'And Here the Nothingness Shows Through'

I watched an old favorite, Laurel and Hardy’s 1933 short Me and My Pal. It’s Oliver’s wedding day and his best man, Stanley, gives him a jigsaw puzzle as a wedding gift. Oliver dismisses it at first as “childish balderdash” and promptly gets hooked putting it together along with, eventually, a taxi driver, Ollie’s butler, a telegram delivery boy and, of course, Stanley. Oliver’s father-in-law-to-be, Peter Cucumber, played by the great Jimmy Finlayson, shows up, as do the cops. Mayhem ensues. 

Jigsaw puzzles encourage that sort of obsessiveness. I remember this with our sons. We always gave them a puzzle for Christmas (two-thousand pieces in the later days), and there went the rest of the holiday. At the risk of pushing it too far, puzzles are convenient metaphors for life itself. We’re always looking for the missing piece, blah, blah, blah. Stanley finds it in the end but it’s too late. The wedding’s off, the visitors are on their way to jail and Oliver throws Stanley out the door.   

 

Samuel Beckett loved Laurel and Hardy. In them we can see Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot, also in bowlers and baggy pants. They make cameo appearances in Watt and Mercier and Camier. In Hugh Kenner’s words: “one of them marvelously incompetent, the other an ineffective man of the world devoted (some of the time) to his friend’s care” (A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, 1973). Kenner goes on:

 

“They journeyed, they undertook quests, they had adventures; their friendship, tested by bouts of exasperation, was never really vulnerable; they seemed not to become older, nor wiser; and in perpetual nervous agitation. Laurel’s nerves occasionally protesting like a baby’s, Hardy soliciting a philosophic calm he could never find leisure to settle into, they coped. Neither was especially competent, but Hardy made a big man’s show of competence. Laurel was defeated by the most trifling requirement.”

 

In “Jigsaw Puzzle” (Olives, 2012), A.E. Stallings basically recounts the plot of Me and My Pal and turns puzzle-making into philosophy:   

 

“First, the four corners,

Then the flat edges.

Assemble the lost borders,

Walk the dizzy ledges,

 

“Hoard one color—try

To make it all connected—

The water and the deep sky

And the sky reflected.

 

“Absences align

And lock shapes into place,

And random forms combine

To make a tree, a face.

 

“Slowly you restore

The fractured world and start

To recreate an afternoon before

It fell apart:

 

“Here is summer, here is blue,

Here two lovers kissing,

And here the nothingness shows through

Where one piece is missing.”

'As Sensitive As Anyone Else'

“In common with James Jones, Gina Berriault knows that ill-educated or inarticulate people are as sensitive as anyone else. She renders their speech with a fine and subtle ear for the shy or strident inaccuracies, for the bewilderment of missed points and for the dim, sad rhythms of clichés; but when she takes us into the silence of their minds, their thoughts and feelings come out in prose as graceful, as venturesome and precise as she can make it.” 

That’s Richard Yates (1926-92), author of the novels Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, in “The Achievement of Gina Berriault,” published in Ploughshares in 1979. Yates was a pitiless anatomist of human fallibility. The revival of interest in his novels and stories, thanks in part to the 2008 film version of Revolutionary Road, seems to have faded. Berriault (1926-99), who was especially gifted at writing short stories, seems to have faded even more.

 

Yates’ point is an interesting one. When portraying poorly educated, lower-class or simply inarticulate characters, writers will often treat them condescendingly and even make fun of them (as do others, of course). This seems not only unfair but a lazy indulgence in clichés. I’m reminded of the author’s note to McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (1943), in which Joseph Mitchell, the nonfiction writer for The New Yorker, complains about journalists referring to “the little people”: “I regard this phrase as patronizing and repulsive. There are no little people in this book. They are as big as you are, whoever you are.”

 

Consider Ryabovitch, a young officer in Chekhov’s story “The Kiss” (1887) who must attend a party hosted by his commander, a lieutenant-general. He is self-conscious and uncomfortable: “While some of his comrades assumed a serious expression, while others wore forced smiles, his face, his lynx-like whiskers, and spectacles seemed to say: ‘I am the shyest, most modest, and most undistinguished officer in the whole brigade!’  who attends a party.” Instead of joining a dance, he invites two other officers to play billiards. In modern terms, Ryabovitch is a hopelessly backward nerd.

 

Unexpectedly, a woman embraces Ryabovitch and kisses him. She realizes she has mistaken him for someone else and both shriek. “He quite forgot,” Chekhov writes, “that he was round-shouldered and uninteresting, that he had lynx-like whiskers and an ‘undistinguished appearance’ (that was how his appearance had been described by some ladies whose conversation he had accidentally overheard). When [General] Von Rabbek’s wife happened to pass by him, he gave her such a broad and friendly smile that she stood still and looked at him inquiringly.

 

“‘I like your house immensely!’ he said, setting his spectacles straight.”

 

There’s humor here, as usual in Chekhov’s depictions of even the saddest of human beings, but Ryabovitch is not turned into an easy punching bag. We’re amused, in part, because we understand his social incompetence. It’s possible he has never before been kissed by a woman. He remains obsessed with the memory, and the following day, while mildly drunk, works up the courage to share his experience with several other officers. They seem uninterested. Near the end of the story, Chekhov writes:

 

“And the whole world, the whole of life, seemed to Ryabovitch an unintelligible, aimless jest. . . . And turning his eyes from the water and looking at the sky, he remembered again how fate in the person of an unknown woman had by chance caressed him, he remembered his summer dreams and fancies, and his life struck him as extraordinarily meagre, poverty-stricken, and colourless. . . .”

 

Sadly mild comedy, characteristically Chekhovian. Other writers treat dim, inarticulate characters differently. Yates suggests James Jones, whose enlisted men in From Here to Eternity are often unable to express their bafflement with the world. So too in the fiction of Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson and James T. Farrell, among others. Continuing his description of Berriault’s treatment of inarticulate characters, Yates writes:

 

“That’s a rare ability, and reflects a rare degree of insight. It may well be one of the most valuable skills a writer can learn -- which makes it disappointing to discover, time and again, how few of the most celebrated novelists have bothered to learn it at all.”

 

[The Constance Garnett translation of “The Kiss” is collected in The Party and Other Stories (1917); Ecco Press, 1984.]

'The Most Intense Enthusiasm for Good Literature'

I was reading an interview with X.J. Kennedy when this remark touched me unexpectedly: “He was, of all the people I ever met, the one who had the most intense enthusiasm for good literature.” Spoken by another, this might amount to glibly rendered bullshit, the sort of thing junior faculty say about their seniors on the tenure committee. Kennedy is referring to Randall Jarrell, whom he knew when both taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I can apply Kennedy’s tribute to three people I’ve known, and only two were academics. 

Jarrell’s poetry means little to me but his sole novel, Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy (1954), and a handful of his celebratory reviews, especially those devoted to Kipling, Christina Stead, Marianne Moore, Walter de la Mare and A.E. Housman, constitute a piece of my critical infrastructure. Jarrell likewise understood that mockery is the most potent negative criticism. Laughter hurts more than rational argument, and no critic is funnier. Consider his dismissal of the nearly unreadable Stephen Spender:

 

“It isn’t Mr. Spender but a small, simple -- determinedly simple -- part of Mr. Spender that writes the poems; the poet is a lot smarter man than his style allows him to seem. (If he were as soft and sincere and sentimental as most of his poems make him out to be, the rabbits would have eaten him for lettuce, long ago.)”

 

Back to Kennedy’s characterization of Jarrell. On July 24, 1965, less than three months before his death, Jarrell published “Speaking of Books,” ostensibly a list of suggestions for summer reading in The New York Times Book Review. In fact, it’s a distillation of a lifetime engagement with books. Read with the knowledge of Jarrell’s imminent death, it’s a poignant human document but we shouldn’t allow poignancy to diminish its worth as a paean to passionate reading:

 

“May I finish by recommending . . . some books for summer reading? Giradoux's Electra; Bemelman’s Hotel Splendide; Kim; Saint-Simon’s Memoirs; Elizabeth Bishop’s North and South; the new edition of A.L. Kroeber's textbook of anthropology, and Ralph Linton’s The Study of Man; Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches; Colette’s Julie de Carneilhan and The Last of Cheri; Pirandello’s Henry IV; Freud’s Collected Papers; Peter Taylor’s The Widows of Thornton; Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa; Goethe’s aphorisms; Blake’s ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’; Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Letters to Robert Bridges; Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurid Brigge, and Chekhov’s plays, stories, letters -- anything.”

 

I can hear the serious readers out there assessing Jarrell’s list: “Read that. Hated that. Didn’t read that. Want to read that. Would never read that.” I’ve read roughly half the titles. I can take Jarrell’s list seriously because I know how seriously he read good books, not what’s fashionable or carries the imprimatur of a bien pensant critic. The only bookish things that leave me more indifferent than “best-of” lists are the winners of literary awards. But I enjoy reading lists like Jarrell’s. I want to know a serious reader’s favorite books, the ones he would suggest to other serious readers, the ones he rereads himself. I like the variety of his choices. How many poet’s today, assembling a comparable list, would recommend so few poets? I love Saint Simon, Colette and Taylor. Kim. And Chekhov, of course – “anything.”

  

I might add Parade’s End, Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm, Zeno’s Conscience, Memoirs of a Midget, Arabia Deserta, Imaginary Conversations, Memoirs of Hadrian, London Labour and the London Poor, Barbarian in the Garden, The American Scene, Pale Fire, The Lives of the Eminent Poets, The Leopard, Isaac Babel’s stories, Daniel Deronda, “Master and Man,” Between Meals, Life and Fate. Tristram Shandy, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs,  J.V. Cunningham’s and William Hazlitt’s Essays . . .

'Stimulated to Vigour and Activity'

When John Ruskin (b. 1819) traveled as a boy, his father packed in his luggage four small volumes of Dr. Johnson’s Rambler and Idler essays. In his peculiar memoir Praeterita (1885), Ruskin tells us “had it not been for constant reading of the Bible, I might probably have taken Johnson for my model of English,” and continues: 

“I valued his sentences not primarily because they were symmetrical, but because they were just, and clear; it is a method of judgment rarely used by the average public, who ask from an author always, in the first place, arguments in favour of their own opinions, in elegant terms . . .”

 

Who can imagine the father of an adolescent boy today packing Johnson with his toothbrush and underwear. Even I wouldn’t have done that but it makes sense for an evangelical family of the Victorian era. Johnson’s work might pass as secular scripture. And I agree that most of us can learn from the clarity and forcefulness of his prose.  

 

Three years after his final Rambler essay was published in 1755, Johnson resumed writing periodical essays in The Idler on April 15, 1758. Boswell tells us his friend wrote some of The Idler essays “as hastily as an ordinary letter.” John Wain in his biography of Johnson says they are “lighter and less ambitious” than The Rambler, which doesn’t seem quite accurate, but he adds: “The firm moral purpose is as evident as it always was, but there is more sense of holiday and fun.” In his first Idler, Johnson writes: “Every man is, or hopes to be, an Idler.” This is written by the man who had already published “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” his Dictionary and the Rambler and Adventurer essays, among much else.

 

I would distinguish idleness from laziness, though I do recognize a lazy streak in myself. The only antidote is more work, sometimes accomplished only through an act of will. Idleness can be a virtue, especially when contrasted with manic busyness. I like Johnson’s summation:  

 

“The Idler, though sluggish, is yet alive, and may sometimes be stimulated to vigour and activity. He may descend into profoundness, or tower into sublimity; for the diligence of an Idler is rapid and impetuous, as ponderous bodies forced into velocity move with violence proportionate to their weight.”

'The Amber of His Style'

Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books has digitalized three volumes of Desmond MacCarthy’s essays and reviews -- Portraits (1931), Criticism (1932), Memories (1953) – with a promise of more to come. MacCarthy’s reputation in the U.S. is almost sub-atomic. Devotees of Bloomsbury think of hm as a hanger-on, an outer planet orbiting the Woolf-sun, which is a shame because MacCarthy (1877-1952) is an acute critic who might be thought of as a literary anecdotalist, mingling the lives and works of his subjects. He writes like an enthusiastic reader, not an academic, and his ultimate interest is the muddle of human nature – why people behave so bafflingly or, on occasion, so charmingly. Here, from Memories, is an excerpt from MacCarthy’s essay on one of his friends, Max Beerbohm: 

“His conversation, like his prose, is full of slight surprises. As a talker he belongs to more leisurely days, when the tempo of conversation permitted people to express themselves, and hosts did not prefer emphatic jawing guests, who shift their topic every moment. The art of conversation has passed away. In London to tell a story well is now impossible, for it may take more than two minutes; Oscar Wilde would be voted a bore, and neighbours at dinner would begin talking to each other after his third sentence.”

 

Note the shift from specific to general, suggesting that in 1946, when MacCarthy is writing, traditional English tolerance for eccentricity is already waning.  MacCarthy, like Beerbohm, was a gifted conversationalist. When he died six years later at age seventy-five, Beerbohm broadcast a brief, touching remembrance of his old friend on the BBC. In “Sir Desmond MacCarthy” (Mainly on the Air, 1946; rev. 1957), Beerbohm recounts the time Virginia Woolf hired a stenographer to surreptitiously record MacCarthy’s inspired, eloquent conversation. When transcribed, however, “the typescript was a disappointment. Without the inflections of the voice, without the accompanying gestures and changes of facial expression, how could it have been otherwise?”

 

MacCarthy writes with a comparable intimacy about writers dead before he was born. Take his 1942 tribute to Walter Savage Landor, another forgotten figure cherished by some of us:

 

“He is one of those writers for whom, if you care at all, you care immensely. His prose, apart from its content, gives me more pleasure than that of almost any other writer. The Landorian period is built up of chiseled statements, without conjunctions or transitions; the blocks . . .  are so hard and well-cut that they require no mortar.”

 

And here, a few paragraphs later, MacCarthy demonstrates his gift for aphorism: “He wrote many a page that was as lifeless as it was flawless. The amber of his style also embalmed mere flies and straws. Like several others who have mastered a manner of pronounced aesthetic quality, he sometimes ceased to observe its unfitness to the matter in hand; yet how frequently, both in prose and verse, Landor triumphed in the controlled expression of tenderness and solemnity!” 

 

MacCarthy’s prose is often so vivid, so unexpectedly and tastefully thrilling, that even familiar judgments sound novel and definitive. Here he is, also from Memories, on Kipling:

 

“Kipling has been the most wide-flung combustion in the sky of English letters since Byron and Dickens. . . . Kipling is a writer whose phrases must be allowed to soak a moment in the mind before they expand, like those little Japanese pellets which blossom into flower only when they have lain awhile on the surface of a cup of water. Yet with all his ostentatious word-craft, he remained a favourite author of thousands upon thousands of readers who are ordinarily impatient of that kind of writing.”

 

Something similar might be said of MacCarthy. It’s likely you have never read his work or even heard his name, so you can thank Isaac Waisberg for the generous introduction.

'Probity Was Perhaps the Highest Good'

As a newspaper reporter I covered only one capital murder trial. This was in rural Indiana in 1983. At the age of eighteen, William Spranger had fatally shot a town marshal, William Miner, in the back with the officer’s service revolver. The jury found Spranger guilty and Judge James C. Puckett sentenced him to death.

I knew the judge the way reporters often know public figures. The relationship was genial but guarded. After the sentencing I asked the bailiff if I could see Puckett in his chambers. The bailiff passed on my request and, to my surprise, the judge agreed. I knew Puckett as a man of great dignity, always conservatively dressed and groomed, serious and scholarly, tall with a Lincolnesque manner. The judge was sprawled in the chair behind his desk, disheveled, sweating, tie undone, hair out of place. He could hardly speak and gave me a few brief answers to my questions, which I no  longer remember. I left the courthouse with a single word in my head, one we seldom hear anymore: probity. I think of the judge when I encounter the word.     

 

Puckett gave the lie to the stereotype of the “hanging judge.” Clearly, his decision had disturbed him severely. I saw a man who had wrestled with his conscience and his obligations as a judge. There was nothing cavalier or vindictive about him. He did what he was obliged to do, and it took something out of him.

 

Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary defines probity as “honesty; sincerity; veracity,” qualities we seldom associate with judges and other public officials. The meaning has shifted with the centuries. The OED gives us “the quality or condition of having strong moral principles; integrity, good character; honesty, decency.” Among the citations is one from Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913): “In a few years his unprincipled wife warped the probity of a lifetime.”

 

I recently reread Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), my favorite among his novels. I remembered a brief essay Theodore Dalrymple wrote a decade ago about the great writer. He doesn’t mention Nostromo but he does examine probity, a quality that distinguished Judge Puckett:

 

“In finding something for his hand to do, and doing it with all his might, Conrad always kept morality in view. For Conrad, probity was perhaps the highest good, the moral quality he admired most; for him, very distant goals diluted probity and finally dissolved it utterly. The good that resulted from doing something with all one’s might had therefore to be tangible or immediate, and not so far removed that it entailed or permitted the doing of evil in the name of the eventual good that it would supposedly produce.”

'Where I Went and Cannot Come Again'

A brief return to the Russian word toska mentioned in Thursday’s post by Gary Saul Morson in reference to Chekhov. Dave Lull alerted me to Nabokov’s explication of the word in his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. In the second of the four volumes, Nabokov writes: 

“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, lovesickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom, skuka.”

 

A word layered with nuance for Russian speakers. No wonder it’s tough to translate. Later in the same volume Nabokov writes: “The vocabulary of ennui also includes toska (a preying misery, a gnawing mental ache).” Among English-language writers whose work is suffused with a toska-like sentiment, I think first of Housman, as in XL from A Shropshire Lad:

 

“Into my heart an air that kills 

  From yon far country blows: 

What are those blue remembered hills, 

  What spires, what farms are those? 

 

“That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain, 

The happy highways where I went 

  And cannot come again.”

 

Housman’s lyrics often teeter between the lachrymose and the genuinely toska-like, an honestly earned sadness, not cheaply sentimental. Given his themes, it’s remarkable how gracefully he approaches but avoids the maudlin. I think of John Williams’ novel Stoner (1965), and stories and novels by Edith Wharton, William Maxwell and John McGahern. In its cumulative power and sadness, Stoner reminds me of nothing so much as Henry James’ final, hopeless sentence in Washington Square (1880): “Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlor, picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again – for life, as it were.” And I think toska is frequently encountered in Japanese literature, what little I know of it -- Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro, for instance.

 

[Dave also supplies a link to a 2017 thesis by Jason Scott Jones, “The Concept of Toska in Chekhov’s Short Stories.”]