Southern Bookman

Pushcart Prize Anthology Uneven

For years, I've enjoyed reading the Pushcart Prize Best of the Small Presses anthology, so was tickled to come across the 37th edition. While Bill Henderson's project boosts of its grass-roots authenticity, it's gained over the years some institutional pomposity; the collection is slickly published, along with the volume number in Roman numerals, à la the Super Bowl. Henderson's introduction espousing the literary virtues of the pieces gleaned from the nation's small publishing entrepreneurs has a smug, self-congratulatory quality.

Indeed, the contents are uneven, especially the poetry, chosen by Bob Hicok and Maxine Kumin. Hicok and Kumin talk like battle heroes of choosing from hundreds and hundreds of poems, which is scary, since the poems I've encountered so far strike me as amateurish, overwrought, poorly considered, and unfinished. A typically sentimental and banal Ted Kooser poem made the most of an impression. Henderson points to a poem by a fourth grader. Perhaps it will raise the intellectual and artistic level.

On the prose side, the most notable piece so far is one of Marilynne Robinson's mind-stretching essays, "On Beauty." The late Harry Crews shows the best of his macho style with a memoir fragment. I started but grew bored with a short story by Karen Russell, the new it girl of short stories a few months ago. I've liked Laura Kasischke's poems, but her short story reprinted in the anthology, "The Barge," strikes me as something a talented high school girl would produce. While discovering some new voices, the anthology has its share of familiar names such as Joyce Carol Oates, Wendell Berry, Jane Hirshfield, Andrew Huggins, and Adam Zagajewski.

I'll keep browsing; surely a jewel or two will be found.

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.

An Atavistic Publishing Venture

The New York Times' media watchdog David Carr reported this morning that old media turned new media mogul Barry Diller is involved with a new e-book publishing venture with Atavist, a Brooklyn startup that offers an e-book platform for would be publishers, writers and pundits. Atavist's original mission, as related to its name, was to provide a format for publishing old-fashioned lengthy pieces in the new e-world. Looks like the bright young kids have hit the jackpot with the new venture, to be called Brightline.

Brightline will seek to compete with the e-book heavyweight Amazon, which has already signed up some bigtime publishing and writing talent. It's striking that "content" remains the vital ingredient, no matter the format. Stories are a key part of human nature, whether told orally over the campfire, written on scrolls or transcribed by monks with pens, produced by printing presses, or, now, by electronic pulses.

As the e-book world churns, I am happy with my Nook and a bunch of recent discoveries. The former New Yorker worker Janet Groth's memoir "The Receptionist"  is among my recent downloads. Her recollection of her years at the magazine, with memories of famed New Yorker writers like Joseph Mitchell and the doomed poet John Berryman, makes me wonder how she remained on the receptionist's desk for 18 years without writing for the magazine. Her ability to set scenes and convey character was sorely needed during former editor William Shawn's late years.

Also, I have on my Nook library poems of Laura Kasischke, discovered through The Sunday New York Times Magazine's piece on Stephen Burt, the cross-dressing Harvard literary critic. Yes, those terms are correct; read the piece. Kasischke's strong vision and original use of language in her collection "Space, In Chains," stand out.

Of course, I remain a denizen of the old print world. I discovered in the library a copy of Burt's "The Age of Randall Jarrell," which I checked out, as well as poet/critic Louis Simpson's study of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams. Simpson, whose poems I once studied when I first started in the poery world, died this week, another fine mind ruined by Alzheimer's. He was one of America's under-appreciated World War II and after poets, with a refined, muted understanding of the desperation beneath American affluence.

As I mourn longtime favorites like Simpson, the fall-like weather makes me glad at the prospect of new literary discoveries, both in the E and old-print worlds.

 

An Affecting Portrait of Robert Lowell, New England Society

A few weeks ago, The New Yorker ran a piece by a writer I'd never heard of, Sarah Payne Stuart, about buying houses in the old, history-drenched town of Concord, Mass. One of our most memorable vacations included a stay in Concord, where the first shot of the Revolution was fired, and where Emerson, Thoreau and the Alcotts lived. Stuart delighted me with her lilting, ironic-funny voice. I did a Google search and discovered that she was a member of Robert Lowell's family and had written a memoir about him and his relatives called, "My Cousin, Once Removed."

I ordered the book on Amazon; sorry, independent booksellers. Despite its unimaginative, vanity press-sounding title. the book is a valuable contribution to Robert Lowell studies. As a longtime lover of Lowell's poetry, fascinated by his tortured, manic-depressive life, I savored each word of Stuart's memoir. Along with a sympathetic-repelled portrait of Lowell, she also amusingly slices up Thoreau's work, along with the Concord tourist hype surrounding him. I'll never think of Thoreau in the same way again. Her wry resistance to Walden romanticism is a bracing, if eventually secondary, part of the book.

Stuart, whose claims of not understanding Lowell's poems are a frequent refrain, deftly devastates his work, especially his early, clotted poems. While highly affectionate about Lowell, picturing him as an emotionally pampered, fragile genius at family gatherings, she shows "Bobby" as a perpetual lost adolescent, if that far advanced emotionally. While she shows glimpses of Lowell, nicknamed "Cal" for either Caligula or Caliban, as the self-centered bullying brute oft depicted, her final passages reveal him as a tender, compassionate man, especially with female members of his family. He is shown having a particular kindness to younger kinfolk, such as Stuart herself.

The author's subtitle about madness, money and Lowell's family is apt; money and madness are the poles of the family's long decline, although Stuart's generation, while losing the family inheritance, shows a new creative energy. Lowell's often incapacitating disease was a family curse, at least of the old New England Lowell and Devereux families, if not of the Winslows who married into them. Stuart gives fascinating glimpses through generational studies of all three interconnected families. Stuart's own mother, Lowell's first cousin, like Lowell also spent time in mental hospitals, and Stuart's brother also inherited the mental imbalance. Along with bittersweet laughter, Stuart shows the pathos of such gifted people continually struck by crippling mental breakdowns. Her brother, called Johnny here, is the gifted musician John Payne, who played on Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks," and performed with other musicians and now operates an innovative music-education center in Brookline, Mass. Johnny, who shared time with Robert Lowell at the upper class mental hospital McLeans, was later thrust into the crueler public hospital Mass. Mental. A series of electric shock treatments ended Johnny's breakdowns, along with his higher creativity; when Stuart points out that Lowell's breakdowns continued until his early death, I wondered why electroshock wasn't tried on him, although it might have crippled his late burst of poetic power.

Along with her brilliant insights into mental illness, Stuart shows deep understanding of the dynamics of "old money." Most of the money in the book belongs to the eccentric "Uncle Cot," who married Stuart's Aunt Sarah, a major character in the book. "Uncle Cot" is not a blood member of the family, but is a central figure in its existence. With Stuart's mother achieving a personal liberation through opposition to the Vietnam War, and Stuart and her brothers showing a 1960s swing to the left, Uncle Cot ends up leaving his fortune to a museum instead of the new generation, although the museum keeps most of his artwork and furniture in storage. Stuart gives a heart rending cry about the loss of the family wealth: couldn't we have said to Uncle Cot that we were just kidding? 

The history of the tragic-comic families, if sometimes confusing with all of the similar first names, is a fine corollary to Lowell's own "Life Studies." Stuart, a novelist, gives a memorable gallery of characters, especially the families' strong-willed, eccentric women, particularly Aunt Sarah and Lowell's mother, Charlotte. Stuart's mother, Jackie, is another heart-rending force in the narrative. New England and Boston society and its long decline are memorably reflected in the personal lives of Stuart's relatives, with whom she ruefully claims kinship. The author expertly balances the inner geometries of different marriages, including her own, and father-daughter-son relationships. While deftly skewering her family's pretensions and personal foibles, she also shows a fierce loyalty, borne of long traditions and culture as well as blood. 

Stuart is one of the all-too-rare writers these days who understands the power of understatement, the well-chosen right word. At the end of summer, I'm happy to have discovered a new writer whose work I'll continue to anticipate. Her final paragraphs are one of the most beautiful, heart-breaking endings I've encountered in quite a while. Stuart's portrait of Lowell, his tortured wives Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick and Lady Caroline Blackwell, and his family will make re-readings of his poems even more enriching. Published several years ago, and recognized as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Stuart's book deserves recognition as a classic family history and memoir.

A Trip to San Francisco

I've just returned from that exquisitely literary city, San Francisco, where I quickly made my pilgrammage to the Beat cathedral, City Lights Books, in a racy North Beach area. My son accompanied me, and I proudly showed him Jack Kerouac Alley next to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's book-jammed spot. Seeing Saint Jack's sign and standing in the soft West Coast light, I felt a momentary wash of emotion, a mourning for the lost days of freedom and hope that Kerouac captured.

Inside, my son was amused by the sections devoted to radical politics and writing. I found a book on Jimmy Rodgers, the old Mississippi singing brakeman, surprised that my interest in old roots music would be met by City Lights, which I place in another literary/intellectual/artistic realm than country and western. Goes to show the universality of the City Lights collection, quite an anachronism these days, but quite common at independent bookstores back 30 years ago.

City Lights is also an excellent press; and I purchased a nice City Lights poetry anthology. After making my purchases, I saw a new book by the great guitarist Ry Cooder, a short story collection called "Los Angeles Stories," published by City Lights, but didn't buy it right then. Later, at another bookstore, this one located on Second Street downtown, I did buy it to take home with me.

With all of its tomes on anarchism, socialism and the like, City Lights is a capitalist place. I pointed out to my son a book on type and fonts that I had read, checking it out of the library, and he, a type wonk, decided to buy it, then complained over and over about its $30 cost. 

My son wasn't impressed when we returned outside and I pointed out to him the nearby Hungry I, once the center of the cutting edge standup comics like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce. I was happy to see the old spot, assuming that it still gives a forum for comedians, poets and musicians. A few days later, we happened on a cool spot called Melt, where we listed to jazz for several hours from two different bands, the first a trio and the second a packed tightly together group with piano, bass, sax, guitar, two drummers, and a guy playing trumpet and French horn. Each group had a musician playing standup bass, a wonderful instrument.

The spirit of Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade floated in the cool bay breeze when I sat at a sidewalk spot drinking coffee and saw a sign above a storefront advising that here was the office of a private eye. Our companion, a resident of the neighborhood, said the P.I. had left a few years ago, but in my mind I was already forming the detective novel about the place. San Francisco is one of those magical places that inspires writing. 

A Visit to Nashville's Parnassus

On a recent trip to Nashville, I had to make a pilgrimage to Parnassus Books, author Ann Patchett's independent bookstore experiment. Belying my imagined enraputure with an old-fashioned, overstuffed bookish haven in a vintage storefront near Vanderbilt or downtown, we found the store in a contemporary space in a mall in Green Hills, the city's upscale area.

While the bookstore met the measure of a clean, well-lighted place, the area's sterility was disappointing. Inside, a good crowd of book lovers chatted about authors and readings and looked through the shelves. The presence of such folks was encouraging, but didn't quite overcome the arid commercial feeling of the business.

The store did have a strong variety of books, better than seen these days at Barnes & Noble. The poetry section contained several books with which I was unfamiliar, or could never find in Atlanta, and I also found a long-sought work, Edith Pearlman's short story collection, "Binocular Vision," with an introduction by Patchett herself. I also found the American Poetry Review, for years common on newsstands, but which has disappeared in the last half decade or so. Parnassus' bulletin board gave evidence that it is making a good effort to foster the city's literary culture, with announcements of readings, workshops, book signings and writer's appearances.

Later, we heard about a similar experience to ours in regard to Parnassus. Our daughter's roommate said her mother, like me, had read about the bookstore in The New York Times and had to make a visit to the described literary oasis. Similar to me, the Mom had been disappointed by the sterile mall location.

Well, that's not the important thing. The books, and the nurturing of literary culture, are what matter. I salute Patchett for her effort in keeping independent bookstores alive.