botanizing

Reading Sebald

Debbie, Peter, and I read recently W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and met this week for dinner to discuss the book.  I had first read the book, along with Sebald’s Austerlitz and The Natural History of Destruction, about four years ago as I explored relationships between stories and photographs.  The Rings of Saturn interested me as I thought about ways to write about travel, especially the way that stories could emerge from walking.

The Rings of Saturn has a setting—a walking trip taken by the author through the English countryside in Suffolk—but it does not have a theme.  The book has been compared to a collage—it is an assembly of stories that on the whole create an impression, but collectively the stories provide no narrative arc.  The walk, which could provide the basis of a narrative, provides only as disjointed locales of reference that serve as points of departure for the stories.  Sebald’s landscape is minimally described, but the independent stories that have tenuous roots in or wildly twining tendrils that grasp for the places Sebald visits are vividly told.

Near the beginning of The Rings of Saturn, where he writes of the author Thomas Browne, Sebald suggests (p. 18) that the earlier author saw the world as “no more than a shadow image of another one far beyond.”  This serves also as an excellent description of The Rings of Saturn in which the villages and landscape of Suffolk are little more than umbral shadows cast for stories caught from the past.

* * *

Photo by DL

Up the river with Ray

After we rise in the morning, I fix tea water and a breakfast of eggs and sausage for everyone.  We clean-up the campsite, and disperse to prepare our packs for a walk up the Selway River.  Ray, as he walks down the hill from the campground’s pit toilet, announces, “I read a poem by W. S. Merwin while on the privy.”  Debbie laughs.  “Ray,” I say, “that sounds like the first lines of a poem.”   

Soon, Ray shoulders his pack, grabs his pole, and walks to the trailhead.  A few minutes later, Debbie and Peter depart.  Adrian and I continue to pack and, then, we also shoulder our backpacks to walk up the river.  We walk for nearly three hours and go a little more than three miles.  

Debbie, Peter, and Ray lie on a point bar, where they bask in the hot afternoon sun after a swim in the chilly Selway, when Adrian and I arrive.  We chat through the remainder of the afternoon about the poems of William Stafford, Theodore Roethke, and Inger Christensen.  

Ray says, “Ouzels sound to me like change jangling in your pocket.”  Soon, as he sits with his back to the river, we hear the jangling call of a bird as it flies upriver.  Ray swiftly tilts his head to catch the call.  “Hear that?” he says, “It’s an ouzel.”  We always enjoy the ouzels on the Selway.  We’ve watched them dive from boulders to water at some campsites.  At other sites, we have waited pensively for those dives when the ouzels were contented simply to do knee-bends on riverside stones.  I wait, too, for Ray to write a jangling poem about the behaviors of ouzels as he has done for salmon and wolverines.  

As the afternoon becomes evening, we gather firewood, and Ray starts a fire on the point bar that will be our campsite.  We reconnoiter spots around the fire—expecting the wind to go either up river or down—and put our sleeping pads on the sand around the fire where we hope that smoke will not go.  

In the darkness, Ray reads aloud from the collected poems of Theodore Roethke.  He asks the rest of us to each read a stanza of Roethke’s poem “The Rose” and, by the light of our headlamps, we read.  Debbie begins:  “There are those to whom place is unimportant, / But this place, where sea and fresh water meet, / Is important . . .”  

This place, the Selway River, is important.  By walking this river over the years we have built of steps our history in this place.  Point bars have become the places of stories.  The river’s flow, its sinuous channel, and its rippled reflections of light have become poems.  

When we finish reading Roethke’s “The Rose,” accompanied by the rush of the river and the chirruping of tree frogs, we leave the fire to head to our tents for the night.  I think about this line from Roethke’s poem: “It is here that the poet claims to find his true self.”  I am not a poet, and I am uncertain about true selves, but many claims reside here for me.  I find on the Selway River solace, calm, and beauty as well as good friends, Ray’s stories, and nights of poetry.

* * *

The photograph of the group around the fire was taken by Adrian.

Reading R. S. Thomas

As I walked home from work on Friday, I flipped open the Collected Poems of R. S. Thomas to find “A Welshman at St. James’ Park.”  The London park of the poem is much like our manicured campus, where I walked in the shade of trees and read the poem’s opening:  “I am invited to enter these gardens / As one of the public . . .”

The cantankerous poet is at once at odds with the park’s regulations to keep the mass of urban humanity in check, including “To keep off the grass and sample flowers / Without touching them; to admire birds / That have been seduced from wildness by / bread they are pelted with.” The long trip to London from his Welsh countryside helps Thomas see how counter he is to conforming not just to the park’s rules:

                             I am not one

Of the public; I have come a long way

To realise it.  Under the sun’s

Feathers are the sinews of stone,

The curved claws.  

His sense runs counter to the public and even to humanity; the poet sees himself more of nature than of humanity and sees, under the park’s feathery light, his sinewy muscles are earthy stone, and his hands are animal-like claws.  His urge is for a place more primal than a park:  “I think of a Welsh hill / That is without fencing . . .”  I smile at the power of Thomas’s unease in the poem.  

Thomas goes further in his poem “Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man.”  We find him not merely revealing his earthy and animal sides but knowing the thoughts of animals and speaking for them, which he does through blackbirds.  

“Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man” is the poem that sent me today to the library.  I wanted to know more about the man who had written this poem and to read more of his writing.  I checked-out of the library with not only his Collected Poems but also a volume of later poems, his selected prose, and a book of criticism.  My urges are scholarly.  

I was drawn to Thomas’s “Thirteen Blackbirds” by an another, earlier and better known, poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens.   The Stevens poem is one of my favorites.  It is a poetic replica of what a Japanese artist, like Hokusai or Hirosige, might have designed for a series of woodblock prints.  Replete with senuous imagery, “Thirteen Ways” leans stylistically toward traditional Japanese poetic forms, such as haiku and tanka, which consist of few lines and equate a single strong image with a mood or sense.  I was curious how Thomas’s “Thirteen Blackbirds” might respond to Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways.”  

That response by Thomas is largely homage, held in the echo of his title and his poem’s structure of 13 brief stanzas.  What Thomas has taken from Stevens is the imagery of blackbirds.  In Stevens’s poem those blackbirds had a role that was all-encompassing and almost god-like, but in Thomas’s poem the blackbirds are more like the citizens.    

In Stevens’s  “Thirteen Ways,” we find perceptions of unity and continuity in the world; in Thomas’s “Thirteen Blackbirds,” we find that disruption, even evil, has entered the ecologically unified world because man is part of nature but acts willfully apart from nature.  Where Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways” was stylistically delicate and elliptical, Thomas’s poem is hard and direct, reflecting, perhaps, our better understanding, than we had early in the twentieth century when Stevens’s poem was written, that many ecological dilemmas are human created and spiraling out of human control.  

“Thirteen Blackbirds” expresses wariness of the human-centered world and sees man as evil in nature.  The poem sets us first in an Edenic world where good and evil are unknown, but they are foreshadowed by the presence of man.  A shadow becomes real in stanza 3 when devilish—“forked”—man, emblematic of evil, creates “darkness / stretching from horizon / to horizon” when he stands out-sized in natural environments, here exemplified by a moor, where nothing native is higher than a low bush.   

The problem of man, the blackbirds state clearly in stanza 5, where “the garden is disturbed,” is that he expects “everything to come to him.”  That all of nature should be available to man to till and mine creates imbalances distasteful to Thomas’s blackbirds.  In stanza 6, the blackbirds “wipe our beaks / on the branches / wasting the dawn’s / jewellery to get rid / of the taste of a man.”  Man infiltrates all and the blackbirds in stanza 12 have so tired of hearing him by day that at night “we stop our ears / lest we should hear tell / of the man in the moon.”   

The life of fair seasons, like the time of plentiful resources on Earth, ends in stanza 13, with the departure of migrants, and the poem ends with a question:  “When they return / in the spring to the garden,  / will there be a man among them?”  The question is at once wishful—the blackbirds seeking a time without the disruptions of humans—and uncertain—what should the blackbirds expect of humans who pillage resources and abandon the spoils.  

Where Wallace Stevens framed his “Thirteen Ways” using first and last stanzas beset by snow, in which the liveliness of the blackbird’s eye is posed against pastoral snowy mountains at the beginning and the calmness of the blackbird stands against active and inevitable weather in the last stanza, Thomas has framed his with scenes in a garden.  That garden, with its Edenic reverberences of good and evil at the beginning of the poem, raises the importance of Thomas’s life as a curate in the Anglican Church and the persistence of God and religious themes in his poetry; those are themes beyond both my ken and desire.  

While his god is called and questioned frequently in Thomas’s poems, his beliefs for me recall those of Robinson Jeffers.  In the preface to The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948), Jeffers called for a philosophy of “inhumanism,” which he described as “a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man.”  The emphasis of Thomas’s  “Thirteen Blackbirds” remains man (and, perhaps, the evil “taste of a man”), but we might say that the perspective of this poem and others by Thomas are “not-man.”

Light reading

I read recently in the mornings when the early light came down my driveway, in the eastern-most of my southern windows, and slipped over my shoulder onto the page.  The illuminated text was a pleasure.  I read long for a few days and lived in the pages of A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, while I subsisted on tea, toast, and delicious paragraphs.

Woolf: A Gift in the Library

I stopped by the archives of the library to read in preparation for an upcoming trip.  The receptionist took my book request and stepped into the back to have someone retrieve the book.   A moment later I heard the voice of Trevor Bond, the head of the archive, call my name.

“There is something I want to show you,” Trevor said.

I followed him behind the reception area to a corridor where offices are located and then into a large room where books are stored.  This is one of the rooms where the library keeps some of its most valuable and oldest collections. 

Trevor spread his hand toward a wall of books.  “We’ve begun to reorganize the Woolf collection,” he said.

One of the important collections in our university archive is the personal library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, which includes over 9000 volumes.  The archive is in the process of reorganizing the volumes of the Woolf library to maintain them as an integrated group of books to enhance use by scholars.  Trevor knows that I have a fondness for Woolf and the Bloomsbury circle, and he wanted to show me the progress that was being made on the reorganization of the Woolf library.

The Woolf library is being placed on shelves that stand over six feet high and extend for nearly 50 feet along a wall through two rooms.  About 15 linear feet of wall are now covered by the Woolfs’ books.  “I expect they will ultimately extend all the way through the next room and around the corner,” Trevor said about the Woolf library.  I made a quick estimation that it would be about 300 square feet of books.  [And I also made a quick calculation of the square feet of books in my personal library . . . about 165 square feet, although my collection of paperbacks is hardly as interesting as the books in the Woolf library.]

As Trevor and I talked, I noticed a small volume on St. Kilda and thought about Leslie Stephen’s fondness for travel, especially in the mountains.  Many of the books that Virginia and Leonard had in the their personal library came from her father, Leslie Stephen. 

A copy of Frazier’s Golden Bough also caught my attention.  The Golden Bough was influential in the first half of the 20th century, and it played a role in my reading last weekend about the archeologist Arthur Evans and his investment of myth in the reports about excavations at Knossos.  I wondered whether Virginia Woolf had read Frazier’s Golden Bough and what she thought of it.

Trevor took the Golden Bough from the shelf and examined the opening pages to look for a name or notes.  On the end pages of the volume, there were handwritten notes in pencil.  “Leonard Woolf,” Trevor said, “made notes like that.  Organizing themes on the blank end pages.” 

Trevor then waved his hand with excitement and said, “Andrew just found this.”  Andrew is one of the graduate students from the English Department who is working this summer to reorganize the Woolf library.  Trevor reached for a heavy blue volume.  Its title was Men, Women and Things, Memories of the Duke of Portland.   Trevor opened the volume to an inscription written in a flowing hand.  The volume was a gift “presented to Mrs. Virginia Woolf by her devoted & obedient servant.”  It was signed “T. S. Eliot on the occasion of Christmas 1937.”  And at hand, I had a book handled by both T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.  It was a fine gift for an afternoon in June.

[The scan of the T.S. Eliot inscription in Men, Women and Things, Memories of the Duke of Portland was downloaded from the website of the Washington State University Libraries at http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/rssapp/rssviewer.aspx?Story=1127]

Books

A couple of weeks ago The New York Times had a review of Larry McMurtry’s new book, Books:  A Memoir.  The review was not especially strong, explaining that McMurtry’s narrative was disjointed and his stories were too often dropped before they were developed.  I immediately ordered the book despite the caveats raised by the Times.

Books:  A Memoir arrived quickly, and I read it yesterday.  The Times review as accurate; and as I read I wished that McMurtry had better developed his stories; yet, Books:  A Memoir was wonderful.

When I first opened Books I was amazed and a little intimidated by the list of books that McMurtry has published.  My response was the kind had by someone who can’t write books when faced with another who seems to have written so many with such ease and success.  But surely I read too much into a simple list.  Near the end of Books, Murtry talks about himself as a writer, describing writing as “neither a keen pleasure nor a hated chore.”  He calls it “simply my vocation.”   

I have read only two of McMurtry’s earlier books—All of My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers and The Last Picture Show.  The film of the latter is among my favorites, and I watch it every couple of years.  A copy of McMurtry’s Roads sits on my library shelves, and I look forward to reading it because my own interest in travelling American roads is only a little less strong than my interest in reading.  I have read regularly the reviews that McMurtry has published in the New York Review of Books, which are strikingly well informed, giving the impression of a writer who has exceptional facility with a broad body of knowledge.

Books is not about the vocation of writing books or the writing life, it is about what McMurtry calls “a powerful competitor” to writing:  book buying. Books is about having books—searching for, handling, accumulating, and then selling books.  It is about book collections and the book trade.

McMurtry says the “antiquarian book trade is an anecdotal culture.”  Books fits that culture as a succession of anecdotes.  His chapters are fragments of memories, barely shaped into stories.  Still, it holds the shape and stuff of a life about which McMurtry has cared—it has the joy of experience and the pleasure of various characters.  That experience and those characters provide a sociology of America and show our social structuring. 

Books reminded me of a used bookstore.  Its short chapters, one after another, were like the piles of books that crowd aisles.  It had valuable finds amid dross.  It was all a pleasure—one enjoys looking through the piles and scanning the books on the shelves, pulling out the interesting ones to see how they feel.

From its beginning, Books made my imagination hum.  I could read only a few sentences before my memories would overwhelm my concentration, and the words on the page would fuzz before the vivid images in my reveries.  McMurtry begins Books by telling us that his parents had not read him stories as a child, and he tells us where he discovers stories in the first books that he acquires.  And I was thinking about being read to as a child and thinking about my first books.  I was thinking about the consuming desire for books and the pleasure of reading.  I would read few paragraphs then put Books aside to reach for my pen.

*  *  *

Larry McMurtry, 2008. Books:  A Memoir.  Simon & Schuster, New York.

Dickinson’s Windows

South light of winters would have lain on Emily Dickinson’s small sleigh bed.  Her bed offered itself to both low south and late west light.  There were windows on each of those walls of her corner bedroom. Her small writing table stood angled between those two windows.  I have not thought about Dickinson and light.  They do not seem affiliated.  I have wondered about the values of her windows.  They were portals to spy on arrivals, allowing her moments to decide whether to remain hidden or to descend to conversation. Dickinson could ‘play’ from the windows, dropping sweets and surreptitious notes.

When I think about her windows, it is her mirror that comes to mind. A small mirror hung above her dresser, and I wonder whether she was too tightly framed by it.  I doubt a tiny mirror could have held Emily Dickinson’s ecstatic vision.  Seated at her writing table, however, she could have looked to the windows, eyes flitting to give a quick glance to south and west, to catch her own face in quarter profile in each window.  In her windows, Dickinson could have seen herself reflected against the outside world. She could see herself in the world without entering it, her face poised against leaves and the town, providing a cautiously distant perspective, a sense of self kept at reflective remove from wearying conflicts.

Below her mirror, Dickinson had hung pictures of George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  She could capture her face in the mirror, then look down to her mentors, and up again, holding the shapes of their strongly outlined faces against her own in the mirror.  Her hands could be on the chest below the mirror.  She could reach down to the bottom drawer, where she had collected her own poetry, miscellaneous sheets as well as sheaves bound by string.

There was a large mirror over the fireplace in the Dickinson front parlour.  On my tour of the house there were several other people, including teenage girls who seemed to know Dickinson quite well.  When we were in the parlour, a lovely young woman, who was perhaps 16, asked the tour guide whether Dickinson had cared about her looks and how other people saw her. The guide could have told us about Dickinson’s tiny mirror, her reflective windows, and how she gazed at the pictures of Browning and Eliot, but these were not part of her answer for the young woman. After the guide’s answer, the young woman turned toward the parlour mirror.  She looked intently at her own face.  Here she was.  Her gaze was self-reflective, but the strong look connected to Emily, to questions of self and place in the world, and to wariness at the questions of the world’s gaze.  The young woman looked in the mirror as if looking through Emily’s windows to find the poet.

*   *   *
For RT, who shared her observations and put Emily Dickinson on our itinerary.

Henry Dies

I thought that Ralph Waldo Emerson would write about Henry Thoreau’s death.  I expected Emerson to make some note of his feelings or describe what he had done after hearing of Henry’s death, but there is no note of Thoreau’s death in Emerson’s journals.  Emerson and Henry had been wearyingly close.  Thoreau had lived in Emerson’s house for extended periods on at least two occasions.  For even longer, Thoreau had been a handy fixit-man and firewood cutter for Emerson. 

Emerson knew Thoreau’s death was coming.  In January 1862, Emerson wrote the header “Old Age” in his GL journal.  “As we live longer,” Emerson wrote, “it looks as if our company were picked out to die first, & we live on in a lessening minority.”  Emerson listed friends in England and Rome who had died.  Here, Emerson noted, Mary Howell Russell, a friend of his wife Lidian, had died, and he jotted also “I am ever threatened by the decays of Henry T.”

On the first of April 1862, when Thoreau lay immobile, dying, in bed, Emerson went to Walden Pond, where he walked across the ice.  The next day he wrote in his journal, “I walked across it again.  I fancied it was late in the season to do thus; but Mr. Thoreau told me, this afternoon, that he has known the ice to hold to the 18th April.”   Henry’s mind remains like the ice, but his body is melting. 

Emerson noted later that the ice remained unbroken on 18 April despite the warmth of the day, and Mr. Channing, he noted, had been on the ice the day before.

May 6, 1862, went without remark in Emerson’s journal.  It was later in the month that he wrote the header:
“Books bequeathed to me
by Henry D. Thoreau.”
The books were mostly Hindu religious myths and other writings on eastern art and philosophy.  Thoreau had introduced Emerson to Asian myths.

Through June and July, Emerson read Thoreau’s journals.  “Henry T. remains erect, calm, self-subsistent, before me, and I read him not only truly in his Journal, but he is not long out of mind when I walk, and, as today, row upon the pond.  He chose wisely no doubt for himself to be the bachelor of thought & nature that he was,—how near to the old monks in their ascetic religion.”

Emerson began to quote from and comment on Thoreau’s journal.  “He loved the sweet fragrance of Melilot,” Emerson recalled and then, in response to a description of Henry’s, “He is very sensible of the odor of waterlilies.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne was living in Concord when Henry died, and he also failed to mention the death in his journals.  Hawthorne had noted well the living Thoreau.  As Hawthorne planned his move to Concord, which had been encouraged by Emerson, Thoreau had planted a garden for Hawthorne and his new wife—Emerson had hired Henry to do the gardening.  Hawthorne would rent a house that had been in Emerson’s family, a house that Hawthorne would call the “Old Manse” in stories that would add to his fame.  Within days of Hawthorne’s arrival at the Old Manse, he tells us in his journal:

“Mr. Thoreau dined with us yesterday.  He is a singular character—a young man with much of the wild original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own.”

Only a few months later, in the spring, Thoreau told Hawthorne that he was leaving Concord—Henry had been living in Emerson’s house and Hawthorne noted that “Emerson appears to have suffered some inconveniency from his experience of Mr. Thoreau.”  Hawthorne wrote, “On my account, I should like to have him remain here; he being one of the few persons, I think, with whom to hold intercourse is like hearing the wind among the boughs of a forest-tree; and, with all this wild freedom, there is high and classic cultivation in him too.”

Ellery Channing began in the days after Henry’s death to write his biography.  On the day that Henry died, Channing went to the Alcotts’ home to tell them the news.  Like Channing, Bronson Alcott had been deeply affected by Henry, and, hearing of Henry’s death, Alcott walked to the Thoreau house to kiss the forehead of his beloved friend.

Louisa May Alcott, who had attached to Henry a young girl’s romantic fantasies, wrote about Thoreau’s death.  “On Tuesday at eight in the morning he asked to be lifted, tried to help do it but was too weak and lying down again passed quietly and painlessly out of the old world into the new,” Alcott wrote to Sophia Foord, who had also admired Henry.  Louisa Alcott was displeased that Emerson had disavowed Henry’s wish not to have a church service at his death.  “Emerson,” Louisa wrote, “ said his sorrow was so great he wanted all the world to mourn with him.”  She disliked the address that Emerson read at the funeral.  In Louisa’s mind, Henry might have belonged to her.  “It was a lovely day, clear, and calm, and springlike,” she wrote to Foord, “and as we all walked after Henry’s coffin with its pall of flowers, carried by six of his townsmen who had grown up with him, it seemed as if Nature wore her most benignant aspect to welcome her dutiful and loving son to his long sleep in her arms."

It was 6 May 1862 when Henry died.

*   *   *

Notes

“As we live longer . . .”  p. 165 in Allardt, L. and D. W. Hill (eds.), 1982.  The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume XV, 1860-1866.  Belknap Press, Cambridge.

“I walked across it again. . .”  p. 249.  ibid.

“Books bequeathed to me . . .” p. 252.  ibid.

“Henry T. remains erect, calm . . .” p. 261. ibid.

“He loved the sweet . . .”  and “He is very sensible . . .” p. 263.  ibid.

“Mr. Thoreau dined with us . . .” p. 105 in Arvin, N. (ed.), 1929.  The heart of Hawthorne’s Journals.  Barnes and Noble, Inc., New York.

“Emerson appears to have suffered . . .” p. 113, ibid.

“On my account . . .” p. 112-113, ibid.

The story of Channing telling Alcott of Henry’s death is from Saxton, M., 1995.  Louisa May Alcott:  A Modern Biography.  Noonday Press, New York.

“On Tuesday at eight . . .”  p. 247-248, ibid.

Acknowledgments

In a review in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Alan Hollinghurst begins by looking at acknowledgments, which he believes provide “slightly cryptic narratives of the writer’s heroic struggle.”  In the acknowledged, he finds boasts (‘see all of the important people I know’) as well as a record of debt.

Authors and the success of writing a book make me curious – as a consequence, I often turn first to the acknowledgments when I pick-up a new book.  There is often a different tone in the acknowledgments than in the book’s body – the difference is akin to that between our speaking voice and the voice we hear in our head.  The acknowledgment voice, like that voice in our head, rationalizes while also reeling-back through recall, sorting the names and events and their effects.

Some books lack acknowledgments.  Lionel Shriver’s recent The Post-Birthday World, for example, has none.  That absence fits well the deception of the novel. The parceling of names and events among paragraphs and categories in acknowledgments speaks of an author’s values and circumstances.  Does the absence of acknowledgments speak also of a certain muteness in the voice in the head?

The writer’s circle – those friends and colleagues who inspire and assist or simply join the writer for tea – are critical, I imagine, to the creative endeavor. The channels of ideas and energy that help to create books are fascinating, and I look for them in acknowledgments. 

There’s a will to connect in reading acknowledgments.  I want to know whether I know anyone acknowledged – a recognition that would give me at least a tenuous connection to the writer and his or her creative process.  Reading acknowledgments may also reflect my desire to be acknowledged – not only to have had some value in the creation of work as substantial as a book, but also to exist in that circle of writers, where creation and conversation and art and life mix (in my imagination at least).

Jacques Barzun’s A Stroll with William James, a book about James’s intellect, which I took from the library a few days ago, has the acknowledgments titled “A Personal Note.”  Barzun begins:  “This book is the record of an intellectual debt.”  As a record of debt, I’m intrigued that the entire Stoll could be read as acknowledgments.  But the body of the book is something other than a record, more than a memoirist acknowledgment of understanding and influence, it is Barzun recreating James’s ideas, and it’s appropriate, I suppose, that he acknowledged the source at the beginning.

*  *  *
Notes
Alan Hollinghurst’s review of Satyr Square:  A Year, a Life in Rome by Leonard Barkan is in the New York Review of Books (volume 54, number 10, June 14, 2007), and I have quoted from page 40.

Jacques Barzun’s A Stroll with William James was published in 1983 by Harper and Row, New York.  The quote is from page vii.

I acknowledge that I have been listed in the acknowledgments of at least one book.  I thank the author for recognizing my role.

I acknowledge also that a book I co-edited in 1996 does not have any acknowledgments.  I regret that omission and wish now to thank everyone that I then neglected.

Some Nights Ago

The sky still held a little blue.  A broad belt of retted cloud was suffused with saffron.  I drove up the Selway River to camp above a cobble bar of white stones.  To take my place here, I tossed the day’s New York Times in the fire ring and piled-on handfuls of fallen sticks.  The Times was reluctant to catch fire.   I grabbed dried grasses and handfuls of cottonwood leaves to place on the newspaper and humped the sticks over them all.  The grasses and leaves took a match and fire transferred to the Times.  The fire rose into the sticks.  The first moist smoke drifted down to the river and across the Selway.  As the flame steadied, I added logs from home to the fire.

I fixed tea from hot water in a thermos and sat in my canvas chair next to the fire.  The gibbous moon rose up river, and, in the dusk, milky Venus sat over the conifer-covered hills to the west. I began reading C. S. Giscombe’s Giscome Road, poems about travels in and the landscape of Canada.  Giscombe’s uneven, sometimes interrupted lines, following the length of fast steps, exerted breathing, or a steady gaze taken at a long rest, reminded me of Gary Snyder’s work. 

“The song’s a commotion rising in the current . . .” the volume's first poem begins.  The sound of the Selway rose.  A river finds its volume when the commotion of day dies away.   At the campfire, I read the poems aloud to myself, my frosty breath mixed with the fire smoke.  “ . . . the voice was always centerless talking that was leading up to song, was about to / be the horn that marked the edge of the water–”

I went to bed when I finished reading the volume of poems.  In the morning I was up at first light and drove three miles down river to the Wilderness Café, which wasn’t yet open.  I sat in the parking lot in my truck to wait, certain that it wouldn’t be too long.  The owner arrived about 6:15. He went inside but didn’t turn on the lights.  He turned on the television, a garish, shifting glare of yellow, red, and green behind the counter.  I waited.  Perhaps ten minutes later, another man arrived, and he opened the door of the restaurant.  The owner stepped outside with the man, and they smoked cigarettes while leaning against the building; each man stood with a knee bent to put a foot against the siding. 

My friends, writers and English professors, arrived at 6.30.  Cecil Giscombe, the poet, was with them.  We would all backpack up the Selway River.  After breakfast.  After a cup of tea.  We put on packs, then began the walk.

“[A]t the river-landing the field name verges on the day name: / at the river-landing’s the place where the river’s 'noble' in a description of it there—/ the river’s aimless self & the portage trail are something else, one goes / off into the trees”  the poet said.

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Quotations from “Sound Carries” in Giscome Road by C. S. Giscombe (1998, Dalkey Archive Press)