`The Dry Disease'

Another aged giant came down this week, a sycamore in Houston that stood 106 feet tall, with a circumference of 149 inches and a horizontal spread of eighty feet. It’s a familiar story, developer vs. tree, one that pits the rights of property owners against the unquantifiable rights of living things and their admirers. The equation will always remain unbalanced, with both sides getting agitated and inarticulate. (For an articulate voice, see Mike Gilleland on arboricide.) I feel a special empathy for sycamores. With their flaking bark and rawboned branches, they’re like awkward teenagers, pretty girls with acne. Robert A. Vines writes in Trees of East Texas (University of Texas Press, 1977): 

“The wood is used for crates, interior finishing, furniture, cooperage, rollers, butcher blocks, and tobacco boxes. It attains the largest size of any deciduous tree in the United States and is often planted for ornament. It is slow growing but long-lived, and old trees are often hollow with decay.” 

Sycamore is an inexact word referring to a fig tree native to the Middle East, a European species of maple (Love’s Labour’s Lost: “Under the cool shade of a sycamore / I thought to close mine eyes some half an hour”) and our North American plane tree or buttonwood of the genus Platanus. I associate it with cities but early settlers found great stands of sycamore in the Appalachians, and learned to associate them with rich bottomland and abundant water. In 1802, the French botanist François André Michaux found a sycamore on the bank of the Ohio River near Marietta that measured forty-seven feet in circumference. In his three-volume Histoire des arbres forestiers de l'Amérique septentrionale (1810–13), Michaux says the tree’s base was “swollen in an extraordinary manner.” 

In Flora and Fauna of the Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), Kelby Ouchley includes a passage from a letter written by Private Theodore F. Upson of the 100^th Indiana Infantry Volunteers. It’s dated Nov. 24, 1864, after the Battle of Griswoldville: 

“We had no coffins, but I could not bear to think of putting my old friend into his grave in that way. I remembered that at a house a short distance away I had seen a gum or hollow sycamore log of about the right length and size. We got it, split it in halves, put one in the grave dug in the sandy soil, put his lifeless body in it, covered it with the other half, filled up the grave and by the light of a fire we had built with the rails, marked with a peice [sic] of lumber pencil his name, Company, and Regiment.” 

In “Poplar, Sycamore” (The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, 1947), Richard Wilbur divides his poem into two equal parts, each devoted to one of the title trees. Here’s the second half: 

“Sycamore, trawled by the tilt sun,

Still scrawl your trunk with tattered lights, and keep

The spotted toad upon your patchy bark,

Baffle the sight to sleep,

Be such a deep

Rapids of lacing light and dark,

My eye will never know the dry disease

Of thinking things no more than what he sees.” 

Wilbur’s final two lines read like a fine eulogy for the sycamore at the corner of Oxford and Twenty-Third streets. 

[Scott Joplin composed one of his rags, “The Sycamore,” in 1904.]

"Patterns You Desire to See Again'

An earnest and nervously anonymous reader tells me her sole mission in life is to “make beautiful things and share them with the world.” Commendable, surely preferable to making ugly things, the mission of too many contemporary artists, but perhaps a little high-minded. Based on the poem she includes in her note, her resolve is sincere but premature. “Needs work,” as a newspaper editor I once worked for invariably wrote on raw copy. Beauty calls for more than good wishes and a longing to please. Guy Davenport said Marianne Moore’s “triumph is that she has found [beauty] where few have before.” One of Guy’s lessons as writer and teacher is the conviction that goodness, truth and beauty are not incompatible, that “every force evolves a form,” in the old Shaker formulation. Claudia Gray restates the notion in “Beauty”: 

“Only prepare the soil and bury seed

in patterns you desire to see again

enrobed in color's riot. Only then

look up and hope the sky will meet their need,

your need, for what your plan was all about.

For if you say its name, there may be drought.” 

Tuesday marked the twenty-third anniversary of my only meeting with Davenport – not counting letters, telephone conversations and books -- at his home in Lexington, Ky. His house on Sayre Avenue and its contents embodied beauty in the home-grown American sense of a clean, orderly, well-lit space. Davenport found beauty in Melville’s description of the mating and birthing of whales, in thistle, in the prose of Ruskin, Doughty and Beckett, in Arthur Golding’s translations of Ovid, in Shaker furniture. He deemed Love’s Labours Lost the most beautiful of Shakespeare’s plays. He would, I think, have agreed with Aquinas who defined beauty as id quod visum placet – “that which being seen pleases.” 

`Trades, Manufactuaries, High Life, Low Life'

A thoughtful, amusing and characteristically confused entry in Coleridge’s notebook dated “Midnight 5 April 1805”: 

“I will write as truly as I can from Experience [--] actual individual Experience – not from Book-Knowle[d]ge. But yet it is wonderful how exactly the Knowle[d]ge from good books coincides with the experience of men of the World, as I have often noticed when much younger / in men of the World who beginning to withdraw a little into themselves, commonly by reading –" 

Coleridge’s late-night, laudanum-addled thoughts careen like pinballs. In the first phrase he might be Hemingway, with his he-man cult of experience. He sounds the now-familiar anti-intellectual platitudes of the intellectual – no book-learnin’ for me, says the book-intoxicated poet. At age thirty-two, he discovers wise men, “men of the World,” have found wisdom in books. Winning evidence of an incipient humility. 

“—I have noticed in them their deep delight in so many passages that had escaped me – so much in so many others which I had never heard of but from Books / Experience necessary no doubt, if only to give a light and shade in the mind, to give to some ideas a greater vividness than others, & thereby to make it a thing of Time and outward reality – practical – for all being equally vivid = the whole becomes a dream.” 

Reading grows deeper with age – not that a facile reader will ever read deeply. The text reveals itself sequentially, like a time-released pill. We and our books, “good books,” grow old together, tested against experience. 

“But not withstanding this & other reasons I yet believe that the saws against Book-knowle[d]ge are handed down to us from Times when Books conveyed only abstract Science or abstract Morality & Religion / whereas in the present day what is there of real Life in all its goings on, Trades, Manufacturies, high Life, low life, animate & inanimate, that is not in books. Books are conversation at present. Evil as well as Good in this, I well know / but Good too as well as Evil –” 

[From Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection, ed. Seamus Perry, Oxford University Press, 2002. The immediately preceding passage, dated April 2, is lovely, suggesting Coleridge should have paid more attention to the natural world and less to the contents of his mind: “The beautiful Milk Thistle with the milk-blue-white veins or fibres up & athwart its dark green Leaves.”]

`Like a Frock Coat on a Mermaid'

A friend once speculated that perhaps the only justification for his existence was his introduction of one person to another. This may have happened years before, and he may have forgotten or was never even aware of his small essential role, like Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. In other words, we may be nothing more than conduits or catalysts for others, mere plot devices, linkages rather than links. A humbling thought, one that downsizes the swollen ego and emphasizes our interconnectedness with others. In the literary world, John Wain (1925-1994) serves as such a figure for this reader. The Observer has reposted Wain’s tribute to his friend Stevie Smith, who died March 7, 1971, at age sixty-eight. He pays her the surpassing compliment of precisely understanding her strategy as a poet: 

“As for her poetry, its most immediately striking feature is the perfect marriage of form and content. Since she perceived the world by the light of an imagination as undeflected as a child’s, traditional poetic form would have hampered her like a frock coat on a mermaid; mere formlessness, on the other hand, would have failed to convey the ritual element in her message.” 

What a superb choice is “undeflected,” a word that outshines “innocent” or “naïve,” with its suggestion of courageousness and resolution. Wain says “she had a strong sense of the numinous that pervaded everything she wrote.” “Numinous”: another precise usage, preferable to the more conventional “spiritual.” Smith’s admirers need tactful reminders of her genuine eccentricity, her human and literary oddness. At the time of Smith’s death, Wain was already working on Samuel Johnson, the first post-Boswell biography of Johnson I read, published in 1974. We know Smith knew her Johnson. In his assessment of Smith’s diction, Wain observes that “the familiar and domestic took on an aureole of wonder and, sometimes, of dread” – a formulation that applies with equal justice to Johnson’s work. 

I’ve read little else by Wain, but his biography of Johnson I’ve revisited three or four times in forty years. Only Boswell’s and W. Jackson Bate’s lives I’ve read more often. I sympathize with Wain’s affinity for Johnson, as he expresses it in his introduction. He “lived the same life of Grub Street, chance employment, and the unremitting struggle to write enduring books against the background of an unstable existence.” Stevie Smith writes: 

“Away, melancholy,

Away with it, let it go.”

`Tableau Vivant if You Will'

An old woman collects wildflowers, yellow ones, and finds a dead man. With Beckett, minute points of grammar and word choice assume unaccustomed importance. He begins: “He was found lying on the ground.” Why the passive voice? Because a corpse is by definition incapable of activity? Then: “No one had missed him.” In Indiana thirty years ago, police found the body of a dead man in a field, in a “state of advanced decomposition,” as they say, and he was never identified. At the scene I thought of “The Groundhog”: “His form began its senseless change.” The police found “no evidence of foul play.” Death invites the soothing cliché. This was an anonymous death capping what remains, to my knowledge, an anonymous life. 

But “One Evening” (Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1995) is the old woman’s story, not the corpse’s. She knows death and seems unmoved by her discovery of the body: “She is wearing the black she took on when widowed young. It is to reflower the grave she strays in search of the flowers he had loved.” In his biography, Anthony Cronin tells us the corpse, in his green coat with mismatched buttons, suggests Beckett’s father and “the essential isolation and pathos Sam conferred on him.” We don’t need to know that. Beckett writes: 

“The old sunlit face. Tableau vivant if you will. In its way. All is silent from now on. For as long as she cannot move. The sun disappears at least and with it all shadow. All shadow here. Slow fade of afterglow. Night without moon or stars. All that seems to hang together. But no more about it.” 

That’s how the fragment, published posthumously, concludes. Beckett discarded it as part of a longer work published in 1981 as Ill Seen Ill Said, which concludes: 

“First last moment. Grant only enough remain to devour all. Moment by glutton moment. Sky earth the whole kit and boodle. Not another crumb of carrion left. Lick chops and basta. No. One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness.”

`What Culture Survives the Century'

“Apocalypse Next Exit” is not top-shelf Guy Davenport. For his seasoned readers, the themes are familiar – cultural decay, the corrosive ubiquity of automobiles, the growing cheesiness of just about everything – but his jeremiad is shriller and less witty than elsewhere. The essay ran in the Dec. 1, 1970, issue of National Review, where Davenport had been reviewing books for eight years and would continue doing so for another three. It begins: “The automobile, a mechanical termite, has in the last two decades eaten the American town, turning it into a rotten lace of trashy buildings.” Inarguably true, but so what? The sentence, unlike Davenport’s best essays (and essays-as-stories), tells us nothing new, makes no novel connections, leaves us without memorable music. It’s a failed aphorism. By the end of his half-column paragraph, he settles in, the prose improves but it’s the same old tune: 

“The great historical fact of the immediate past is therefore not that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon or that the century of total war has continued into its seventieth year or that the liberal philosophies of the nineteenth century have become the mandates for terrorism and totalitarianism, but that man has ruined his one design for a community.” 

Davenport moves on to a more congenial subject, literature, which he says “has displayed a nervousness and strange disquiet that needs sharp-eyed interpretation.”  Clearly, times have changed in the subsequent four decades, as when Davenport claims the American writer is “not a political animal.” Today, every mediocre writer is political (as well as a few good ones). He writes: 

“Neither comedy nor satire has attracted the mind of the Left, which has a leaden tendency toward postures of sincerity, ritual wailing, doctrinal propaganda and high-toned seriousness. No sane artist would give up the mobility of his intellect for the frozen attitudes of the Left.” 

The period since 1950, Davenport observes, marks the end of Modernism, the “brilliant modern renaissance that began in 1910.” However, “a cultural period takes its tone as much from what it honors in the past as what it creates,” he says, citing the deferred recognition of  Charles Ives, Louis Zukofsky, Jorge Luis Borges and Robert Walser. Neglected figures include Paul Metcalf, Ivy Compton-Burnett (about whom Davenport writes an appreciation, “The Last of the Masters,” after her death, in the Oct. 7, 1969, issue of National Review) and Charles Doughty. He praises Cormac McCarthy, Harry Crews and Kenneth Gangemi. As always, Davenport is a connoisseur of the obscure, unexpected, ignored and devalued. His tastes are never programmatic and seldom predictable. Among critics he remains a non-aligned nation. He says we are entering a decadent period in which “one can detect the autumnal seriousness, a certain ripeness of decay, echoes of the high rot of the end of Rome. Decadence in the arts is always harvest time, the moment of summaries, resignation, retrospection.” 

Davenport is writing here at age forty-three. Most of what we remember him for – fiction, essays, poems, translations – is still in the future. In 1969 he had published his first story, “The Aeroplanes of Brescia,” in The Hudson Review.  His first book of fiction, Tatlin!: Six Stories, will come out in 1974. His private renaissance is already underway. In 1970, Bellow, Beckett, Nabokov, Philip Roth, J.F. Powers, Stanley Elkin, Peter De Vries, John Cheever, William Maxwell, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Anthony Powell, Charles Portis, Richard Yates, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kingsley Amis, Thomas Berger and Eudora Welty are working, and that's just fiction. Davenport concludes his essay with these words: 

“It will be the business of literature and the arts to contain and transmit what culture survives the century. If any.”

`The Sport of Truly Chastened Things'

Levi Stahl got some of us swapping stories about turtles, a creature tailor-made for fables because he embodies so many human vulnerabilities and strengths. A turtle is armored but slow, slow but patient, patient but fierce. Marianne Moore, who translated La Fontaine and often wrote of armored animals, was nicknamed “Turtle” by her family and suggested, among other names, “Utopian Turtletop” when the Ford Motor Co. asked her in the nineteen-fifties to christen their new automobile (they settled on “Edsel”). 

As to resilience, I remember almost twenty-five years ago driving back to my newspaper after visiting the animal sanctuary Beaversprite in Dolgeville, N.Y. Ahead of me, I watched as a driver swerved to strike a box turtle crossing the road, and saw the animal ricochet off a tire and into the tall grass along the berm. I pulled over and found the turtle, scuffed on the side of his shell like an old pair of shoes, already walking again into the adjacent field. In “Turtle” (Flamingo Watching, 1994), Kay Ryan appreciates the creature’s human lot: 

“Who would be a turtle who could help it?

A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,

she can ill afford the chances she must take

in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.

Her track is graceless, like dragging

a packing-case places, and almost any slope

defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,

she's often stuck up to the axle on her way

to something edible. With everything optimal,

she skirts the ditch which would convert

her shell into a serving dish. She lives

below luck-level, never imagining some lottery

will change her load of pottery to wings.

Her only levity is patience,

the sport of truly chastened things.” 

I haven’t read Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary, the book that inspired Levi’s post, though I saw the movie starring Ben Kingsley, Glenda Jackson and Michael Gambon a long time ago. Hoban, I find, returned to turtles in a poem, “Turtle Prince?” (A Russell Hoban Omnibus, 1999). It reminds me of Stevie Smith (who, incidentally, was played by Glenda Jackson in the film Stevie). Nice for the turtle to come out, for once, the victor.