Southern Bookman

Chaucer's Enduring Gift

Chaucer's small crypt in Westminster Abbey is a striking memento a mori. Standing there looking at the stone box that holds his remains, I thought about how alive he and his characters are in "The Canterbury Tales." In his verse narrative, a prototype for imaginative literature from the English novel to Milton's epics and Shakespeare's plays, he describes an energetic London whose spirit remains in today's swirling streets of sound and color. His bones have lain in the old cathedral for hundreds of years, but walking outside into the city's life, I could imagine him still a part of it, bustling around, hearing snatches of conservation, hurrying to a tavern such as the one he mentions, the Tabard Inn.

Now, with another April arrived, I reread the General Prologue to his famous book, his hymn to the month and the renewal of spring as current today as when he first wrote it in 1386. While his language is archaic, his poetic force surges on, his words still expressing the reader's excitement at spring's arrival.

Chaucer's work is one of the foundations of the English language. He says at the start of his poem "Whan that April with its showers soote/The drought of March hath perced to the roote./And bathed every veine in swich licour, of which vertu engendred is the flowr; ..." His work is the root of English literature.

Donne's Ride Remains New After 400 Years

With Good Friday here again, a bit early this year, I once more read John Donne's "Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward." How nice to again turn the pages of my Norton Anthology of English Literature, from Beowulf to Chaucer, Sydney, Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare to Donne, leading the 17th century.

The reading has special significance this year when I see I have reached the 400th anniversary of the ride described in the poem. Yet Donne's language, the glow of his mind, remain fresh and vital.

While still bound by pre-Copernian cosmology, Donne's outlook seems close to ours with its emphasis on business and self-improvement. The poet is a man on horseback, but he could just as well be on a plane. The key, unchanging element is the promise of redemption, a faith in a self that transcends daily busyness. As with all great poems, "Riding Westward" contains a mystery, a presence, beyond its words. Each year I read its lines, It's like for the first time.

T.S. Eliot's Turning Point

The Sandy Springs library at times places recent acquisitions directly in the regular shelves, without a stay on the new book racks. The other day, browsing in the British literature section, I came upon Volume 3 of T.S. Eliot's letters, released only this year. Unless I missed it, the collection was never displayed in the all too skimpy new books section at the front of the library. This seems to especially occur with books on poetry and literature, so I have gotten used to hunting among the shelves of older books for new treasures such as the Eliot letters.

The letters cover 1926-27, when Eliot's first wife, Vivien, was sinking further into madness. "The Wasteland" was already a sensation, and most of Eliot's energies are devoted to editing The Criterion, a literary journal that never received wide readership. In these years, Eliot is also acquiring British citizenship and joining the Anglican church.

Many of the letters concern his editorial duties at the literary journal, which shifts from quarterly to monthly publication. In the early part of the book, he's concerned with Vivien's illness; later, after she's committed to an institution, she virtually disappears. He writes to a dizzying variety of the era's literary figures, many of them forgotten. Of interest is his friendship with the flamboyantly gay Jean Cocteau, who makes a brief early appearance, and his flirty tone with Virginia Woolf.

Vivien's letters are heartbreaking; Eliot's often dry and rigid. He himself is in poor mental health; an anecdote from Aldous Huxley mentions a pale and haunted Eliot downing six gins at lunch. Like a bad odor in the drawing room, many of the letters, especially those to close male chums, display a dismaying anti-Semitism and racism expressed with crude jests about black people.

The letters reveal a witty, cosmopolitan man who despite his problems enjoys the swirl of lunches and teas, literary gossip and frequent trips to the continent. Although the letters rarely reveal his poetic and critical principles in depth, they through his mind give a reading of the era's literary culture, with its anxieties, preoccupations and appalling prejudices.

In his role as Criterion editor, his rejection notices are direct, pungent and barbed with constructive criticism. Here's a jab from one to Allen Tate refusing some poems, "you are a little tied up in your own tail at present, but I am sure it will get straightened out in time."

Eliot's second wife, Valerie, with whom he found great happiness, was the editor of the first three volumes of the letters, along with John Haffenden. Valerie Eliot died earlier this year, with many decades of letters to come. Haffenden will likely carry on for the rest of Eliot's life through World War II, his winning the Noble Prize and his progression as a critic and playwright.

One stylistic note; the British edition of Volume 3 of Eliot's letters has a full length photo of him in a classic double-breasted suit, wearing a bowler and leaning jauntingly on an umbrella. The American edition has a sober portrait of him, perhaps taken at his office. The two photos together present two sides of the writer, one free-spirited and engaged with life's pleasures; the other brittlely serious and crippingly earnest. Both are well-represented here.

The collection shows a man journeying from the despair that brought forth "The Wasteland" to the religious serenity shown later in "The Four Quartets." That Vivien was left behind on that journey raises our sympathy, along with the realization that his self-preservation resulted from her abandonment.

Farewell, Valerie Eliot

T.S. Eliot's widow, Valerie, known for giving the famed poet and critic happiness in his later years and zealously guarding his legacy, has died at age 86. Valerie, who was 38 years younger than Eliot, is the editor of his letters and a lauded edition of Eliot's "The Wasteland." That critical edition included a fascimile reproduction of the famed poem's manuscript, including changes suggested by Ezra Pound.

"The Wasteland," that earth-shattering icon of modernism, was the product of Eliot's horrible first marriage to the mentally unstable Vivienne Eliot. who died at a tragic young age. The Eliots' explosive marriage was the subject of the play and film "Tom and Viv," which, with the advent of feminism, cast Eliot at the villain.

Valerie, Eliot's secretary at the publishing firm Faber & Faber, defended Eliot against personal criticism such as that stirred up by the play. The release of Eliot's letters took years, and academic magpies accused Valerie of being too personally connected with the project. HIs letters revealed  his distressing anti-Semitism as well as a certain crude sexual humor.

He was certainly a complex, tortured man whose youth was wasted by mental problems. Valerie is among literature's heroes for comforting his final years, and her editing shows that she is a strong literary figure in her own right. Eliot was a complex figure. His work will long stand as one of the hallmarks of English literature, and Valerie has an honored place for preserving his legacy, although she did allow "Cats."

Happy Keats Day

Today is the autumn day I wait for all year, the one that matches the spirit of John Keats' "To Autumn," to my mind the most perfect poem in the language and an essential expression of Romanticism. With crisp wind, blue skies and the leaves nearing their peak of autumn color, today feels like the day Keats described so many years ago.

Lately, I've been slowly reading Nicholas Roe's new life of Keats, a frequent subject of biographers the past 50 years or so. Roe has uncovered many new details about Keats and exhaustively traces connections among Keats and his family and friends. He fills in a lot of gaps left open in previous biographies, and makes more than a few speculative leaps. The autumn connection is appropriate this week, Keats' birthday was Oct. 31, at least on his birth certificate. His family said he was born on Oct. 29, 1795, 217 years ago today.

I suppose covers are not protected by copyright: Roe's book uses the same cover illustration of Andrew Motion's earlier biography of Keats, Joseph Severn's painting of Keats on the heath listening to the nightingale (shown below from the cover of Motion's book).

Severn, who cared for Keats in his final months, was neglected by Keats in his early days as a poet, Roe says. Pretty much snubbing young Severn, Keats rather sucks up to the then lauded artist Benjamin Haydon. Along with details about Keats' friendship with Haydon, Roe comes up with copious information about Keats' first literary acquaintances, including the most important, Leigh Hunt, the poet/journalist/editor/critic and political agitator who did prison time because of his radical views. The prison stay doesn't sound too daunting; Hunt was able to bring to his cell many personal belongings and comfort items and receive visitors.

 Roe describes a scene I don't recall reading about before, a meeting between Shelley and Keats at Hunt's home. Shelley and Keats are entwined in literary history, through Shelley's eulogy to Keats and their joint burial in Rome's Protestant Cemetery. Older than both Keats and Shelley, Leigh outlived his young proteges by many years, eventually achieving the dubious immortality of being a model for one of Dickens' comic characters.

I've visited the Keats houses in Rome and Hampstead in London. Roe discloses a number of other locations for Keats, which made me desire to return to London and embark upon a Keats pilgrimage. Until then, I'll continue reading "To Autumn" and other Keats poems. 

One striking and thrilling detail about Keats' emergence is emphasized by Roe. The young poet for months wrote the kind of juvenile verse that other beginning poets produce, nothing distinguishable from the verse churned out by his early rival Reynolds, some of whose work Roe cites. Then, all of a sudden, Keats produces "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer," which displays the control and vivid language of his mature poems. Genius makes a stunning appearance, with little previous foreshadowing. Roe notes the advance, but doesn't delve deeply into its cause. Was it a rush of inspiration, or a new confidence in technique? Or a miracle that can be ascribed to the mystery of genius?

Keats would struggle with later poems, especially his "Endymion," and even poems like "Ode to A Nightingale" are marred by clumsy writing. "On Looking Into Chapman's Homer" however anticipates the mastery of "To Autumn."

1.

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

2.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Recalling Henry V, Agincourt on St. Crispin's Day

St. Crispin's Day recalls Shakespeare's Henry V and the British king's stirring victory over the French at Agincourt. King Harry's rousing speech to his outnumbered troops on the eve of battle in the patriotic play contributed the phrases "We Band of Brothers" and "the happy few" to the language. Robert Kennedy loved the "band of brothers" idea, and Stendahl dedicated "The Charterhouse of Parma" to the happy few, presumably those sophisticates who enjoy civilization's best.

The historic Agincourt has long fascinated me; at times I have felt the mystical sense that I was present at the battle on Oct. 26, 1425. Henry's ill and starving soldiers defeated a numerically superior French force. Reports vary on how much the British were outnumbered; it could have been as much as 5 to 1. The French also had a big edge in the number of horses. Some of Henry's men suffered from dysentery; unlike the beautiful uniforms and armor worn in films of the play, they fought naked, with watery shit running down their legs.

The British long-bow archers evened the odds, and battlefield luck did the rest. Henry stationed his archers on the sides, and their arrows spooked the French horses, which attacked from high ground and crashed into each other on a muddy, recently plowed field. The British also created a fortress with sharpened stakes from trees. With the French entangled with their fallen horses, many of them crushed into the mud and drowning, the British ran up to slaughter them, swinging swords and axes.

Another intriguing aftermath of the battle is that Henry ordered the killing of French prisoners, a severe violation of chivalric rules of battle. The controversy has raged through the centuries as to how many French nobles were killed and whether Henry was justified. Shakespeare himself gives a propaganda-ist defense of Henry.

The French military elite were decimated on that day. The tragedy echoes into the future; the English stood with the French in World Wars I and II, when French losses recalled the ancient debacle.

You Tube videos of Henry's St. Crispin's Day speech abound; one of the best is by Kenneth Branagh, from his Henry V movie of a few years ago.

Oscar Wilde's Wife Rediscovered

Didn't watch "Hemingway and Gellhorn" after all, after Mike Hale's pan in The New York Times convinced me that the HBO movie would be cliched and loaded with bad Hemingway dialogue. Sometime when I want to spend two and a half hours reliving the Hemingway myth, I'll probably watch it on On Demand.

In these days of shrinking print products and signs of cultural decline, small advances are worth celebrating. The London Review of Books has mysteriously shown up at the Barnes & Noble bookstand, and I spent several enjoyable hours on Memorial Day quaffing Guinness Stouts and reading the LBR, particularly Colm Toibin's educational and entertaining review of a new biography of Oscar Wilde's wife, Constance, and an annotated edition of Wilde's "The Portrait of Dorian Gray." Sad to say, before reading the review, I was unaware of Wilde's wife, or the two sons that he fathered with her.

As with so many other previously little known women married to famous men, Constance appears an interesting woman, with an admirable, long-tested loyalty to Wilde. "Feminist" critics and historians continue to illuminate the lives of women who played signicant roles in their men's lives of greatness or notoriety. Not only are these women like Constance Wilde or Clover Adams, whose accomplishments don't match those of their husbands but whose lives are worth examining. They also include those such as Gellhorn, whose more substantial achievements were long underappreciated.

I hope the LBR remains for sale at the Barnes & Noble. A few months ago, the Times Literary Supplement made a similar appearance, then disappeared. When I asked a B&N employee, he claimed the TLS hadn't sold enough copies to remain. I hope the LBR makes the cut; the copy I bought recently was the last one, so perhaps it's selling.

Farewell, Paul Fussell

After reading Paul Fussell's obituary in The New York Times, I found on a dusty bookshelf at home Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory." Fussell's study of the English literature that emerged from World War I began my abiding interest in the global bloodbath from 1914 to 1918 that wrecked European civilization and, as Fussell registered, brought forth a new ironic consciousness.

Beginning with Fussell's book, I've deeply studied what was called the "war to end all wars." One of my favorite books is an anthology of poetry and fiction from all countries embroiled in the war; the disillusion and ironic style Fussell analyzes in English writing was universal. The combination of the writers' high culture and the squalor of the trenches has always given me a deep tragic sense.

His examination of disillusion of writers such as Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves (I'd previously read "Goodbye to All That") arrived during the crashing wave of Vietnam-era books, articles and movies. The anti-war and anti-establishment anger had been numbed by the advent of disco -- preceding Fussell's death were those of Robin Gibb and Donna Summer -- and Fussell's book achieved surprising popularity. The World War I era he evoked mirrored the contemporary post Watergate, post-Vietnam epoch. Fussell's book did for the great war's literature what Edmund Wilson's "Patriotic Gore" did for the writings from the American Civil War.

I read other books by Fussell, his biography of Samuel Johnson, his study of the meter and form of English poetry, and his harrowing memoir of his World War II service as a young infantry soldier in Europe. He wrote with the classic elegance of English writers like Johnson, William Hazlitt and Walter Pater while maintaining a modern accessibility. In later life, he blasted U.S. culture with devastating, if heavy-handed, accuracy, an American version of British curmudgeons like Evelyn Waugh or Kingsley Amis. A telling sign of the triumph of mass popular tastes over the classic values Fussell championed was that Summer's obituary, unlike Fussell's, made the Times front page.

If much of Fussell's rants at the debased mass culture will likely fade, his "Great War and Modern Memory" will be one of the books read for generations.

John Sutherland Uncovers History of English Novel

John Sutherland's "Lives of the Novelists" is entertaining and educational. Sutherland displays knowledge of American and English novelists famed and obscure from the 17th century through today. So far, I've made it to the end of the 19th century, with more than 1,000 pages to go. The book's witty capsule bios find value in the little-known writers and deflate the reputations of some of the better known ones, such as Dickens. Overall, the portraits offer an in-depth history of English literature and publishing.

One of Sutherland's strengths, a chatty, informal style, turns into a weakness. The writing is marred by all too frequent dangling phrases, some unintentionally and painfully comic. A learned professor such as Sutherland should not be so susceptible to such sloppy writing. Such constructions, alas, are increasingly common in books, magazines and newspapers.

Despite the tangled sentences, Sutherland is an amusing and learned guide. Apparently, he's read deeply in the novelists he covers, an amazing feat. Reading "Lives of the Poets" is like munching snacks, but the nutritional value is more like sliced carrots than potato chips.

Farewell, Christopher Hitchens

At Christopher Hitchens' death, I recall in some amazement how much of his work I've read. Before completing his memoirs, "Hitch-22," I regularly read his columns in Vanity Fair and the online magazine Slate, as well as collections of his essays. I first started reading him years ago in "the Nation," when he was an unalloyed member of the left. I've also read some of his other books, such as his appreciation of Orwell.

Reading his book reviews for the Atlantic in his recently released volume of collected essays, I return to my earlier opinion that he was at his best writing about literature, although he perhaps was better known as a political and social polemicist. Although he never wrote fiction or poetry, or at least published any, he possessed as a critic a perception of imaginative writers' purposes and how well they accomplished them.

At times in his political writing, I felt he was a fraud, a charlaton with opinions a bit too glibly stated. He was always, though, an engaging writer who challenged thought, an examinatioin of my own opinions and conceptions. I liked his swaggering, wise-guy personality. His takedowns of Mother Teresa, Kissinger and Bill Clinton remain in my memory, bolstering my skepticism and natural propensity to shun idols.

His final writings gave excruciating details about the progress of the cancer that killed him. A final piece in the current Vanity Fair vividly renders the pain and humiliation of a terminal patient. It reads like great fiction, making me wish that he had written novels and short stories.

He dies at 62, the same age my father died of cancer nearly 30 years ago. Hard to imagine the world of thought and language without Hitchens' distinctive voice.