Lately I’ve been reading books by and about the classic American writers who lived in Concord, Massachusetts in the years before the Civil War — Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Fuller. My reading has given me definite ideas about what must have been the personal qualities of each of them. I would be surprised if, on meeting Emerson, I found him to be anything but smiling and serene, or Thoreau anything but serious and difficult to engage in conversation, or Hawthorne anything but shy, courteous, and brooding on evil, or Fuller anything but an epitome of critical intelligence. My ideas may be no more than caricatures, but they do have roots in what I have read.

But I had been unable to form any such definite idea about Bronson Alcott, who was a figure of consequence in that extraordinary community of writers and thinkers. Although he wrote almost daily, in a journal that grew to thousands of pages in the course of his long life, he never fully succeeded in revealing himself in his writing. That is, as far as I know; I haven’t read the volume of selections from his journals edited by his biographer Odell Shepard.

And yet, I am certain that he was an extraordinary person of some sort. He was taken quite seriously by distinguished writers whom we must take seriously. He became a close friend of both Emerson and Thoreau. At one time, Emerson and Alcott tinkered with the idea of combining their households to form a sort of transcendental commune. (Mrs. Emerson and Mrs. Alcott said no.). He lent Thoreau the ax that he used when building his hut at Walden Pond and he became a frequent visitor at the hut. He was entrusted with planning Thoreau’s funeral and memorial service. When a young poet named William Dean Howells paid Hawthorne a visit in Concord, Hawthorne told him that there were two more people whom he must see before he left town: Emerson and Alcott.

His acceptance by the great figures of Concord — he was a outsider from Connecticut — is all the more remarkable in that it occurred when Concord was beginning to attract cranks and and cultural sight-seers of all types, and the great figures in town were no doubt on guard against them. Alcott got through their defenses.

But for all that, I was able to picture him only as a failure — as a teacher, a writer, a thinker, and a breadwinner for his wife and four daughters. I’m missing something.

To begin my quest for Bronson Alcott, I looked up the main facts of his life in standard reference works, and found the following.

Amos Bronson Alcott (1799 – 1888) was born in Spindle Hill, Connecticut. His father was an unprosperous farmer and mechanic. Like Lincoln, Alcott had little formal education but made up for this lack by reading classics of English literature. Unlike Lincoln, Bronson did not become a distinguished writer. His very real gifts would lie elsewhere.

Growing up, he worked in a New England clock factory, and as a pedlar selling books in Virginia and the old Carolinas.

In 1830, Alcott married Abby May, the daughter of a prominent abolitionist. Through her personal connections, he became acquainted with William Lloyd Garrison and contributed an article to Garrison’s anti-slavery paper The Liberator. Alcott and his wife visited Garrison in jail on the day after Garrison had been rescued by authorities from a Boston lynch mob — jail being the best way that the authorities knew to protect him.

Visiting Garrison while the lynch mob was still no doubt violently agitated was a courageous and principled act, and not the first such act that Alcott would take. He later refused to pay taxes as a protest against the Mexican War — and was bailed out by friends. Thoreau admired Alcott’s courage and emulated him, even to the point of being bailed out by friends.,

But Alcott’s real vocation was not political agitation, but teaching.

After teaching in several schools in New England and Philadelphia, he founded the Temple School in Boston. Here, in his own school, he had the freedom to follow his own unorthodox teaching philosophy, which stressed the development of the child’s personality rather than the inculcation of knowledge. This philosophy was based on his belief that children have within them illimitable funds of knowledge and wisdom. The teacher’s job, accordingly, is to elicit this knowledge and wisdom, to make it effective and working in the lives of pupils. And the way to draw out a pupil’s inner riches, Alcott believed, was through conversation. Alcott listened to his pupils as much as he spoke to them; he tried to engage them in dialectic of the kind practiced by his hero Socrates.

Even in the matter of discipline, Alcott refused to rely on his authority as the teacher, and instead adopted a collaborative and Socratic approach. When a pupil misbehaved, Alcott asked the other pupils to decide on a punishment. This would, Alcott believed, arouse in the pupils a sense of shame at their own misbehavior. It worked, according to later accounts of some pupils, but it disturbed some of the parents. The hickory stick reigned in American classrooms at this time. Thoreau lost his teaching job in the Concord public schools by refusing to cane his students.

Alcott’s classroom was decorated to reassure and inspire his pupils. The walls were covered with maps and with prints of such paintings as Guido Reni’s “Flight into Egypt”. Busts of Plato and Socrates and Milton were mounted on the walls, to remind students of the greatness of which the human spirit is possible. Dr. Johnson’s English Dictionary sat on Alcott’s desk, where it was displayed as a sacred ark of human knowledge. 

Alcott was assisted in running his school by two brilliant women, Elizabeth Peabody and later Margaret Fuller. Peabody — whose sister Sophia married Nathaniel Hawthorne — would later open the first English language kindergarten in the United States and become a leading expert on early childhood education. Fuller would become a major figure of the transcendentalist movement. That Alcott was able to enlist the help of two such women is another indication that he was something more than a crank.

I have read different explanations of how Alcott’s school failed. One explanation is that it simply came to lack pupils. Some parents withdrew their children when they saw how unorthodox Alcott’s teaching philosophy was. The economic panic of 1837 forced other parents to withdraw their children.

According to another account, suspicions of heretical teaching led authorities to shut the school down. Alcott had been engaging his pupils in conversations about the meaning of the gospels. Elizabeth Peabody wrote a book about the conversations. A Boston attorney bought 750 copies of the book in order to destroy them. When a sheriff appeared at the door of the school holding a copy of the decree that the school must be closed, Alcott’s little daughter Louisa May confronted the sheriff and said, “Go away, bad man, you are making my father unhappy!”

Later, Alcott would open a small version of the Temple school, and would again outrage public opinion, this time by accepting a black girl as one of his pupils.

After the Temple school failed, whatever the reason, Alcott moved his family to several different towns before settling in Concord in 1840, some say at the urging of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The family lived in poverty alleviated occasionally by earnings from Alcott’s lecturing. Lecturing could be a lucrative occupation in that era, as Emerson and Mark Twain were showing, but Alcott’s style of lecturing would never become popular. He called his lectures “Conversations” and expected members of his audience to do at least half of the talking. The truth will emerge through dialectic, he told his bewildered ticket holders. In the end, though, few people cared to spend money on tickets only to hear themselves talk,

He founded a short-lived community to be based on principles of virtue and the sharing of wealth. The members of the community were to sustain themselves by farming, and their enterprise, accordingly, was named Fruitlands. This project, perhaps the noblest of all projects undertaken by Alcott, contributed by its failure to Alcott’s reputation as an impractical visionary.

Increasingly, the Alcott family was supported by Louisa May, whose books Little Women, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys became (and remain) best sellers. Bronson’s diaries record the great pride that he took in his daughter’s success.

In 1859 he was appointed superintendent of the Concord School System, a job he held until 1865. I have been unable to find out who was behind the appointment; whoever it was, the appointment indicates that Alcott was held in esteem by Concord’s civic leaders.

As superintendent, Alcott found, rather late in life, a paying job for which he was well suited. He visited classrooms throughout the district, encouraging a more spontaneous and joyous style of teaching and learning than was then customary. He invited Thoreau to visit classrooms and talk to students about nature, and to write a natural history of Concord for use in the schools. Thoreau liked these ideas but was too sick with tuberculosis to act on them.

In 1879, Alcott and the former abolitionist Franklin Sanborn founded the Concord School of Philosophy, which Alcott hoped would become a modern Plato’s Academy. The school was housed in a building constructed on the grounds of the Alcott House. It hosted lecturers who spoke about modern philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, as well as transcendentalists and the abolition movement. The school closed in 1888 with a memorial lecture about Alcott, who had recently died.

In his old age, Alcott lived quietly, receiving visits from guests and admirers who regarded him as a sort of oracle. Of course, others regarded him as a crank, and in fact the jury remains out on the value of his claim on our attention. But that is just question that I set out to answer for myself.

That is what the reference works tell me. It’s a picture frame waiting for a portrait. Fortunately, his gifted acquaintances were good portrait painters.

Of all his gifted friends, Alcott was probably closest to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson met Alcott in Boston in 1835 and the two got along well from the beginning of their acquaintance.

Scholars and readers have speculated about why Emerson took to Alcott so quickly. My guess is that in Alcott, Emerson saw a reflection of his own unfallen nature.

Henry James Sr., who knew Emerson well, wrote that Emerson lacked a conscience, by which he meant that Emerson had no sense of ever having sinned. Emerson never tasted of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He didn’t reflect on his own good intentions; he simply took the goodness of his intentions for granted.

And in fact, Emerson was instinctively virtuous, so much so that James was outraged when he saw Emerson enjoying a cigar and a drink at a literary banquet in Boston. It was the desecration of an otherwise immaculate temple, James felt.

Alcott, similarly, was virtuous by instinct, without his left hand knowing what his right hand did. Alcott would be the subject of many entries in Emerson’s journals, and it is from these that I draw most of my idea of Alcott as a person.

In his journal entry for October 21, 1835, Emerson wrote: “Last Saturday night came hither Alcott & spent the Sabbath with me. A wise man, simple, superior to display & drops the best things as quietly as the least.” Much later Emerson is known to have described Alcott as “a tedious archangel”, but he never seems to have lessened his regard for Alcott’s character. Emerson’s biographer Robert Richardson believed that Emerson may have had Alcott in mind when he wrote his essays on “The American Scholar”:and “Character”. The latter essay begins:

“I have read that those who listened to Lord Chatham felt that there was something finer in the man, than anything which he said. . . . This inequality of the reputation to the works or the anecdotes, is not accounted for by saying that the reverberation is longer than the thunder-clap; but somewhat resided in these men which begot an expectation that outran all their performance. The largest part of their power was latent. This is that which we call Character, — a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means.”

In a journal entry dated March — April 1842, Emerson wrote:

He [Alcott] delights in speculation, in nothing so much and is very well endowed & weaponed for that work with a copious accurate, & elegant vocabulary; I may say, poetic; so that I know no man who speaks such good English as he, and is so inventive withal. . . . Where he is greeted by loving and intelligent persons his discourse soars to a wonderful height, so regular, so lucid, so playful, so new & disdainful of boundaries & experience, the the hearers no longer seem to have bodies or material gravity, but almost they can leap into the air at pleasure, or leap at one bound out of this poor solar system

Emerson the notes with regret that Alcott could not transfer his wonderful flow of words and speculation to paper. In the following excerpt from an essay by Alcott, something is struggling for articulation and form but does not succeed:

Nature is quick with spirit. In eternal systole and diastole, the living tides course gladly along, incarnating organ and vessel in their mystic flow. Let her pulsations for a moment pause on their errands, and creation’s self ebbs instantly into chaos and invisibility again. The visible world is the extremist wave of that spiritual flood, whose flux is life, whose reflux death, efflux thought, and conflux light. Organization is the confine of incarnation,—body the atomy of God.

Reading this, I am reminded of Tertan, the brilliant and altruistic university student of disordered mind who is the central figure of Lionel Trilling’s short story “Of This Time, of That Place”. Tertan’s literature professor encourages Tertan to express his ideas intelligibly, without success. I was tempted, when first thinking about Alcott, to find evidence of mental illness in his words and actions, but the more I read and thought about him, the less this seemed to account for him. Alcott was certainly sane. And like Tertan, he had a gift for disinterested love. Although he must have been frustrated by his own failure as a writer, he took pride in the success as writers that his daughter Louisa May and his friend Henry David Thoreau were enjoying. He seldom quarreled with anyone, and remained on good terms with people who told him that he was ludicrous or dangerous.

Emerson further noted that Alcott never lost his belief in a benevolent superintending Deity, and this at a time when Darwin’s discoveries and the Higher Criticism of biblical texts were undermining the faith of Christians, Alcott remained convinced of the truth of most Christian teachings. His simple unquestioning belief in life after death led to his often being asked to console children who had lost family members.

Being human, Bronson Alcott must have done his share of mean and shabby things, but none are recorded — and it’s hard to imagine him doing them. His inability to make money created much hardship for his wife and family. Louisa May resolved not to become financially dependent on a man, and never married. But of intentional cruelty toward those he loved, I’ve read nothing.

Alcott may best be understood, then, as an unfallen spirit in a fallen world. That much we can say, but it doesn’t come close to making up for what we will forever lack, the experience of listening to him talk so brilliantly and unselfconsciously, out of the fullness of a mind that retained, through a long life of failure and turmoil, its stubborn, undefeated innocence.

NOTE. The books that are most helping me in my quest for Alcott are:

— Pedlar’s Progress: the Life of Bronson Alcott, by Odell Shepard

— Books about Emerson, Thoreau, or the Transcendentalists by Robert Richardson

— The essays of Emerson

— Selection from Emerson’s Journals, edited by Joel Porte.

I love a good sentence, and having perpetrated many thousands of sentences myself, I know how difficult a thing it is write a good one. Great sentences are more than difficult to write; they approach impossibility as a limit. When you run across a great sentence, you do not forget it. The greatest sentence in English that I know of is the following:

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth.  John 1:14

I can think of several other sentences that are nearly as beautiful as this one, the Authorized Version’s translation of the pedestrian Greek. But great sentences are not what I am concerned with in this post.

I am concerned with great paragraphs. Paragraphs interest me more than sentences because paragraphs are big enough to express connected thoughts in. A sentence makes a statement, but a paragraph can make an argument. And a paragraph gives the poetically inclined writer room in which to raise or lower his voice, quicken or slow his tempo, and deploy the whole panoply of rhetoric. English sentences that attempt to do these things wind up being long, and long English sentences that succeed are always something of a tour de force.

A paragraph can appeal to me by the neatness with which it develops an argument; or by the effectiveness with which it marshals details to produce an effect; or by the sound it makes, whisper or roar; or by the rising level of excitement within it; by its satirical bite; or for many other reasons

In this post, I will print a number of paragraphs that interest and move me, without commenting on them. To experience how these paragraphs affect me, try saying them out loud, in your boldest stentorian voice, before someone who loves or at least abides you.

Isaiah 60:1, King James Version

Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee. For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the LORD shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. And the Gentilesu shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising. Lift up thine eyes round about, and see: all they gather themselves together, they come to thee: thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side. Then thou shalt see, and flow together, and thine heart shall fear, and be enlarged; because the abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee, by the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee. The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah; all they from Sheba shall come: they shall bring gold and incense; and they shall shew forth the praises of the LORD.

from The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, an Athenian (Richard Crawley translator)

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. This belief was not without its grounds. The preparations of both the combatants were in every department in the last state of perfection; and he could see the rest of the Hellenic race taking sides in the quarrel; those who delayed doing so at once having it in contemplation. Indeed this was the greatest movement yet known in history, not only of the Hellenes, but of a large part of the barbarian world- I had almost said of mankind. For though the events of remote antiquity, and even those that more immediately preceded the war, could not from lapse of time be clearly ascertained, yet the evidences which an inquiry carried as far back as was practicable leads me to trust, all point to the conclusion that there was nothing on a great scale, either in war or in other matters. 

from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon

In the second century of the Christian Æra, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence: the Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines. It is the design of this, and of the two succeeding chapters, to describe the prosperous condition of their empire; and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Antoninus, to deduce the most important circumstances of its decline and fall; a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth.

 

from A Letter to Lord Chesterfield by Samuel Johnson

Is not a Patron my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it: till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which providence has enabled me to do for myself.

from Samuel Johnson’s commentary on Shakespeare

“But Falstaff unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee? Thou compound of sense and vice; of sense which may be admired but not esteemed, of vice which may be despised, but hardly detested. Falstaff is a character loaded with faults, and with those faults which naturally produce contempt. He is a thief, and a glutton, a coward, and a boaster, always ready to cheat the weak, and prey upon the poor; to terrify the timorous and insult the defenceless. At once obsequious and malignant, he satirises in their absence those whom he lives by flattering. He is familiar with the prince only as an agent of vice, bot of this familiarity he is so proud as not only to be supercilious and haughty with common men, but to think his interest of importance to the Duke of Lancaster. Yet the man thus corrupt, thus despicable, makes himself necessary to the prince that despises him, by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety, by an unfailing power of exciting laughter, which is the more freely indulged, as his wit is not of the splendid kind, but consists in easy escapes and sallies of levity, which make sport but raise no envy.  It must be observed that he is stained with no enormous or sanguinary crimes, so that his licentiousness is not so offensive but that it may be borne for his mirth.

 

from Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. 

from A Grammar of Assent by John Henry Newman

 Let us consider, too, how differently young and old are affected by the words of some classic author, such as Homer or Horace. Passages, which to students are but rhetorical commonplaces, neither better nor worse than a hundred others which any clever writer might supply, which they get by heart and think very fine, at length come home to them, when long years have passed, and they have had experience of life, and pierce them, as if they had never been known to them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then they come to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation, for thousands of years, with a power over the mind, and a charm, which the current literature of their own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival. Perhaps this is the reason of the medieval opinion about Virgil, as if a prophet or magician; his single words and phrases, his pathetic half lines, giving utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in every time.

from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

Once a day a cheap, gaudy packet arrived upward from St. Louis, and another downward from Keokuk. Before these events, the day was glorious with expectancy; after them, the day was a dead and empty thing. Not only the boys, but the whole village, felt this. After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall, chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep—with shingle-shavings enough around to show what broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk, doing a good business in watermelon rinds and seeds; two or three lonely little freight piles scattered about the ‘levee;’ a pile of ‘skids’ on the slope of the stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them; two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the other side; the ‘point’ above the town, and the ‘point’ below, bounding the river-glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one. Presently a film of dark smoke appears above one of those remote ‘points;’ instantly a negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up the cry, ‘S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin’!’ and the scene changes! The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving.

 

from My Mark Twain by William Dean Howells

Next I saw him dead, lying in his coffin amid those flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour. After the voice of his old friend Twichell had been lifted in the prayer which it wailed through in broken-hearted supplication, I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it: something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes–I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.

 

 

from A la Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust

He [Bergotte] was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self- sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there — to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only if then ! to fools. (trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff)

Il était mort. Mort à jamais ? Qui peut le dire ? Certes, les expériences spirites, pas plus que les dogmes religieux, n’apportent la preuve que l’âme subsiste. Ce qu’on peut dire, c’est que tout se passe dans notre vie comme si nous y entrions avec le faix d’obligations contractées dans une vie antérieure ; il n’y a aucune raison, dans nos conditions de vie sur cette terre, pour que nous nous croyions obligés à faire le bien, à être délicats, même à être polis, ni pour l’artiste cultivé à ce qu’il se croie obligé de recommencer vingt fois un morceau dont l’admiration qu’il excitera importera peu à son corps mangé par les vers, comme le pan de mur jaune que peignit avec tant de science et de raffinement un artiste à jamais inconnu, à peine identifié sous le nom de Ver Meer. Toutes ces obligations, qui n’ont pas leur sanction dans la vie présente, semblent appartenir à un monde différent, fondé sur la bonté, le scrupule, le sacrifice, un monde entièrement différent de celui-ci, et dont nous sortons pour naître à cette terre, avant peut-être d’y retourner revivre sous l’empire de ces lois inconnues auxquelles nous avons obéi parce que nous en portions l’enseignement en nous, sans savoir qui les y avait tracées – ces lois dont tout travail profond de l’intelligence nous rapproche et qui sont invisibles seulement – et encore ! – pour les sots.

 

from Poetry and the Age by Randall Jarrell

The critic said that once a year he read Kim; and he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love—he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn’t help himself. To him it wasn’t a means to a lecture or article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself. And isn’t this what the work of art demands of us? The work of art, Rilke said, says to us always: You must change your life. It demands of us that we too see things as ends, not as means—that we too know them and love them for their own sake. This change is beyond us, perhaps, during the active, greedy, and powerful hours of our lives; but duringthe contemplative and sympathetic hours of our reading, our listening, our looking, it is surely within our power, if we choose to make it so, if we choose to let one part of our nature follow its natural desires. So I say to you, for a closing sentence, Read at whim! read at whim!”

 

Great books, by people like Homer and Dante and Shakespeare, are great because of the amount of truth that they encompass — so great that we are tempted to call them universal in their significance.

There, I’ve paid proper homage to the big guys. Now I’m talking about a book that deals in truths that no one would call universal. They are local to a place (a small town in Minnesota) and a profession (public high school teaching) and a phase of civilization (American civilization, mid to late twentieth century). The book is Staggerford, by Jon Hassler, and it accurately reports the truth of its setting and subject matter, with humor and pathos

The central character of the novel is a 35 year-old unmarried high school English teacher named Miles Pruitt. The story is told if not in Miles’ voice at least from his point of view. He has studied Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer in graduate school, and now must spend 45 minutes every day proctoring a last period study hall crowded with bored and restive students; and every day he must suppress the groans and giggles that erupt when some student’s anonymous flatulence — never more than 15 minutes into the period — takes the stuffy room by storm.

His trials are more than olfactory. He is strongly attracted to a charming younger woman on the faculty who becomes engaged to the school’s dumb jock principal and his superior salary. He must deflect the attentions of a beautiful, intelligent, and troubled female student who is in love with him. He must help his principal — the guy who got his girl — find a diplomatic resolution to a standing protest by the families of the school’s native American students; the native Americans are bored rather than aggrieved and everyone knows it, but the impasse takes all of Miles’ patience and cynicism to resolve.

To ease the pain of his existence, Miles almost always talks ironically — provoking the further irony that his colleagues don’t understand him.

No, this book is not filled with universal truths, but it seems to me, now that I’ve written all the above, that its truths may be something more than little and local.

A few years ago, as my wife and I were leaving a restaurant in Newburyport, Massachusetts, she noticed a flyer on a bulletin board advertising a “Poetry Appreciation Day”. This event was to be a gathering of poetry lovers at the town hall in Newburyport, the following month. Anyone who cared to could read their favorite poem out loud before the gathering, and explain what importance the poem had for them.

My wife urged me apply to be a reader at the gathering. “You like poetry”, she said, “and you would enjoy talking about one of your favorite poems.” She was right, and I applied to be a reader and was accepted.

A month later, I found myself sitting on a stage in the auditorium of the Newburyport town hall with about a dozen other people who were going to read their favorite poems. I was one of only two adults on the stage; the rest were high school students. Sitting next to me on my left was a girl who appeared to be asking herself “How the hell did I get myself into this?” I asked her what poem she had chosen to read — I didn’t recognize the name of the poem or author that she said —and I told her that she was going to be great. She did not appear to believe me.

Whatever qualms the young poetry lovers were feeling, they read their poems with conviction and gusto. Only one of them read a poem by a poet of whom I had heard, though; this poem was by Constantine Cavafy. The rest of the poems were free verse, and personal — outpourings of feelings that had not been submitted to the discipline of art. Or maybe these poems bore the marks of art, and the genre was simply too strange to me for me to perceive it.

It was clear to me after the event that the new generation of poetry lovers is unacquainted with the work of Francis Turner Palgrave, the friend of Tennyson and compiler of the anthology known as Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, originally published in 1861. Palgrave included in his anthology only short lyric poems — Lycidas is one of the longest poems in the book — and no poems by then living authors. Palgrave’s selection was extremely influential on the practice of English language poets up until recently. It was one of the books that well educated English soldiers took with them into the trenches of World War I, and in many cases their “war poetry” is in fact a dialog between Palgrave and the realities of the war. Robert Frost read his copy of Palgrave so often that he had to have it rebound.

Palgrave’s Golden Treasury has never been without its detractors. William James said that it was more like an aviary than a book. The poets whose work it enshrines, some complain, are almost all men. But Palgrave’s taste was sure — at least it agrees with, or has formed, modern taste — and there are few pages in the book that a sensitive reader would want to tear out and submit to the shredder.

This book, as I saw, made no appeal to the young poetry lovers sitting on the stage with me.

The poem that I read was “Here Lies a Lady” by John Crowe Ransom, a formal poem in regular meters. The poem is about the death of a young wife and mother after “six little spaces of chill and six of burning.”. After I read the poem, I explained that I liked it because I, like Ransom, can be made to feel uncomfortable by too direct expression of emotion. Ransom, it has often been said, defended himself against a natural inclination to the pathetic by creating an elaborate, mock pedantic, ironic style that seems to say “I’m not really greatly moved,” his denial intensifying the emotion in the poem. (Randall Jarrell said that Ransom’s style works well except when he is not feeling much emotion to pretend not to be feeling.)

The poem:

Here lies a lady of beauty and high degree.
Of chills and fever she died, of fever and chills,
The delight of her husband, her aunts, an infant of three,
And of medicos marvelling sweetly on her ills. 

For either she burned and her confident eyes would blaze,
And her fingers fly in a manner to puzzle their heads—
What was she making?  Why, nothing; she sat in a maze
Of old scraps of laces, snipped into curious shreds—

Or this would pass, and the light of her fire decline
Till she lay discouraged and cold as a thin stalk white and blown,
And would not open her eyes, to kisses, to wine;
The sixth of these states was her last; the cold settled down.

Sweet ladies, long may ye bloom, and toughly I hope ye may thole,
But was she not lucky?  In flowers and lace and mourning,
In love and great honour we bade God rest her soul
After six little spaces of chill, and six of burning.

Ransom said that as he wrote the third stanza, his cheeks became wetted.

As I read this poem to my audience, I sensed that Ransom’s little fable about the death of a wife and mother was holding its attention. Whether they saw the poem’s application to their own lives — that everyone’s life is six little spaces of chill and six of burning — I do not know. That is an application that only readers are likely to make who have read some of the older poetry, such as the poetry that Francis Palgrave selected for the delight and instruction for us, his posterity.

I have never in my life wanted to be an actor. For once, my ambition has assessed my gifts accurately. I don’t have an actor’s looks or presence. My voice is weak, and I have a hard time keeping it from trailing off in mid-sentence. I never dreamed about being part of Hollywood, and I’ve seldom given a thought to Broadway, except to relish someone’s wisecrack about it, that Broadway at night would be the most beautiful sight in the world, if only one couldn’t read.

And I can’t remember what made me decide to read Moss Hart’s memoir about Broadway, Act One, or understand why it is one of my favorite books, except perhaps for the witness that it gives to the truth of one of my favorite sentences in Thoreau’s great book Walden:

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” 

Moss Hart himself, reflecting on the ease with which one can lose one’s way and one’s self in the world of theatre, arrives at an Emersonian conclusion:

Every time I have departed from my own values and substituted those of others, I have suffered the consequences.

Moss Hart (1904 – 1961) was an American playwright, librettist, and stage director. Act One is his story of how he achieved his dream of being part of Broadway, in spite of discouragements and failures that would have made most of us settle for selling encyclopedias door-to-door. It is a story about heroic perseverance.

It was his dream of being part of Broadway that sustained him through the long years of an unhappy childhood and adolescence, as a member of a troubled and cash-strapped family. He was sustained, too, by his mother’s sister, Aunt Kate, who spent what little money she had on theatre tickets. Aunt Kate was eccentric — she dressed with a strange flamboyance that caused her to be ridiculed wherever she went — but her comments on plays, production, and acting were always penetrating and just.

His dream, of course, added to his misery while sustaining him. As he wrote:

“The non-athletic boy, the young.ster who liked to read or listen to music, who could not fight or was afraid to, or the boy who had some special interest that was strange or alien to the rest, like the theatre in my case, was banished from the companionship of the others by rules of the ‘tough’ world that was already beginning to prevail.”

He gained acceptance from the boys of his tough world — a neighborhood of mostly poor Jewish families in the Bronx — only by retelling for a group of them the story in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, which he happened to be reading. They were spell bound by Hart’s retelling, and demanded that he keep reading the book and telling them what happened in the book as he read it. In this way Hart became aware that he had a gift for entertaining people.

But it was a long time before he was able to find a way to make his gift useful to Broadway. In the meanwhile, he knew only the monotony of poverty and the unhappiness of life in a family with a violent, mercurial father. His grandfather and father had been cigar makers; but they were put out of work by someone’s invention of a cigar-making machine, and Moss had to drop out of school to work to help support his family. He never completed high school.

His first job was unloading and storing shipments of furs for a furrier. The work left him exhausted by the end of the day. He also picked up an offensive odor from the furs; on the subway home, no one would sit near him. But worst of all, time was passing and he was doing nothing to realize his dream of being part of Broadway.

His description of working for a furrier is certainly vivid enough to impress any reader, but it will have special meaning for anyone who has ever worked at a job of soul crushing monotony for low pay.

But Broadway, when he finally got a foothold in it, introduced him to miseries greater in scale and intensity than anything he could ever have imagined before. He wrote a play titled The Beloved Bandit. How he came to write this play and how it came to be produced off-broadway is too involved a story to tell here. It is enough for the purpose of this article for me to say that the author makes his readers feel the humiliation of seeing one’s audience stand up and walk out of the theatre at the end of the first act, without deigning to voice their contempt for the wretched thing that they had paid good money to see.

        from Frank Capra’s 1938 movie version of “You Can’t Take It With You”

But he remained determined to be a part of Broadway. He began by writing play after play — tragedies modeled on Eugene O’Neil, and explorations of social questions modeled on George Bernard Shaw. He began to develop aesthetic distance — the ability to stand back from one’s own work and judge it as if it were someone else’s. He saw that his plays were slowly becoming better crafted but were still lifeless. Something about his approach was wrong.

Then a friend who had read one of his plays told him, “The comedy in it is what works best.” He had been unaware that he had written any comedy at all. He reread his play and found that his friend was right and found himself as a playwright.

Although I always knew that Moss Hart would become one of the great names in the history of Broadway theatre, that he would collaborate with George S. Kaufman on the writing of classic comedies such as “Merrily We Roll Along” (1934), You Can’t Take It With You” (1936), and “I’d Rather Be Right” (1937) — even so, his story of ordeals including homelessness and hunger, of success achieved through heroic doggedness in the looming shadow of final humiliating failure, keeps me turning the pages of this almost fairy tale, set in a time when New York City was still a place where a young person talented and plucky and lucky enough could meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Kaufman and Hart won over the critics as well as the audiences. “You Can’t Take It With You” is a very funny show”, wrote Robert Benchley in the New Yorker, December 26, 1936. “It is so funny that even when you are not laughing, you get a blow, for it is not only funny, but nice.” Maybe the reason I like Act One is that it conjures up a New York City at a time when plays could be reviewed by Robert Benchley and praised for being “nice” — still the city of dreams and not yet the city of nightmares.

          George S. Kaufman (left) and Moss Hart, 1937

When I’m reading Shakespeare, I ask myself why I ever waste time reading other writers, and I resolve to read nothing but Shakespeare from then on.

When I’m not reading Shakespeare, I hold back from picking him up and having a go at it again. I’m lazy and reading Shakespeare is work. He’s work, because he asks of you all the attention and nimble-wittedness than you can bring to bear on him. I like Rex Stout’s detective stories about Nero Wolfe and his cheeky factotum Archie Goodwin, and I make no apologies for liking them. But I have one thing to say against them. They keep me from reading Shakespeare, because reading them is not work.

The harder jobs pay better. Brain surgeons make more than school crossing guards. Reading Shakespeare pays better than reading Rex Stout. So I always go back to reading Shakespeare, eventually.

But he is work.

Matthew Arnold wrote that there are few lines in King Lear that he didn’t have to read several times before he understood them.  Shakespeare glories in puns and metaphors and stretching and pulling words until they mean things they have never meant before. Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson do not do this and because they don’t they are much easier to read.

In Cymbeline, Imogen tells her husband Leonatus that he must marry again if she should die before he does. Leonatus, loving husband that he is, says to her in reply what every wife would want to hear:

          How, how? Another?
You gentle gods, give me but this I have,
And sear up my embracements from a next
With bonds of death!

I understood Leonatus’ reply, more or less, on first reading. Context helped. But this wonderful language is not plain. I have to be at my reading best to understand and enjoy it.

In Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses urges Achilles to act greatly once again:

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon 
As done: perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery. 

I understood most of this at first reading, even though Shakespeare here fails to manage his metaphors coherently. My literary conscience rebels and then submits to Shakespeare’s magnificent flouting of prose logic.

Christopher Marlowe, in contrast, has Dr. Faustus avow his damnable ambition lucidly:

O, what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honor and omnipotence,
Is promised to the studious artisan!
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command. Emperors and kings
Are but obeyed in their several provinces,
but his dominion that exceeds in this
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man.
A sound magician is a demigod. 

This is great poetry, in my opinion, and it’s a lot easier to understand than Shakespeare. But it’s just not as much fun as Shakespeare.

One part of Shakespeare is not much fun, however, and that is the joking, the duels of wit, the brazen punning, wherein the speakers try to impart a backward spin to their every word the way Minnesota Fats imparted the same to pool balls. Jokes are no longer funny when they have to be footnoted.

But then there is the miraculous exception, the play that has the perfection of something found, not made: Henry IV Part 1. Here the horseplay is all perfectly understandable and fresh because it is a working and necessary part of the play, not a treat for the members of the audience who would rather be at a public hanging.

My enjoyment of Falstaff is so great and I cherish it so much that I have never been able to bring myself to read The Merry Wives of Windsor. I’m told that this play is a sad affair for lovers of the fat old rogue. But someday I’ll screw my courage to the sticking place and read it. It’s by Shakespeare, after all.

My copy of Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing: Questions From The Great Philosophers, by Lesek Kolakowski, arrived at my house in a roundabout way. When I ordered it online, I accidentally had it mailed to my wife’s niece in Alaska, for whom I had ordered another book, I forget which or when.

So this wonderful book went to Alaska where it waited patiently — and philosophically — on an Alaskan doorstep for several weeks, until my wife’s niece discovered it. This niece, seeing that I was the sender, mailed it to me.

I mention this book’s journey because of its aptness to its subject matter, which is broad like the North American continent between Alaska and Massachusetts, and wild like Alaska.

The author, a Polish intellectual best known for his critiques of Marxism, in this book writes about the fundamental question that each of thirty different philosophers poses to himself. What is real? asks Parmenides of Elea. What is the source of truth? Plato wants to know. Kant wants to know how knowledge is possible. What is the human spirit, Bergson wonders. William of Ockham asks whether ideas exist. And so on.

But the greatest question of all, it seems to me, is: Why is there something rather than nothing?

When I was in high school, my best friend and I would sometimes retreat to an old barn on my family’s property where, sitting on bales of hay, we would twist the tail the cosmos, confident in our ability to extort from it the answer to any question that we cared to pose. What is causality? Why nothing, really — only our expectation, founded on experience, that throwing an egg against a wall will be followed immediately by the egg cracking. (We didn’t know that this view of causality had been proposed several hundred years before our time by a man almost as young as we were, David Hume.)

But we had no such easy answer to that biggest of all questions, the only one really worth asking, it still seems to me: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

We first thought that there might be an ineluctable logical necessity that something exist. But, then, why does logic exist? Any answer to this question that we could think of was merely kicking the can a little farther down the road, because the answer itself was always something that existed.

Were we like a cat sitting on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange when the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board makes an announcement that throws all the traders into a panic? What would the cat think was causing all the commotion? That a mouse was running around among the traders’ feet? Would the question even occur to the cat? Are we cats on the Stock Exchange floor when we ask why there is something rather than nothing?

In Kolakowski’s book, this biggest of all questions is fielded by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646 – 1716). Surely Leibnitz would know. “His brilliant mind,” Kolakowski began by writing, “encompassed everything; whatever he touched was enriched by him.”

I read on eagerly, wishing to be enriched by Leibnitz. Kolakowski’s account of his ideas was expressed in plain non- technical English, which could not conceal, however, the strangeness and difficulty of his thought.

So why is there something, rather than nothing, according to Leibnitz? Because God is the sufficient reason of everything that is. And a sufficient reason, according to Leibnitz, is the reason why a thing is, and is what it is and not something else. The sufficient reason of something, being itself something, must have a sufficient reason of its own. Thus, there is a sequence of sufficient reasons, which must however originate in one absolute reason which needs no sufficient reason. This absolute reason can only be God.

I must admit I am a little disappointed in Leibnitz’s answer to the biggest question. I am disappointed because it is pretty much the answer that I came up with on my own, minus the terminology, and minus “ monads”, those irreducible absolutely simple particles of being that somehow are at the bottom of what is.

I am sure I am committing a foul outrage on Leibnitz’s logic, which must be powerful. He discovered calculus, after all, although not in time to prevent Newton from trying to patent it.

Still, I don’t believe that God can be found by logic. That means that the answer to the question, why is there something rather than nothing, cannot be found by logic, either. But the philosophers who raise the questions that we have to ask but cannot answer are giving voice to the needs of our minds, and for that I think we must honor them.

Anyway, there is something, rather than nothing. There is, for example, my toothache, which has been getting worse since I started to write this post. Its existence, mysterious but indubitable, now compels me to go get some Extra Strength Tylenol. But why is there my toothache, rather than nothing?

A beginning sketch of this article got posted and for that I apologize.k

I’ll post a finished article in a couple of weeks.

Your forbearance is appreciated.