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]

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.

***

John Millington Synge is gross. Not really. At least not as far as I know. I was reading The Oxford Book of Modern Verse and got caught without a bookmark. J.M. Synge starts on page 144, so that was my little mnemonic: “John Millington Synge is gross.”

Synge was a great Irish playwright who wrote poetry, but very little of it. At least, he published very little of it. As best I can tell his sole collection is Poems and Translations. It contains twenty-two original poems, all short and mostly light and amusing. In addition are translations of poems by Petrarch and Villon, but they’re prose translations of the original author’s verse. I don’t find those terribly interesting.

The twenty-two seem more from a man who wanted to play with an amusing thought that channel a muse. Yeats was fastidious after perfection. Heaney feared frogs. Gogarty swashbuckled. Irish poets have great origin stories. Synge was wickedly clever and insightful, but I don’t get the sense he envisioned himself as a poetic force. That’s not to say he didn’t think big thoughts on the subject. There was a conservator about him.

From his brief preface to Poems and Translations:

“I have often thought that at the side of the poetic diction, which everyone condemns, modern verse contains a great deal of poetic material, using poetic in the same special sense. The poetry of exaltation will be always the highest; but when men lose their poetic feeling for ordinary life, and cannot write poetry of ordinary things, their exalted poetry is likely to lose its strength of exaltation, in the way men cease to build beautiful churches when they have lost happiness in building shops.

Many of the older poets, such as Villon and Herrick and Burns, used the whole of their personal life as their material, and the verse written in this way was read by strong men, and thieves, and deacons, not by little cliques only. Then, in the town writing of the eighteenth century, ordinary life was put into verse that was not poetry, and when poetry came back with Coleridge and Shelley, it went into verse that was not always human.

In these days poetry is usually a flower of evil or good; but it is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.”

And so he wrote well for general enjoyment.

Epitaph

After reading Ronsard’s lines from Rabelais

If fruits are fed on any beast
Let vine-roots suck this parish priest,
For while he lived, no summer sun
Went up but he’d a bottle done,
And in the starlight beer and stout
Kept his waistcoat bulging out.
Then Death that changes happy things
Damned his soul to water springs.

All of his poems are structured simply; like or nearly like the above. There’s not much technically to discuss, so I’m just going to drop one in every few paragraphs.

My first encounter with Synge was in high school, as a visiting scholar. Every year my school would load up participating juniors and seniors for the Northern or Southern College Trip. We’d go wandering around college and university campuses all over the South or North, alternating each year, badgering earnest students giving minimum wage work-study tours with rote questions like “What is the average class size and student-to-teacher ratio?” and “What percentage of students live in on-campus housing?” We didn’t care about the answers, but after a day or two barnstorming campuses we realized pretty quickly that all the guide spiels were more or less the same. A few preemptive questions targeting the standard tour highlights disarmed the speaker, sped up the tour, and gave us more time, as our teacher-chaperones said, to “get a feel for the campus,” which we understood as “wander around unsupervised and look at girls.”

It was a good time, even the bus rides. Our headmaster led the way. He was renowned for making a long shot college application a possibility, a maybe a yes, and developed such relationships with a few sparkling name colleges and universities that his prudently-given recommendation meant automatic acceptance. He was also a veteran of the New York theater scene, collecting anecdotes for classroom digressions as he whiled away his twenties in off-Broadway productions. Trips to big cities meant an excuse to see a big show on the school’s dime and so we all, twenty or so sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds and three or four teachers, arrayed in an arc before him in a hotel lobby. We had tickets to see Synge’s Playboy of the Western World at the Kennedy Center and by God in heaven we were going to behave. There would be no snickering at prurience. We would act our age. Pay attention. The reputation of the school. Fire and brimstone. Students in the hand of an angry headmaster.

Winter

(With little money in a great city)

There’s snow in every street
Where I go up and down,
And there’s no woman, man, or dog
That knows me in the town.

I know each shop, and all
These Jews, and Russian Poles,
For I go walking night and noon
To spare my sack of coals.

Our headmaster had recently lost considerable weight but settled in at still, though less than before, corpulent; an obese man wearing the no longer elastic skin of an even larger man. He was so animated. Add to that theatrical and effeminate. To be clear, we liked him. He was our overweight, animated, theatrical headmaster so don’t you make fun. But Lord, did we. He cut an impossible comic figure and held a position requiring earnestness. It was just funny.

Ten minutes into Playboy’s second act we were nudging blue blazered elbows and tossing nods to anyone not paying attention. For all his demands for propriety, dear leader was dead asleep in his seat; head lolled back and snoring to beat the band. We didn’t need another episode to make make fun of, but the man was a giver. Thirty years later, I’m in my old high school’s auditorium to see my son, then a student there himself, in a student production and chatting with a former classmate whose son was also in the cast. We were talking about plays we did when we were students. “Hey,” he says. “Remember when we went to the Kennedy Center?” Some teachers are unforgettable.

In Glencullen

Thrush, linnet, stare and wren,
Brown lark beside the sun,
Take thought of kestrel, sparrow-hawk,
Birdline and roving gun.

You great-great-grandchildren
Of birds I’ve listened to,
I think I robbed your ancestors
When I was young as you.

Synge debuted Playboy of the Western World in 1907 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. His last three plays – Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea, and The Well of the Saints – made prominent voices in the nationalist movement pretty angry. He self censored one play, The Tinker’s Wedding. There’s a scene where a Catholic priest gets tied up in a sack and he didn’t think that’d go over well. He decided not to put it on.

He was a co-founder and director of the Abbey, so he had some say in what shows were put on but he wasn’t the final word. The two other founding directors were split on the play’s merits. W.B. Yeats liked it. Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory when she’s not at home, did not. Knowing Synge courted controversy, they risked outrage. A riot broke out in the theater on the second night.

From The Irish Monthly, July 1921, retrospective of the Abbey’s first sixteen or so years (as near contemporary as I can find):

“When the ‘Playboy of the Western World’ was produced, a perverse rumor ran round Dublin that the new play showed Irish peasants extolling a parricide: on the second night the pit was filled by a noisy audience, who had concealed beneath their coats tin-trumpets, drums and other ingredients of a jazz band; for a whole week their opposition reduced Synge’s comedy to a dumb show.”

Was my headmaster’s snore an homage?

Yeats wrote to Irish audiences that they had “disgraced yourselves again.” Lady Gregory, maybe not a fan but a defender nonetheless, wrote “It is the old battle, between those who use a toothbrush and those who don’t.”

Synge died two years later of Hodgkin lymphoma. He was only thirty-seven.

Queens

Seven dog-days we let pass
Naming Queens in Glenmacnass,
All the rare and royal names
Wormy sheepskin yet retains:
Etain, Helen, Maeve, and Fand,
Golden Deirdre’s tender hand;
Bert, the big-foot, sung by Villon,
Cassandra, Ronsard found in Lyon.
Queens of Sheba, Meath, and Connaught,
Coifed with crown, or gaudy bonnet;
Queens whose finger once did stir men,
Queens were eaten of fleas and vermin,
Queens men drew like Monna Lisa,
Or slew with drugs in Rome and Pisa.
We named Lucrezia Crivelli,
And Titian’s lady with amber belly,
Queens acquainted in learned sin,
Jane of Jewry’s slender shin:
Queens who cut the bogs of Glanna,
Judith of Scripture, and Gloriana,
Queens who wasted the East by proxy,
Or drove the ass-cart, a tinker’s doxy.
Yet these are rotten—I ask their pardon—
And we’ve the sun on rock and garden;
These are rotten, so you’re the Queen
Of all are living, or have been.

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

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

First, a little verse.

***

I’m re-reading David Foster Wallace’s essay, “E Unibus Pluram.” If you aren’t familiar, he discusses the impact of television on his generation of fiction writers, as well as those subsequent. He makes the case that we’ve been roped into an irony trap – too post-modern for our own good – and served a side of warped empathy to boot.

The idea that we’re shaped by consumed drama has nagged at me. Frankly, I feel bludgeoned by it. The saddest scene I’ve seen on video is one lost to channel surfing. It was one of those true crime investigative documentary series. I can’t find or recall the name of the show where I saw the original, but plenty of similar scenes exist. A young woman’s mother was murdered. She’s giving her victim’s impact statement before a judge as part of the pre-sentencing procedure. This should be unprecedented in someone’s life. There should be no proper way of doing things. There should be no blueprint. But she has one.

I know she rehearsed in front of a mirror, because that’s the human thing to do. I know she wanted the most impact, as is implied. And I know she’s not comfortable in front of people, in front of an attentive crowd, in front of a camera. Because few are. There was nothing inauthentic about what she did, and I don’t usually think along these lines, but I figure she did her mother proud. But we live surrounded by stories. Like no other time in history, we have narrative crafted to draw us in playing background. It’s all heightened emotion. Television, streaming, sports talk radio, energetic music, sad love songs. At every turn our attention is drawn and those doing the drawing are well aware they don’t hold a monopoly. The saddest or loudest or whatever the fix du jour draws us in, and the more the more. We’re social creatures. We act as we find appropriate to our experience but our experience is intruded upon by stories, fantastical and elevated circumstance. Emotional displays escalate in response and the exaggerated becomes commonplace. We need to ratchet up for the uncommon, and more and more.

The woman did a wonderful job communicating to the judge. She honored, in horrific circumstances, her mother who, I suspect, would have been thankful and proud. I wasn’t watching critically, but couldn’t help noticing. Her cadence and gestures were effective, appropriate to an actress schooled in swaying audiences. Not a twenty-something-year-old office worker.

It struck me what outliers we are. The Spartans were warlike; men, women, and children ready mentally and physically for conflict and its hardships. Mongols rode “before they could walk.” Vikings sailed. I’m watching this woman flourish knowing it’s affectation, but also knowing she’s not acting. That’s how we see it done. Private grief honed to effect is not wrong, but we are so devastatingly good at it. It bothered me so much, this realization that we are constantly selling. All around us there’s a mass media swarm of minor chords and actors tossing triggers. I don’t think we’ve picked up tricks. I think we’ve incorporated tricks.

There’s a top or a fall. Everything has an upper limit so in time we’ll revert or go in a different direction, but I think our time will be remembered as an oddity; a paroxysm.

I don’t have a theory or even a hypothesis. I saw the office worker’s statement years ago, but I keep seeing examples. So, I’m rereading David Foster Wallace and Marshall McLuhan. Why I bring this up here is because earlier this week I read “God’s Grandeur: Gerard Manley Hopkins,” an essay by Dana Gioia (included in The Catholic Writer Today and Other Essays). Reading Gioia’s on a poet who wrote essentially for himself without publishing around the same time as reading Wallace’s on outside influences on writing got me wondering about lack of criticism or feedback. What does it do to a poet if their only course corrections are sui generis?

Obviously, reclusive poet conjures Emily Dickinson, so I’ll include her with Hopkins. For those looking for conclusions or theories, I (again) have none. I just enjoyed considering and thought I’d share.

Neither wrote in a vacuum. Hopkins was a Jesuit, not a cloister. The order employed him as a teacher, though he found teaching miserable. He’d have been schooled in forms and movements, kept abreast of journals and read on his own; aware of the world. As a boy he’d won at least one poetry prize, but direct criticism of his adult work was limited.

On committing himself to the church, Hopkins stopped writing, seeing it as a distraction to his higher calling. In 1875, five Franciscan nuns, among others, drowned in the wreck of the Deutschland. Hopkins’ superior suggested someone write a poem in commemoration. Seeing his calling align with his talents, he volunteered and delivered a 280 line work, “The Wreck of the Deutchland,” dedicated “To the happy memory of five Franciscan nuns/exiles by the Falck Laws/drowned between midnight and morning of/Dec. 7^Th, 1875.”

The opening:

from The Wreck of the Deutschland
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World’s strand, sway of the sea
Lord of living and dead;
Though hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

The editor of the Jesuit journal to which he submitted called it, per Gioia, “unintelligible.” His friend Robert Bridges, the only person with whom we know he regularly shared his poems, again from Gioia, “disliked it so much he later referred to Hopkins’ formidable first mature poem as ‘the dragon folded at the gate to forbid all entry.’” Despite the reception, Hopkins began to write again.

Bridges is an interesting fellow. He was Hopkins’ lifelong friend since youthful school days. Hopkins didn’t just stop writing poetry on entering the vocation, he burned his copies of all his work to date. Thankfully, Bridges saved everything he was sent, both before and after Hopkins’ poetic hiatus. It was he who arranged and published, twenty years after his friend’s death, the forty-nine poems we have.

As an ear for bouncing work off of, Bridges was preposterously ideal. The school friend was a poet in his own right, and per Providence or luck if you don’t believe, an esteemed one: a medical doctor, Baronet, playwright, and Milton scholar. Fifteen years after Hopkins’ death, Bridges served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. Five years into his seventeen year tenure as such, he released Hopkins’ body of work. His office no doubt drew attention to the publication. Providence.

It’s disingenuous to say Hopkins only received criticism from an old friend, considering, but his work was entirely original; unlike anything Bridges wrote, unlike anything that had been seen.

You’ll often hear that he revived Anglo-Saxon stress patterns. Maybe. No doubt he was familiar and maybe found inspiration in them and from elsewhere, but what he derived or synthesized or made up was from whole cloth; was not known.

More from Gioia:

“Although he was a Victorian poet, he does not sound like any of his contemporaries—nor any of ours. Hopkins did not build on conventional foundations of English verse. He reinvented the art from the ground up in terms of meter, syntax, and texture.”

Hopkins packed in alliteration, hard consonant beats, and set a quickend pace. “Sprung rhythm” was his great innovation, a meter measuring stresses regardless of syllables.

Had he regularly published, would reviews have affected him? Would popularity or its lack cause course corrections?

“Pied Beauty” is of a handful of poems written before ordination; a last hurrah of sorts before shutting down.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles in all stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Emily Dickinson took to speaking to her scant and rare visitors from the top of the stairs or with a partially opened door between her, seated as I understand it, and her guest, also seated. There was no line of sight. For all intents and purposes, she was cloistered in her later years. Unlike Hopkins, she published, though only seven of her sixteen to eighteen hundred poems ever saw print in her lifetime. Like Hopkins, she didn’t allow many opportunities for criticism. She sent poems to family and friends on occasion, but none of her friends ended up Poet Laureate. I know she confided in one professional regularly.

In 1862 she sent four poems to Atlantic Monthly editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson who wrote that he experienced, “The impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius.” But he didn’t know what to do with them. He was unsure if they even qualified as poetry as understood at the time. In any case, the two struck up a correspondence. She had at least one sounding board.

What makes her special is absolute immersion in metaphor. The poet and critic William Logan puts it infinitely better in his essay, “Dickinson’s Nothings” included in his collection, Broken Ground: Poetry and the Demon of History:

“No other poet after Shakespeare has made metaphor the basic currency of imagination—her range is not as broad, her experience not as comprehending; but to live in her poems is to live in a world of stifling privacies and shadowy longings and in a sensibility of extraordinary reach and demand. The woman is an enigma, her poems as revealingly unrevealing as Shakespeare’s sonnets.”

In her privacies she can be maddeningly impenetrable. That makes sense if she’s only writing for herself, and we must assume she often was. Some are easily decipherable. Some, we’ll never unravel. Some require knowing about the poet’s life.

“Alone and in a Circumstance” is about an encounter with a spider and subsequent anxieties. Not knowing that her father’s house, called Homestead, was most of her agoraphobic world in her later life, and that her father was an attorney, might leave you wondering exactly what is going on. Knowing that doesn’t inform completely, but allows for a clearer picture.

Alone and in a Circumstance
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Alone and in a Circumstance
Reluctant to be told
A spider on my reticence
Assiduously crawled

And so much more at Home than I
Immediately grew
I felt myself a visitor
And hurriedly withdrew

Revisiting my late abode
With articles of claim
I found it quietly assumed
As a gymnasium
Where Tax asleep and Title off
The inmates of the Air
Perpetual presumption took
As each were special Heir—
If any strike me on the street
I can return the Blow—
If any take my property
According to the Law
The Statute is my Learned friend
But what redress can be
For an offense nor here nor there
So not in Equity—
That Larceny of time and mind
The marrow of the Day
By spider, or forbid it Lord
That I should specify.

More from Logan’s essay, this about the poem:

“The reference in the poem to law books suggests that she is sitting in the family library at the Homestead or next door in her brother’s library at Evergreens.”

I had guesses, but no certainty. That the poem is peppered with law terms is obvious, but knowing a bit about her circumstance, or a great deal as Logan does, and you see that a spider’s made “a gymnasium” out of her father’s desk or shelves of law books. There’s certainly more to the poem. (As and aside: I won’t get into it other than to say that Logan’s commentary on this specific is worth the price of his book, but the draft of the poem was found on a scrap paper with a three cent stamp featuring a picture of a locomotive and with pinned one end under the stamp are two strips of cut magazine article from a review of a George Sands novel. It likely has nothing to do with the poem, but with Dickinson you have to wonder. We’re not her audience.)

Impenetrability has its allure, but she wasn’t trying to invoke mystique. Her reader was herself, privy to all she knew. Why bother with exposition? She slides into metaphor without need to explain, shown purely as the author imagines without compromises that make it accessible. She doesn’t meet us halfway or invite us in. Even out in the cold, we marvel.

Obscurity grants liberties. It doesn’t guarantee genius. I’m sure there are forests of unread composition notebooks filled with amateur verse that deserve to be right there forever under the mattress where they reside. But it’s interesting that two of our most unique voices developed relatively undisturbed.

I thought this was interesting. In the beginning of his Hopkins article, Dana Gioia notes,

“Hopkins ranks as one of the most frequently reprinted poets in English. In William Harmon’s statistical survey of anthologies and textbooks, The Top 500 Poems (1992), Hopkins stood in seventh place among all English-language poets—surpassed only by William Shakespeare, John Donne, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, and William Wordsworth.”

They’re both in there, attempts to fly under the radar not withstanding.

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

This essay is not a novel. I’m drinking a cup of coffee, so there’s action. Since I actually am drinking a cup of coffee you might say that this essay is not a roman à clef. I’m going to introduce an apple which I am not actually eating. Then, I’m going to have the protagonist choke on the first bite. I have a sense of timing so I’ll leave that for a moment to build suspense; let the reader wonder what’s going to happen next.

In the end, the fictitious apple doesn’t kill thinly veiled fictitious me. But frozen in a moment of uncertainty, caught in, as the slice is in what a little bit of authorial research may or may not confirm is the epiglottis, we have an inflection point.

In the still moment between possibilities I confront evidence of a spiritual existence I’d suspected, hoped and relied on, but suffered the same anguishing doubts over as one does over any article of faith in what’s desired.

The body acted on its own. It retched, contracted where contraction might help, looked to expel, was persistent. The mind didn’t do any of that autonomic stuff. It was onlooker, chronicler, and judge as reels of experience ran out of sequence before it. Foibles. Triumphs. Missed Kisses. I was I, separate from the choking meat, watching my life, paused in recall. Every detail reviewed. I knew my evaluation didn’t matter a whit, preliminary to that of something greater. It would have neither bearing on that ultimate judgment nor give standing for appeal.

The apple dislodged and vanished in tears and an oriental rug. I re-integrated. Knowing I was doing so. Knowing I was a soul in a body; a coat I wore. I saw through a window into the world, firmly tethered to something higher. I learned and resolved.

I’ve satisfied a few middle school requirements: a character undergoes change, Man vs. Nature, Man vs. God, and by contrasting, Man vs. Man and Man vs. Himself. The bases are covered and the lovable protagonist has undergone change.

Nobody should put up with me calling this a novel. Even a high school kid looking to dodge an onerous reading assignment would be too proud. If I put a chapter break in right here, it wouldn’t matter a lick.

That this isn’t a novel doesn’t diminish the work in any way nor would it improve if it were so called. The essay-not-novel remains word for word as it is no matter; brilliant and harrowing plot, subtle characterization, and emotionally wrenching. This piece connects with readers in an amazing and unexpected way no matter what genre damnable critics assign it from their categorical grab bag.

So, why do so many people indent lines awkwardly to call their work poetry? Why do they insist on the designation?

I feal the lines, blue
potent potential mocking white
and feather tips old men waste
against Polished grain

Begin anew on Sunday
Righteous din, big nation
we are all on stolen land

That’s my rhythm-less free verse contemplation of the blank notebook page on the desk to my right while someone on TV makes background noise fun of a Grammy winner. It took half a minute to write and most of that was deciding whether or not to feign religious disdain by not capitalizing “Sunday.” Give me grants.

I kinda like the “Righteous din, big nation.” I can’t decide about “feal.” In any case, it’s a crappy bit of nonsense indented and unpunctuated, as that vogue comes and goes, with random capitalization. There’s no craft beyond the Sunday decision. It’s not a poem. It’s not even broken up prose. Whatever it is, it’s dressed up in poet-face. That kind of thing passes more often that I’d like.

So much similar by so many is out there bound and hailed as poetry. Why?

It certainly isn’t the money. I think it was in James Matthew Wilson’s The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking – though I haven’t been able to confirm by picking and scanning through the book so apologies if I’ve misremembered – where I read that publications generally pay more for flash or micro-fiction than they do for poetry. A sentiment laden block paragraph looses value when you indent.

It must have to do with prestige. Calling your written musings poetry carries panache. We like poets. We like having them around. At least we like the idea of having them around so long as they don’t bring the room down. (They can even do that if they bring the room down in a way that lets everyone affect understanding and caring about a Big Idea.) Their presence or acquaintance impresses others and makes attractive. We dwell in the company of unique curiosities. Poets hold grand concerns, love passionately, think intently, and here I am in the midst of one. I must be pretty deep too. People like to sleep with people who are deep. So goes the thinking. Actual poets are interesting people if you talk to, rather than display, them. That’s tediously old-fashioned.

Poets get a lot of leeway. Most guys who pull over busloads of people, kill all the men, and do the same to all the women and children they can’t find a use for are rightly despised. But Che wrote poetry. Look at all the sophomores parading around with his picture on their shirts.

Of course, a lot of the image is claptrap. Poetry means making. It’s a craft worked on by people with certain aptitudes: for rhythm and sound, vocabulary and overlap, perception and history, time and change. These people take all these things for which they have aptitudes – things which all exist alone or in combination outside of poetry – and subject them to discipline.

To dismiss free verse is a mistake. Robert Frost’s Country Club quip that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net or handball without a wall aside, free verse is damn hard to pull off. Anyone who thinks otherwise should spend an afternoon with Robert Graves and Laura Riding’s A Survey of Modernist Poetry. In Chapter III, they break down an ee cummings poem to give a sense of what goes in to making a poem from unmetered lines. Unfortunately, that some poets are successful means every poor fool is licenced to try. What they offer is often – and this time I’m certain I read this in Wilson’s Fortunes of Poetry – “discontinuous juxtaposition.” “Irons unplugged/Robins lost in wormspace/Screaming shattered cow song.” That sort of crap. Sometimes they offer something cogent and poignant; perfectly fine prose if left without devices. In either case, desire doesn’t make poetry no matter how poetic the sentiment.

That want to express yourself is natural. Doing so in print is laudable no matter how successful the attempt, but no matter how passionate the expression, it is not automatically poetry. We know this, and calling any such meaningful (or not) writing such diminishes poetry as an art form. An angry goose honking is expressing itself. The triumph of poetry is in imposing order to expression.

Apropos of nothing: What’s the deal with novellas? They’re pretty short, right?

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

First, a little verse.

***

Carl Sandburg was posthumously honored with a postage stamp bearing a sketch of the poet done by his friend William A. Smith and the poet’s “distinctive autograph.” The “distinctive autograph” language comes from Wikipedia which appears to have gotten it from the world stamp authority, Scott Catalogue. Who doesn’t have a distinctive autograph? Signatures are supposed to be distinctive.

Before this week, I didn’t know much about Sandburg beyond a handful of poems I really liked and a handful I really didn’t. I knew he was a major figure in American letters, but didn’t realize the scope. In short, I was aware of his poetry and impact on that discipline, vaguely aware that he’d written Lincoln biographies, and think I’d heard somewhere that he helped preserve and widen the audience for American folk music. I didn’t realize how beloved he was in his time. Rather, I didn’t realize how large a figure he was in his time, because for all that he was beloved, he was scorned too.

Reports run hot and cold. The slights seem more rancorous than necessary. The hagiographies exalt quotidian stuff, shades of the distinctive autograph (His fingerprints were one of a kind!). It’s hard to get a handle on the man.

He’s probably best known poetically for the opening of “Chicago,” the first poem in his collection, Chicago Poems.

from Chicago

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

In the author intro for Sandburg in The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol 1, the editors tell us “Some readers of his Chicago Poems (1916) objected to his delight in violence and attributed to his socialist politics.” In a letter to Amy Lowell he claimed, per Norton, his intention wasn’t to “propound theories of the Industrial Workers of the World, but ‘to sing, blab, chortle yodel, like people, and people in the sense of human beings subtracted from formal doctrines.” He’s hailed as Whitman-esque by many. He’s hailed as having, maybe more than any American before him, done as Wordsworth declared a poet should: speak in the words of the common man.

Norton’s also tells us that William Carlos Williams “regretted that Sandburg ‘deliberately invited’ failure by inattention to the demands of craft.” Robert Frost said Sandburg was a fraud.

Ezra Pound seemed to like his work. There’s an out of print anthology he put together in 1915, right before Chicago Poems was published, called Catholic Anthology, 1914-1915. It was Pound’s spiteful rebuke, a collection published to compete with and to overshadow the forthcoming Some Imagist Poets: An Annual Anthology – the first publication since Amy Lowell’s hijacking (Whether she did or not, that’s how he saw it.) of his Imagiste movement under the Imagism banner. Awful copy/pastes of Catholic Anthology are scattered about dusty corners of the internet; indentations mangled and poems half deleted. There’s a very good scan at HathiTrust.

Pound really didn’t like Lowell. As I wrote on these electronic pages a couple of years ago:

He marched around at one of her parties with a metal wash tub on his head making fun of her poem “The Bath.” The eponym “hippopoetess” was coined by the poet Witter Bynner, but Pound wasn’t shy about using it freely to describe the five foot tall, two-hundred and fifty pound, cigar chomping Lowell.

It appears that in order to make her look as bad as possible while simultaneously making himself look as magnificent as possible, Pound pulled out all the stops. Her book was good, but his book opened with Yeats, the time’s major poet, and featured the first book-bound printing of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” William Carlos Williams is in there. Despite the title’s 1914-1915 claim, Pound reprinted from his own 1913 hit series, “Contemporania.”

In total, sixteen poets contributed. It’s a tremendous collection. Perhaps the most interesting entry is the single poem by Harriet Monroe. I like the poem a great deal, but it doesn’t jump out because of its merits. Monroe was the founder and editor of Poetry magazine and as such, one of the most influential people in English language poetry at the time. Maybe the most influential. I think her poem, “A Letter from Peking,” served as a middle finger aimed right at Lowell. Pound marking territory.

In this most important salvo of a book meant to humble Lowell’s stewardship of Pound’s Imagism movement (which he took to calling “Amygism” with all its obscene connotations), Sandburg offers two from his then upcoming Chicago Poems: “The Harbor” and “The Road and the End.”

The Harbor

Passing through huddled and ugly walls,
By doorways where women haggard
Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,
Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,
Out from the huddled and ugly walls,
I came sudden, at the city’s edge,
On a blue burst of lake,
Long lake waves breaking under the sun
On a spray-flung curve of shore;
And a fluttering storm of gulls,
Masses of great gray wings
And flying white bellies
Veering and wheeling free in the open.

Without meter he builds alliteration followed by hard consonants to set beats; H, G, and D in the first half and G, L, FL, and WH in the second. Fixed walls and drained people give way to “burst,” “breaking,” and “spray-flung” – a release.

Sandburg wrote two multi-volume biographies of Abraham Lincoln. Or he didn’t, depending on who you listen to. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years was published in two volumes in 1926, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years in four volumes, in 1939. The Pulitzer committee certainly loved the latter, but they have a standing rule against awarding biographies of Washington and Lincoln for some reason. They gave him, instead, a Pulitzer Prize for History. This was possible because of criticism that his works, while brilliantly written and informative, didn’t contain any new scholarship. He didn’t do the work of a biographer. To those holding that opinion, he wrote a history. In either case, the books were smashing successes.

Having read “Notes for a Preface,” which despite the title serves as preface for his Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, I can understand why any faults in the Lincoln books were easily passed over. He’s an engaging prose writer even when, as a reader, you are at odds with his argument. Which, in the case of the preface, I am.

In it, he confronts criticisms claiming his poetry is not, in fact, poetry, writing that poetry is beyond form:

There is formal poetry perfect only in form, “all dressed up and no where to go.” The number of syllables, the designated and required stresses of accent, the rhymes if wanted—they come off with the skill of a solved crossword puzzle. Yet its animation and connotation are less than that of “a dead mackerel in the moonshine,” the latter even as an extinct form reporting that once it was a living fish aswim in bright waters.

That’s not very satisfying. That bad poetry exists should surprise no one. If rising to a threshold of excitement or serenity is what makes a poem, should prose writers restrain themselves lest they accidentally bump their novel into the realm of poetry?

His 1928 collection Good Morning begins with “Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry.” I don’t know his body of work well enough to claim a pattern, but with “Notes for a Preface,” that’s twice he’s begun a book with an offering claiming to be a draft. If that’s the extent of it, it’s amusing. He’s showing that his thoughts are ever evolving. I hope he didn’t beat the idea into the ground.

Some of the definition, italics his:

Poetry is the report of nuance between two moments, when people say, ‘Listen!’ and ‘Did you see it?’ ‘Did you hear it? What was it?’

and

Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration.

and

Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters.

There are thirty-eight of them. I think he’s protesting too much, trying to establish that inspiration for poetry makes craft unnecessary, as if the same inspiration could be a painting but for the paint, a novel but for the story, or a symphony but for the music.

No matter what definition of poetry you adhere to, he’s fun to read.

In addition to poetry, history/biography, and prose, Sandburg was known for music. In 1929 he released a book of folk music titled, American Songbag. A hit on the lecture circuit, he showcased his many talents with talks, poetry reading, sang, and played guitar. Apparently he played guitar extremely well, having studied under the legendary classical guitarist Andrés Segovia. Poetry Foundation’s not-celebrated-enough mini biographers describe him as “an author accepted as a personality” in the vein of Mark Twain, a touring celebrity.

He did a lot. He put out a lot, so even if, like me, you don’t like the whole, there’s slivers enough of really good material to make Sandburg worth reading. He is agile.

Here’s the second of Sandburg’s from Pound’s anthology. I should note that Amy Lowell was impressed by Chicago Poems, calling it “one of the most original books this age has produced.”

The Road and the End

I shall foot it
Down the roadway in the dusk,
Where shapes of hunger wander
And the fugitives of pain go by.
I shall foot it
In the silence of the morning,
See the night slur into dawn,
Hear the slow great winds arise
Where tall trees flank the way
And shoulder toward the sky.

The broken boulders by the road
Shall not commemorate my ruin.
Regret shall be the gravel under foot.
I shall watch for
Slim birds swift of wing
That go where wind and ranks of thunder
Drive the wild processionals of rain.

The dust of the travelled road
Shall touch my hands and face.

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

It’s POETS Day! Friday afternoons aren’t meant to be spent working. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Duck out and grab a beer, catch a game, or stroll through the park. You’ve done your part. Enjoy the rewards.

First, a little verse.

***

Narcissus gets a bad rap.

There is a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. You can read all the traits common to sufferers and a series of deficits and exuberances therapists are on the lookout for in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5^th Edition. The problem is there’s no Latin. All the warning signs are kitchen table words so though it may well be true that “grandiosity” has a very specific meaning to mental health professionals, it has a more elastic meaning to the rest of us and we have an obnoxious aunt who won’t abide competing cobbler recipes, a co-worker who parks his precious convertible across two spots because he’s worried about dings, and a neighbor who thinks I like his grass clippings piled on my side of the line. By my reading of the DSM-5, they’re all a bunch of damn narcissists.

He died enthralled by his own reflection, starved because he couldn’t break gaze even to eat. Narcissus is the prime choice as patron of the self-obsessed, but there’s a hitch.

The story’s an older one than the popular version we know from Ovid. Wikipedia mentions a copy, recently found in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, of the Narcissus story by Parthenius of Niceae from around fifty years before Ovid’s was written. They give a translation from W.B. Henry’s New Light in the Narcissus Myth.

He had a cruel heart, and hated all of them, till he conceived a love for his own form: He wailed, seeing his face, delightful as a dream, within a spring; he wept for his beauty. Then the boy shed his blood and gave it to the earth… to bear.

The Oxyrhynchus version is only fifteen lines long and not all is translated, whether because of damage or illegibility or whatever else, I don’t know. “God-like” appears to be the only translated words from the first nine lines and then the above, lines ten through fifteen. That’s the whole. There’s no Echo and no flower. In this telling, Narcissus is of the same species as the stock Narcissist character we find today wearing oddly expensive workout clothes while loudly telling the bartender about his Bitcoin Wallet.

Again, the story is old. Narcissus is assumed to be from Anatolia by those who research such things. I have no idea what clues were followed in order to place him anywhere specifically, but the name Narcissus appears to predate Ancient Greek languages. There’s a book called The Horse, The Wheel, and Language by David W. Anthony that demonstrates how much can be learned tracing sounds, root words, and cognates from language to parent language. Maybe there’s evidence in the name; something proto-Turkish.

It may be that Ovid invented the story as we know it, pulled in Echo and invented the transformation into a white and yellow flower. No matter the original story, Ovid’s has been the dominant version, the one referred to when discussing Narcissus, for the last two thousand years.

From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book III
translation by Rolfe Humphries (1894-1969)

Was sixteen years of age, and could be taken
Either for boy or man; and boys and girls
Both sought his love, but in that slender stripling
Was pride so fierce no boy, no girl, could touch him.

I’m a big fan of the above translation. Arthur Golding’s is the standard for good reason, but Golding, ensconced and glorified among Shakespeare’s influences, writes in fourteeners, and I can’t read those couplets without slipping into annoying sing-song (Pound’s tub-thump) so I usually turn to Rolfe Humphries blank verse.

Here’s the same passage from Golding:

From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book III
translation by Arthur Golding (1536-1606)

For when years three times five and one he fully livéd had,
So that he seemed to stand between the state of man and lad,
The hearts of divers trim young men his beauty gan to move,
And many a lady fresh and fair was taken in his love.
But in that grace of Nature’s gift such passing pride did reign
That to be touched by man or maid he wholly did disdain.

It wasn’t just boys and girls, man or maid. The nymph Echo was smitten by him, too. Juno had punished Echo by cursing her voice so the nymph could never begin a conversation and only repeat what was said to her. The nymph drew ire from the goddess because she served as street corner lookout for Jove’s dalliances, whether on behalf of Jove himself or the nymphs and dryads he fiddled about with, I’m not sure. In either case, if Juno came around while her husband was carousing, she’d engage in stalling chatter and gossip to give the trysters time to scatter and hide the infidelity. Juno got wise and fixed it so Echo wasn’t able. When the nymph saw Narcissus, she followed but stayed hidden. Eventually, he guessed he wasn’t alone and called out. She repeated him. “Come out,” he tried. She repeated. That went on for a while until she broke cover and approached him. He was an ass.

“Keep you hands off,” he cried, and “do not touch me!
I would die before I give you a chance at me.”

She was crushed, hid away, and withered until all that was left was her voice. There are a brief few lines about him rejecting many others, but no details as to how or if cruelly.

One of the spurned boys (unnamed by Ovid but called Ameinias by his contemporary, Conon) calls down Nemesis, and prays “to God he may once feel fierce Cupid’s fire, / As I do now, and yet not joy the things he doth desire.” And so Narcissus, cursed, becomes this self-obsessed creature whose name we toss at the selfish and vain to this day.

But what did he really do? He was a jerk. He was an ass as well. Basically, he didn’t want to sleep with people and, because some attitude from him, at least one of them thought he should pay. His stalker had a goddess’s ear.

I have trouble calling what happened next self-obsession. He may have been awful and thought too damn much of himself, but the punishment for not sleeping with Ameinias was to act as dictated by the spell of a supernatural vengeance being. He didn’t fall in love with himself. He was shoved in love with himself; wasn’t self-obsessed so much as his obsession was directed towards his self by a third party.

There’s a malicious children’s book called The Rainbow Fish, about a fish with colorful scales that draws admiration from all the other fish. These other fish take turns swimming up to the protagonist and asking if they could have one of his scales. Naturally, he says no. He’s a bit snippy with them but well within what’s expected when asked to give up a body part. None of the fish want to be his friend because he won’t cut off parts of himself and share. He gets lonely and sad, gives in, mutilates himself and joins the collective, no longer impressive but no longer alone, having learned the moral: “Give in to peer pressure.” It’s a terrible book to give to kids you don’t dislike.

Like the conforming fish, Narcissus didn’t want to give himself. That shouldn’t be a capital offense.

The lessons of the myth aren’t dependent on the particulars. No matter how Ovid frames the case for divine punishment, the story is about broad-brush action. Don’t reject the world. Don’t turn inward at the expense of broader experience or you stagnate and die. It’s very much like the story of Oedipus. Fear of change or love of the status quo becomes an infatuation with the familiar or the moment and you can get caught in it whether you intended to or not.

As to the particulars of the story as Ovid tells it, Narcissus, jerk and ass, may well have been far beyond in acceptable self-regard. However awful and contemptuous he may have been, he was not suicidally obsessed with himself until he got zapped by a B-list Olympian. That came from outside.

He was horribly punished. Below are excerpts, first from Humphries and then from Golding, describing what happens when you don’t put out for Ameinias.

From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book III
translation by Rolfe Humphries (1894-1969)

What you seek is nowhere,
And if you turn away, you will take with you
The boy you love. The vision is only shadow,
Only reflection, lacking any substance.
It comes with you, it stays with you, it goes
Away with you, if you can go away.
No thought of food, no thought of rest, can make him
Forsake the place. Stretched on the grass, in shadow,
He watches, all unsatisfied, that image
Vain and illusive, and he almost drowns
In his own watching eyes. He rises, just a little,
Enough to lift his arms in supplication
To the trees around him, crying to the forest:
“What love, whose love, has ever been more cruel?
You woods should know: you have given many lovers
Places to meet and hide in; has there ever,
Through the long centuries, been anyone
Who has pined away as I do?”

From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book III
translation by Arthur Golding (1536-1606)

The thing thou seekest is not there. And if aside thou go,
The thing thou loves straight is gone. It is none other matter
That thou dost see than of thyself the shadow in the water.
The thing is nothing of itself. With thee it doth abide;
With thee it would depart if that withdrew thyself aside.
No care of meat could draw him thence or yet desire of rest
But, lying flat against the ground and leaning on his breast,
With greedy eyes he gazeth still upon the falséd face:
And through his sight is wrought his bane. Yet for a little space
He turns and sets himself upright and, holding up his hands,
With piteous voice unto the wood that round about him stands
Cries out and says, ‘Alas, ye woods, and was there ever any
That loved so cruelly as I? You know; for unto many
A place of harbour have you been and fort of refuge strong.
Can you remember anyone in all you time so long
That hath so pined away as I?

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

We have a long weekend ahead with Martin Luther King Day on Monday. You may think, given the holiday, it would be greedy to call for a POETS Day. That’s what they want you to think.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. You aren’t getting any work done on Friday afternoon before a regular weekend, much less a long one. The boss is probably halfway to his dacha as you read this. Get out, enjoy the sunshine, hit the bar, and claim the time that’s rightfully yours.

First, a little verse.

***

My favorite librarian recommended a moderate stack of books when I asked for essays attempting (essaying!) to define American poetry. As best I can explain, we’re known for our rebels. Pound wanted to make it new, Eliot stopped and restarted the world, Whitman sang to his own meter, Dickinson’s literary mentor loved her work but wasn’t sure it was even poetry. Robert Frost plays down-home, and Pound introduced him in a letter to Alice Corbin Henderson as “VURRY Amur’k’n,” but Frost was a wicked practitioner of conversational rhythms in a way that set him apart. William Carlos Williams made it his mission to set an American course, but he’s as unique as the rest of ‘em.

Strip away all the innovation. What’s the commonality we find in American verse that distinguishes it from European? Is there anything? My hunt may be an exercise in eye strain. Possibly Quixotic, but I enjoy the looking.

I’ve read more than a few definitive assertions “that American poetry can be defined by…” Some have been impressive, but none satisfactory. My librarian knows that and seems to have an able mental account of what raised my eyebrow or drew a scowl. The recent stack had a copy of Adam Kirsch’s 2008 collection, The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry. If you’re not familiar with Kirsch, he’s a poet whose verse I keep meaning to read more of, a critic whose essays I read often, and a professor who teaches at a place I was too dumb to get into.

The Modern Element offers twenty-five or so essays, most about a specific poet. Kirsch is not trying to posit an American poetic ethos but there are sift-able thoughts and pieces that might fit later, should a picture emerge. The book isn’t confined to American poets or poetry. In most of the essays, Kirsch finds something idiosyncratic about the subject poet, so further bulging the “unique” category when the poet is a Yank. And it may be that that’s the thread, but I’m too cautious to conclude American poetry is defined by individualism unless I’m really sure. Too obvious. Smacks of jingoism.

Kirsch pulls incidents into his criticism – builds around the incidents in some cases – that lend narrative to discussions of poetic merit or tendencies. James Merrill claimed to have turned to his Ouija board for inspiration, practically abdicating his claim as a poet in favor of serving as some sort of conduit through which spirits from beyond compose. That’s fairly common knowledge. Ephraim, a two-thousand-year-old Jew from whom the inspiration for Merrill’s The Book of Ephraim is delivered or transmitted, has been the stuff of criticism and speculation. Kirsch fleshes it out, lets us know that Merrill’s friend, the writer Alison Lurie, found Ephraim “foreign, frivolous, intermittently dishonest, selfishly sensual, and cheerfully coldly promiscuous.” I know that she knows (actually, I strongly assume that she knows but allow for New Age seriousness) that Ephraim was a persona, but I have a scene in mind now. More importantly, a friend told me what about the persona was not like the poet, what made it different, and now I have a better picture of what the poet was like.

The opening of his essay on Richard Wilbur gave a modest surprise. I’d never read Wilbur’s poem “Cottage Street, 1953” or heard the story behind it. Apparently, Wilbur’s mother-in-law was friends with Sylvia Plath’s mother. The young poet was fresh off her terrible Mademoiselle internship and the summer in New York she’d loosely fictionalize years later in her novel, The Bell Jar. She’d also just attempted to kill herself.

Wilbur describes the occasion for the tea (brief video here followed by a reading of the poem and commentary in a separate video clip from the same sitting.)

“My assignment when I went to the tea that day was to be encouraging to the very young Sylvia Plath about the life of the poet and to hearten her to set aside her suicidal urges and go on with her writing. That of course, was a very difficult assignment which I failed.”

Kirsch points out that the two poets were wildly dissimilar. He references two lines in Wilbur’s accounting, “Cottage Street, 1953” below: “Asks if we would prefer it weak or strong. / Will we have milk or lemon, she enquires?” Wilbur looked to beauty in the world where Plath was a torrent. He asks, “Does the fact that he was destined for happiness condemn his poetry to be weak, the tepid ‘milk’ to Plath’s acrid ‘lemon’?”1

The tea would be a bit of trivia but for Wilbur’s poem.

Cottage Street, 1953
Richard Wilbur (1921-2017)

Framed in her phoenix fire-screen, Edna Ward
Bends to the tray of Canton, pouring tea
For frightened Mrs. Plath; then, turning toward
The pale, slumped daughter, and my wife, and me.

Asks if we would prefer it weak or strong.
Will we have milk or lemon, she enquires?
The visit seems already strained and long.
Each in his turn, we tell her our desires.

It is my office to exemplify
The published poet in his happiness,
Thus cheering Sylvia, who has wished to die;
But half-ashamed, and impotent to bless.

I am a stupid life-guard who has found,
Swept to his shallows by the tide, a girl
Who, far from shore, has been immensely drowned,
And stares through water now with eyes of pearl.

How large is her refusal; and how slight
The genteel chat whereby we recommend
Life, of a summer afternoon, despite
The brewing dusk which hints that it may end.

And Edna Ward shall die in fifteen years,
After her eight-and-eighty summers of
Such grace and courage as permit no tears,
The thin hand reaching out, the last word love.

Outliving Sylvia who, condemned to live,
Shall study for a decade, as she must,
To state at last her brilliant negative
In poems free and helpless and unjust.

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

There’s a BarBQ place a mile and a half from our house that my children like to ride their bikes to, get an order of fries, and spend an afternoon downing soda and reading books. Monday, I hopped in the car for a quick trip to the store and came up on my youngest cycling, about halfway to the restaurant, and pulled over to ask if he wanted me to pick up anything while I was out. He told me I wasn’t the first person to pull over and talk to him that afternoon. Some persnickety woman rolled down her window a block or so from our house to “Make sure everything was all right.” She told him it wasn’t safe to be out biking.

The kid is thirteen. When did it become an oddity that one of his tribe might be outside by themselves? We hope she does it again. Next time my kid is going to point at her and start screaming “Stranger Danger!” at the top of his lungs.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Go outside and have some fun. Make it an honest to God POETS Day. Skip out of work and be as free and independent as a kid on a bike.

***

East Coker is a real place. Barely. It’s a tiny village in Summerset set as inland as can be, sandwiched between the Bristol and English Channels, on the north and south respectively; somewhere between Southampton and Plymouth on that southernmost extension of Great Britain the Pilgrims watched sink below the horizon. Wikipedia counts the population as 1667 souls as of the last edit and pictures tell me it’s the kind of quaint English village ripe for a festival-related trio of murders only a clergyman or spinster can solve, to the embarrassment of the local constabulary.

The hamlet is famous as a vehicle for T.S. Eliot’s contemplation in the eponymous poem “East Coker,” the second of the works in his Four Quartets. It was, or is, the ancestral home of the Eliot line. The family left for the American Colonies in the early 1600s and a return by T.S. as a representative of the American diaspored is the occasion for reflections and assertions of the cyclical nature of being, continuity, decay, and rejuvenation.

Eliot returns to his beginning, the place where family lore begins. This place is also his personal end; having left America for England; it, the nation if not one of its smaller postal codes, is his destination, the place he’s made a home. He’s completed a circuit, all the better that it’s a personal end with a cross-generational beginning, as it concerns a man but also mankind.

In “Burnt Norton,” the first poem of the Four Quartets, Eliot plays at time. He opens,

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

All is in circular motion, he tells us. “Desire itself is movement,” he writes. Time and change mean satisfaction is impossible. Only “Love itself is unmoving.” In the center of all the turning of time and want is a still point of perfection. It’s an ecstasy he glimpses in a mote filled beam of sunlight, “Caught in the form of limitation / Between un-being and being.” He leaves us there, contemplating the divine still point we can’t see but for a glimpse, warned off as Moses that to see directly is too terrible.

“In my beginning is my end,” begins “East Coker,” and we are right back in circular motion. I’ve chosen only the first part of the poem for this week’s post. The whole is a bit long, but it’s freely available online should you want to read. As with “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker” is divided into five parts. As I wrote here over a year ago,

“Eliot wrote extensively on Elizabethan drama and its five act structure is certainly being mirrored, but Wilson points out that Eliot was a devout man and this is a religious work so we see in the five parts the structure of mystical prayer.”

The parts are, per the Wilson mentioned above (the poet James Matthew Wilson whose four part lecture on the Four Quartets is well, well worth your time), setting, discovery, contemplation, purgation, and repentance, so we are concerned with the setting.

He introduces a present perfect world. This was and is and will be a place where things rise and fall and participate in the next iteration. Where in “Burnt Norton” we had a cracked concrete pool that remained a pool though it could no longer hold water, here we have indentured matter that in all its permutations remains of the place.

Part I, from East Coker
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

Eliot obviously raises Ecclesiastes with the last few lines, mimicking King Kohelet’s passed wisdom. Man, nature, and man’s creation are interwoven, each a part of each in turn recalling his “Burnt Norton” opening, “time future contained in time past.”

Having established flux, in the next stanza he fixes his moment, where in the cycle he stands as he speaks to the reader. He gives definites about the place as it exists, not necessarily at a specific moment, but over a day. This is East Coker as he encounters it at this stage in his life, so it’s populated with specifics hinting at the time of year but also specifics of a moment as a van passes. We’re out of generations and grand schemes as he gathers himself.

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.

In his video on “East Coker,” Wilson says that Eliot denies the last line of the second stanza references Hegel’s line, “The owl of Minerva only flies at dusk.” I can’t remember if he shrugs or rolls his eyes after saying so in the video, but Wilson clearly thinks Eliot was, at the very least, influenced by the philosopher’s line. Maybe it was Hegel, maybe it was the same frustration felt through ages that spurred Ronnies Lane and Wood to write “Ooh La La” about wishing they knew then what they know now. Whatever wisdom is coming, he trusts in it though it hasn’t yet arrived and hopes it comes sooner as the day is already late.

Eliot was no intellectual slouch. His work is filled with spiraling ideas, philosophy, and theology. He didn’t always write in verse. There is a shelf’s worth of essays where the man espoused in prose eloquently. In his verse a particularly well made phrase can get lost in the midst of high ideas, but he chose to put it in song. Sometimes I have to pull myself away from what he says and remember he was as concerned with how he said a thing.

I’ve said my piece against free verse, reversed myself, and reversed myself again. In all cases, I’ve held that no matter what my verdict, I’m loath to excommunicate the likes of Eliot and Pound, H.D. and Williams. On the one hand, I fear free verse gives cover to pretenders. That’s a fear realized and well borne out. On the other, there is a rhythm that comes unexpectedly and unconventionally from honest practitioners.

I read C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism last weekend and was struck by this passage:

“In childhood sing-song is not a defect. It is simply the first form of rhythmic sensibility; crude itself, but a good symptom not a bad one. This metronomic regularity, this sway of the whole body to the metre simply as metre, is the basis which makes possible all later variations and subtleties. For there are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious. Again, it is possible that those who are now young have met vers libre too early in life. When this is real poetry, its aural effects are of extreme delicacy and demand for their appreciation an ear long trained on metrical poetry. Those who think they can receive vers libre without metrical training are, I submit, deceiving themselves; trying to run before they can walk.”

The nuns weren’t too high on free verse, so it was all sing-song in my elementary education. From seventh grade onward we were fed Dickinson and Whitman. There was Shakespeare, Keats, and Poe along the way, but I’m worried I “met vers libre too early in life.” I wouldn’t be alone. Free verse is everywhere now and has been since the childhoods of my generation at the very least. Are folks older than I am better able to appreciate it? I don’t doubt that I can enjoy free verse as I often do, but am I handicapped? Is there a level of appreciation I don’t know exists. Damn Lewis.

In any case, I was struck by a line that pulled me into music. It’s the second in the next section, which is still a part of the second stanza, though marked by half lines. The editing software throws fits when I try to indent, but after “Wait for the early owl.” the next line below should begin dropped and set a few tabs in, under and after the word “owl.”

“If you do not come too close,” he writes. It’s conspiratorial. We’re drawn in. And then he repeats, “if you do not come too close,” as if telling us we can come closer, maybe a little bit. We’re huddling, about to receive wonder. This whole next section is enchanting. Archaic spellings that probably are but at least recall Middle English take us out of our time, a wedding signals continuity, and all a part of old Kohelet’s understanding.

In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Having taken us out of our moment, he pins us, even from our great vantage point astride generations, binds us as in time where divinity is without. We cannot partake in infinity as men.

Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

Part II begins in an Indian Summer, a break in the expected cycle and the wisdom of old men, invoked by Ecclesiastes, is called into question. The persona doubts not just his understanding, but his capacity to understand and resolves to be humble and wait.

Around the same time, Eliot sorta wrote Cats.

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

I used to work in a restaurant called Elizabeth on 37^th in Savannah, Georgia. It was a great place swimming in awards and accolades from all manner of associations but the owners were most proud of their James Beard Awards. If I remember right, when I was there we had a Beard Award for Best Restaurant: Southeast, Best Chef: Southeast, Best Wine Program, and our Chef de Cuisine won the Rising Star recognition. We even got shortlisted for whatever they called the best service in the nation award in 1999 or 2000.

When we got word of that service nomination we looked at the other four restaurants in competition and saw we were up against NY, San Francisco, Dallas, and a second from either NY or San Francisco – it’s been a while and I forget. One of the waiters I worked with used to work for the or one of the NY based nominee(s) and said something about them having a $30K a month budget for flowers. We didn’t have that. The owner cracked a few bottles of champagne and we paraded through the restaurant chanting “We’re number five! We’re number five!”

The awards – Beard, Wine Spectator, and others – were hung in the foyer. It was a bit braggadocios but the staff was ready to back up the initial impression. The last time I was there all that stuff had been taken down so as not to distract from the framed pictures of the owners in Oslo, various certificates, and invitations to receptions from when they were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the Dalai Lama. The Savannah crew got to stand on a balcony and were serenaded by masses of Norwegians and feted well. The award went to the European Union that year. One of the owners jokingly brushed it away. “Yeah,” he said. “The fix was in.”

They never thought they were going to win, but if someone of consequence nominates you for the Nobel Peace Prize and you have the means, why wouldn’t you make the trip to Norway? Considering the local buzz they generated they probably could have written it off as an advertising expense.

I’m still not clear on the details but one of the brothers that bought the restaurant from Elizabeth Terry was a regular at the local Savannah Buddhist temple, so when the Dalai Lama visited the monks brought him to the restaurant. They got talking, the Dalai Lama’s concerns about a water reclamation issue in India or somewhere came up, and the owners had a fund raising idea. That’s about as much as I could get from the falsely modest owners. A few former co-workers told me little more but I got the impression that the false modesty was a new thing and the employees had heard and discussed their fill of the subject.

A huge perk of working at E37 was Saturday night dinner. Each week a member of the kitchen staff was given a fifty dollar budget to feed the staff. Some used their turn to wow us all with something cool and avant garde and some made hit-the-spot burgers with tater tots. There was a lot of in between and we never knew what we were getting until we got. The cooks didn’t look on it as extra work. It was time to shine. There was one particular line chef whose turn we all looked forward to.

Her name was likely Chrissie or Christine or something but I don’t remember. Her job previous to Elizabeth was at The Lady and Sons, Paula Deen’s flagship restaurant. Deen got her start making hot lunches from her home and sending her sons out to sell them door to door in downtown Savannah before opening an official business with licenses and everything, thus the restaurant’s name.

The Lady in Sons was supposed to have the best southern comfort food in Georgia. I have no idea. I lived in Savannah for three years and never made it in there. The line was always too long. But if it was anything like what Chrissie/Christine made for us every sixth or seventh Saturday I’d say it has rights to the claim. Wossername made us juicy and crisp fried chicken, Salisbury steaks swimming in onions, black eyed peas in rich pork liquor (we would drink it straight,) and greens that would make you feel bad for using that terrible phrase “make you slap your momma.” It was always a great night when she cooked for us. Almost.

One particular Friday she was off her game. She was on apps and everything was coming out slow or worse: piecemeal, with one or two of a table’s plates ready four or five minutes before the others. The drum of “Do you have 21 coming?” and “I’m dragging a tarte,” and “No, you said two minutes five minutes ago,” got to her. She didn’t yell. She got quiet. Steaming quiet. But not steaming enough to keep us from asking why the steamed Vidalia stuffed with sausage and thyme wasn’t ready yet. She never caught up and our demands never let up. Her ears were radiant crimson.

Eventually, service ended, we cleaned the dining rooms, had a smoke and a cocktail, and went back to see what was for dinner. Chrissie put two platters in the service window, said “Bless all ya’ll,” and stormed out, but she didn’t say “bless.”

On one of the platters was unseasoned boiled chicken thighs and on the other was plain white rice. Two things happened that night. First, I tried sriracha for the first time. I’d never had it before. I’d never even heard of it, but one of the non-harassed kitchen guys brought some out and said it saves anything. He was right. Even blah unsalted yardbird aint half bad with a few squirts of sriracha. Second, I decided to branch out from Italian and French stuff and learn how to cook southern staples for myself. My friend Jeffrey, who was working as a waiter but had an impressive CV as a chef, told me it was an easy style to get good at if you had a little patience. Chrissie (sure) led me to believe that I was going to get a plate full of fatty salty meat and vegetables with all the icky vitamins cooked out but she left me high and dry. No more of that.

I never mastered fried chicken. The vegetables came easily. Salisbury steak was a breeze. What I liked best, though, was smothered pork chops in an onion gravy. I stick with the meat-and-three tradition of using the cheap breakfast style chops, but I throw in some white wine and herb de Provence because I’m a snob at heart.

I hope you like this. By itself it’s easy to put together and there’s enough simmering time to make a few side dishes and have it all come out hot and ready at once which, despite that one night, Chrissie excelled at doing.

Southern Style Smothered Pork Chops

• 6 breakfast chops

• 1 large Vidalia onion, sliced

• 3-4 cloves of garlic, minced

• 3 tbsp all-purpose flour plus more as needed

• 1 ½ cups dry white wine

• 1-2 cups chicken stock

• 1 tsp herb de Provence or more to taste

• pinch red pepper flakes (optional)

• salt and pepper to taste

• olive oil

Liberally salt both sides of the chops. I don’t add pepper yet, but feel free to if that’s what you like.

Add a few glugs of olive oil to a Dutch oven or similar pan over medium high heat put in the chops.

Get a sear on both sides.

Remove the chops to a plate and set aside. Add the sliced onions and sauté for five or so minutes until they start turn translucent in spots and a few pieces start to brown.

Add 3 tbsp of flour and toss the onions to coat. Cook for three or four minutes more.

Add the garlic, continue cooking for a minute, and then add the wine and red pepper flakes if you choose to use them.

Reduce by a third and then add the stock and bring to a boil then reduce heat to a low simmer.

Add the herb de Provence and stir. If needed add a bit of flour to thicken and a pinch of salt. Put the chops back in the pan and submerge them as well as you can. Cover and let simmer for twenty minutes rotating the chops midway if they can’t all fit under the liquid.

After twenty minutes they should be perfectly done and moist as all get out, but just in case cut into one and be certain. If needed, cook a bit more (but I don’t think it will be needed.) Correct for salt and pepper serve.

All sorts of starch and vegetables or fruit combinations will work well as sides here but I’m happy with spicy pineapple collards and sort of but not really labor intensive mac & cheese. They look good on a plate together.

Hope you enjoy.

[This entry originally posted at ordinary-times.com on February 16, 2023]