'Our Ignorance of the Most Common Objects'

My middle son is reading a book by the late J.E. Gordon titled Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down (1978). Michael is a third-year midshipman in computer engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy. Gordon’s book is more concerned with civil and mechanical engineering, with an emphasis on his still-evolving academic field, materials science, but the book is aimed at curious, non-specialist readers. While leafing through it I noticed the author takes his epigraph from Dr. Johnson’s Idler essay published on November 25, 1758: 

“Among the innumerable mortifications that waylay human arrogance on every side, may well be reckoned our ignorance of the most common objects and effects, a defect of which we become more sensible, by every attempt to supply it. Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge, and conceive themselves informed of the whole nature of things when they are shown their form or told their use; but the speculatist, who is not content with superficial views, harasses himself with fruitless curiosity, and still as he inquires more, perceives only that he knows less.”

 

To be a true polymath today is probably impossible. Knowledge metastasizes, as does specialization. Johnson himself seemed to know a little about everything, even chemistry. The wall between STEM and the humanities has never seemed so forbidding. Most engineers don’t read poetry. Most poets don’t dabble in differential equations. I write for an engineering school and could probably explain the workings of an internal-combustion engine, but CRISPR and indoor plumbing leave me baffled. You and I might have a stimulating conversation about Shakespeare or Nabokov, but just yesterday I wrote a story for work with reference to “NP” (nondeterministic polynomial time), and I still feel like an idiot. I know from experience that the most reliable way to learn about the world is to read and write about it. In his “Introductory Note” to The Hunter Gracchus (1996), Guy Davenport comes close to identifying writing with teaching and, by implication, learning:

 

“The way I write about texts and works of art has been shaped by forty years of explaining them to students in a classroom. I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.”

'Repeated, Renewed, or Served Up Again'

On July 1, 1727, during his final visit to England, Jonathan Swift was staying at Alexander Pope’s home in Twickenham, where he wrote to his friend and future biographer Thomas Sheridan. Swift asked him to copy the verses he had written for Esther Johnson, known as Stella, who had collected and transcribed Swift’s poems to prepare them for publication. Not surprisingly, the poem is titled “To Stella, Who Collected and Transcribed His Poems,” and may date from as early as 1720. Here is an excerpt:

 

“So Maevius, when he drain’d his skull

To celebrate some suburb trull,

His similes in order set,

And every crambo he could get;

Had gone through all the common-places

Worn out by wits, who rhyme on faces;

Before he could his poem close,

The lovely nymph had lost her nose.”

 

Maevius was a poetaster from the age of Augustus Caesar who appears in Virgil’s Eclogues and whose name became synonymous with bad poetry. Crambo stumped me. In his edition of Swift’s Complete Poems (Yale University Press, 1983), Pat Rogers identifies it as “a popular game in which one player challenges another to find a rhyme. . . . The implication here is ‘threadbare, familiar rhyme, striving for ingenuity.’” In other words, worse than conventional, unimaginative rhyming, as in June/moon. More like proboscis/colossus.

 

The first definition in the OED is “a game in which one player gives a word or line of verse to which each of the others has to find a rhyme.” This sounds a little like a cutting contest among jazz musicians, and might be a lot of fun with the proper crowd. “To win at a parlor game like crambo, / It’s best to make your rhymes like Rambo.” Or some such. The Dictionary cites Swift’s poem in its second definition: “rhyme, rhyming: said in contempt.”

 

In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson bluntly dismisses hopes of determining the word’s origin: “a cant word, probably without etymology.” The OED refers us to another word, crambe, from the Greek for “cabbage,” usually in reference to the Latin phrase crambe repetīta cabbage repeated, renewed, or served up again . . . any distasteful repetition.” Few poets today can be accused of crambo because they don’t even try to rhyme. With apologies to Yeats: “All things can tempt me from writing free verse: / ‘Swift’s Epitaph,’ ‘Coole Park’ and ‘Adam’s Curse.’”

'The Noble Phrase-Maker of the Schoolbooks'

Sometimes we read H.L. Mencken for his crankiness and the unapologetic glee he takes in eviscerating some fool feckless enough to make himself conspicuous. So long as we agree with his judgment, we root for Mencken’s demolition jobs. Here he is in 1921 on “Dr. Harding” – that is, Warren Gamaliel Harding, our twenty-ninth president:

 

“Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English I have even encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.”

 

One is pleased by the still-useful, one-size-fits-all applicability of Mencken’s presidential verdict. With a handful of exceptions, little has changed in a century. Eight years later, Mencken reviewed a book about an earlier president, Meet General Grant by W. E. Woodward, and much of his assault on the hero of Appomattox feels cheap and rooted in wrongheaded myths and folklore:

 

“He was not, in point of fact, a man of any great competence, even as a soldier. All the major strategy of the war, including the final advance on Richmond, was planned by other men, notably Sherman. He was a ham as a tactician, and habitually wasted his men.”

 

Grant was no backwoods, drunken lout. He was not a gifted politician, as his presidency (1869-77) proved, but he was among the most adept of our generals and writers. Mencken’s attack on Grant sounds petty and personal, on occasion almost hysterical. He utterly misreads Grant’s achievements as a writer:

 

“The military automaton of the Memoirs and the noble phrase-maker of the schoolbooks disappears, and there emerges a living and breathing man, simple-minded, more than a little bewildered, and infinitely pathetic.”

 

Grant’s Personal Memoirs is one of the pinnacles of American literature, a model of prose clarity. In Chapter LXVIII, near the conclusion, Grant writes a memorably prophetic passage. On April 14, Lincoln invites Grant and his wife to accompany them to the theater that evening. Grant replies that they would like to do so but he is occupied with work and anxious to see his children. He learns of Lincoln’s assassination in Philadelphia and hears (falsely) that William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, had also been murdered:

 

“It would be impossible for me to describe the feeling that overcame me at the news of these assassinations, more especially the assassination of the President. I knew his goodness of heart, his generosity, his yielding disposition, his desire to have everybody happy, and above all his desire to see all the people of the United States enter again upon the full privileges of citizenship with equality among all.”

 

Grant reacts as a man and a citizen, not an avenging soldier. He thinks of the impact the murder may have on the country and its future:

 

“I knew also the feeling that Mr. [Andrew] Johnson had expressed in speeches and conversation against the Southern people, and I feared that his course towards them would be such as to repel, and make them unwilling citizens; and if they became such they would remain so for a long while. I felt that reconstruction had been set back, no telling how far.”

 

And yet, Mencken blames “the worst horrors of Reconstruction” on Grant.

'His Enduring Influence on Myself and Others'

“He was the very model of a grand old man: punctilious, unbellicose, evenhanded, coasting with evident enjoyment down the waning rim of his life and into—well, posterity?” 

A graduate student in English, soon to write one of the first books devoted to the now forgotten novelist John Gardner, came downstairs, probably on September 30, 1973, to tell me W.H. Auden had died at age sixty-six. He had tears on his face. I had thought of Auden for some time as old yet somehow permanent, like Proust. In the previous year or so we had lost Marianne Moore, John Berryman, Edmund Wilson. As a kid, I discovered Auden’s poems in an Oscar Williams anthology. Here’s an admission that at one time would have embarrassed me: I liked his poems because I understood them. He wrote to be understood and to please his reader, not to sound brooding or baffling. Among his chief virtues as a writer were articulation and clarity. You came to think he could write a poem about anything, however unlikely, and make it work.

 

Over the holidays I’ve kept his hefty Collected Poems on my nightstand, reading a few at random each day, starting with my current favorite, “In Praise of Limestone.” It’s fashionable to see a decline in quality in Auden’s work in his final years. I don’t see it. Take “Old People’s Home,” written in 1970 for his friend Elizabeth Mayer and collected in Epistle for a Godson (1972). It begins:

 

“All are limitory, but each has her own

nuance of damage.  The elite can dress and decent themselves,

    are ambulant with a single stick, adroit

to read a book all through, or play the slow movements of

    easy sonatas. (Yet, perhaps their very

carnal freedom is their spirit's bane: intelligent

    of what has happened and why, they are obnoxious

to a glum beyond tears.)”

 

A fiction writer might envy the human wealth in these lines, clear and suggestive as good prose. The passage quoted at the top is from the remembrance L.E. Sissman wrote for Auden, published in The Atlantic Monthly and collected in Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s (1975). Sissman concludes:

 

“So I have written instead this fragment of reminiscence of how his work affected me when I first came upon him, and how it has affected me for the rest of my adult life. Because he has lived, in his enduring influence on myself and others, it is safe to say he will live. Of that I am quite sure.”

 

Sissman himself, born on January 1, 1928, would die two and a half years after Auden, on March 10, 1976, at age forty-eight.

'They Are There, Silent and Waiting'

“[Stefan] Zweig had always treasured the refuge of reading. His parents remembered him locking himself inside his room with a book to escape the disturbance of their socially active family life.” 

Doesn’t every kid? I suppose not. One mustn’t generalize from the particulars of one’s life, though I remember most of my parents’ friends as voluble, condescending bores. Once the obligatory niceties were out of the way, I headed for my room and resumed reading. In The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World (Other Books, 2014), George Prochnik describes Zweig using books as “ballast that will keep him from washing away.” I quibble with Prochnik’s use of “escape.” In the previous sentence, refuge is more appropriate. When fleeing Hitler, Zweig sought refuge in the U.S., among other places. Escape, escapist, escapism – all connote failure, laziness, weakness, even cowardice. A refuge is a place of safety, as Brazil was supposed to have been at the end of Zweig’s life. There, Zweig and his wife committed suicide in 1942. Prochnik continues:

 

“It’s no wonder that in the Americas Zweig turned more than ever to what remained of his library as an antidote to the tumult of the era . . . And yet there were books.”

 

Can non-readers -- whether illiterates, alliterates or readers exclusively of junk -- know what access to books means to a civilized man or woman? One’s life is rooted in them. They form a sustaining continuum and make us contemporaneous with our forebears. Bookless, one is without sustenance. Zweig hated the New York portion of his exile, yet Prochnik writes:

 

“Zweig’s thrill at being given free run of the university library is touching. 'I can take as many books home as I want and go to the shelfs myself,’ he informed [his wife’s] family in England. ‘Books are better company than humans just now and I have had to do without them for a long time,’ he exclaimed in another letter.”

 

Nabokov, after emigrating to the U.S. in 1940, expressed similar delight in the freedom of American libraries. “The pain of being separated from books,” Prochnik writes, “is a recurrent motif among the émigré authors . . . . No one reverts to the problem of separation anxiety from books so insistently as Zweig. His pining for their presence reflected the way books served him both as sensual objects that could be held and stroked and as vehicles of sublimation—physical entities that mediated between this world and a higher realm.”

 

That gets perilously close to an unholy melding of mysticism and fetishism, but one understands. Prochnik quotes from a brief 1937 essay, “Thanks to Books,” written by Zweig while still in Austria, translated into English by Harry Zohn and published in the February 8, 1958 issue of The Saturday Review.      

 

“They are there, waiting and silent. They neither urge, nor call, nor press their claims. Mutely they are ranged along the wall. They seem to be asleep and yet from each one a name looks at you like an open eye. If you direct your glances their way or move your hands over them, they do not call out to you in supplication, nor do they obtrude

themselves upon you. They make no demands. They wait until you are receptive to them; only then do they open up.”

'Do These Things Go Out With Life?'

“The last day of the year – a cold but bright and sunny day, with a film of fluffy snow on the bare ground. Where there are weeds, the snow is not apparent.” 

My youngest son asked why people still make a big deal out of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day: “It seems so arbitrary.” I didn’t have a glibly fatherly answer, at least not one that might make sense to a seventeen-year-old. When I was his age, December 31 was a ready-made excuse to stay up late, with at least one more day off before school resumed. My crowd called it “Amateur’s Night,” when non-drinkers or dainty drinkers drank. New Year’s Day was an addendum to Christmas. It never inspired thoughts of time’s wingèd chariot. I feel no longing for the holidays of the past. They have always carried a hint of bittersweetness, a sense of opportunity missed. To call this melancholy would seem melodramatic. The passage above is from the painter Charles Burchfield’s journal entry for December 31, 1946. He continues:

 

“This year I seemed to reach some sort of milestone – gone was the acute nostalgia for my boyhood Christmases . . . Not that all yearnings for past Christmas joys were absent however. Every so often would come a pang of regret for the half-revealed memories of incidents that perhaps never existed.”

 

Burchfield is wise enough to know one must be skeptical of nostalgia, and that memory is a faculty of the imagination. My one remaining New Year’s Eve ritual is to read Charles Lamb’s Elia essay “New Year’s Eve.” Lamb’s customary silliness is in evidence, of course, as is a muted awareness of mortality. It’s one of Lamb’s profoundest creations. He writes:

 

“I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived; I, and my friends: to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave.—Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. . . . A new state of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself—do these things go out with life?”

'Every Lover Admires His Mistress'

“I have been reading lately Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy; and I think you will be very much amused with a page I here coppy [sic] for you.” 

Keats was in good company. Among the writers amused by Burton’s Wunderkammer (1621) are Swift, Sterne, Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, Lamb, Melville and Beckett. It’s less the book’s themes that attract readers than Burton’s crazy learning and logorrhea. Some of his pages recall Finnegans Wake. He loved lists and catalogs of nouns, verbs and adjectives. His prose is opulent, the opposite of minimalist.

 

Keats was writing one of his serial letters to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana Keats on September 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25 and 17 in 1819. We know he had acquired his copy of Burton the previous spring. The quoted Burton passage is in the letter entry dated Sept. 18. In the Hyder Edward Rollins two-volume edition of Keats’ letters, the quotation fills an entire page, thirty-one lines of print, all copied longhand. The poet takes it from the section titled “Symptoms of Love,” which begins:

 

“Every Lover admires his Mistress, though she be very deformed of herself, ill-favored, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tann’d, tallow-fac’d, have a swoln juglers platter face, or a thin, lean, chitty face, have clouds in her face, be crooked, dry, bald, goggle-eyed, blear-eyed or with staring eyes, she looks like a squis’d cat . . .”

 

Keep in mind, Keats is sharing this with his brother and his brother’s wife. To no one's surprise, Burton was a bachelor (1577-1640). The parade of grotesqueries continues:

 

“. . .  a sharp chin, lave-eared, with a long crane’s neck, which stands awry too, pendulis mammis her dugs like two double jugs, or else no dugs in the other extream, bloody-falln fingers, she have filthy, long, unpaired, nails, scabbed hands or wrists, a tan’d skin, a rotton carcass, crooked back, she stoops, is lame, splea footed, as slender in the middle as a cow in the wast, gowty legs, her ankles hang over her shooes, her feet stink, she breed lice, a meer changeling, a very monster, an aufe imperfect, her whole complexion savors, an harsh voice, incondite gesture, vile gate, a vast virago, or an ugly tit, a slug, a fat fustilugs, a trusse, a long lean rawbone, a Skeleton, a Sneaker . . .”

 

An ambitious reader could devote a book to annotating the single passage quoted by Keats.