Friday, April 22, 2011

Jane Kenyon - May 23, 1947 - April 22, 1995

Jane Kenyon didn't live a long life and she did not write a great number of poems but many of those she did write are exceptionally beautiful and lovely.  A friend of mine, Mary Ann, died back in January. "Let Evening Come," a favorite of mine, and, though I had not known it, also a favorite of Mary Ann's, was included in the eulogy.


Let Evening Come

BY JANE KENYON
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving   
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing   
as a woman takes up her needles   
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned   
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.   
Let the wind die down. Let the shed   
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop   
in the oats, to air in the lung   
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t   
be afraid. God does not leave us   
comfortless, so let evening come.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Stephen Tennant - April 21 1906 - Feb. 28, 1987

Stephen Tennant was a dandy, a dilettante, aesthetic. He wanted to be a novelist but never finished Lascar, his only attempt. Or, some said, he never really started it - unless you counted the countless lavish illustrations he designed for the cover. He nevertheless made himself literarily historical for the friendships he made. Some of those whom he enter-tained with witticisms and outrageousness were the painter Rex Whistler (felled at Normandy), the photographer Cecil Beaton, all the poetic Sitwells, and the five delightful Mitford sisters. Tennant is considered to be the model for the wonderful character of Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate, as well as the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh when Waugh was drawing the character of Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited.  Despite his lack of concrete accomplishments his friendships and character warranted a lengthy 1992 biography by Philip Hoare.

He was vain.  Once, anticipating a group picture that was to be taken of him and some friends, he wrote, "My tongue is already flickering like an adder, lest one iota of foreground is denied me."

The novelist Rosamond Lehmann reports that Stephen invited her to visit him one weekend at the seaside where he was summering.  She turned up at his home to find no one in.  She sat down on the steps and awaited Stephen's return. Soon she heard his distinct tip-tapping footsteps approaching. "Rosamond, dear! What are you doing here?" "You invited me for the weekend, Stephen, don't you remember?" "But how could you be so cruelly literal, darling?"

Along with the Hoare biography, along with the many references to him in the biographies of his contemporaries, along with his having served as inspiration for characters in the novels of great writers, Stephen Tennant also holds an especially odd niche in literary history: When he had become elderly he rented the cottage on his family estate to a novelist by the name of V.S. Naipaul; the latter immortalized Tennant as a character in The Enigma of Arrival -- a roman a clef which, for its being perfectly and simply written, happens to be one of my favorite novels. 

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Time Out


Break-time.
College basketball season is over.
My taxes are done.
Going to Washington DC tomorrow.
Five nights in Takoma Park, Md.
Three nights in Ashton, Md.
Two nights on N Street Southwest.
Return 4/26.

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Waiter Nightmares

It's a syndrome.  Waitrons often have nightmares .. their stations expand, they can't find their checkbook, they are totally lost, their food orders never come out of the kitchen. A waitress in Provincetown once told me a funny story ... not about a nightmare, but a day-mare: "I was waiting tables at the Post Office Cafe.  It was the Fourth of July weekend.  I was a horrible waitress .. just never got the hang of it. Before every shift I got so nervous, butterflies in my stomach, and would feel like I was going to throw up.  Going to work felt like stepping into a nightmare which I had to face and live through. On the 4th I was so afraid of going to work that M.B. [a well-known hostess at another restaurant] handed me a pill and said, 'Here .. take this .. it'll help you get through the day.'  It was a blue valium. I popped it, took a sip of my coffee, and set off for work. A half-hour later I was wandering up and down amongst the tables, my arms full of plates of eggs, crying, asking people if any of this belonged to them!"

I haven't waited tables for something like 25 years but I still will have a waiter nightmare about once a year.

Friday, April 1, 2011

Writing about Writing: James Wood

One of my friends who loves reading, who is a serious reader, and who has so many friends that he sends out a thousand Christmas cards, said he could count on one hand the number of those friends who are serious readers. Ditto, except I don't have a thousand friends.  


I so much love to read that I love to read books about books. How Fiction Works was a great treat. Crystal-clear precise style. Well-wrought. Notable tidbits:


In a footnote, James Wood asks: "Am I the only reader addicted to the foolish pastime of amassing instances in which minor characters in books happen to have the names of writers?  Thus Camus the chemist in Proust, and another Camus in Bernano's Diary of a Country Priest, and the Pynchons in The House of the Seven Gables, and Horace Updike in Babbitt, and Brecht the dentist in Buddenbrooks, and Heidegger, one of Trotta's witnesses in Joseph Roth's The Emperor's Tomb, and Madame Foucault in Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale, and Father Larkin in David Jones's In Parenthesis, and Count Tolstoy in War and Peace, and a man named Barthes in Rousseau's Confessions, and come to think of it, a certain Madame Rousseau in Proust."


So, yes, James Wood pays close attention.


"In Flaubert and his successors we have the sense that the ideal of writing is a procession of strung details, a necklace of noticings, and that this is sometimes an obstruction to seeing, not an aid." I love his phrase "a necklace of noticings".  It reminds me of a line from the Spanish poet Lorca: "Life is laughter amid a rosary of deaths." A rosary of noticings?


"Flaubert loved to read aloud. It took him thirty-two hours to read his overblown lyrical fantasia, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, to two friends. And when he dined in Paris at the Goncourts', he loved to read out examples of bad writing.  Turgenev said that he knew of 'no other writer who scrupled in quite that way.' Even Henry James, the master stylist, was somewhat appalled by the religious devotion with which Flaubert assassinated repetition, unwanted cliches, clumsy sonorities. The scene of [Flaubert's] writing has become notorious: the study at Croisset, the slow river outside the window, while inside the bearish Norman, wrapped in his dressing gown and wreathed in pipe smoke, groaned and complained about how slow his progress was, each sentence laid as slowly and agonizingly as a fuse."


In a footnote to the above passage Wood "wonders if a great deal of time was not spent just sleeping and masturbating (Flaubert likened sentences to ejaculate). Often, the excruciation of the stylist seems to be a front for writer's block. This was the case with the marvelous American writer J.F. Powers, for instance, of whom Sean O'Faolain joked, in Wildean fashion, that he 'spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon wondering whether or not he should replace it with a semicolon.' More usual, I think, is the kind of literary routine ascribed to the minor English writer A.C. Benson -- that he did nothing all morning and then spent the afternoon writing up what he'd done in the morning."
----
(From my notes one could get the impression that Flaubert is the main subject of How Fiction Works, but he's not; Wood's swathe is wide; he discusses in depth a good many writers -- from Chekov to Saul Bellow.)