'A Troublesome Error, a Pernicious Foppery''

Let’s be grateful to our troubled age for making it necessary to revive such formerly dormant words as cant and foppery, so as to avoid the more precise but less polite bullshit. For foppery, the OED offers among its definitions “foolishness, imbecility, stupidity, folly.” It’s one of those words I’ve never heard spoken but I happened on it again in Act I, Scene 2 of King Lear. Edmund speaks: 

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.”

 

Humans are the excuse-generating species and newspapers still publish astrology columns. It’s easier to blame the stars for our troubles than our own “foolishness, imbecility . . .” I’m pleased to see that one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, also uses foppery in connection with astrology:

 

“For what matter is it for us to know how high the Pleiades are, how far distant Perseus and Cassiopeia from us, how deep the sea, &c., we are neither wiser, as he follows it, nor modester, nor better, nor richer, nor stronger for the knowledge of it. Quod supra nos nihil ad, nos [what is above us does not concern us], I may say the same of those genethliacal studies, what is astrology but vain elections, predictions? all magic, but a troublesome error, a pernicious foppery?”

 

The OED on genethliacal: “relating to the forecasting of a person’s character and future life and circumstances, based on the relative positions of the stars and planets at birth.” Burton uses foppery earlier in the Anatomy, in his introduction titled “Democritus Junior to the Reader”:

 

“So are we fools and ridiculous, absurd in our actions, carriage; diet, apparel, customs, and consultations; we scoff and point one at another, when as in conclusion all are fools, ‘and they the veriest asses that hide their ears most.’ . . . [T]hat which he hath not himself; or doth not esteem he accounts superfluity, an idle quality, a mere foppery in another: like Æsop’s fox, when he had lost his tail, would have all his fellow foxes cut off theirs.”

 

Theodore Dalrymple uses the passage from Lear quoted above as the epigraph to Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Ivan R. Dee, 2001). He quotes Edmund’s words again in articles published in the British Medical Journal and The New Criterion, both in 2007, and in a speech he gave in 2014 in Michigan, when he glossed them like this:

 

“This passage points, I think, to an eternal and universal temptation of mankind to blame those of his misfortunes that are the natural and predictable consequence of his own choices on forces or circumstances that are external to him and outside his control. Is there any one of us who has never resorted to excuses about his circumstances when he has done wrong or made a bad decision? It is a universal human tendency.”

 

Edmund’s words show up again in Chapter 4 of Dalrymple’s Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality (Encounter Books, 2015). In this context he notes: “Instead of astrology, however, we believe in psychology, of whatever school—and call it progress.” It takes a deft writer with a strong memory to repeatedly quote an evil fictional character to good purpose.

'The Artist Knows He Is Ready'

A young reader complains that he’s “good with words” but doesn’t know what to write about. It sounds as though he seizes up when he sits down at the keyboard. To call his condition “writer’s block” would be premature. He’s too inexperienced for that to be happening already. The only way I know how to find a worthwhile subject, one that gives me plenty of room to domesticate and make my own, is to start writing – about what is unimportant, though it’s nice to get an invitation. Build up momentum and let it carry you. Reading helps – much of writing is a response to what has already been written, explicitly or otherwise. So does paying attention. I know from experience that tedium is often the product of my own dullness or laziness.

The ever-thinking Jules Renard writes in his journal on May 9, 1898: “Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.” This makes sense not as theory but practice. Even a tiresome writing job brings with it the pleasure (if not the “joy”) of satisfaction for an obligation fulfilled. Every such accomplishment is an opportunity to learn something – about the subject at hand and especially about words and how to artfully arrange them. The word we’re hovering gingerly around – Out of embarrassment? Out of vanity? – is inspiration. It’s a discredited idea, and certainly a lot of romanticized nonsense has been written about it, but Nabokov was a believer. I remember first reading his essay “Inspiration” in the Saturday Review while hitchhiking on the Ohio Turnpike in January 1973. Sumptuous as always with metaphors, Nabokov writes:

 

“One can distinguish several types of inspiration, which intergrade, as all things do in this fluid and interesting world of ours, while yielding  gracefully to a semblance of classification. A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life. This feeling of tickly well-being branches through him like the red and the blue in the picture of a skinned man under Circulation. . . . It expands, glows, and subsides without revealing its secret. In the meantime, however, a window has opened, an auroral wind has blown, every exposed nerve has tingled. Presently all dissolves: the familiar worries are back and the eyebrow redescribes its arc of pain; but the artist knows he is ready.”

 

[The line from Renard can be found in his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).

'Will Your Birds Be Always Wingless Birds'

A questionnaire sent to Louis MacNeice in 1934 – that “low dishonest decade” was big on sending questionnaires to writers – asked, “Do you take your stand with any political or politico-economic party or creed?” The Irishman replied: “No. In weaker moments I wish I could.” Never a nihilist and never a true believer in anything, unlike many of his fellows, MacNeice remained immune to politics and other systematic modes of thought, whether aesthetic, religious or philosophical. He distrusted dogma. Don’t confuse this with indifference. 

I’ve been reading MacNeice seriously for several months. Despite his well-known associations with Auden and other poets, he impresses me as one of nature’s “isolatoes,” to adopt Ishmael’s word. There’s nothing pathological about his solitariness as a poet and man. He was social and certainly enjoyed female company. But he seems not to have needed the conventional shoring of belief. “My sympathies are Left,” he wrote elsewhere in the Thirties,” but not in my heart or my guts.” When writers define themselves by their politics, they risk peddling themselves like prostitutes.

 

In the nineteen-fifties, MacNeice wrote “To Posterity” (Visitations, 1957), a poem strangely prescient of our diminished world:

 

“When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards

And reading and even speaking have been replaced

By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you

Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste

They held for us for whom they were framed in words,

And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,

Or will your birds be always wingless birds?” 

 

When the world is no longer “framed in words,” when the best eyes and ears of the past are no longer consulted, when we presume to confront the world in all our arrogant solitude, what remains?  A weirdly mutated world of “wingless birds.” Without words, grass is no longer “green” but something less. We have betrayed not only the visual world but our precious cultural inheritance.

 

Even writers, people we persist in believing ought to be independent thinkers, defying the herd, happily join the herd. Another poet, Louise Bogan, answered yet another questionnaire, this one prepared by the editors of Partisan Review in 1939 and collected in A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005). More than eighty years ago she writes near the end of the same decade as MacNeice, one not unlike our own. Its dogmas too are metastasizing:

 

“The true artist will instinctively reject ‘burning questions’ and all ‘crude oppositions’ which can cloud his vision or block his ability to deal with the world. All this has been fought through before now: Turgenev showed up the pretensions of the political critic Belinsky; Flaubert fought the battle against ‘usefulness’ all his life; Yeats wrote the most superb anti-political poetry ever written. Flaubert wrote, in the midst of one bad political period: ‘Let us [as writers] remain the river and turn the mill.’”

'Relief, Joy, or Nostalgia'

“Of course, no one simply reads, or rereads, a given book. One reads a certain edition at a specific time in one’s life, and the particular book’s smell, typeface, and paper can be as much a part of the experience as one’s physical and emotional circumstances.” 

I used to think this sort of thing was drippy sentimentality, a wallow in a make-believe past. Now it’s nearly an everyday occurrence. For books – good books -- my memory hasn’t seriously faded. I don’t think of Lolita. I think of the Crest Giant paperback I bought in 1968 from James Books in Parma, Ohio, and read on my parents’ porch that summer.   

The passage at the top is from Tess Lewis’ review/essay “Once Is Not Enough: Rereading and Remembering,” published in the Autumn 2002 issue of The Hudson Review. Lewis is a fairly tough-minded reader. She quotes Nabokov’s well-known declaration in his Lectures on Literature (1980): “One cannot read a book, one can only reread it.” In fact, almost the only books worth reading are the ones you will want to read a second time, at least. Lewis writes:

“Pace Nabokov, you never do read the same book twice, and the betrayal of earlier selves and the  flirtation with possible new ones that rereading occasions can bring relief, joy, or nostalgia as much as it can piquancy.”

In 1888, three years before his death, Melville self-published John Marr and Other Sailors in an edition of twenty-five copies. The title poem is prefaced with a brief prose passage that is almost a short story. I was exchanging thoughts the other day with a reader about Willa Cather’s prairie novels and “John Marr” came to mind. Marr is a former sailor who “settles down about the year 1838 upon what was then a frontier-prairie, sparsely sprinkled with small oak-groves and yet fewer log-houses of a little colony but recently from one of our elder inland States.” Which in turn recalls a passage from “Loomings,” Chapter 1 of Moby-Dick: “Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies . . .”

I first read “John Marr” in the Penguin paperback Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories (1970), purchased in a bookstore in Savoy during my first visit to France. On the title page I wrote my name followed by “7-24-73 Chambéry.” The pages are browning but after half a century the book remains intact and perfectly (re)readable.

Lewis’ essay begins as a review of Wendy Lesser’s Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering (2002) – the first book I ever ordered from Amazon. The book arrived at our house in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., on a rainy day and was ruined. They promptly replaced it and I was impressed. I had interviewed Lesser two years earlier in Berkeley for a freelance newspaper story I was writing.

All of this is confirmation of my conviction that all books are one book, as Borges told us long ago.

'Well-known Types of Miracle'

It’s grim out there and getting grimmer. Two poems encountered on the same day delivered a touch of buoyancy. The first was originally written in Russian by Vladimir Nabokov on May 6, 1923: 

“No, life is no quivering quandary!

Here under the moon things are bright and dewy.

We are the caterpillars of angels; and sweet

It is to eat from the edge into the tender leaf.

 

“Dress yourself up in the thorns, crawl, bend, grow strong—

and the greedier was your green track,

the more velvety and splendid

the tails of your liberated wings.”

 

Nabokov was living in what turned out to be permanent exile. The Bolsheviks had seized Russia in a coup d’état. Lenin was busy murdering kulaks, among other innocents. The previous year, Nabokov’s father had been murdered, and he writes a touchingly hopeful poem. He suggests we may metamorphose into angels. The other poem is by John Wain from his 1961 collection Weep Before God (1961):

 

“This above all is precious and remarkable.

How we put ourselves in one another’s care,

How in spite of everything we trust each other.

 

“Fishermen at whatever point they are dipping and lifting

On the dark green swell they partly think of as home

Hear the gale warnings that fly to them like gulls.

 

“The scientists study the weather for love of studying it,

And not specially for love of the fishermen,

And the wireless engineers do the transmission for love of wireless,

 

“But how it adds up is that when the terrible white malice

Of the waves high as cliffs is let loose to seek a victim,

The fishermen are somewhere else and so not drowned.

 

“And why should this chain of miracles be easier to believe

Than that my darling should come to me as naturally

As she trusts a restaurant not to poison her?

 

“They are simply examples of well-known types of miracle,

The two of them,

That can happen at any time of the day or night.” 

 

Yes, people on occasion are capable of exercising the good, despite the barbarism flourishing around them. A decade or so ago I read Wain’s Sprightly Running: Part of an Autobiography, published in 1962. Later he would publish a good biography of his mentor, Dr. Johnson. In the memoir he describes his wartime years at Oxford:

 

“When I should have been running forward to embrace life, I was digging a fortification against it. With every reason for optimism, I became a stoical pessimist. Samuel Johnson was my favourite author, my moral hero; Boswell and The Rambler were constantly open on my table. Johnson reflected my mood exactly, because he put into dignified and resounding prose the sense of stoical resistance against hopeless odds.”

 

He continues:

 

“I would murmur to myself. As if they were lyrics poems, sombre fragments of his lay sermons. 'Life is everywhere a state in which there is much to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.’ [Rasselas, Chap. 11] 'So large a part of human life passes in a state contrary to our natural desires, that one of the principal topics in moral instruction is the art of bearing calamities.’ [The Rambler #32] But it was not his gloom alone that made Johnson a hero to me. It was his tragic gaiety.”

 

[The Nabokov poem is translated by Brian Boyd and Dmitri Nabokov, and collected in Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (eds. Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, Beacon Press, 2000).]

'It Is Wonderful to Be a Writer'

I met the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld in 1987 on the same day I met Raul Hilberg and Cynthia Ozick. I had read Appelfeld’s first novel, Badenheim 1939 (1978; trans. 1980), several years earlier and found it disturbing in an unexpected way. The action takes place on the cusp of the Holocaust. Its Jewish characters are oblivious to what’s coming. We know, they do not.

Appelfeld’s mother was murdered in 1941 when the Romanian Army retook his hometown after a year of Soviet occupation. He and his father were deported to a forced labor camp in Romanian-controlled Transnistria. He escaped and for three years hid in the forests of Ukraine. He later became a cook in the Soviet Army. In 1946 he arrived in Palestine, two years before Israel became a nation.

Based on my brief conversation with Appelfeld at a Holocaust conference, I could never have guessed the events he had endured more than forty years earlier. He was soft-spoken, laconic, avuncular. Physically, he reminded me of my step-grandfather. He was short and round yet oddly powerful looking, like an aging boxer. I liked him and went on to read another four or five of his novels. He died in 2018 at age eighty-five.

In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel, she notes that Appelfeld does not blame pre-war Jews for weakness and self-hatred, a common accusation. He replies:

“No, I do not blame them. I like them because I like weakness. I’m a lover of weakness, human weaknesses, I mean. People have a lot of weaknesses, and I am nourished by their weaknesses.”

This seems irrational and even self-destructive. Appelfeld could not have survived the Holocaust had he been weak. Wachtel asks why he loves weakness and he replies:

“Because a weakness is humane. To hate yourself is humane. You love the non-Jew; it’s humane. I understand why you love the non-Jew. . . . So, I don’t blame, because I know where all this comes from.”

There’s a cult of strength – and not merely among the Nazis -- that readily turns into bullying and savagery. Humans are not good at regulating strength. We tend to overdo it. In evolutionary terms, those who are strong – physically, emotionally, intellectually -- are likelier to survive, and Appelfeld is not advocating extinction. I think he is expressing a literary, not necessarily a moral preference. He understands his characters and knows they will do foolish things. In this, he reminds me of George Eliot and Henry James, who often feel sympathy for their people. I think of Catherine Sloper in James’ Washington Square. Later in the same interview, Appelfeld says:

“Well, it is wonderful to be a writer, because I am a woman and I am a child. I’m an elderly man and I’m a non-Jewish person. A writer has to be devoted totally to the person he is writing about.”

[The Wachtel interview can be found in Encounter with Aharon Appelfeld (Mosaic Press, 2003), edited by Michael Brown and Sara R. Horowitz.]

'Everything is Singing, Blooming and Sparkling'

In a May 4, 1889 letter to his friend and editor Alexi Suvorin, Chekhov complains of taking no interest in “reviews, conversations about literature, gossip, successes, failures, high royalties,” and adds:

“[I]n short, I’ve become a damn fool. My soul seems to be stagnating. I explain this by the stagnation of my personal life. It’s not that I’m disappointed or exhausted or cranky; it’s just that everything has grown less interesting. I’ll have to light a fire underneath myself.”

Chekhov wrote almost six-hundred short stories in his forty-four years, not to mention plays and thousands of letters. Some of the early stories are trifling, little more than anecdotes written quickly for publication in newspapers. In 1889, he was just entering his mature and most prolific period. Chekhov was not by nature a depressive, nor was he given to self-pity. One senses an element of mock-misery that he could share only with a close friend.

Chekhov is writing from Sumy (heavily damaged in the early days of the 2022 Russian invasion) in northeastern Ukraine on the Psel River. He begins the letter by telling Suvorin he has just returned from “the hunt: I was out catching crayfish.” What follows is a paean to spring, beginning:

“Everything is singing, blooming and sparkling with beauty. By now the garden is all green, and even the oaks are covered with leaves. The trunks of the apple, pear, cherry and plum trees have been painted white to protect them from worms. All of these trees have white blossoms, making them look strikingly like brides during the wedding ceremony: white dresses, white flowers and so innocent an appearance that they seem to be ashamed of being looked at.”

That image reminds me of Guy Davenport’s closing lines in his essay on Eudora Welty, “The Faire Field of Enna” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981):

“An anecdote about Faulkner relates that once on a spring evening he invited a woman to come with him in his automobile, to see a bride in her wedding dress. He drove her over certain Mississippi back roads and eventually across a meadow, turning off his headlights and proceeding in darkness. At last he eased the car to a halt and said that the bride was before them. He switched on the lights, whose brilliance fell full upon an apple tree in blossom.

“The sensibility that shapes that moment is of an age, at least, with civilization itself.”

Chekhov is no mystic or Transcendentalist. He’s too much the realist, the physician, to fall for nature sentimentalism, but he retains a powerful aesthetic sense – not a combination of traits we associate with most of the great Russian writers. He shifts tone in the paragraph cited above:

“Nature is a very good sedative. It gives a person equanimity. And you need equanimity in this world. Only people with equanimity can see things clearly, be fair and work. This, of course, applies only to intelligent and honorable people; selfish and shallow people have enough equanimity as it is.” 

In closing, Chekhov writes to Suvorin: “Well, God grant you health and all the best.”

[The translators of the letter are Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky (Letters of Anton Chekhov, 1973).]