Vita saw it more as a dalliance. Wellesley, a passionate gardener herself according to the biography written by her granddaughter, Jane Wellesley, seemed to have held expectations more in concert. Their relationship was consequent enough that Wellesley left her husband and children to carry on.

The two women remained involved from roughly 1922 through 1932. There’s guesswork in those dates, but Wellesley was separated in 1922, Sackville-West dedicated her epic, The Land, to Wellesley in 1926, and it appears there was only a short spell between breaking up (though they remained friends) with Sackville-West and taking up with Matheson. That pair I’m told were together for the last eight years of Matheson’s life which ended in 1940. They were on again-off-again or had an understanding as Sackville-West was gardening with Virginia Woolf around that time as well. Very modern.

“Fire” is the first of her poems as arranged by Yeats in Oxford Modern. He gave her a surprising fifteen pages in the original format. For comparison, TS Eliot got twelve. Pound got six. He only gave himself nine. I’m not implying favoritism. It was the poetry that drew him to her. This wasn’t a case of him being smitten and that coloring his professional judgment.

The opening, as I mentioned, is tremendous. It’s a long poem; six of her fifteen pages. As Yeats wrote, she changes pace. I’ll defer to Yeats, but not all the pace changes are welcome. The following I like alone:

Butcher, baker, candlestick-maker,
Blood, and bread, and taper,
Meat, and wheat, and light,
Along with Jones the draper
The wife finds these in little shops
On the right of the undertaker.

Not as an aside or break in the outset’s tone. And then she nails what should have been the ending:

Send him with torches, blaze the pyre,
Far from town and street:
Burn his body on the shore
Where Earth, Air, and Water meet,
As all poets know,
As all dead men know.

But continues with a non-aphorism in aphorism’s clothes.

Death’s the first and everlasting,
Life the lean time and the fasting,
Birth the end and everlasting,
Whether we will or no.

I’m forced to pause and adopt a more sonorous voice. I didn’t want to do that.

I think Aspects of History has an excerpt from Blue Eyes and a Wild Spirit, that biography written by the granddaughter. If it isn’t an excerpt, then they have an entertaining teaser for the book written by the author. Jane Wellseley shares a note and tales from her grandmother’s drop of-a-hat trip to Persia. It’s a charming history. With a few companions the ladies saw sites, braved bandit lands, always on the lookout for desert flowers.

Dottie left the group before the last leg and flew out on her own. Virginia Woolf, who never flew herself, asked her to write about the experience. Jane—which sounds overly familiar but the page is awash in “Wellesley” so forgive the intimacy—shares from Dottie’s response.

“Then came the Caspian. I looked slap down into those green depths & into all that caviar. I got hungry. I thought: this has been for years the place of my dreams, the land between the old caravan routes, & the empire of Trebizond, & here on the map you’ve put your finger & said: ‘I wish I were there.’”

Like Yeats before with her poetry, I’m delighted by her prose.

Again, this next is taken from a longer poem. I don’t have a date on this, but I don’t think I’m taking much risk in saying she wrote it after her Persian trip.

from Asian Desert

Here she has no heart,
Lies not as the earth in other lands
With her limbs apart.

Here strongly the sap is outwrung,
Here the memory divine
Of an old woman is mine
So old she was never young.

Ah, but see, is she not beautiful?
Hank of stone, wrinkle of rock,
Pared, seared, stark with age?
Is she not tenderer far than what she allures
Man on his pilgrimage?

Such were rail routes that the journey to Tehran took Wellesley and Sackville-West through Moscow, where they visited Lenin’s tomb.

from Lenin

Greedy of detail I saw,
In those two minutes allowed,
The man was not wax, as they said,
But a corpse, for a thumb nail was black,
The thing was Lenin.

Then a woman beside me cried
With a strange voice, foreign, loud.
And I, who fear not life nor death, and those who have died
Only a little, was inwardly shaken with fear,
For I stood in the presence of God;
The voice I heard was the voice of all generations
Acclaiming new faiths, horrible, beautiful faiths;
I knew that the woman wailed as women wailed long ago
For Christ was a wax man too,
When they carried him down to the grave.

Jane tells us they stayed at the British Mission in Moscow, and right after that writes, “‘Look here,’ she said to Vita, ‘I believe people are watching us and listening to what we say. I don’t think we ought to talk.’”

Was Wellesley worried that Soviets were listening, or that in the British Mission, artists were watched—Bloomsbury affiliation bestowing protection and drawing suspicion—for communist sympathies? I don’t know. They were very modern.

I just got an email from my son’s college informing parents that our little darlings have to be out of the dorms by May, 9. That went quickly. Tempis fugit, carpe diem, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it,” Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Honestly, that really snuck up on me. Freshman year: Almost down.

In the mean time, do that last one. Happy POETS Day.

First, a little verse.

***

I read about poets lives a good deal, and have decided that a lot of literary immortality is born from not having any idea what you’re doing on any front—politics, relationships, plain ole human decency—and making a ton of noise while you try to figure it out.

Not all, but many. Mild mannered insurance agent Wallace Stevens threw a punch at Hemingway. Pound blathered on about passports, clothing drives, new, new, new, and economic fantasy. The upright TS Eliot kept well within the rails when not tearing hundreds year old poetic tradition to pieces and filling the void with continuum-compliant fixes. He may have been the messiest of the lot. It’s seamless energy. Even in tubercular throes, Keats, Dunbar, Praed, and Lawrence produced poetry, sent out letters, remained exhibitionist observers. From one thing to another, promiscuous passions, stardom, hermitage; there is either a singularity of focus in the moment frequent to literary success or a conspiracy of biographers leading me to believe so. And the energy needs focus. One thing succeeds, fails, or finishes. What’s next?

The great Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid was a fascist in the 1920s when everybody who was a loud and proud fascist or a loud and proud anti-fascist thought Roy Campbell was the opposite and got into public spats with him. But MacDiarmid was too much a political gypsy, so left fascism behind for Communism. The local Scots variant wasn’t sufficient and so, having had a taste, moved on to Stalinism. I don’t know the order or the particulars other than that in the 1930s he was kicked out of the Communist Party of Great Britain twice, at least once for being too nationalist, and kicked out of the Scottish Nationalist Party, even as a founding member of its predecessor organization, the National Party of Scotland, for being too communist. Bygones happened somewhere along the line as he stood for Parliament in 1945 under the SNP banner and 1964 as CPGB.

I think it’s wrong to read MacDiarmid as a steady conscience not fitting quite into so bouncing between parties. He was mercurial. In a given span he’s throwing bombs in both directions. One of his biographers, Dr Margery Palmer McCulloch of Glasgow University, is quoted in a 2010 Sunday Times article under the headline “Hugh MacDiarmid: I’d prefer Nazi rule,” as saying “MacDiarmid seemed to just fire off ideas and antagonisms without thinking them through.” His daughter-in-law and literary executor, Deirdre Grieve, is quoted in the same article: “I think he entertained almost every ideal it was possible to entertain at one point or another.” Just Hugh being Hugh.

I came upon something that I had to read twice, do a few searches, and then read those searches twice. George Orwell put MacDiarmid’s name to MI5 as someone to watch for Soviet sympathies. This was in 1949. Orwell was no fan of the Soviets and listed several he feared might be open to giving whatever the British condemnatory equivalent of “aid and comfort” to the enemy is. I don’t know what MacDiarmid was up to, but it’s eyebrow raising to read that the author of 1984 thought a little monitoring prudent.

Once you know a guy is into totalitarian politics, it’s hard to pin anything as his focus. Politics saturates the whole. But, he was a poet. Maybe first and foremost, though a nationalist poet who saw his work as a vehicle for a Scottish literary renascence, breaking away from the oppressive English, and elevating the pretty much dead Lallan (Lowland) language. Politics.

The problem, or obstacle, was the indifference of the Scots. There wasn’t a single language to revive so much as a passel of dialects. It was all Creole and no French, with none of the shoots a clear true heir. Poor MacDiarmid had to scrabble together whatever he could from his Lowland upbringing, scour John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, and impose familiar (English) grammar on the result. He lived on the island of Whalsey in the Shetlands from 1933 to 1945, and I’m sure he must have made friends who’d give him an honest answer, but per Wikipedia, “Local legend has it that he asked about Whalsay words and some of the Whalsay folk made up fantastical words that did not exist.”

Michael Glover’s “Thistle & thorns” (The New Criterion, March 1994) is one of the more entertaining articles I’ve read on any subject. He takes MacDiarmid down a host of pegs but it’s clear Glover respects the man a great deal as a poet. It’s a kindly takedown, as if he pulled MacDiarmid aside and said “Have you thought about what you’re doing? Do you see how this looks?” From the article:

“The prophet, sad to say, was not honored in his own country. MacDiarmid’s Scots readers, English speakers to a man, were perplexed. Who owned this synthetic language, this tissue of willful obscurities? they asked. And what were they to do with it? MacDiarmid sighed and rent his shirt. For if there was one nation that MacDiarmid had an even greater contempt for than the English, it was undoubtedly his own: that people of his who deemed ‘their ignorance their glory’; who had willingly accepted the terms of slavery that the English had handed down to them; and who had no capacity to think anything other than their own ‘dour provincial thochts.’”

There’s no hatred like that reserved for the most likely ally. Back to politics: Leninists hate Trotskyites hate Stalinists, Right-Libertarians hate Consequitialist Libertarians, Jacobins hate all in time, and Orwell turned in Soviet types. So the Scots earned MacDiarmid’s scorn. More so did those who made a fetish over Robert Burns. To be clear, he loved Burns. But you don’t get Burns. Not like he did.

His most famous work is A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, a two-thousand six hundred and eighty-five line epic about a man walking home from the pub, thinking about the world. It’s a patchwork of styles and subjects; those ranging from the writings of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, Isadora Duncan and a union strike, and, all this per Wikipedia, “develops and consciously parodies compositional techniques used by poets such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.” It’s a well respected and praised work. I’ve read bits here and there. It’s a mess if you try to wring out every meaning. It’s the authors Esperanto so there’s no one reader that gets it without a glossary, but there’s music. There’s no denying the sound.

Here’s an excerpt where he gives what for to Burns fans.

from A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978)

You canna gang to a Burns supper even
Wi’oot some wizened scrunt o’ a knock-knee
Chinee turns roon to say, “Him Haggis—velly goot!”
And ten to wan the piper is a Cockney.

No’ wan in fifty kens a wurd Burns wrote
But misapplied is a’body’s property,
And gin there was his like alive the day
They’d be the last a kennin’ haund to gie—

Croose London Scotties wi’ their braw shirt fronts
And a’ their fancy freen’s, rejoicin’
That similah gatherings in Timbuctoo,
Bagdad—and Hell, nae doot—are voicin’

Burns’ sentiments o’ universal love,
In pidgin’ English or in wild-fowl Scots,
And toastin’ ane wha’s nocht to them but an
Excuse for faitherin’ Genius wi’ their thochts.

His real name was Christopher Murray Grieve. Hugh MacDiarmid was a pen name. For those keeping score, he used a fake name and a fake language, both evoking a nostalgic Scottish tradition, in order to reassert a muscular Scots literature. It’s absurd, but it kinda worked. Again, he was a very talented poet.

It’s possible for all the barbs and pokes of the Glover article to land and for the following, from the excellent unsung biographers who toil at Poetry Foundation, to be true.

“C. M. Grieve, best known under his pseudonym Hugh MacDiarmid, is credited with effecting a Scottish literary revolution which restored an indigenous Scots literature and has been acknowledged as the greatest poet that his country has produced since Robert Burns. As a writer, political theorist, revolutionary, prophet, and multifaceted personality, he was a man to be reckoned with, even by those who did not agree that he was one of Great Britain’s major poets. Ian Hamilton wrote that MacDiarmid made enemies largely because ‘he makes his own rules, contemns categories, cracks open water-tight compartments, bestraddles disciplines, scorns social, cultural, and academic cliques and claques, and affirms . . . that it is not failure but low aim that is criminal.’”

Once more for those keeping score, that’s “prophet” twice, and from different sources.

The Norton Anthology of the English Language, Vol II, footnotes an explanation for the next poem.

“This is one of a series of four lyrics titles Au Clair de la Lune (“By the light of the moon”). MacDiarmid has written of it: ‘The first two lines of “Moonstruck” mean: “When the world is dozed like a top at the height of its spin, that the light-looking crow of a body, the moon…” I can think of no English equivalent which can bring out the complicated sense of that description of the moon, at once insubstantial and disreputable looking, radiant and yet dark with sinister influences.”

It also has a footnote defining “peerieweerie” as “Diminished to a mere thread of sound.” I am charmed and will be using the word.

Moonstruck

When the warl’s couped soon’ as a peerie
That licht-lookin’ craw o’ a body, the moon,
Sits on the fower cross-win’s
Peerin’ a’ roon’.

She’s seen me—she’s seen me—an’ straucht
Loupit clean on the quick o’my hert.
The quhither o’ cauld gowd’s fairly
Gi’en me a stert.

An’ the roarin’ o’ oceans noo’
Is peerieweerie to me:
Thunner’s a tinklin’ bell: an’ Time
Whud’s like a flee.

MacDiarmid butted heads frequently and publicly with Edwin Muir who believed that if Scotland were to have a national literature, it should be English, as speakers of almost every dialect knew English as well, to one degree or another. His 1938 Scott and Scotland drew ire from most quarters, but he was right that if there was a commonality to be expressed, the language was secondary to expressing it and English was already in place for the Scots. Glover is frank on the point:

“…the humiliations suffered by the native languages of Scotland…began in earnest much earlier; earlier even than the uniting of the two crowns of England and Scotland in 1603.”

The Geneva Bible was the Bible of service in Scotland since 1579. It was translated into English, not Scots. When James I united the crown, he moved his court South. Court and church were creatures of the English language, and Scots in all its forms diminished.

In addition to Muir, MacDiarmid found new ground for battling Campbell; their Fascist dyspepsia launched a new conflict over MacDiarmid’s brand of Lallans he dubbed “Synthetic Scots.” Campbell was having none of it. He was born in South Africa, but to Scottish parents and carried second generation zeal for the old country. To him, the manufacturing was too much to overlook. There’s a poem Campbell wrote to mock the whole endeavour, but I can’t find a single stanza online or at the library. From the title, I suspect it’s amazing: “Ska-hawtch Wha Hae! A Likkle wee poom i’th’ Aulde Teashoppe Pidgin Brogue, Lallands or Butter-Scotch (Wi’ apooligees to MockDiarmid).”

MacDiarmid carried on the fight until one day he didn’t. He may have been unable to think of an “English equivalent which can bring out the complicated sense of that description of the moon,” but he was having trouble with everything else. For all his passion and the aid of the Jamieson Dictionary, the assembled Scots vocabulary was too small. It was limiting. So he started writing in English.

I can find no recorded apostasy. One day he railed against those who didn’t join his crusade, the next he abandoned it. I can’t find anything from Muir’ side either, though I’m sure there must have been something written somewhere. Maybe they thought, “Take the win.” He joined their side, no point in berating him for agreeing.

A last from Glover:

“And, true to his own estimation, that vituperative nature which held him in its thrall also caused him to give birth to much that was clumsy, ugly, ill-formed; to be silly, pedantic, naïve, and absurdly pretentious. And yet, amidst all this bluster, there is still some great poetry to be reckoned with.”

From Fascist, to damn Hitler, to at least the Nazis aren’t English, from preserving a heritage, to embracing a broader expression. All on a dime and all full steam. He’s a tremendous English poet for a rebellious Scot.

In the Children’s Hospital

“Does it matter? Losing your legs?”
Siegfried Sassoon

Now let the legless boy show the great lady
How well he can manage his crutches.
It doesn’t matter though the Sister objects,
“He’s not used to them yet,” when such is
The will of the Princess. Come, Tommy,
Try a few desperate steps through the ward.
Then the hand of Royalty will pat your head
And life suddenly cease to be hard.
For a couple of legs are surely no miss
When the loss leads to such an honour as this!
One knows, when one sees how jealous the rest
Of the children are, it’s been all for the best!—
But would the sound of your sticks on the floor
Thundered in her skull for evermore!

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

The work week’s nearly done and you’re spending these last few hours doing what exactly? Trying to look busy? Surreptitiously scanning restaurant reviews? Checking game times? Texting your friends about restaurants and game times? Cut it out and cut out. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

I’ve mentioned before that I’m an introduction reader if the introduction is relatively short or obscenely long. My theory is that I might as well read a short one and that a long one indicates something in the book requiring the long introduction; something I might otherwise miss. My experience shows mid-length ones to be fumbling, fawning, and filled with ten dollar praise of the sort grad students fuss out over beloved former teachers. If I like the book, I’ll read those after. It’s a slapdash theory, but it’s served me and I’m fixed in my habits.

Christian Lorentzen wrote the Introduction to the NYRB Classic edition of Take a Girl Like You by Kingsley Amis, and I’m a little ticked off at him. He’s funny and drops some whispered-about biographical info, though he’s writing about Amis and the info is about infidelity so it was loud whispering to begin with, but entertaining. I’m not going to work out the chronology, but Harper’s claims Lorentzen as a contributor, as do the London Review of Books and others. This intro is a small sample size, but I’m content to dub him one of the good guys and read what I come upon in the future. Still, he ticked me off. I’m pretty sure he gave away the ending of the book.

Not so terribly that I won’t read. I’m pretty, not totally, sure he spoiled it. Lorentzen gives a who’s who of the characters, outlines the conflict central to the plot, and then tells us the ending is “genuinely shocking.” But given the build up as explained there’s only one genuinely shocking ending. If he’s pulled a feint and one of the mains out of nowhere joins the priesthood, reveals himself as the Lindbergh baby, grows a trunk: fine. The ending isn’t spoiled. But given where the story, by his touching on it tells, is going… Dammit.

He didn’t put me off the book. Lucky him, Amis is funny; a wiz writing internal dialogue and contrasting it with behavior contrary but in line with social harmony—snide thoughts behind spoken niceties, etc.

If I hadn’t read the introduction, I might have skipped straight to chapter one. If I’d done that I’d have torted myself twice. First, by not having the wherewithal to tut-tut the dedication, “To Mavis and Geoff Nicholson.” Lorentzen gave me the dirt on that: “Geoff was his former student, and Mavis his mistress. Amis led a complicated life.” Second, I wouldn’t have been baffled by the epigraph:

Where shall I go when I go where I go?

Go, gentle maid, go lead the apes in hell.

He leaves it there uncredited. It’s actually two quotes. The novel’s working title was Song of the Wanderer, and “Where shall I go…” is a pull from the lyrics of a 1926 or 27 Neil Moret song, “Song of the Wanderer (Where Shall I Go?)” made famous at various times by a list of people, none of which I’ve never heard of. That was easy enough to find. Bafflement came from the second part. Even now that I’ve read all about the whens and wheres, I can’t make satisfactory sense of why.

WorldHistory.net was extremely helpful, and I should highlight and thank them as they were the source informing me of the existence of most of the instances I’m referencing in this piece. They say, “The obsolete phrase to lead apes in hell expresses the fancied consequence of dying a spinster.” There was shame in spinsterhood. It’s a squandering of resources or some such, but the phrase was meant as a threat: “Get married, have children, or face the consequences.” From what I’ve gathered searching around the web, mothers led their children in heaven. That was the foundational obsolete saying. It doesn’t seem diametrical to me, but apes and hell are antonymical enough. Enough, it proves, to catch on and make a short run of common parlance. “You’ll go blind.”

The first known written occurrence of the phrase comes from the great trendsetter, George Gascoigne (~1539-1577), author of the first original English poem in blank verse. His “apes in hell” comes to us via prose, in his A Hundreth sundrie Flowres bounde vp in one small Poesie (1573.) The book is a monster with no theme as far as I can tell from the table of contents and as much random reading as I could tolerate using the archive.org flipbook viewer (not much). It’s got prose, poetry, translations, fiction, and essays. The apes appear in a section called “A pleasant discourse of the adventures of Master F.I.” in an episode where F.I. is adjudicating what seems to be a divorce or annulment proceeding pressed by a husband against his wife of twenty-one years, Lady Pergo. For seven years of marriage she wouldn’t “yéeld vnto his iust desires,” seven more she “spent in séeking to recouer his lost loue.” The final seven they didn’t have much to say to each other. She pled with F.I.,

“Nowe, of you worthy Gouernour I would be most glad to heare this question decided, remembring that ther was no difference in the times betwene vs: and surely, vnles your iudgement helpe me, I am afraide my marriage wilbe marred, and I may goe lead Apes in hell.”

I wrote “seems to be a divorce or annulment proceeding” but it’s also possible this is a farce and she’s suing her husband for performance. I’ll update if I find a more tolerable way to read on. The salient take away is that the phrase “lead apes in hell” was in use in 1573.

Fake Shakespeare confirms that the phrase wasn’t just a one off by Gascoigne then repeated by his admirers. In the 1605 play The London Prodigall, once attributed to William Shakespeare but on consideration not, the author lets on that “apes” was a proverb, and an old one at that.

from The London Prodigall from 1605
Fake William Shakespeare (probably not 1564-1616)

– Lancelot. What is it folly to loue Charitie?
– Maister Weathercocks. No mistake me not syr Lancelot,
But tis an old prouerbe, and you know it well,
That women dying maides, lead apes in hell.
– Lancelot. Thats a foolish prouerbe, and a false.

Actual Shakespeare used the phrase in dialogue twice. First, in or around 1591.

from The Taming of the Shrew
@realWilliamShakespeare (1564-1616)

Katherine: What, will you not suffer me? Nay, now I see
She is your treasure, she must have a husband,
I must dance barefoot on her wedding day
And, for your love to her, lead apes in hell.
Talk not to me. I will go sit and weep
Till I can find occasion of revenge.

Again, in or around 1599.

from Much Ado About Nothing

Leonato: You may light on a husband that hath no
beard.
Beatrice: What should I do with him? Dress him in my
apparel and make him my waiting gentlewoman?
He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he
that hath no beard is less than a man; and he that is
more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less
than a man, I am not for him. Therefore I will even
take sixpence in earnest of the bearherd, and lead
his apes into hell.

Sir John Davies wins. He included the phrase in his poetic dialogue “A Contention Betwixt a Wife, a Widdow, and a Maide.” In either 1601 or 1602, the poem was performed at the house of Richard Cecil in from of Her Royal Majesty Elizabeth I, The Virgin Queen. If I’ve got it right, Davies wrote knowing she would be in the audience. I have to buy a finer hat to tip.

He was a favorite of the queen. In 1598, a fellow lawyer made him mad over some slight so he hired two goons with swords to follow him into an Inns of Court dining hall and glower away anyone who’d stop him from trouncing his offender with a cudgel. That got him disbarred for a while. A year later he dedicated a poem to Elizabeth. She un-disbarred him, or leaned on those who did, and set him up for a seat in Parliament to boot. He was risking a good bit setting a wife and widow on a defender of maidenhood in this work.

It’s a long poem, but this excerpt gives the sense: the maid claims innocence and purity, the wife lives in the hoped for moment, and the widow reaps rewards. They’re all snippy with each other.

II. A Contention
Betwixt a Wife, a Widdow, and a Maide
Sir John Davies (1569-1626)

Maid. The maid is ever fresh, like morne in May:
Wife. The wife with all her beames is beautified,
Like to high noone, the glory of the day:
Widow. The widow, like a milde, sweet, euen-tide.

Wife. An office well supplide is like the wife.
Widow. The widow, like a gainfull office voide:
Maid. But maids are like contentment in this life,
Which al the world haue sought, but none enioid:

Go wife to Dunmow, and demaund your flitch.
Widow. Goe gentle maide, goe leade the Apes in hell.
Wife. Goe widow make some younger brother rich,
And then take thought and die, and all is well.

Of course there’s fawning subtext meant to flatter Herself. Davies was daring, not foolish. He included bits like the below before getting to the apes above.

Wife. Why marriage is an honourable state.
Widow. And widdow-hood is a reuerend degree:
Maid. But maidenhead, that will admit no mate,
Like maiestie itselfe must sacred be.

And of course, as it would be genuinely shocking if she didn’t, the Maid gets the long speech closing the disagreement before the kumbaya final stanzas.

Maid. Not Maids? To spotlesse maids this gift is giuen,
To liue in incorruption from their birth;
And what is that but to inherit heauen
Euen while they dwell vpon the spotted earth?

The perfectest of all created things,
The purest gold, that suffers no allay;
The sweetest flower that on th’ earths bosome springs,
The pearle vnbord, whose price no price can pay:

The Christall Glasse that will no venome hold,
The mirror wherein Angels loue to looke,
Dianaes bathing Fountaine cleere and cold,
Beauties fresh Rose, and vertues liuing booke.

Of loue and fortune both, the Mistresse borne,
The soueraigne spirit that will be thrall to none;
The spotlesse garment that was neuer worne,
The Princely Eagle that still flyes alone.

She sees the world, yet her cleere thought doth take
No such deepe print as to be chang’d thereby;
As when we see the burning fire doth make,
No such impression as doth burne the eye.

In short, you find out the strangest things by virtue of reading introductions to books. It’s a good practice.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

In the summer of 1818, John Keats and his friend Charles Armitage Brown went on a walking tour of Scotland. It looks like the pair covered somewhere between six hundred to six hundred and fifty miles over forty-four days, so about fifteen miles a day, give or take and accounting for weather.

Keats wrote a series of letters about the journey to his consumptive brother Thomas, unable to travel with what they didn’t know at the time was his last bout with tuberculosis. He brings his brother along in these letters. It’s endearing. He’s colloquial and considerate. Reading, you get the sense he really did “Wish you were here.” You also get the sense that he was entertaining a bedridden friend, and further, the sense that his audience enjoyed laughing at small frustrations.

There’s a great deal about lovely views, divine salt water baths, and all the joys that make for good travel brouchuring, but Keats peppers it with amusing observations; little asides he would give were Thomas along.

He and Brown came upon the Duke of Argyle’s “modern magnificent” seat on a day when a band played, a little serendipity adding music to the grey stone Inverary Castle by “lovely” Loch Fyne and surrounding dark, old woods. To Thomas:

“I must say I enjoyed two or three common tunes—but nothing could stifle the horrors of a solo on the Bag-pipe—I thought the Beast would never have done.—Yet was I doomed to hear another.”

There were rough nights and coarse meals; all the minor bitches travelers log. I was very glad to read they took a long road miles out of their way rather than pay what they considered an unfair toll for the comparison Keats made.

“—but the expense is 7 Guineas and those rather extorted.—Staffa you see is a fashionable place and therefore every one concerned with it either in this town or the Island are what you call up. ’Tis like paying sixpence for an apple at the playhouse.”

Or $22.39 for a popcorn bucket at an AMC. Some things never change.

What I believe to be the first letter to Thomas from tour, dated July 17, 1818, recounts steam boats, purple mountains, pink clouds, a deceptive sign promising breakfast without informing that said breakfast was fifteen miles away, and the banks of the Clyde. Almost perfect:

“—I have just been bathing in Loch Fyne a salt water Lake opposite the Windows,—quite pat and fresh but for the cursed Gad flies—damn ’em they have been at me ever since I left the Swan and two necks.”1

After that line, he offers a fourteen stanza poem. It’s doggerel and unpolished, but suited to bring a smile to a bedridden brother. There was no title. Where it appears it is often given the working title “Gadfly.”

Gadfly
John Keats (1795-1821)

All gentle folks who owe a grudge
To any living thing
Open your ears and stay your trudge
Whilst I in dudgeon sing.

The Gadfly he hath stung me sore—
O may he ne’er sting you!
But we have many a horrid bore
He may sting black and blue.

Has any here an old grey Mare
With three legs all her store,
O put it to her Buttocks bare
And straight she’ll run on four.

So far, good fun. He gets mean in the next section. As to why, I need help.

In The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1850-1830, Paul Johnson writes about “one of the most memorable dinner parties in the history of English literature.” The party itself doesn’t seem all that memorable to me. There’s drunken foolishness, it’s peopled with luminaries, and there’s some awkwardness made more awkward by the mentioned drunken foolishness, but there’s nothing epochal in the telling. The telling itself is interesting. Johnson contrasts how Keats relays the story immediately and then months after.

On December 28, 1817, Keats met William Wordsworth for the first time. The older poet was visiting London and the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon was keen to introduce the young up and coming poet to the great man. Both were invited to dinner, along with Charles Lamb and Thomas Monkhouse, a merchant and cousin of Wordsworth’s wife Mary. Others joined as the day went on: an engraver named Landseer and Joseph Ritchie, famous for his travels. They discussed Voltaire, toasted Newton, and recited Milton. Good times.

At the time, Wordsworth was under appointment from his landlord and friend William Lowther, second Earl of Lonsdale, as Collector of Stamps for Westmoreland, a job Johnson notes, “was by no means a sinecure.” He earned roughly £200 a year, but there was a great deal of work to be done. His duties put him in frequent correspondence with his superior, John Kingston, Commissioner of Stamp Duties in London, a fan. Kingston heard of the dinner, knew Haydon, and asked if the painter might make him an in person introduction to Wordsworth. Haydon agreed and Kingston was set to come join the group after dinner, which I take to mean lunch as it’s mentioned the gathering continued into supper.

Lamb got obliterated. In a letter to his brothers George and Thomas, Keats singles him out as “tipsy,” but he’s soft-pedaling. Kingston didn’t fit in. He was in over his head trying to join the conversation. Johnson says he asked Wordsworth if he thought Milton was a genius. It was a stupid question, given the company—like asking a bunch of football coaches if they found the forward pass useful—but he asked from respect and interest. Lamb called him a “silly fellow” and asked “will you allow me to look at your phrenological development?”

At this point, Wordsworth had been introduced to Kingston but without honorifics, so hadn’t connected that this Kingston was the Kingston, Lord of All Postage, for whom he worked. When Kingston told Wordsworth that he’d enjoyed their correspondence, Wordsworth was at a loss. “With me, sir?” he asked. There was some confused back and forth until Kingston made clear, “I am the Commissioner of Stamps.” Johnson writes,

“There was, said Haydon, ‘a dead silence,’ broken by Lamb’s repeated ‘Do let me have another look at that gentleman’s organs.’ At that point, Haydon recorded, ‘Keats and I hurried Lamb into the painting-room, shut the door, and gave way to inextinguishable laughter.’ Kingston was huffy and, at first, ‘Irreconcilable,’ and Wordsworth had to humor him as best he could. But he was persuaded to stay to supper, during which, at intervals, could be heard Lamb’s voice from the next room: ‘Who is that fellow? Allow me to see his organs once more.’”

That’s the story as it comes to us from Haydon. In a letter to George and Thomas a week after the Sunday dinner, Keats gives the briefest coverage: there was a dinner, Lamb was tipsy, here’s who was there. He tells his brothers that he and Wordsworth made plans for lunch the next Thursday but weather was an issue. All seemed well between the two.

By mid-summer, Wordsworth was fodder for quick jotted mocking.

Has any here a Lawyer suit
Of Seventeen-Forty-Three,
Take Lawyer’s nose and put it to ‘t
And you the end will see.

Is there a Man in Parliament
Dum[b-] founder’d in his speech,
O let his neighbour make a rent
And put one in his breech.

O Lowther how much better thou
Hadst figur’d t’other day
When to the folks thou mad’st a bow
And hadst no more to say.

If lucky Gadfly had but ta’en
His seat upon thine A—e
And put thee to a little pain
To save thee from a worse.

Better than Southey it had been,
Better than Mr. D—,
Better than Wordsworth too, I ween,
Better than Mr. V—.

If we move forward to February 21, 1818, we find another mention of Wordsworth in a letter to George and Thomas. It’s a roundup letter: Sorry I haven’t written lately, went to the British Gallery, Haydon’s essays are in translation to Italian, Reynolds got a leech treatment, thrushes and blackbirds are out, reading Voltaire and Gibbons, new Byron coming out, Ditto new Scott. Then there’s,

“I am sorry that Wordsworth has left a bad impression wherever he visited in town by his egotism, Vanity, and bigotry. Yet he is a great poet if not a philosopher.”

There’s no explanation. It’s unclear whether Wordsworth offended him or if he felt others mistakenly took offense to his manner or deeds. It’s a curious little enigma. On to “have not yet read Shelley’s Poem,” “Your affectionate brother, John.”

Johnson makes no mention of that letter. He skips ahead to an attempt by Keats to visit Wordsworth en route to his summer walking tour with Brown. On June 27, he asks about Wordsworth of a waiter at his hotel and is told that the poet is off canvasing the countryside on behalf of his friend the Earl’s family members, the Lowthers, due for election. Keats is offended. A Romantic poet, any poet, is above politics. Wordsworth is betraying a spirit. He was already suspect as holder of a government position, but he was electioneering. He rained down on Robert Southey in the Gadfly poem for holding a position in government too, even though that position was Poet Laureate. How much more vulgar must Wordsworth pressing hands seem?

He makes a call at the Wordsworths’ the next day, but has to settle for leaving a note “and stuck it up over what I knew must be [Dorothy] Wordsworth’s portrait.” There doesn’t seem to be any record of what the note contained. I think I’m supposed to infer a sneer in placing the note on Dorothy’s portrait. I’m not certain why. He fired off a “Lord Wordsworth” letter to Thomas right away.

He also told a different version of the dinner going forward. In the knew telling, Wordsworth was obsequious towards Kingston, a toady ignoring or brushing away the other guests. Keats either let anger warp memory or embraced a soothing slander. The poem letter came after some time to ruminate.

Again, from Johnson:

“Three weeks later, still disgusted by Wordsworth’s flaunting of the radical orthodoxy, he wrote a set of vulgar verses, much concerned with buttocks and arses, mocking Wordsworth, Southey, the Lowthers and, for good measure, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nicholas Vandittart.”

After he got a few angry stanzas out of his system, it’s back to standards: making fun of girls who read too many novels—the “What is up with airplane food?” of 1818.

Forgive me pray good people all
For deviating so—
In spirit sure I had a call—
And now I on will go.

Has any here a daughter fair
Too fond of reading novels,
Too apt to fall in love with care
And charming Mister Lovels,

O put a Gadfly to that thing
She keeps so white and pert—
I mean the finger for the ring,
And it will breed a wort.

Has any here a pious spouse
Who seven times a day
Scolds as King David pray’d, to chouse
And have her holy way—

O let a Gadfly’s little sting
Persuade her sacred tongue
That noises are a common thing,
But that her bell has rung.

And as this is the summon bo-
num of all conquering,
I leave withouten wordes mo
The Gadfly’s little sting.

“The first point to be grasped,” Johnson tells us, “is that the romantic movement produced heightened sensibilities, felt (even if unconsciously) at every level of society.” Johnson’s a brilliant historian, so when he goes on to say that the early 1800s saw a sudden awakening to income inequality, a keen sympathy for the impoverished, and a disgust at resignation regarding both, I believe him.

“...it is necessary to pause and examine why it is that John Keats, not a man much interested in politics, rather one who reflected the prevailing notions of his friends, should feel so depressed by Wordsworth’s allegiance and why the latter should have committed himself so wholeheartedly to upholding the government. Why did these poets of different generations—Wordsworth was now 48—but of similar sensibilities… find themselves on opposite sides of the great political divide which then severed Britain and indeed the whole of Europe?”

His interest is in cultural shifts. He needs to see everything in light of a larger picture. I’m nosy. I want the smaller story. What elicited the “egotism, Vanity, and bigotry” claim?

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Mago Barca was Carthaginian, brother to Hannibal the elephant guy. Mago really liked to crucify people. He was the type of guy who would wake up on a Wednesday and ask himself, “How many people can I crucify today?” and then get up on Thursday and say, “I can beat that.” He was energetic. They named an island port town after him.

As a benefit of the Punic Wars, the Romans had control of Hispania. Carthage was completely delended and control of the island we now call Menorca, where Mago’s namesake city sat, fell to enterprising pirates preying on the sudden uptick in commercial voyages between the Italian and newly Roman Iberian peninsulas. Rome sacked the pirates and took over. Then… It seems like everybody got a turn in charge: Vandals, Caliphate of Cordoba, Count of Barcelona, Crown of Aragon, Kingdom of Mallorca, Aragon again, Crown of Castille. Along the way it got picked over by Turks and Barbary slave raiders. In 1708, British and Dutch forces under Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI wrested control during the War of Spanish Succession. Menorca went to the Brits, along with Gibralter, in the Treaty of Utrecht.

Words change over time. Indo-European “Patre” becomes the Germanic cum English “Father.” The “p” elides to “f” as the puh sound is close to the fuh sound and the “t” isn’t that far off from “th.” You say potato, I say fathato. Somehow a Mediterranean Island port named for Mago became known as Mahon. I kinda get that particular change, but it happened whether I do or don’t. In its current inception it’s called Maó, a Catalan change over from the British name, Port Mahon, on the island of Minorca (or Menorca, depending on who is being pedantic.) It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from Majorca, where the great poet Robert Graves taught British people they could escape to a vacation paradise and have inconsequential sex with multiple women if you tell the ladies that they’re your muses. Tourists flock to the place.

If John Byng had known about the Robert Graves sex ploy, he might have engaged.

He didn’t. Byng was the admiral tasked with defending the then-British-controlled island from the insidious French in the mid 18^th century. One day he saw a French force, decided it was overwhelming, and retreated. He was court martialed and executed for his decision. Farther reaching consequences followed.

Imagine being a mildly prosperous islander with a couple of cows. It’s 1756. You speak Spanish but you’re okay with British rule; they keep the peace, more or less. The last thing you’re worried about is Armond de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (not the one that immediately spring to mind, but the great or great-great nephew of that guy.) But Armond de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, lands avec a beaucoup of soldiers, takes over your island, and for some reason kills your cows.

“Why did you turn my back yard into a slaughter house?” you might ask the soldiers.

“We didn’t,” they’d reply. “We turned it into an abattoir. That’s Gallic. More sophisticated than your slaughter thing.”

“Well, I want to lodge a complaint.”

“I get it,” says the soldier, dripping in a mixture of English and bovine blood. “But there are a lot of cows on this island and I’m pressed for time. We can talk about this at tonight’s salon.”

“Why are you killing cows at all? This doesn’t make sense.”

“I’ve got my orders.”

“I’m going to report this to Byng!”

“Good luck with that.”

If you’re looking for an explanation for why cows were killed, I don’t have one. But the French did it, and they went about their duties vigorously. A mandated four day work week doesn’t mean there’s less work to be done. It means there’s more pressure.

If your sympathy is with the suddenly cowless burgeoning middle class islander, you haven’t looked far enough ahead. Armond de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (not the one that immediately springs to mind, but the great or great-great nephew of that guy,) ordered a feast in celebration of his conquest of Menorca at its capital city, Port of Mahon. Your sympathy should be with the chef.

That poor man was probably excited initially. A celebration dinner is a chef’s bread and butter, so to speak. There were all manner of birds to be stuffed into pies. He must have been so happy. But you see the looming issue.

He was French and he was a chef. Consider his mindset.

Pork Chops: That gets cream sauce.

Lamb: Cream sauce.

Asparagus: Cream sauce.

It’s cream sauce all the way down.

I assume he had a staff, but I also assume he had access to a few soldiers willing to trade gossip for a nip of wine or a drumstick on the sly. I’m sure that a few guards attending to the needs of Armond de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (not the one that immediately springs to mind, but the great or great-great nephew of that guy) hung around the kitchen. He probably said something like “I need some dairy,” and the soldiers who killed all those cows for some reason start looking at the ground or into the sky and mumbling about why they can’t help with dairy because the guys tasked with burning the bodies of dead Englishmen are really short handed and maybe they should help out with pyre building.

I hate mayonnaise. I hate it desperately. I think it’s vile. My wife thinks it’s evil, a distinction without much difference as we both agree on the letters if not the order. Despite myself, I have to credit the unknown chef of Armond de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (not the one that immediately springs to mind but the great or great-great nephew of that guy.) He pulled off one of the greatest improvisations in culinary history.

With no cream to be had he threw together eggs, oil, some lemon, probably a bit of salt and pepper, and made Armond de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (not the one that immediately springs to mind, but the great or great-great nephew of that guy,) happy.

My tastes aside, the stuff is ubiquitous. I don’t order a turkey and Swiss on wheat. I order a turkey and Swiss on wheat with no mayo because the presence of that demon condiment is assumed. Dammit.

So that’s mayonnaise. It takes its name from a pirate booty swapping base of a port city named for a serial crucifier and was first served as wafts of burning British bodies permeated the air. Enjoy your sandwich.

[A version of this article appeared in Ordinary Times on October 4, 2021]

For those who care about golf, this is your time. The Masters and its NPR whisper-excitement for four televised days is a duck out of work away. For those who don’t care about golf, it’s going to be a pain in the ass getting a table at the neighborhood joint. My local sods the dining room and patio, props azaleas in all the corners, pulls in an under-armor collared shirt Hootie type band for post-round, and makes it damn near impossible for a regular to eat a club sandwich in peace. People in green and white holding red solo cups spill out into the parking lot. They pack the place and good for them, I guess.

Happy POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. I hope your golf team wins.

First: verse.

***

In his younger years, George William Russell had a vision. Details of the vision are unclear to me, but “Aeon”, a Gnostic word meaning early being or ancient cosmic intelligence, popped from the fringe of understanding and held court, nipping at his synapses. He claims to have never heard the word before and to have been ignorant of its meaning until revelation fixed it front and conscious center. Obviously, he looked it up. Obviously it had meaning and implications. He decided Aeon would be his non de plume.

Something got confused. A printer was buffaloed by Russell’s use of the ash, or “Æ” character, to spell Æon. There doesn’t appear to be an academic reason for the ash. I can’t find support for using the symbol in aeon though there was a fashion for dressing up Latin and Greek terms with it as flourish in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries whether called for or not. There were heavy metal album cover designers before there were heavy metal albums, so it’s possible Russell spelled for an esoteric aesthetic.

For whatever reason, he used it and the printer didn’t pick up on what he laid down. To the printer’s defense, Russell’s handwriting was notably atrocious. He’s lucky to have deciphered the hieroglyph as resembling A and E at all. The result was a work credited to an author named AE. Russell liked AE and kept it.

A few of you may remember weeks’ back when I wrote about DH Lawrence. I took a tangent to regret having regularly written T.S. Eliot now that a decorative turn had me preferring TS Eliot. C.S. Lewis suddenly looked dated compared to CS Lewis; like a double space after a full-stop, a flouncy handkerchief in a Wall Street pocket-square law firm. Sometimes, AE would sign A.E. and sometimes, AE. With frequency, he signed poems and paintings as Æ. A.E. is old and staid. Æ is an affectation. I applaud circumstances that confer on AE a middle of the road, moderate, common sense mantle.

The periods had their A.E. moment. James Joyce paid homage to Russell with a cameo, or the literary equivalent, in Ulysses. Fictional Russell objects to Stephen Dedalus’s delving into Shakespeare’s life to enlighten the plays. Russell’s having none of it:

—But this prying into the family life of a great man, Russell began impatiently.

Art thou there, truepenny?

—Interesting only to the parish clerk. I mean, we have the plays. I mean when we read the poetry of King Lear what is it to us how the poet lived? As for living our servants can do that for us, Villiers de l’Isle has said. Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day, the poet’s drinking, the poet’s debts. We have King Lear: and it is immortal.

Immediately after the conversation Dedalus is reminded that he owes Russell a pound, so the pun happy Joyce has him say “A.E.I.O.U.”

I wonder at the conversation. Russæll shared a long friendship with W.B. Yeats, though the two were said to be contentious. Did Joyce allude to frequent intellectual splits between Yeats and Russell with his fictional Shakespeare debate? Was he acknowledging a broader penchant for verbal sword crossing during the Modern Period’s Irish Literary Revival? Was he singling out Russell as particularly argumentative? Russell certainly entertained game discussion on all manner of subjects.

Oliver St John Gogarty, short list candidate for wittiest man no longer alive, wrote of Russell’s famous salon-casuals at 17 Ruthgar Avenue in Dublin, coined “At Home Sundays” by the host. Gogarty wrote a semi-fiction work, “neither a ‘memoir’ nor a novel” by the author’s telling, called As I Was Going Down Sackville Street: A Phantasy of Fact. Real life figures like Joyce, Yeats, and Micheal Collins pop in and out and interact with fictions. In one scene he—fictionalized Gogarty—tries to explain to a pair of American girls the honor they’d just received on being invited to an At Home Sunday.

“To explain my meaning, I want you to think of this house of [Russell’s] as a house for artists, and not for lecturers, readers, preachers, teachers, or people with points. It has been said of Æ that he is one of those rare spirits who brings us a realization of our own divinity and intensify [sic] it. He enlarges the joy that is hidden in the heroic heart. He is a magnifier of the moods of the soul; and he communicates them more naturally by music and murmuring song than by messages or points. Don’t forget what Robert Louis Stevenson said about geniuses like Æ. ‘Such are the best teachers. A spirit communicated is a perpetual possession. Those best teachers climb beyond teaching to the plane of art. It is themselves, and, what is more, the best in themselves, that they communicate.” That is the secret of Æ. He is an artist. He teaches nothing. He communicates himself, and the best in himself, which consists of poetry, loving kindness, and a passion for beauty more than for anything else. So you see he is far more like Plato than like the Tolstoi whom I saw that his appearance suggested to you at first sight.”

By “The Tolstoi,” as he referred to Æ at least a couple of times in the book, Gogarty needled the man for his formidable beard, very serious rifle sight of a nose, and pince nez/flat-line brow combination framed by often longish wavy hair. Gogarty didn’t agree with Russell all that often, but they got along famously.

Yeats had his own salon on Mondays. Yeats attended Russell’s and Russell attended Yeats’s. In fact, the same luminaries attended both but the character of the gatherings were different, reflecting the temperament of the host. 17 Ruthgar was egalitarian and free spirited debate was encouraged. Yeats’s was appreciative. Almost aristocratic. Trends and merits were discussed at Russell’s. Yeats presented what he’d already decided was worthy of attention.

Russell was a devotee of Helen Blavatsky’s Theosophy religion, of which followers insist is not a religion. Blavatsky began her movement in New York in the late 19^th century. Anyone who’s read Charles Portis’s Masters of Atlantis will note that much of the book’s fictional Gnomon Society echos Theosophical lore: secret masters, lost knowledge. Hers was a synthesis of Eastern religion and European philosophy. There were mysteries and an elite. Members were privy where others were not. I say “were privy.” There remain enough current adherents to slightly more than sell out a Montreal Canadiens home game.

New York
George William Russell (1867-1935)

With these heaven-assailing spires
All that was in clay or stone
Fabled of rich Babylon
By these children is outdone.

Earth has split her fire in these
To make them of her mightier kind;
Has she that precious fire to give,
The starry-pointing Magian mind,

That soared from the Chaldean plains
Through zones of mystic air, and found
The Master of the Zodiac,
The Will that makes the Wheel go round?

Russell remained a Theosophist for life. He was joined by Yeats for a brief while. The two collaborated on murals decorating the Dublin Theosophical Society where Russell kept a room for a few years, but Yeats caused trouble. There were occult practices forbidden by the non-religion and he pracriced them anyway. In 1890, Yeats was excommunicated. Again, a point of contention: mysticism vs magic.

The Æon vision wasn’t a one off. Russell suffered visions all his life. He considered them blessings. There were fiery beings, old souls specifically not angelic as experience and sorrow corrupted their spirit. They were tired but continued. In them he claimed to see a spark or remnant of purity. They moved through multiple lives and collected knowledge and featured prominently in his paintings. He’d catch glimpses of Pre-Columbian America, ancient Athens and Egypt, China. He slipped through reincarnations and communed with the earth.

It’s an unexpected CV, but the painter, poet, mystic, salon host was also an excellent civil servant. As an Assistant Secretary of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society he helped established a couple of hundred co-operative banks to service the nations farmers as well as spread process and innovation throughout the countryside. Daniel Mulhall, writing for the Green Book, notes that after a trip to the United States, Russell “had a keen admirer in President Roosevelt’s Secretary for Agriculture, Henry Wallace.”

All of the poems selected for today’s column are among the few chosen by Yeats for his Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935. Russell’s Collected Poems by A.E. is freely available to borrow from archive.org, and there’s a great deal to admire, but I stuck with the Yeats-chosen poems because a) they were the first I encountered and they made an impression, and b) I noticed an interesting thread running through three of them.

Remember the last line of “New York” above: “The Will that makes the Wheel go round?”

Immortality

We must pass like smoke or live within the spirit’s fire;
For we can no more than smoke unto the flame return
If our thought has changed to dream, our will into desire,
As smoke we vanish though the fire may burn.

Lights of infinite pity star the grey dusk of our days:
Surely here is soul: with it we have eternal breath:
In the fire of love we live, or pass by many ways,
By unnumbered ways of dream to death.

In “New York,” the will was a force. It is in “Immortality” as well, but in danger of slipping into desire and dissipating. He differentiates between the will to do and the desire to want. One is an aspect of actionable power. The other is already shelved; desire the wrong trajectory to possibility. The consideration of a thing as a wish distances it from becoming reality.

In the next, desire is resurrected. The cast away ideas are still there waiting to be acted upon.

Desire

With Thee a moment! Then what dreams have play!
Tradition of eternal toil arise,
Search for the high, austere and lonely way
The Spirit moves in through eternities.
Ah, in the soul what memories arise!

And with what yearning inexpressible,
Rising from long forgetfulness I turn
To Thee, invisible, unrumoured, still:
White for Thy whiteness all desires burn.
Ah, with what longing once again I turn!

I don’t know what order the poems were written in. I laid them out in an order because I think there’s a presentable progression, but it’s not required. A man who has visions, who allows the visions a guiding position in his outlook, gives weight to abstractions. Desire and will are given mental place in relation to reality. I can’t decide if he’s mimicking a medieval hierarchy or flattening prejudice and treating real and conceptual on equal footing.

This last isn’t of a piece with the others. I just liked it. He leaves no doubt as to his opinions re nature v nurture.

Germinal

Call not thy wanderer home as yet
Though it be late.
Now is his first assailing of
The invisible gate.
Be still through that light knocking. The hour
Is thronged with fate.

To that first tapping at the invisible door
Fate answereth.
What shining image or voice, what sigh
Or honied breath,
Comes forth, shall be the master of life
Even to death.

Satyrs may follow after. Seraphs
On crystal wing
May blaze. But the delicate first comer
It shall be King.
They shall obey, even the mightiest,
That gentle thing.

All the strong powers of Dante were bowed
To a child’s mild eyes,
That wrought within him that travail
From depths up to skies,
Inferno, Purgatorio
And Paradise.

Amid the soul’s grave councilors
A petulant boy
Laughs under the laurels and purples, the elf
Who snatched at his joy,
Ordering Caesar’s legions to bring him
The world for his toy.

In ancient shadows and twilights
Where childhood had strayed,
The world’s great sorrows were born
And it’s heroes were made.
In the lost boyhood of Judas
Christ was betrayed.

Let thy young wanderer dream on:
Call him not home.
A door opens, a breath, a voice
From the ancient room,
Speaks to him now. Be it dark or bright
He is knit with his doom.

Interesting bit I came across: Russell’s son Diarmuid went on to be a well regarded literary agent with clients including Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, and George Plimpton. Walt Disney tried for years to get PL Travers to sign over the film rights for Mary Poppins. On Disney’s behalf, Russell spoke to Travers, who had been a good friend of his father. He got the deal done, and we’ve endured generations of people making fun of Dick Van Dyke’s accent because we assume he’s trying for cockney. We don’t know his character’s origin story. Maybe Bert immigrated from Adelaide. Leave Dick alone.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

“Eat the muscle pulp of lean beef made into cakes and broiled. This pulp should be as free as possible from connective or glue tissue, fat and cartilage…..The pulp should not be pressed too firmly together before broiling, or it will taste livery. Simply press it sufficiently to hold it together. Make the cakes from half an inch to an inch thick. Broil slowly and moderately well over a fire free from blaze and smoke. When cooked, put it on a hot plate and season to taste with butter, pepper, salt; also use either Worcestershire or Halford sauce, mustard, horseradish or lemon juice on the meat if desired.”
– Dr. James Henry Salisbury (1823-1905)

Don’t do that.

Before Bob Atkins, there was James Henry Salisbury. He got lost in the Victorian Era nutritionist craze. John Harvey Kellog promoted a vegetarian, cereal-heavy diet supplemented by yogurt enemas. Sylvester Graham made people sleep on hard beds, take cold baths, and lie about masturbating. Those were the heavy hitters. It was a fascinating time peopled by fascinating people.

As with Kellog, Salisbury was an early voice suggesting germs had a part in sickness and infections. He got made fun of a good bit for that before being proven right. Both men probably got away with a lot of crackpottery after that. Salisbury promoted a diet of beef cakes as described above, three times a day washed down with hot water. Why hot I’m unsure, but he warned against ever drinking other liquids at other temperatures. Fruits and vegetables were chock full of poisons and the cause of “summer complaints.” Pace Kellog and Graham, plants were relegated to a rounding error; no more than one percent of the Salisbury diet.

If you’re trying to imagine what it would be like to go through life eating the same minced meat every meal, every day, washed down with the same scalding mug of plain water or what kind of person would soberly agree to such a regimen, I’ve got great news. You don’t have to imagine. Elma Stuart, she of the friends of novelist George Eliot fame, took all her suddenly free meal-planning time and wrote What Must I Do to Get Well? And How Can I Keep So?, a 390 page tome revealing all the closely-held sputum divining mysteries. Her testimonial comes after eleven years as a practitioner. I don’t know if it’s more remarkable that she suggests she’s in the midst of an unbroken streak of twelve thousand and forty-seven meals (my rough approximation) or that the book (as linked here) made to at least a 12^th edition. I don’t know how many editions of Middlemarch were printed in Eliot’s lifetime, but I’m betting if it was eleven or less, Elma knew.

Salisbury would doubtless freak seeing the steam tables his legacy serves, with smothered pork chops and battered catfish, as anchor; psychosomatic summer complaints, I’d expect. Toxic potatoes and mushy green beans, fried okra. “Tomatoes are from the nightshade family!” His intent was not to have his namesake on a fork with a bit of mac ‘n’ cheese.

Our modern conception of Salisbury steak is a creation of several telephone game generations. I don’t know if the phrase “modern conception of Salisbury steak” has been written before, but these days, it’s a school lunch cafeteria and meat ‘n’ three staple defined by the gravy. Otherwise, it’s a hamburger.

I’ve made replicas; filled a Dutch oven with beefy flour and onion broth, adding mushrooms inconsistently – just like they did in high school, with submerged par-cooked patties not to be fished out until blessed by a half hour’s simmering. It’s hard-to-beat comfort food, especially with an overly complicated mac ‘n’ cheese or oddball collards on the side.

I recently went to Belize where I bought a lot of black pepper and I recently got rid of a tree that carpeted my roof in pine straw and made outdoor grilling a panicky pastime I largely abandoned. I couldn’t stop worrying about breeze-borne bits of still incandescent ash lighting my roof kindling and having neighbors sing about not needing no water and letting the domestic franchise burn.

I wanted to grill something, and this is what I came up with. The sauce is a definite keeper. It’ll get used with other meats, other recipes. But the whole was better than expected. It’s made the rotation.

We used to make fun of one of the best chefs I’ve ever worked with because he started featuring “deconstructed” dishes right when the deconstructed craze fad was at its height. As fads go, deconstructed was a fun one. But as much as I liked it, I liked teasing the chef about being chic and trendy more. If he reads this, it’s with hat in hand that I present it.

Deconstructed Salisbury Steak

• 1 ½ lbs. ground chuck

• 2 decent sized whole portobello mushrooms

• 1 large yellow onion, sliced into rounds

• sauce to taste

  • 4-6 cloves garlic, chopped

  • ½ yellow onion, diced

  • 1 carrot, diced

  • 1 rib celery, diced

  • tbsp tomato paste

  • fresh thyme, small handful

  • 1 bay leaf

  • 1 glass dry white wine

  • 3 cups beef stock

  • red pepper flakes to taste

  • arrowroot as needed

• olive oil

• salt and cracked black pepper to taste

Start with the sauce. It can be made ahead and reheated if that’s your druther. Pour a few glugs of olive oil into a saucepan over medium heat and add the onions and carrots. When the onions start towards translucent, add the celery and thyme. Cook until both celery and carrots start to dull, 3-5 minutes. Add garlic and then half a minute or so later add the tomato paste.

Stir a few times to coat everything with tomato paste and let cook for 1 minute. Add white wine and red pepper flakes, reduce by half, and add the beef stock and bay leaf. Bring it all to a boil and then reduce heat to a simmer. Let it simmer for at least twenty minutes to reduce and thicken. Stir occasionally.

After the sauce has simmered, strain it through a sieve. Everything’s had time to add what it brought. Take a minute to look at the picture above. I’ve mentioned this when writing about similar sauces, but I’m going to beat this drum again anyway. That stuff is gold in an omelet. Don’t throw it away.

Pour the strained liquid back into the saucepan over low heat. It’s time to add arrowroot. Look at the picture above.

Don’t do that.

I accidentally dumped a tbsp in. I was paying attention to something on tv and not to what I was doing. Do what I did and you have to strain again because the powder quickly finds a way to form lumps and you’ll hate yourself trying to break them up.

You want to let the arrowroot fall like an early snow. If you have a sifter, great. Use that. If not: sprinkle in a little bit, whisk, sprinkle in a little bit, whisk, …

How viscous the sauce will be is up to you. I like it to stick to the back of a metal soup spoon. That took roughly 1 ½ tbsps.

You can take it off the heat, put it in Tupperware or whatever, and refrigerate at this stage if you like. I kept mine at the lowest simmer and started on the grill.

Rub the mushrooms and onion with olive oil and liberally salt and pepper. I started this with a pepper craving so, spread over all ingredients, I used roughly one Spanish galleon’s worth. You probably don’t want to commit as heavily, but when I say “liberally” maybe take me to mean “Liberally” where pepper is concerned.

Make hamburgers as you do. I like a fatty mix, particularly when grilling because I’m losing so much to the fire, so I use ground chuck. I also don’t like to make a fuss with burgers. Worcestershire, garlic, cayenne, etc. are all fine, but I prefer to leave the meat alone save salt. In case you missed it, this time I added pepper, but simpler is better in my opinion. Suit yourself.

The burgers need a head start, so I hold off putting the mushrooms and onions on until at least the first burger flip. There are people who believe that a perfect burger needs only one flip. They have been misled. That’s a post in itself, so I’ll get back to that point some other time.

Cook the burgers to taste and try to get some char on the onions and mushrooms.

Pull everything off the grill. Slice the mushrooms. Taste the sauce and correct for salt and pepper.

Put it all on a plate and be generous with your ladle.

It’s not the comfort food steam table stuff. This is cleaner and satisfies a different hankering. There’s charred meat and smokiness. The mushrooms still have a little bite. The onions are still sharp. And it’s no longer faddish.

[This entry originally posted at ordinary-times.com on February 27, 2024]

Happy Easter and Ziessen Pesach, if I have that right. All to all.

There may not be work to get out of, but here’s some pseudo-POETS Day mystic verse.

***

When Juan Yepes, ordained John Matthias and later changed to John of the Cross, died in 1591, crowds thronged his viewing, tearing away pieces of the beloved spiritual leader’s burial clothes as mementos. There was impressive competition for his remains.

He was originally buried in Ubeda where he died. Two years later, he was relocated on the sly. The monks at Segovia felt that since he’d been prior of their monastery, they had claim to his remains. They left a leg behind for the Ubeda folks and donated an arm to be venerated in Madrid, but the bulk was whisked away by the Segovian interests. An appeal to Pope Clement VIII in 1596 put the Ubedans back in the game. The pope ordered John’s remains sent back. There was rumbling and arguing. In the end, the Ubedans added the other leg and the arm that wasn’t in Madrid while the Segovians held onto his head and torso.

I resisted saying St John had been the “prior prior” above, so I feel I’m entitled to make an “everybody wanted a piece of him” crack here: Everybody wanted a piece of him. People were different then.

St John of the Cross was a great reformer. The Carmelite order was considered lax at the time of his joining. He began his clerical vocation with the Carthusians, specifically because they stressed solitude and meditative prayer. It was a meeting with St Teresa of Avila (Rome: right foot and piece of upper jaw, Lisbon: hand, Rhonda: left eye and left hand, Alba de Torres: left arm and heart, Paris: finger, Sanlucar de Barrameda: finger) where she laid out her plan for returning the Carmelites to their abandoned “Primitive Rule”—rigorous study, meditation, severe fasting, and times of silence—that caused him to reconsider and join her in her cause.

Omer Englebert does Teresa a disservice in his often cited Lives of the Saints. He writes “At the age of seven she ran away to join the Moors who, she thought, would consent to cut off her head. Cheated of martyrdom…” He makes her sound like Tracy Flick. She did run off to fight the Moors with her brother at age seven, but her uncle found them just outside of town and brought them home. Pace Englebert, it sounds like a “ran off to join the circus” adventure more than an honest death wish. Imagined youthful glories passed. She wasn’t keen on becoming a nun at first. It appears her family applied pressure and she caved, but as a last gasp at independence joined the nearby, per Wikipedia, “easy-going Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation” as what must seem to modern readers as a comically minor act of rebellion.

She learned quickly that the religious life was her calling; any hesitations fell away. The laxity surrounding her became a hindrance. She was blossoming into mysticism and there were distractions. It’s a longer story than this, but she wasn’t able to recreate the Carmelites to her wants, though she was able to form a subgroup, an orthodoxy within an orthodoxy that split and gained independence as the Order of the Discalced Carmelites under Papal decree in 1580. Teresa wrote extensively on prayer and meditation. In John she found an apt pupil and encouraged his gift for poetry. The two went on founding convents and monasteries respectively. They must have made for a formidable side. Both would be named among the thirty-eight Doctors of the Church, Teresa the first woman so honored.

In last week’s POETS Day I touched on Roy Campbell’s travails at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The Carmelite brothers entrusted with the personal papers of St John asked Campbell and his wife to hide the papers in their home, afraid that the communists would turn on the monastery. Their fears were grounded. Republican forces burned the monastery library and shot all seventeen monks in the street. Earlier that day, the Campbell’s home was searched. By his telling, the soldiers passed repeatedly by the trunk in which St John’s work was hidden. They rested their rifles against it, but they never looked inside. They would have likely been killed if they had, but Campbell believed St John himself interceded and saved his family. He vowed to translate the poetry into English in thanks.

Roy hid the trunk and escaped Spain, but returned two years later in 1937 as a journalist and recovered it; managed to get the originals back to the Carmelite order. In 1939, Campbell joined the English Army at the age of thirty-eight. He had a miserable time in boot camp, but an officer recognized him and became very upset on hearing Campbell swore off poetry to focus on fighting. Something in the officer’s protest affected him. He reconsidered and started translating St John in the evenings after drills. It took him eleven years to finish, but this being Campbell, he claimed St John inspired him and in a feverish few months it all was revealed.

The Poems of St John of the Cross brought more success than Campbell had ever known. Kathleen Raine wrote in the New Statesman, as provided by Peter Alexander in his Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography:

“Of all living English poets, Roy Campbell is the most masterly in his use of rhyme, and he is able to use metre so as to convey a sense of internal passion. He has reproduced the Spanish rhymes and metres as closely as possible, and yet his English versions have the freshness of original poems.”

The Observer called the translations a triumph. He was popular again. His finances were finally in shape. Stephen Spender, of whom last week I mentioned Campbell punched on stage because Spender planned to accuse him of Fascism in a speech, was set to give the Foyle Prize for Poetry. He had no idea who he would be honoring until immediately before the ceremony. You can image poor Spender on learning that he’d be on stage with Campbell once again, this time honoring him. Phantom jaw pains rearing. Per Alexander, “the two men shook hands with the utmost cordiality, in marked contrast to their previous encounter.”

“Were I superstitious I should say San Juan brought me luck,” Roy wrote.

This week’s poem is often referred to as “En Una Noche Oscura,” by its opening line. St John didn’t title his poems. Alternately it is “La Noche Oscura del Alma,” or “Dark Night of the Soul” in English.

Christian mysticism deals with preparation for and contemplation of communion with God. It was the belief of St John that we must shed ourselves and all our notions and imaginings to be open to the unimaginable presence of God. There can be nothing left.

The theme repeats throughout his work.

Without support, yet well supported,
Though in pitch-darkness, with no ray,
Entirely I am burned away.

And,

This life I live in vital strength
Is loss of life unless I win You:
And thus to die I shall continue
Until I live in You at length.
Listen (my God!) my life is in You.
This life I do not want, for I
Am dying that I do not die.

To some he went too far. A state of forgetting he insisted is necessary, a complete wipe of our well-meaning but flawed understanding, for divine communion. Even the lessons of the Church must be set aside when in the mystic state to allow for a fuller understanding direct from God. Catechism was true but tainted because nothing of man is perfect. It was an obstacle; preconceptions in the light of purity. Conrad Pepler, O.P., in his afterward to the Cluny Press edition of Campbell’s translations writes,

“[St John] says, following perhaps the lines of this way of analysis, that images and sounds and the like may be used by beginners in the love of God, but that they should be no longer necessary when the soul has progressed. Sacramentals such as the crucifix are to be unattractive or at least crude in their artistry lest they should distract by their material beauty and human skill.”

And then he writes divine verse? Presumably, ecstasy for beginners.

Early editors removed language stating that “memory must be emptied of all its impressions,” and replaced it with “twenty lines of praise for the memory of Christ” and a brief exemption from forgetting for Jesus and his humanity. St John was briefly imprisoned and tortured by less reform minded factions of his own order. There were during his lifetime and after, efforts to suppress or soften his teachings. Not everyone understood his hope for perfect union.

“En Una Noche Oscura” is a daring into the unknown. It is faith, fear, and hope. It’s believed he began the poem in his prison, writing on paper smuggled in by a kindly guard.

En Una Noche Oscura
St John of the Cross (1542-1591)
as translated by Roy Campbell (1901-1957)

I.

Songs of the soul in rapture at having arrived
at the height of perfection, which is union with God
by the road of spiritual negation

Upon a gloomy night,
With all my cares to loving ardors flushed,
(O venture of delight!)
With nobody in sight
I went abroad when all my house was hushed.

In safety, in disguise,
In darkness up the secret stair I crept,
(O happy enterprise!)
Concealed from other eyes
When all my house at length in silence slept.

Upon that lucky night
In secrecy, inscrutable to sight,
I went without discerning
And with no other light
Except for that which in my heart was burning.

It lit and led me through
More certain than the light of noonday clear
To where One waited near
Whose presence well I knew,
There where no other presence might appear.

Oh night that was my guide!
Oh darkness dearer than the morning’s pride,
Oh night that joined the lover
To the beloved bride
Transfiguring them each into the other.

Within my flowering breast
Which only for himself entire I save
He sank into his rest
And all my gifts I gave
Lulled by the airs with which the cedars wave

Over the ramparts fanned
While the fresh wind was fluttering his tresses,
With serenest hand
My neck he wounded, and
Suspended every sense with its caresses.

Lost to myself I stayed
My face upon my lover having laid
From all endeavor ceasing:
And all my cares releasing
Threw them amongst the lilies there to fade.

Interesting bit I came across: St Teresa died late in the evening on or immediately following October 4, 1582. It’s not known at what time, leaving the possibility that she died after midnight, which should have been October 5. But… 1582 was the year Spain adopted the Gregorian calendar and as it happened, they did so on the day after October 4, skipping ten ahead. So, she died either on October 4 or a few hours later on October 15, on which the Church celebrates her feast day.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Major League Baseball season is upon us. The Sweet Sixteen is under way. You need not to be at work. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, some verse.

***

Roy Campbell says that in February of 1936 he was forced at gunpoint to vote, using a dead Spaniard’s identity, for the Popular Front. This would have been months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Peter Alexander writes, in a footnote in his Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography that he was “unable to verify this story.” It’s important to note that he notes this because Campbell was an outrageous story teller whose facts regarding his own exploits need checking. But the truth is, Campbell led an outrageous life filled with noble, clownish, ill-considered, shrewd, Quixotic, and valiant, depending on the situation, deeds.

He’s hard to believe. Campbell bragged he was a spy for Great Britain during World War II. That wasn’t the lie. The lie was that he was good at it. His espionage involved getting drunk in Spain, cosying up to fellow bar patrons, and saying “Don’t tell anybody, but I’m a spy for England. Have you heard anything about what the Germans are up to?” (Not kidding.) You get enough of his exaggerations and then hear a surefire whopper where he claims to have played matador “bullfighting” a rhino in the wild, and it turns out he’s telling the truth. He survived, but the beast charged through his makeshift cape and made a mess out of his brother-in-law’s Range Rover. Such is the complicated task of making sense of the life of Campbell.

I say this because Peter Alexander is a well-respected biographer. That he points out when he can’t verify something should tell about what he tells you without qualification. The following from Campbell’s life he presents without such couching.

In March of ‘36, amid a wave of anticlericism sweeping Spain, Campbell and his wife Mary hid local Carmelite monks in their large rented Toledo home. This was risky. Not just because hiding clergy was risky, but because he and his wife were recent converts to Catholicism and active; they made an effort to be known to the community as such. Hiding at the Campbell house was safer for the monks than staying at the monastery, but they were hiding at an address on the short list of places sure to offer shelter. It was a poorly-kept secret, and when the monks went back to their home, when danger seemed to have passed or become something to get used to, a fact not passing, people resented Roy and his wife.

To get a sense of the mood in the city, before the election a bartender who knew Campbell showed him his guns, adding that he’d shoot him “when the time came, ‘if you are still here… and haven’t been bumped off by anyone else.’” Things only got worse after. On March 16, members of the Assault Guard—Cuerpo de Seguridad y Asalto, the real name of an organization under the Second Republic—harassed Campbell while he was out on a horseback ride and… did their thing. He wrote about the incident where he was beaten with rifle butts and the Assaulteers “paraded him back into town to be thrown in prison,” again, per Alexander who reports the incident, but calls Campbell’s later poem recounting the incident “histrionic”:

from To My Jockey

And four of those black bastards
To hold a single man:
And four to take him to the gaol –
Proclaiming thus my clan.

Campbell certainly indulged in a little chest beating (Alexander said he had at least two different stories of his daring escape from captivity), but he’s embellishing his reaction, not the circumstances in Toledo at the time. Still more from Alexander:

“He was very lucky not to have been shot as so many Spaniards were under similar circumstances, and as his companion that day, a gypsy named ‘Mosquito’ Bargas, who did occasional odd jobs for him, had been shot by the roadside just minutes before Campbell’s arrest.”

His wife was harassed on the way to morning mass, his family glared at, and threatened on the streets.

On July 18, Franco rebelled. The Popular Front went hunting for enemy sympathizers. The Carmelites had asked the Campbells to hide a chest of documents, including the personal papers of St. John of the Cross, in their home. A cross on the wall could get you shot, such was the communist zeal, but Roy and Mary agreed. On July 22, all seventeen of the Carmelite monks were shot and killed in a nearby square, their buildings torched. Alexander says Campbell snuck out in the evening and found his friends’ bodies covered, but lying where they died.

Toledo, July 1936
Roy Campbell (1901-1957)

Toledo, when I saw you die
And heard the roof of Carmel crash,
A spread-winged phœnix from its ash
The Cross remained against the sky!
With horns of flame and haggard eye
The mountain vomited with blood,
A thousand corpses down the flood
Were rolled gesticulating by,
And high above the roaring shells
I heard the silence of your bells
Who’ve left these broken stones behind
Above the years to make your home,
And burn, with Athens and with Rome,
A sacred city of the mind.

Earlier that day, the Republicans searched the Campbell home. Any religious item found might mean death for them all. Campbell said one soldier was worked up on finding a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, recognized Italian and assumed it was Fascist. “Campbell,” Alexander writes, “with admirable presence of mind, showed them some of his Russian novels, and so convinced them he was neutral.” The Campbells scrubbed the house of any iconography, literature—you name it—save the truly valuable. None of the soldiers looked in the trunk. They leaned rifles against it as the searched, their weapons inches from St. John’s writings. The family watched nervously, but no one opened and saw. Roy saw St. John’s hand as protecting his family in that moment and vowed to translate the Saint’s poetry for an English audience, a vow he kept.

Angelo Monico, described by Alexander as an “idiot poetaster” Campbell mentored, arrived at the Campbell home with the body of a dead child in his arms. He gave the family cash picked from the body of a dead priest. With that money they bribed their way onto a truck carting bodies out of town and made for the coast and a boat to Marseilles. Coincidentally, Robert Graves and Laura Riding were fleeing on the same boat. Whatever enmity existed between the three poets disappeared in flight, a shocking turn to any familiar with Campbell’s earlier attacks on the other two. Riding offered to loan a sizable amount to the Campbells who were in desperate need, having left nearly everything behind. Esprit de Corps.

Campbell was often accused of being a Fascist. He denied it. There was a case to be made that he was. He worked as a propagandist for Franco, claimed to have attended Franco’s victory parade, and vigorously opposed the Republicans. The British Union of Fascists tried to recruit him:

“I not only refused Mosley’s and [Percy Wyndham] Lewis’s offer of a very high position and lucrative position in the Fascist party but explained that I was returning to the ranks to fight Red Fascism, the worst and most virulent variety, and that when the time came I was ready to fight Brown or Black Fascism and that I could (though badly disabled) knock both of their brains out there and then! I explained that I was only fighting as a Christian for the right to pray in my own churches, all of which (save 3) had been destroyed in Red Spain…I then asked for my coat and hat: Lewis has never forgiven it.”

All the talk about Red and Black and Brown fit with his assertion that fascism “is merely another form of communism.” He hated them all. It got back to Campbell that Stephen Spender was going to out him as a fascist in a speech so he marched up on stage and punched Spender before he got the words out. He enlisted to fight the Nazis. He was adamant that he was not as was claimed. The claims persisted.

Flowering Rifle gave plenty more ammunition to his detractors. It’s a one hundred and sixty-five page poem published in 1939, celebrating Franco’s victory and excoriating the British intelligentsia for supporting the communists in the Spanish Civil War. He’d already put the Bloomsbury wing of British Literary Society against the wall with his 1931 attack against Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, and the lot: The Georgiad. With Flowering Rifle, he went after them again, only this time handing over to them the beautifully wrapped gift of siding with the ideology menacing the minds of Europe and rightly worrying England.

It’s lost that the Fascists, under Franco, were part of a coalition made up of nationalists, monarchists, Catholics, and anticommunists. Campbell was certainly two out of the five, but I think we can push politics aside and entertain that fighting for Franco was secondary to fighting against the Communists who beat him, killed his friends, hounded his family, and chased him from his home. Why focus on politics when animosity suffices?

Roy and CS Lewis first met as undergraduates at Oxford in the years following WWI. They didn’t know each other very well, but the casual acquaintance was enough to spark recognition between the two in 1927 on a chance encounter in a London pub. Campbell was there on a mission. Mary had just confessed her affair with Virginia Woolf’s ex, Vita Sackville-West. More over, she hoped he would be okay with her continuing her infidelity with the woman. The Georgiad seeds were sown. Campbell was there to get drunk, which he did. Loosened, he relayed his sordid circumstance to Lewis, who responded, “Fancy, being cuckolded by a woman.” Roy went into a days long rage. Lewis’s comment stuck with him. The two were not on friendly terms.

Flowering Rifle was published in February of 1939. Lewis responded in the pages of Cherwell, one of Oxford’s independent student papers, with “To the Author of Flowering Rifle.”

To the Author of Flowering Rifle
CS Lewis (1898-1963)

Rifles may flower and terrapins may flame
But truth and reason will be still the same.
Call them Humanitarians if you will,
The merciful are promised mercy still;
Loud fool! To think a nickname could abate
The blessing given to the compassionate.
Fashions in polysyllables may fright
Those Charlies on the Left of whom you write;
No wonder; since it was from them you learned
How white to black by jargon can be turned,
And though your verse outsoars with eagle pride
Their nerveless rhythms (of which the old cow died)
Yet your shrill covin-politics and theirs
Are two peas in a single pod—who cares
Which kind of shirt the murdering Party wears?
Repent! Recant! Some feet of sacred ground,
A target to both gangs, can yet be found,
Sacred because, though now it’s no-man’s-land,
There stood your father’s house; there you should stand.

Lewis admired Campbell’s skills as a versifier, and the political divide didn’t dissuade him of that admiration as is obvious by “your verse outsoars.” Lewis does put himself on an island; not fond of the “Charlies on the Left,” but very much offended by Campbell.

The two didn’t meet again until 1944 and as the last time, at a pub. This time it was at the Eagle and Child in Oxford. Given the years, Lewis didn’t recognize Campbell. JRR Tolkien, who was there with Lewis, was writing the Lord of the Rings at the time and said the larger-than-life Campbell reminded him of Strider. He liked that Campbell was mysterious to Lewis on entering. It’s claimed that Campbell inspired some of the character’s mannerisms, that Tolkien wrote a gesture or the poet’s attitude into his descriptions.

In Tolkien’s telling, Lewis got snippy and accusative and Campbell laughed and brushed off criticisms. From a letter from JRR to his son Christopher:

“C.S.L.’s reactions [to Campbell] were odd. Nothing is a greater tribute to Red propaganda than the fact that he (who knows they are in all other subjects liars and traducers) believes all that is said against Franco, and nothing that is said for him. … Yet if a Lutheran is put in jail he is up in arms; but if Catholic priests are slaughtered—he disbelieves it (and I daresay really thinks they asked for it). Bur R.C [Roy Campbell] shook him a bit …”

Over the course of the evening, Campbell told Lewis his experiences in Spain and Lewis softened. By night’s end, Lewis offered to put Roy up at his house the next time he was in Oxford and invited him to an Inklings meeting. The two began a correspondence discussing the works of Milton. The two got chummy.

It doesn’t seem they ever agreed politically. Campbell died in a car crash in 1957. In 1963, shortly before he died himself, Lewis said he “loathed and loath Roy Campbell’s particular blend of Catholicism and Fascism, and told him so,” so that would be the last word on the subjects of fascism and Popery, but there seemed to be detente.

This next poem, by Lewis, was published posthumously. In it, Lewis chides Campbell for rejecting Romanticism. There’s no animosity. Lewis sets a clear “they” and a “we” while reminding Campbell he belongs as a member of “we”; the side of Wordsworth and the Angels.

To Roy Campbell

Dear Roy—Why should each wowzer on the list
Of those you damn be dubbed Romanticist?
In England the romantic stream flows not
From waterish Rousseau but from manly Scott,
A right branch on the old European tree
Of valour, truth, freedom, and courtesy,
A man (though often slap-dash in his art)
Civilized to the centre of his heart,
A man who, old and cheated and in pain,
Instead of snivelling, got to work again,
Work without end and without joy, to save
His honour, and go solvent to the grave;
Yet even so, wrung from his failing powers,
One book of his would furnish ten of ours
With characters and scenes. The very play
Of mind, I think, is birth-controlled to-day.
It flows, I say, from Scott; from Coleridge too.
A bore? A sponge? A laudanum-addict? True;
Yet Newman in that ruinous master saw
One who restored our faculty for awe,
Who re-discovered the soul’s depth and height,
Who pricked with needles of the eternal light
An England at that time half numbed to death
With Paley’s, Bentham’s, Malthus’ wintry breath.
For this the reigning Leftist cell may be
His enemies, no doubt. But why should we?
Newman said much the same of Wordsworth too.
Now certain critics, far from dear to you,
May also fondle Wordsworth. But who cares?
Look at the facts. He’s far more ours than theirs;
Or, if we carve him up, then all that’s best
Falls to our share—we’ll let them take the rest.
By rights the only half they should enjoy
Is the rude, raw, unlicked, North Country boy.

I’m left wondering about the papers of St. John of the Cross. At present, they reside with the Carmelites, but how they got from the Campbells’ house to their current location, I’m not sure. I’ve read that Campbell, as relayed by the man himself, made a daring return in 1937 to retrieve the documents he hid away at an apartment before leaving in 1935. It sounds very precarious, but… It’s been four or so years since I read Alexander’s Campbell biography, so there might be something in there about this return rescue mission that I’ve forgotten, but I don’t recall reading about it the book. Today I flipped through the section on 1937, checked the index for St. John, and reasonably tried to find a sentence or so of corroboration. I didn’t. It may be true that Campbell risked life and limb, and if pressed I suspect he did. I plan to keep digging, but until then...

I say this because Peter Alexander is a well-respected biographer: It may not be in there because he wasn’t able to verify it.

I had a theory about Lenten fasting that was described by someone whose opinion I value as “the stupidest damn thing I’ve ever heard.” He added something along the lines of “Where do you get this nonsense?” but I thought there was something to it so I’m going to share with you here.

I saw a map of the olive oil-butter line; the dividing line between areas of Europe that primarily use olive oil and those that primarily use butter as cooking fat. Now the EU has super-fast trains and Ferraris to carry goods from one region to another, but that wasn’t always the case. Until recently, you shopped locally without needing to be told to do so by a t-shirt. If you lived below the line you cooked with olive oil. Above, with butter. I remember looking at that map years ago during Lent and realizing the countries to the north of the line were mostly protestant.

The Catholic Church used to have a much larger appetite for fasting. By some accounts nearly half the days of the year were designated as preparation for feast days or days of remembrance or were part of a holy season. All of those were subject to dietary restrictions. If you’re an Italian Catholic in 1516 enjoying a nice dish of turbot sauteed with zucchini in olive oil and one of your dining companions reminds you that the next day, as the first Wednesday after the Feast of Santa Lucia and thus an Ember Day, was a fasting day, you might check the stores to be sure you had more turbot, zucchini, and olive oil to cook them in for tomorrow because the rules likely made no difference to you. The Mediterranean diet was such that you had to be sure and only inject lamb, pork, or beef into your regimen three times a week, which is likely two or three times more often that you were used.

If you lived north of the olive oil-butter divide, fasting was a damnable hassle. The rules of The Church didn’t require adherents to not eat meat on certain days. That’s how we think of it now. The rules required abstaining from terrestrial animal products entirely: no meat or poultry or anything that comes from them. Dairy and eggs were out. To be a Catholic in medieval Germany or England meant trying to avoid being made a vegan for half the year and as everyone around you was a Catholic there was nothing special about your enlightened diet so the smug satisfaction of the modern vegan was a yet unheard of comfort. Not only was there no jerky or nearly spoiled dog meat (they probably didn’t eat spoiled dog meat but I have modern conceptions of the unclean past to deal with) on the menu, there was no fat to cook the fish you were allowed to eat unless you paid outrageous amounts for lampante, olive oil of such low quality it was best suited as fuel for lamps. You could also pay outrageous amounts for indulgences from The Church for exemption from fasting. Most medieval European Yankees made do with dried or salted fish and offered up exhaustion as butter wasn’t just a convenience. It was a major source of calories.

When explaining this to the person of trusted opinions who thought it was the stupidest damn thing they’d ever heard I was suggesting that the difference in diet may have had a minor impact on the success of The Reformation. I wasn’t saying that it was a major reason people abandoned Rome, at least at the time. I am now.

I suspect I’m not alone in that when someone vehemently rejects a thought of mine I go back to the source of that thought, look for more information both supporting and contrary, and fixate on the idea in a way I never would have before someone called me a stupid head. I figured that no one would say they were going Popeless just because they were hungry but if somebody heard about a religious movement and his friends were all doing it he might consider going along with them so long as they promised that he still got to follow scripture and didn’t have to go to hell. If, while he was debating whether it was righteous rebellion against an institution that lost its way, heresy, or Heresy to be a part of this new movement, his friends mentioned that the new church leaders, while not yet wearing turtlenecks and playing guitar, were cool or “down with” eating butter whenever the urge took you, that might nudge him in the protestant direction. It was just a thought I had. When I defiantly looked into it I found this:

“For at Rome they themselves laugh at the fasts, making us foreigners eat the oil with which they would not grease their shoes, and afterwards selling us liberty to eat butter and all sorts of other things … thinking it is a greater sin to eat butter is a greater sin than to lie, to swear, or even to live unchastely.”

That was from Martin Luther’s 1520 address “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation.” He mentions butter in that address six or so times. In the book Butter: A Rich History, food historian Elaine Khosrova writes “It seems hardly a coincidence that most of the dairy-rich countries producing and using butter were the same nations that broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century.”

Far from being “nonsense,” my errant little theory was in line with a body of thought so developed that someone has beaten me to the “Spread of Protestantism” pun. I can taste the vindication.

Again, these days delicacies from all over the world are sold in a market a few miles away from most of us. Fasting isn’t as hard as it used to be to the non-Mediterranean. Modern Catholic fasting rules allow eggs, so even the pasta in today’s recipe is Vatican approved. For those not in communion with Rome, this is a wonderful dish despite the penitential nod. No food promises to make me as happy as tomato sauce over pasta.

There was an impressive chef in Birmingham who was known for his particularity when encouraging his kitchen staff’s creativity by letting them propose ideas for the day’s specials. “Good, but too many ingredients,” was his refrain. His people quickly learned that five was the magic number. “Keep it simple.” This sauce has eight ingredients. Salt and olive oil never count. It’s almost simple.

Tomato Sauce with Smoked Trout and Lemon

• 4 oz. filet smoked trout

• 6 Roma tomatoes diced with seeds in and skin on

• 1 shallot, diced

• 4 cloves garlic, minced

• 1 cup dry white wine

• 1 tbsp. tomato paste

• handful flatleaf parsley

• red pepper flakes, to taste

• salt, to taste

• olive oil

• 1 lb. spaghetti

Start with a few glugs of olive oil in a sauce pan over medium heat and add the shallots and red pepper flakes. Sauté until aromatic – three or four minutes.

Add the garlic and continue cooking for one minute, stirring as needed to keep from browning and then add the tomatoes with a small pinch of salt. Stir to mix and cook another five minutes or so to soften the tomatoes.

Next pour in the wine and the parsley and mix together. Turn up the heat to high, bring to a quick boil, and then reduce to a simmer.

Let simmer at least ten minutes. Add tomato paste to thicken and stir.

Break the trout into bite sized pieces. I had two filets of 4 oz. each in the picture but in the end only one of them was needed. Both would be overkill.

Add the fish to the sauce about five minutes before serving.

Right before serving stir in lemon zest, about a loose half tsp.

Taste, correct for salt and lemon zest and serve over pasta with grated Parmesan or Romano standing by.

Hope you enjoy it, and have a Happy, but appropriately austere, Lent.

Quick note on the olive oil-butter line: It’s true that Ireland stayed Catholic despite their butter climate but there was a choice between hunger pains and agreeing with the English.

[This entry originally posted at ordinary-times.com on February 23, 2023]

It’s March Madness. There’s no need to explain. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

But first, some verse.

***

In the Little Old Market-Place
Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939)

(To the Memory of A. V.)

It rains, it rains,
From gutters and drains
And gargoyles and gables:
It drips from the tables
That tell us the tolls upon grains,
Oxen, asses, sheep, turkeys and fowls
Set into the rain-soaked wall
Of the old Town Hall.

This is a longer poem, ninety-two lines, than I usually feature here, so I’m breaking it up with commentary as I see fit. I hope you’ll excuse my not prefacing each excerpt with “from In the Little…” An added apology: I have no idea who A.V. was. I did look around.

This work first appeared in his collection High Germany, dated 1911 but apparently not published until 1912, and reappeared in the debut anthology of Imagiste poets, back when the movement was helmed by Ezra Pound, Des Imagistes. Pound was awed by Ford and eager to get the established critic, novelist, editor, and poet on board. In part, Pound was thankful. Ford gave several notable poets a beginning in England, among them Pound, DH Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis. When put on the pages of Ford’s English Review, they were elevated, sharing space with Yeats and Ford’s dear friend Conrad. It’s said here and about that he “discovered” these new voices, but that’s a messy term. I’m sure what it means in the pertinent sense, as all had published but not to scale, is that Ford lifted them up and made them salon worthy subjects.

Pound, on his ascendance, sang his, then known as Ford Madox Hueffer, praises to Harriet Monroe in his role as foreign editor for her Poetry magazine. He even resigned his position, albeit it briefly, until a squabble was resolved over some slight afforded the man. In a letter to Amy Lowell, before he decided he hated her and went around London calling the squat, large woman the Hippopoetess, Pound wrote “Also, I’ve resigned from Poetry in Hueffner’s favour, but I believe he has resigned in mine and I don’t know whether I’m shed of the blooming paper or not.”

I can’t figure out for certain what the issue was. In letters to Monroe immediately preceding, he’s praising Ford as then Heuffer and trying to get more prose off the man as “you seemed to like it,” while referring to an off stage problem that is seemingly resolved: “I am eased in my mind about the Heuffer matter.”

Ford’s inclusion in Des Imagistes was a coup. For one, the poem is very good. Second, per the Poetry Foundation, Pound “deemed Ford the best literary critic in England because of his keen editorial eye and celebration of vers libre.” Ford was respected in literary circles and Pound, the great promoter, was never above borrowing reputation from associaties. Further, Imagism broke from Victorian poetry’s fussiness and marriage to an even older diction. Ford wrote with a modern voice. He treated objects directly.

The image of the marketplace he gives is straightforward enough. It’s wet, old, and dark. But he takes the readers gaze and darts around. Look up to the gables, drains, and gargoyles. Back down to tables. Animals presumable are off along the side of the square, but it’s not “horses lashed.” Livestock is here and there. Turkeys aren’t kept with oxen or sheep. Asses are good for light traffic. You have to look around to take them all in. Look around. Rain falls. A tower dominating it all.

Next he pulls the reader up and out.

The mountains being so tall
And forcing the town on the river,
The market’s so small
That, with the wet cobbles, dark arches and all,
The owls
(For in dark rainy weather the owls fly out
Well before four), so the owls
In the gloom
Have too little room
And brush by the saint on the fountain
In veering about.

There’s a greater country about. The town is subject to natural forces, situated where it’s allowed to be. Having pulled out, he zooms in.

The poor saint on the fountain!
Supported by plaques of the giver
To whom we’re beholden;
His name was de Sales
And his wife’s name von Mangel.

(Now is he a saint or archangel?)
He stands on a dragon
On a ball, on a column
Gazing up at the vines on the mountain:
And his falchion is golden
And his wings are all golden.
He bears golden scales
And in spite of the coils of his dragon, without hint of alarm or invective
Looks up at the mists on the mountain.

(Now what saint or archangel
Stands winged on a dragon,
Bearing golden scales and a broad bladed sword all golden?
Alas, my knowledge
Of all the saints of the college,
Of all these glimmering, olden
Sacred and misty stories
Of angels and saints and old glories . . .
Is sadly defective.)
The poor saint on the fountain . . .

The statue is of a great man. Possibly, he’s more than a man, but still great among his kind. We know that because there is a statue of him. He’s decorated with symbols of achievement. He has a very impressive sword. People have paid lavishly that we remember him and honor him, but we can’t do the latter as we don’t do the former.

On top of his column
Gazes up sad and solemn.
But is it towards the top of the mountain
Where the spindrifty haze is
That he gazes?
Or is it into the casement
Where the girl sits sewing?
There’s no knowing.
Hear it rain!
And from eight leaden pipes in the ball he stands on
That has eight leaden and copper bands on,
There gurgle and drain
Eight driblets of water down into the basin.

I wrote and then backspaced “Ford had issues in relationships with women.” That’s true, but there are so many women he had issues with that he can’t hide from common denominator blame. He did have issues with women, but he caused issues with women often by gravitating towards other women on the sly, those women having new and exciting issues of their own, ready to enervate local gossip as needed.

He started off with an angry father-in-law. Before marriage, he proposed to Elsie Martindale when she turned sixteen. He was three years older and the two had been students together. Her parents didn’t like his “advanced ideas, especially about sex,” per Wikipedia. That’s not a telling thing to say about a Victorian nineteen year old. The time’s reserved speech and easily piqued moralisms leaves us very little to go on. He may have had a thing for ankles. He may have been a burgeoning Swinburne. His nebulous predations weren’t the only problem. The family feared for Elsie’s sister Mary’s mental stability. She had a thing for Ford as well, and the family, again per Wikipedia, was “terrified of the effect on her of any special intimacy” between Ford and Elsie.

Two years of parental disapprovals and attempts to dissuade followed. A Rossetti was enlisted to talk Ford away. The Rossettis keep popping up in his story. His father was the artist who mentored Dante Rossetti. An aunt married in to that family so he had Rossetti cousins. In this case, William, brother to Christina and Dante, stood, but to no end. Elsie and Ford eloped in 1894 and didn’t make it back into her family’s graces until their first daughter, Christina, was born in 1897.

To his credit, Ford was very upfront with his wife. He told her wouldn’t be faithful. Ford only knows what happened in the first ten years of their marriage, but on the eleventh Ford banged Mary. Incredibly, that didn’t immediately break up his marriage. He did that the next year when he took up with Violet Hunt.

Violet was well known in London literary circles. She’d written a handful of well received novels, was apparently engaged to Oscar Wilde at one point, had notable affairs with Somerset Maugham and H.G. Wells, but was best known for knowing people as a salon hostess and for founding the English Review with Ford, theoretically before the two were entwined. She was a force in literary London. Neither was faithful to the other. The duplicitous Florence, of Ford’s famous novel The Good Soldier, which he dictated parts of to the author Brigit Patmore, was based on Violet and I’m sure that made for interesting bedtime talk. Patmore famously carried on a love triangle with Pound and Richard Aldington until Pound tapped out to be replaced by HD. Unsurprisingly, Ford took working with her as an opportunity for a physical relationship with her as well. Pull back the veil, and there’s a world of modernist writers on the rise hopping into bed with each other, acting as B-squad Bloomsburys or shadow literati. Literary London required a lot of towels.

Despite, or because of, the loose adherence to fidelity, Hunt and Ford stayed together until 1918, even when, or because, Ford enlisted at the seemingly too old-for-infantry age of forty-one. Max Saunders of King’s College London, writing for the Ford Madox Ford Society, tells us Ford’s was no ceremonial duty of a well known figure.

“Ford joined the army in 1915, serving as an officer in the Welch Regiment. It was an escape from a life that had become intolerable, and he appears to have wanted to die. When he was sent to the Somme in July 1916, only two weeks into the bloodiest battle in British military history, he nearly did die: a shell explosion concussed him, and he lost his memory for three weeks, forgetting even his own name for a few days. He was sent back to the front, this time in the Ypres Salient. But he became ill again, suffering from pneumonia, probably exacerbated by exposure to poison gas. His wartime experiences went into Parade’s End, now increasingly seen as one of the greatest literary works about the First World War, and by some critics as the greatest English war fiction, and one of the greatest English novels.”

Elsie never granted a divorce for the sake of their two daughters. At one point Ford tried to get German citizenship under the impression that a divorce could be granted by the German government without Elsie’s consent. Whether that was possible or not, the German’s refused his application.

Twice in print, Violet was referred to as Mrs. Hueffer and twice Elsie successfully sued Ford for the usurpation. I don’t know how the chain of blame was established, but such was the situation that a newspaper’s claim was his liability. If you’ll allow me to got back to Pound and his correspondence with Harriet Monroe, there’s an exchange – a year after the issue that caused him to resign – where Pound writes “No—you are not at liberty to say that she is Mrs. F.M. Hueffer. You are especially requested to make no allusion to the connection.” And in a second letter dated the same day, “And, as I intimated in my note this morning, no, for gawd’s sake don’t connect Violet Hueffer with F.M.H. There have been enough suits for libel etc. I can’t go into the inner history at this moment, but refrain from bracketing the two names.”

In 1919 he changed his name from Ford Madox Hueffer to Ford Madox Ford. In part, he did so because after the war, Germanic names were on the outs. Another reason is that he’d left Violet for Stella Bowen and, again per Max Saunders, “He needed to change his name now that he had two ex-partners fighting for the right to be ‘Mrs Hueffer’.” A third would make him look greedy.

With Stella he founded, at Pound’s urging, the transatlantic review. She was an Australian painter and writer he met through Hunt. He wrote a lovely and heartfelt dedication for a reprint of the previously undedicated The Good Soldier. He may or may not have cheated on her with Wide Sargasso Sea author, Jean Rhys. After almost nine years and one daughter together, Bowen and Ford split. He took up with the painter Janice Biala next, and the two lived happily ever after. Surprising, but true.

We are beyond the history of the 1912 poem at this point, but it informs the poem knowing Ford’s impermanence.

He introduces a woman into the marketplace.

And he stands on his dragon
And the girl sits sewing
High, very high in her casement
And before her are many geraniums in a parket
All growing and blowing
In box upon box
From the gables right down to the basement
With frescoes and carvings and paint . . .

The poor saint!
It rains and it rains,
In the market there isn’t an ox,
And in all the emplacement
For waggons there isn’t a waggon,
Not a stall for a grape or a raisin,
Not a soul in the market
Save the saint on his dragon
With the rain dribbling down in the basin,
And the maiden that sews in the casement.

She’s as unknowable as the man, the statue. She’s framed in beautiful flowers and steadfast in domestic work, but she is seen, not met. Here the setting of a marketplace is important. It’s a place of exchange. He has his achievements. She has her charms and skills. But around them nothing’s happening. There’s no interaction. They are together, in their place, like the town is in its place, because that is how outside forces intend them to be. They are together by convention, not connection. Man and woman belong together, but then what? His history shows he has immense trouble meaningfully connecting, no matter how enthusiastically he tries.

I had to look up Mutterseelens: As alone as a child in the womb.

They are still and alone,
Mutterseelens alone,
And the rain dribbles down from his heels and his crown,
From wet stone to wet stone.
It’s grey as at dawn,
And the owls, grey and fawn,
Call from the little town hall
With its arch in the wall,
Where the fire-hooks are stored.

From behind the flowers of her casement
That’s all gay with the carvings and paint,
The maiden gives a great yawn,
But the poor saint—
No doubt he’s as bored!
Stands still on his column
Uplifting his sword
With never the ease of a yawn
From wet dawn to wet dawn . . .

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I wish I’d never written T.S. Eliot or C.S. Lewis or even E.E. or e.e. cummings because I’ve established a period pattern where now I think TS, CS, and EE/ee is more elegant. The Chicago manual makes a distinction between initials used in combination with a full name – F.D. Roosevelt – and initials used in the desert – FDR. Yes, and then no, to periods. I’m with the British on Dr and Mr, though in practice I’m in the habit of Dr. and Mr. As a rule of thumb, a shortened Professor becomes a Prof. with a period because the final letter of the contraction is not the final letter of the word. Dr ends with the R, so D…r makes more sense than Dr. Auto-correct puts me off periods even in the case of Prof. because I had to go back and uncapitalize the B in “because” as anything aside from Mr. Mrs. and Dr. gets embiggened as a matter of resolute coding. In most cases, British punctuation makes better sense to me. To paraphrase T?S? Eliot, grammar did not precurse language. We spoke, later wrote, and then imposed inflections, pauses, and groupings. The marks are servant to the writer, so mixing and matching a little American, a little British, and a little intuition isn’t all that bad. It has the added business of flustering hobgoblins.

There is a school that insists D.H. be D. H., but that’s absurd. I’m not sure how the article above will end up. As of this writing, all that exists of it beyond this intro—which I normally write last but I’m so bothered—is “POETS Day! D.H. Lawrence” and I’m incensed that there are periods abbreviating David and Herbert but not Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday even though I know there are different rules governing acronyms and initials. I have a history of T.S. Eliot, but very much want to recant and adopt TS Eliot going forward. I’m struggling internally with a man v man and man v society conflicts.

In any case, It’s Friday. The work week is done but for make work pretending as you look forward to the weekend, so why bother with the show. Get out and go play. Duck out mid afternoon and start the weekend off on your terms. Piss. Off. Early., Tomorrow’s. Saturday.

But first, some verse.

***

I spent a great many years working as a sommelier. That means I spent a great many years reading wine reviews, wine histories, and essays about wine. After a while, you see the limits of jargon. There are only so many descriptors in use by wine writers. It’s not that a full thesaurus is denied, just that, by a seeming mutual agreement, a handful of characteristics are called by all by the same terms. The writers aren’t incapable of being exotic, it’s just that, when writing for the public, they communicate with the more general “citrus” than they might “charcoal flame kissed rind of mid summer bergamot picked a dancers breath from Calabrian pepper roots.” Too exotic, and you lose the audience. People are reading because they want a sense of what a wine tastes like so a few agreed upon terms describing agreed upon flavor profiles work to everyone’s advantage. I don’t believe the “barnyard” aromas on a red Rhone’s nose smell like an actual barnyard, but I recognize the smell as what has been previously described to me as barnyard and find utility in using the term with like interested people.

It gets ridiculous. With a limited palate palate, there are only so many ways to describe a wine, thus all the diversions about coastal breezes and what generation removed a Californian farmer is from simple Burgundian grape picker ancestors whose old world traditions continue unchanged in the rustic doored fermenting warehouse over there beyond the gift shop. In one issue you may read a description of an Anderson Valley Cab as “hints of cherry on the nose, with graphite and deep blackberry up front, and a lingering tobacco finish.” In the next issue, the same writer might describe a Napa Merlot as “hints of tobacco on the nose, with blackberry and graphite up front, and a lingering cherry finish.” Throw in acidity now and then and you have a mad-lib marketing plan ready and set.

It’s not always the writers fault. There are times when you read and realize the author may not have tried the wine at all or he’s so far gone as to set himself above the reader and not bother caring about communicating anything but his own superiority, but writers like that are few and great to have around for finger pointing and laughing purposes. When trying to discuss in common terms, there can only be so many terms in common. Sometimes the writer gets bored and phones it in.

Poetry critics should not be confused with people who write about poetry. William Logan is a good critic. He’ll tell you why a poet errs, why you should be impressed, and in his best moments, he puts the work he’s examining in context, catching dishonesty, expansion of previous themes, false emotion, and damned impressive grasps of subjects others have toyed with. He’s not alone. Then there are writers about poetry; blurb writers, interns who put out introductions for anthology web sites other than Poetry Foundation (which continues to be generally excellent), and middling graduate students. I suspect the former, latter, and in between are, more often than not, one in the same.

The Cambridge Companion to D.H. Lawrence [periods theirs] notes of his poetry, “a great many of his poems are didactic, prosy, irrational, undisciplined, sentimental, obscene, ranting, whiny or otherwise virtually unreadable,” yet his best work stands “alongside the finest poetic efforts of the twentieth century.” The whole rant above came because I read the Cambridge Companion quote and thought, “What utter nonsense,” with a great big sneer on my face. It’s all over the place. Then I sat down and read a swath—more than the here and there I knew through the years—from The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence [again, not mine]. Cambridge is dead on. There is nonsense all over the web about his “sense of the human,” and “vivid use of metaphor.” I read the Cambridge bit, dismissed it as similar blather, and came away upended.

Here’s a few lines from one of his most famous poems.

from Snake
DH Lawrence (1885-1930)

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough
before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over
the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.

The whole goes on quite a bit longer. It has an enviable melody, though he insists that’s not a requirement. He insists on being undisciplined. His essay “The Poetry of the Present” serves as introduction to his 1920 collection New Poems, but it was released to a wider audience in the pages of Poetry magazine. It’s a manifesto of sorts, where he champions poetry of the present. Too much poetry, he says is about the past or the future. He wants to celebrate the immediate. It cannot be forgotten that he was a novelist of consequence. If for no other reason, follow the link to “The Poetry of the Present” for his prose. An example:

“Life, the ever-present, knows no finality, no finished crystallisation. The perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished. Herein lies its transcendent loveliness.”

He is undisciplined as a matter of practice, no matter the contradiction. In his early career, Lawrence wrote traditional metered verse, rhyme and all. In fact, and I’d not seen this before, his Collected Poems has section headings titled “Rhyming Poems” and “Unrhyming Poems,” but he all but abandoned meter after. In “Poetry of the Present,” he extols free verse, especially as practiced by Walt Whitman. But I think he goes too far.

“It is no use inventing fancy laws for free verse, no use drawing a melodic line which all the feet must toe. Free verse toes no melodic line, no matter what drill-sergeant.”

He gives away the game, I think. Those of us who believe poetry should be tied to meter but are charmed by certain brilliant works of free verse maintain that great practitioners, like Eliot or Pound, work to a rhythm all their own. At the very least, he’s saying that there doesn’t need to be a cohesive rhythm throughout a work, but he goes on:

“We can get rid of the stereotyped movements and the old hackneyed associations of sound or sense. We can break down those artificial conduits and canals through which we do so love to force our utterance. We can break the stiff neck of habit. We can be in ourselves spontaneous and flexible as flame, we can see that utterance rushes out without artificial foam or artificial smoothness. But we cannot positively prescribe any motion, any rhythm. All the laws we invent or discover—it amounts to pretty much the same—will fail to apply to free verse. They will only apply to some form of restricted, limited unfree verse.”

This is the quiet part said way too loud. There are no restraints, so anything can be free verse. We are to accept free verse as poetry, so anything can be poetry. It’s a gut shot; a disturbance to the detente. A lot of people are wiling to look the other way and not mumble about indented prose if it sounds nice. I’m willing to do that with Lawrence’s work because it does have a rhythm of its own. It is beautiful at times. Meaningful at times. He should have let the issue lie.

I like to call things -esque, and Lawrence is certainly Whitman-esque. He’s a more restrained, but focuses on the exuberance of a moment from different angles. I’m not a fan of Walt Whitman, but I admire his description, then his sidestep and description of the same thing from a slightly different viewpoint. It seems like he’s indecisive as to which description to give, but that’s not it. Each gives a different flavor or aspect. Lawrence does something similar.

from Sicilian Cyclamens

When he pushed his bush of black hair off his brow:
When she lifted her mop from her eyes, and screwed it in a knob behind
—O act of fearful temerity!
When they felt their foreheads bare, naked to heaven, their eyes revealed:
When they felt the light of heaven brandished like a knife at their defenceless eyes,
And the sea like a blade at their face,
Mediterranean savages:
When they came out, face-revealed, under heaven, from the shaggy undergrowth of their own hair
For the first time,
They saw tiny rose cyclamens between their toes, growing
Where the slow toads sat brooding on the past.

Here’s a moment. Wait, here’s the moment again. Very much in the present.

Politically, Lawrence was all over the place. Bertrand Russell called him a Proto-German Fascist and force for evil. He is described as a right winger with no love for democracy and a dislike of labor, a man who called for a dictator, and a monarchist. He described himself as a socialist, though rejecting the Soviet brand. Per Wikipedia, when living abroad, he told his sister that, were he at home and able, he’d vote Labour. Who knows. I bet he’d be a hell of a good time in a bar room debate.

His poems were frequently decried as obscene as were his novels. He seemed to delight in revealing what he perceived as hypocrisy. He had private friends, but few public.

He was run out of Cromwell during the war as a suspected spy. That was not the first time he was accused of espionage. When traveling in Germany with his wife Frieda, nee Richtofen of the flying Baron family fame, he was arrested. This was right before WWI when tensions were high and he was an out of place Englishman. The Richtofen connections cleared everything up. The marriage itself was scandalous. After his death, his friend Catherine Carswell wrote a letter for publication defending him (from Wikipedia):

“Without vices, with most human virtues, the husband of one wife, scrupulously honest, this estimable citizen yet managed to keep free from the shackles of civilisation and the cant of literary cliques.”

The phrase “husband of one wife” might lead you to believe he was a pillar of fidelity. I don’t know that he personally had affairs, but his wife, when he started seeing her, was married to one of his teachers and she and Lawrence eloped to Germany leaving her three children behind. It wasn’t until securing a divorce two years later that he became a pillar of the marital tradition.

Other than Carswell, I’ve read that EM Forster and his friend Aldous Huxley were notable public voices to speak kindly of the man, but they were in the minority. He was much admired for his prose, poetry, very much for his travel writing, and even his painting, though the one gallery show I read about was closed by the authorities. Obscenity again was the charge, and half of his display was confiscated, returned on the promise that he’d never show the paintings publicly in England again.

A bout with pneumonia in his teens left him weak. A recurrence in his twenties probably didn’t help. While living the Bohemian life on his ranch in Taos, New Mexico, in 1925, he and Frieda took a trip down to Mexico where Lawrence picked up the double whammy of malaria and tuberculosis. That nearly killed him. You can see the trajectory. Five years later, in 1930, his tuberculosis finally took him.

Years after his death, the public began to recognize his quality. Mores that were mores weren’t any more. Obscenity laws loosened and his posthumous reputation grew. The 1959 trial over publication of the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover changed British publishing and brought his name, nearly thirty years after his death, front and center.

After his death, his reputation grew and over time no one remembered objecting personally. Everyone in the sixties was at Woodstock. Every French grandfather was in the Resistance.

Below is one of his dirty, naughty poems that was pulled from his 1929 collection, Pansies before publication.

The Noble Englishman

I know a noble Englishman
who is sure he is a gentleman,
that sort –

This moderately young gentleman
is very normal, as becomes and Englishman,
rather proud of being a bit of a Don Juan
you know –

But one of his beloveds, looking a little peaked
towards the end of her particular affair with him
said: Ronald, you know, is like most Englishmen,
by instinct he’s a sodomist
but he’s frightened to know it
so he takes it out on women.

Oh come! said I. That Don Juan of a Ronald! –
Exactly, she said. Don Juan was another of them, in love with himself
and taking it out on women. –

Even that isn’t sodomistical, said I.
But if a man is in love with himself, isn’t that the meanest form of homosexuality? she said.

You’ve no idea, when men are in love with themselves, how they wreak all their spite on women,
pretending to love them.
Ronald, she resumed, doesn’t like women, just acutely dislikes them.
He might possibly like men, if he weren’t too frightened and egoistic.
So he cleverly tortures women, with his sort of love.
He’s instinctively frightfully clever.
He can be so gentle
so delicate in his love-making.
Even now, the thought of it bewilders me: such gentleness!
Yet I know he does it deliberately, as cautiously and deliberately as when he shaves himself.
Then more than that, he makes a woman feel he is serving her
really living in her service, and serving her
as no man ever served before.

And then, suddenly, when she’s feeling all lovely about it
suddenly the ground goes from under her feet, and she clutches in mid-air,
but horrible, as if your heart would wrench out; –
while he stands aside watching with a superior little grin
like some malicious indecent little boy.
– No, don’t talk to me about the love of Englishmen!

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Officially, the work week’s nearly done; barely a few hours. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done between now and then. Cut it out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

My favorite librarian passed away. I didn’t seen him the last few times I was in, but I never divined his comings and goings well enough to know his days off. Poor health caught up to him. I don’t know what to say other than I’ll miss chatting with him. A few falls ago, I mentioned a Muriel Spark book I picked up. He recommended a few of hers he liked. They were the odd ones people didn’t talk about that often. His co-workers put up a memorial photo of him over a shelf filled with his recommendations. There’s a stack of printed sheets listing his “LOST Classics of the 20^th Century,” for the interested, in the spirit of his Sparks recommendations: lesser-known books picked from respected but not bankable authors, for the most part. It’s an idiosyncratic list. That fits. Godspeed.

Last September, he and I were talking about the poets to come out of Vanderbilt University in the years surrounding World War II. He mentioned James Dickey. I knew Dickey was Poet Laureate back when they still called the office holder Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, but I didn’t know much more beyond. We had to read Deliverance in 9^th grade and as 9^th graders, we watched the movie in addition and made 9^th grade “Squeeeel like a pig!” jokes, but ignorance beyond that.

The library didn’t have the Dickey poetry collection he thought I should read. It wasn’t in the county system or inter-library either so he told me he’d bring his copy from home and lend it to me. He didn’t lower his voice or whisper as he said that, which surprised me. He should be sneakier when he’s running a competing racket from within the beast. Enforcers from the library Monopolist Division are listening. Maybe they took him aside and had a talk or maybe he forgot about it. He never brought the book in and I never pressed. It was a nice offer.

The library still doesn’t have any of Dickey’s poetry. I found an e-copy of James Dickey Poems, 1957-1967 on Amazon for $2.99, so now I have a Kindle Dickey, which is fun to say. So here’s James Dickey, as recommended by Gregory.

A Birth
James Dickey (1923-1997)

Inventing a story with grass,
I find a young horse deep inside it.
I cannot nail wires around him;
My fence posts fail to be solid,

And he is free, strangely, without me.
With his head still browsing the greenness,
He walks slowly out of the pasture
To enter the sun of his story.

My mind freed of its own creature,
I find myself deep in my life
In a room with my child and my mother,
When I feel the sun climbing my shoulder

Change, to include a new horse.

That poem is an outlier as it’s the only one in the collection that doesn’t go on for pages. He missed the spirit of Auden, I suppose. This is a disaster for my purposes. We aren’t pulping for paper, but these electronic pages still have a length and form to pretend to. Rather than distinguish itself by merit, “A Birth” self selected in fine Cinderella fashion. It fit. Characteristics of Dickey’s poetry that I’ve read appear in his work throughout his career are found in the poem. According to the honorable anonymous biographers at Poetry Foundation, Dickey “blurred dreams and reality in an attempt to accommodate the irrational, ‘country surrealism.’” Nature lurks beneath civilization, ready to break out. He doesn’t observe the qualities of a thing so much as set it in motion and note the ripples produced.

A meta tale where a character breaks from narrative, chooses the wild, and stirs something primal in the teller. It’s all there, and told simply.

Like most guys whose cause of death can be discovered written between the lines as complications due to alcoholism, there looks to be a window where he was a blast to be around.

He didn’t do well in high school. Darlington School in Rome, Georgia offered a postgraduate year for upwardly mobile ne’er-do-wells as a last ditch to right the ship. The biographer, Henry Hart, writes in James Dickey: The World as a Lie “Dickey’s parents sent him to Rome because he was frittering his time away with Atlanta girls and because he needed further preparation so he could go to a reputable college.”

Fat lot of good that did. No matter what mom and dad thought he got up to under their watch, he was under their watch. In Rome, he was free. There were girls in Rome, too. Again, from Hart, “—at the high school, at Shorter College, and at Berry College—and Dickey took advantage of whatever romantic opportunities came his way.” He went back to his hometown frequently too, presumably without the fetters of mom and dad and curfews and such. After one 1942 Atlanta weekend trip, out of the blue he told a friend at track practice, “I got my first piece of tail this week-end.” Maybe credit the upright and virtuous nature of Southern maidens, maybe say the world was different before Buddy Holly and his Rock and Roll youth corrupting shenanigans, or maybe feel bad for mom and dad. They thought they raised a hellion, but he didn’t get up to that when they were in charge.

No matter what liberties Darlington allowed and what milestones those liberties allowed him to reach, Dickey was not a fan of his time there. My father-in-law wrote “F___ O___!” on a Duke alumni fundraising letter and mailed it to their office of student dollar bilking. He’d been a consistent donor to the university since graduating, but the way they handled the Lacrosse scandal set his Juris Doctorate to rage. I don’t know specifically what caused Dickey to respond in a similar way to a Darlington fundraising campaign, but lacking my father-in-law’s succinctness, he achieves the same effect.

Dickey’s response is found, again, in Hart. I include it here because it’s wonderful.

“Let me make myself quite plain on this matter. Anything pertaining to Darlington School, past, present or future, is thoroughly abhorrent to me. I was there one year, and a more disgusting combination of cant, hypocrisy, cruelty, class privilege and inanity I have never since encountered at any human institution. The school is such an insipid place that it really shouldn’t call forth reactions as strong as the above, but when the functionaries of a place whose memory I so thoroughly detest came to me, quite literally, hat in hand, asking me for money to help support such a bastion of snobbery and privilege, such emotions do arise, perhaps unfortunately but quite authentically.

I hope this note will serve to get me forever off your mailing list. And if possible, please expunge me also from your rolls, if that is possible, as I wish I could do with the recollection of the place that I have.

You may print this if you like.”

Darlington served him, though. After his awful year of fiddling about, he was able to enroll at Clemson where he became a full-fledged, uniform wearing Clempson Tiger as a running back, but only for a year. He enlisted with the U.S. Army Air Force to fight in World War II.

I should note that Hart interviewed a Darlington classmate who said Dickey was “an absolute aristocrat, on par with kings.” The classmate called his response to the fundraising letter Ironic. It looked to Hart as if Dickey was practicing at myth making or image crafting, “trying to expunge the memory of his privileged upbringing in [the Atlanta suburb] Buckhead.”

Poetry Foundation tells us he flew more than one hundred combat missions in the Pacific Theater. Official records and his son’s memoir put the number flown at thirty-eight. Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry Vol. II says “Although he claimed to have flown a hundred combat missions, he washed out during flight training and instead operated radar equipment during flights in the Pacific.” There are two issues. The first is a distinction I didn’t realize existed. In my mind you claim a combat mission if you were not the guy manning the stick. A few minutes poking around the internet finds multiple examples of gunners et al credited as having “flown.” The second is stickier. In interviews, Dickey claimed to have been a pilot and per his telling, the number of missions hovered around or exceeded one hundred. I haven’t read it, but apparently in the memoir I mentioned, Summer of Deliverance, Christopher Dickey describes feeling betrayed on discovering his father’s exaggerations.

I have to wonder why he exaggerated at all. He served bravely, earned five Bronze Stars, and when Korea erupted, he served as a radar instructor for the next wave of non-pilots who nonetheless served bravely. I don’t know what kept him from celebrating his record as it was.

One further: In between wars, he took a degree at Vanderbilt and began teaching after his time in the military. He carried on lecturing for the rest of his life, but while at the University of Florida, he became disillusioned with the profession. He knew writers with half his talent making a fortune in advertising, figured it would be easy enough, and got himself fired. That’s the assumption. Leaving academia for advertising sounds cretinous. Better to be fired for his art and decry the institutions, so he read the salacious poem “The Father’s Body” to the American Pen’s Women’s Society, got indignant when told to apologize, and walked off to write copy for Coca-Cola and Lay’s Potato Chips rather than compromise his artistic sensibilities. I have to stand and applaud the maneuver.

He said he wrote drivel during the day to make money and wrote serious poetry and fiction in the evenings. “I was selling my soul to the devil all day… and trying to buy it back at night.” Except he wasn’t. Not exactly. The advertising agency fired him for spending too much office time writing poetry.

I don’t know how much all the biographical embellishments helped. He was a very successful poet. As I mentioned above, Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. ABC hired him to compose an original poem to mark the Apollo 11 moon landing and recite it on air the day of. (Occasion poem are rarely all that good – the moment is already momentous – and his isn’t the exception, but you can read watch his ABC scene here.) I don’t know that people dismiss “arresting and powerful” verse, per Norton, because the poet only flew thirty-eight missions.

He erupted in popular literature beyond poetry with Deliverance; wrote the screenplay and made a cameo as a sheriff. Poetry remained his first love. From a 1981 interview (as quoted by Poetry Foundation):

“Poetry is, I think, the highest medium that mankind has ever come up with. It’s language itself, which is a miraculous medium which makes everything else that man has ever done possible.”

Below is a longer poem than I normally print here, but I like Dickey, and I really like the poem. Besides, as I mentioned, he didn’t write many short ones. It’s full of movement, of nature forcing itself through to civilization, and, just like in “A Birth” something is awakened. I honestly can’t figure out why thiry-eight wasn’t enough.

Kudzu

Japan invades. Far Eastern vines
Run from the clay banks they are

Supposed to keep from eroding,
Up telephone poles,
Which rear, half out of leafage,
As though they would shriek,
Like things smothered by their own
Green, mindless, unkillable ghosts.
In Georgia, the legend says
That you must close your windows

At night to keep it out of the house.
The glass is tinged with green, even so,

As the tendrils crawl over the fields.
The night the kudzu has
Your pasture, you sleep like the dead.
Silence has grown Oriental
And you cannot step upon ground:
Your leg plunges somewhere
It should not, it never should be,
Disappears, and waits to be struck

Anywhere between sole and kneecap:
For when the kudzu comes,

The snakes do, and weave themselves
Among its lengthening vines,
Their spade heads resting on leaves,
Growing also, in earthly power
And the huge circumstance of concealment.
One by one the cows stumble in,
Drooling a hot green froth,
And die, seeing the wood of their stalls

Strain to break into leaf.
In your closed house, with the vine

Tapping your window like lightning,
You remember what tactics to use.
In the wrong yellow fog-light of dawn
You herd them in, the hogs,
Head down in their hairy fat,
The meaty troops, to the pasture.
The leaves of the kudzu quake
With the serpents’ fear, inside

The meadow ringed with men
Holding sticks, on the country roads.

The hogs disappear in the leaves.
The sound is intense, subhuman,
Nearly human with purposive rage.
There is no terror
Sound from the snakes.
No one can see the desperate, futile
Striking under the leaf heads.
Now and then, the flash of a long

Living vine, a cold belly,
Leaps up, torn apart, then falls
Under the tussling surface.
You have won, and wait for frost,
When, at the merest touch
Of cold, the kudzu turns
Black, withers inward and dies,
Leaving a mass of brown strings
Like the wires of a gigantic switchboard.
You open your windows,

With the lightning restored to the sky
And no leaves rising to bury

You alive inside your frail house,
And you think, in the opened cold,
Of the surface of things and its terrors,
And of the mistaken, mortal
Arrogance of the snakes
As the vines, growing insanely, sent
Great powers into their bodies
And the freedom to strike without warning:

From them, though they killed
Your cattle, such energy also flowed

To you from the knee-high meadow
(It was as though you had
A green sword twined among
The veins of your growing right arm—
Such strength as you would not believe
If you stood alone in a proper
Shaved field among your safe cows—):
Came in through your closed

Leafy windows and almighty sleep
And prospered, till rooted out.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Officially, the work week’s gonna be over in a few hours. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done between now and then. Cut it out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

“Because, if I am not mistaken, we shall have to say that, about men, poets and story-tellers are guilty of making the gravest misstatements when they tell us that wicked men are often happy, and the good miserable; and that injustice is profitable when undetected, but that justice is a man’s own loss and another’s gain—these things we shall forbid them to utter, and command them to sing and say the opposite.”
– Socrates, from Plato’s Republic, Book III

I hope you’re feeling indulgent at the moment. This week I’m playing around.

As a kid I read a snitty back and forth between writers. George Will called R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. – I’m paraphrasing – “the kind of writer who thinks archaic words are funny.” I had just read Tyrell’s introduction to Orthodoxy, an American Spectator anthology not to be confused with Chesterton’s book of the same name. Will was spot on. Tyrell’s description of his magazine’s founding brimmed with Latinisms. I learned that I was the type of reader who thinks archaic words are funny.

“In those incunabular days,” he began. Again, I’m paraphrasing. I’d just gotten over my “ersatz” fixation, a word I picked up from Tom Robbin’s Still Life with Woodpecker. I read that book because I thought my parents wouldn’t allow it. After, I shoehorned “ersatz” into every paper, test essay question, and letter I could manage. Robbins used Germanic expletives like Tyrrell did Latinisms, but despite my attempt at profane immersion I came out with “ersatz.” But… “incunabular.” Melodic, exotic, and factory preset to slip into a line of iambic. I flogged it to death. It became my ersatz ersatz.

I’m older now and more discerning, but damned if I don’t get a thrill when an opportunity to use either of those words arises.

In the Western Tradition’s incunabular days, rising with the earliest popular poets, there were critics and censors. Per Plato, Socrates wasn’t a fan of versifiers. They appealed with rhythms and elegance to emotion at reason’s expense. They put words into the mouths of gods, suggested poor motives on their part, and undermined morality. They were a bad sort.

As quoted by Plato, from the Benjamin Jowett translation of The Republic:

“In like manner the poet with his words and phrases may be said to lay on the colors of the several arts, himself understanding their nature only enough to imitate them; and other people, who are as ignorant as he is, and judge only from his words, imagine that if he speaks of cobbling, or of military tactics, or of anything else, in meter and harmony and rhythm, he speaks very well—such is the sweet influence which melody and rhythm by nature have.”

“For if, my sweet Adeimantus, our youth seriously listen to such unworthy representations of the gods, instead of laughing at them as they ought, hardly will any of them deem that he himself, being but a man, can be dishonored by similar actions.”

“Popular culture is morally bankrupt, flagrantly licentious and utterly materialistic-and Madonna is the worst of all.”

One of those was actually from Tipper Gore. Can you spot it?

But Socrates biggest objection is that the poet puts forth a false image. To demonstrate he talks about gods, carpentry, painting, and bed making. At one point, cobblers get a call back.

He puts as an example a bed. The idea of the bed originates with the gods. The making of the bed is the purview of the carpenter. The painter makes an image of the bed. It’s Plato’s Cave: there’s an ideal and then the shadows of the ideal; the diffusion that we live in. A painting, and by extension a poem, is a copy of a copy, incapable of representing the whole. Like a picture that only shows one view of a physical bed, the copy doesn’t express all aspects of the original. The further from the ideal, the more is lost. The representation isn’t true.

“…the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth.”

A poem, per Socrates per Plato, cannot help but misrepresent. The poets can’t help but lie. His point was clear enough. I don’t know why he felt he had to reiterate with cobblers.

He left room for Homer and the like to redeem themselves:

“We may further grant to those of her defenders who are lovers of poetry . . . the permission to speak in prose on her behalf: let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to States and to human life, and we will listen in kindly spirit; for if this can be proved we shall surely be the gainers—I mean, if there is a use in poetry as well as a delight?”

I don’t know that any contemporaries took up the challenge. We could argue John Keats gave it a shot, albeit not in prose, a couple of thousand years later with his famous “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” That sounds nice. It doesn’t make much sense, but it sounds nice. T.S. Eliot called the line, “grammatically meaningless.” In response, Cleanth Brooks said if you look at it sideways, it might be okay. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch got in on the debate. It was a big thing. Maybe Keats isn’t the best advocate. People love that line. It’s prettily phrased and fans an emotional want at reason’s expense. It’s a bumper sticker. If anything, his muddled phrase gave credence to the Socratic charge.

There are plenty of arguments, in prose and poetry, that do a fine job defending poetry’s honor, but cherry picking is fun. Picking on Keats, who I very much like, is more fun still. A couple of my favorite poems celebrate lying and crafting a rock-solid dishonesty.

What would Socrates make of the moderns? Here’s a poem from the bastard imperialist Kipling, whom all good people abhor at the moment.

The Lie
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

There is pleasure in the wet, wet clay,
When the artist’s hand is potting it.
There is pleasure in the wet, wet lay,
When the poet’s pad is blotting it.
There is pleasure in the shine of your picture on the line
At the Royal Acade-my;
But the pleasure felt in these is as chalk to Cheddar cheese
When it comes to a well-made Lie—
To a quite unwreckable Lie,
To a most impeccable Lie!
To a water-tight, fire-proof, angle-iron, sunk-hinge, time-lock, steel-faced Lie!
Not a private hansom Lie,
But a pair-and-brougham Lie,
Not a little-place-at-Tooting, but a country-house-with-shooting
And a ring-fence-deer-park Lie.

Back to Socrates: His commentary is handed down to us by Plato. If we apply the form of Socrates’s argument to Socrates’s argument, we have the ideal contention that poets spread falsehood. Socrates’s expressions of the contention here on the prime material plane would be a shadow on a cave wall. Doesn’t that make Plato’s reporting of Socrates argument thrice removed from the king and the truth?

Who’s spreading disinformation now?

I have read not a page of Xenophon nor Aristophanes. Other than Plato, those are the two major sources for the teachings of Socrates. Take this with a grain of salt: from what I’ve read, neither corroborates the criticism of poetry Plato attributes to Socrates. His is the only record to include censoriousness. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Luke’s gospel has parables that don’t make an appearance elsewhere. But… It’s pretty funny to think Plato made the poetry bit up. We’d have a thrice removed imitation of a falsehood. Would that make it true?

Robert Graves lends credence to Socrates’s fears with disarming calm and admiration. To those he adds confidence, grace, and sophistication; always does. The man tiptoes right up to the edge of oleaginous (tee-hee) but keeps fast to the well tailored side. He’s suave. It’s hard not to be enchanted, let his soft meter carry you along. Betrayal may be among the most reviled of sins, but let him explain it. Liars have craft. The best are born to it. There’s artistry involved. Nobody wants to set aside reason. Nobody wants to be susceptible. Don’t worry about that. He’s not talking about traitors and thieves. These are romantic rogues.

The Devil’s Advice to Story-Tellers
Robert Graves (1895-1985)

Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue,
Keep probability – some say – in view.
But my advice to story-tellers is:
Weigh out no gross probabilities,
Nor yet make diligent transcriptions of
Known instances of virtue, crime or love.
To forge a picture that will pass for true,
Do conscientiously what liars do—
Born liars, not the lesser sort that raid
The mouths of others for their stock-in-trade:
Assemble, first, all casual bits and scraps
That may shake down into a world perhaps;
People this world, by chance created so,
With random persons whom you do not know—
The teashop sort, or travellers in a train
Seen once, guessed idly at, not seen again;
Let the erratic course they steer surprise
Their own and your own and your readers’ eyes;
Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair)
Motive and end and moral in the air;
Nice contradiction between fact and fact
Will make the whole read human and exact.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Officially, the work week’s gonna be over in a few hours. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done between now and then. Cut it out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Boys play seriously. Words used metaphorically by noncommisioned adults, words like “scout” and “reconnoiter,” carry a punch in their youthful declarations implying duty or professionalism.

For a brief stretch of years, they patrol the neighborhood with pant legs tucked in galoshes on the lookout for good sticks, skipable rocks, animal tracks, and fossils. If they’re lucky enough to live near slate deposits or any shale that cleaves, “arrow heads” abound.

My wife and I walk roughly the same path everyday, weather permitting, along our creek. The city is making improvements no one wants. They cut ten foot paths through grass and laid asphalt pathways intermittently. Then they stopped. Debris containing construction fences have been in place for ten months now. The wiffle golf players don’t come out any more, nor do the Russian card players, though one of their chairs litters a fenced off section near the put in. The old foot worn paths remain. Neighbors ignore the city’s trails and keep on as habit and sense dictates, but the city paths wind. They snake in such a way that all the clearings that hosted croquet and touch football are intruded upon.

Every so often something happens. A truck comes by and people in reflective vests get out and wander around for a while. Usually, right after they leave, we see spray painted notes on our walks. Orange “ATT Clear”, day-glo green “Spire GAS”, and white “Elec” presumably meant to alert future crews as to the owner or purpose of nearby poles or what pipes or lines lay beneath, but they spray paint on fallen leaves. The next day it’s all wind scattered, leaving the place looking a like safety hued Jackson Pollock. A few weeks later, a truck comes by and people in reflective vests get out and wander for a while. Right after they leave, we see spray painted notes on our walks… They don’t seem to tire of the game.

A month ago, we got a bridge over a gully and then a few days later, another over a small feeder stream. I’ve yet to find a neighbor who saw them built or saw any build up to seeing them built. One day there was a bridge. Then there was another. Neither is finished nor has been worked on since its appearance, but it’s a step closer to improving the grass and trees that everybody liked just fine before.

It’s still a walk and there’s still a creek. The mess is so far a few distope units from overwhelming the sounds and sights of water and all its pleasantries. It’s just frustrating.

To our youngest son, tractors are cool, especially unattended tractors left for days so anyone—no matter how many lawyers his parents know—can climb up on the topside tracks, sit in the cockpit, make vrrrr-choom noises while they pretend to drive, and level tank guns towards enemy artillery position on the crest.

None of the creek park inconveniences take away, from his perspective. Skateboards go faster on asphalt than grass. If they were meant to keep him out, the debris fences would have been made taller. Bikes make dramatic skid marks in gravel.

The world is his archaeological site. There are clues if you’re young enough to look. Every clearing is a meeting place for some unknown cabal even if it’s just where Matt from up the street sits and reads. Every worn path has strategic value. Yesterday he showed me a plank pressed up against two trees with rock piles on both ends keeping it upright. He found it scouting the lower banks. There doesn’t seem to be a much sense to the arrangement, but he tells me it’s probably for watching fish. I have no idea why that would be, but I took his word for it.

I recognize all of this from somewhere else. There was a time before I discovered girls and beer when I ranged a similar landscape. It’s not long till he moves on as well.

In wistful moments, these are remembered as carefree times. They weren’t. Boys play seriously in the woods; canteens, flashlights, compasses, all stowed in backpacks incongruously covered in superhero or video game patches. I think it’s especially true that it’s serious when the kid himself thinks he’s growing out of the age where pretending is appropriate, where he thinks he might get made fun of for acting like a kid. Mine doesn’t carry his backpack with him on his ventures out anymore. He doesn’t let on so much, but I’ll see him, from the house, crouching behind a bush or flat against a tree trunk, risking a peek at nonexistent enemies.

I thought of Robert Frost. He’d be the one to capture innocence playing at knowing. America’s Grampa wrote about rural life in New England and I figured he’d surely touched on what it was like to be a boy let loose on the countryside. I didn’t find anything in his first collection, A Boy’s Will, which I assumed, for not very hard to guess reasons, would be the most likely place to find his expressions on the sentiment. The closest I came to finding what I expected was in “Birches,” from his third collection. And then, the subject is touched on very briefly in a longer poem.

from Birches
Robert Frost (1874-1963)

I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.

That surprised me a bit. What didn’t surprise at all was how succinctly he conveyed independence, creativity, and burgeoning responsibility.

The second poet I’d pressed my assumption on delivered.

Pirate Story
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

Three of us afloat in the meadow by the swing,
Three of us aboard in the basket on the lea.
Winds are in the air, they are blowing in the spring,
And waves are on the meadow like the waves there are at sea.

Where shall we adventure, to-day that we’re afloat,
Wary of the weather and steering by a star?
Shall it be to Africa, a-steering of the boat,
To Providence, or Babylon, or off to Malabar?

Hi! but here’s a squadron a-rowing on the sea—
Cattle on the meadow a-charging with a roar!
Quick, and we’ll escape them, they’re as mad as they can be,
The wicket is the harbour and the garden is the shore.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s name is tied to children’s adventure stories. I’d say synonymous, but he played adult mind games in his classic Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I remember Kidnapped as the book report assignment that served as vehicle for the nuns’ imposition of the five paragraph essay stricture: “Tell me what you’re going to tell me. Tell me. Tell me what you told me.” Either of those titles may be his best known novel. I don’t know how to pick apart his popularity, but if I had to guess, I’d say the pirate book rules them all.

In 1881, he amused his twelve-year-old stepson with a tale of pirates and adventure. The story grew, was serialized in Young Folks magazine and eventually published as Treasure Island. The N.C. Wyeth’s1 illustrations were added to popular editions in 1911, seventeen years after Stevenson’s death. It’s hard for me to imagine one without the other, but the book was a smashing success before. He was the one who came up with X marking the spot and pirates with peg legs and parrots. He made the Jolly Roger ubiquitous, convinced us that buccaneers risked life and limb for piles of treasure they buried instead of spent.

In addition to prose, he wrote a great many poems for adults and children including, as I’d hope to find, a great many for adults recalling adventures imagined as children.

This last is full of daring at nursie’s side.

My Treasures

These nuts, that I keep in the back of the nest,
Where all my tin soldiers are lying at rest,
Were gathered in Autumn by nursie and me
In a wood with a well by the side of the sea.

This whistle we made (and how clearly it sounds!)
By the side of a field at the end of the grounds.
Of a branch of a plane, with a knife of my own,
It was nursie who made it, and nursie alone!

The stone, with the white and the yellow and grey,
We discovered I cannot tell how far away;
And I carried it back although weary and cold,
For though father denies it, I’m sure it is gold.

But of all my treasures the last is the king,
For there’s very few children possess such a thing;
And that is a chisel, both handle and blade,
Which a man who was really a carpenter made.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]