Anyone have a year without Eliot?

   Aye, and poets send out
   the sick spirit to green
   pastures, like lame hor-
   ses turned out unshod to
   the turf to renew their
   hoofs. A sort of yarb-
   doctors in their way, po-
   ets have it that for sore
   hearts, as for sore lungs,
   nature is the grand cure.
   But who froze to death my
   teamster on the prairie?
   And who made an idiot of
   Peter the Will Boy?

I was at breakfast yesterday
with a learned and accomplish-
ed couple of my acquaintance
of the past dozen years or so,
and in exchanging good news of
what we're reading, Crawford's
biography of Eliot (up to the
publication of The Waste Land)
came up, as would be normal.
It turns out, they hadn't read
the poem yet, but insofar as I
had paid it serious attention
(within my usual limits) only
in very recent years, I hold
no scorn for this revelation,
only the profoundest excite-
ment for their sake, to have
reserved that extraordinary
experience. They go all over
the world, they do whatever
they want (they are young),
and they're acutely alert in-
dividuals. I did mention the
usual assurance, that if they
had heard any Dylan (or heavy
metal or Alban Berg), they'd
been standing at the starting
gate long enough, to let them-
selves go; and in any good edi-
tion (I like the one cited be-
low), footnotes and the like
would look after them - not,
in any musical sense, that
they're needed.

As they then joined his fam-
ily, to see an afternoon of
Star Wars, I went looking for
a decent edition for them, on-
ly to find there wasn't one
in town. By "town," I mean
the site of the university
Jefferson designed for our
illumination, not far from
his own house. Of course, 
the library must hold a copy,
and probably it is available
for nothing online. 

We all do live with this poem;
but not to know it, is peculi-
ar. As our conversation over
the division of coffees and
pastries had ranged over read-
ings in poetry, in general, so
I opened a new volume from a
poet cited here before, scan-
ned some lines which could
have come only from Mark Doty,
and realized, much was going
on in them that would not be
there without The Waste Land.

With great regard for a poet
I will always read, and usu-
ally with gratitude (some,
morally obligatory), I sug-
gest he has deeply imbibed
Eliot's praise of Chaucer's
nostalgic sense, of April -

April is the cruellest month ..

           We began to think the white fish individual

           - the one of the pair who'd struggled, after all,

           when our pond's cold water shocked

           and he lay pulsing in the shallows

           till we thought him all but gone ...

           Then simply he drew himself up,

           if that were something a fish

           could do, and swam away.

           A heron ate his mate.

           He surfaced in March,

           after his first season

           entombed in the bottom mud,

           unscathed, a four-inch emperor

           in his white silk coat,

           insignia of the kingdom

           splashed over his back

           the color of candied orange rind.

           He'd nose up out of the lily-murk

           when our shadows crossed his borders,

           push to the edge to open the translucent

           white ring of his mouth over and over

           as if begging ... As if! Seems to want,

           seems to feel. But as we knew him

           semblance fell away: We felt the presence

           of the soul of him, if soul could be

           understood as specificity,

           so that when he himself was swallowed

           - white appetite perched on the roof,

           bill raised to the air, the throat unrelenting -

           the absence in the pond grew resonant,

           a sort of empty ringing. Where were the details then,

           the gestures that had marked him?

           ...

Herman Melville
The Confidence-Man
  His Masquerade
1857
Cited in:
John Williams
Butcher's Crossing
1960
New York Review Books, 2007©

Robert Crawford
Young Eliot
  From St Louis to 
  The Waste Land
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015©

T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land
I, i
1922
Michael North
  editor 
1951
Norton Critical Edition, 2001©

Mark Doty
Deep Lane
  Poems
  Deep Lane iii
  [fragment]
Norton, 2015©

All the good

..  they were still 
sixty-five kilometres 
from Périgeux, on a 
winding back-country 
road, and beginning to
get hungry. The land-
scape was gilded with
the evening light.

On their way to the
restaurant where Jer-
ry Richardson had told
them, he'd had the best
meal of his life, the
Ormsbys experienced a
flat tire, their 7th
in their drive from
Vézelay, in the lug-
gage-laden Renault.

The whole of William
Maxwell's story, of
the Ormsbys' journey
to duplicate those
impressions of another
palate, is digestible
in a matter of minutes,
and can be counted on
to remain with one for
years. He writes so
delicately of mislay-
ing what to keep, it
would be improper to
say what to taste for.

I received a message
yesterday from an an-
cient friend, asking
how to send me some-
thing. I told him he
just had.

Christmas, everyone.

William Maxwell
Early Novels
  and Stories
  The Pilgrimage
    The New Yorker
    August 22, 1953
The Library of America, 2008©

Poinsettia
Photo Laurent

It could happen

A gallant and generous 
blogger from the Péri-
gord, La Pouyette, has 
framed a Christmas post
from the perspective of 
the handsomest way of an-
ticipating its arrival. 

Apart from Heraclitus' 
perfect perch, of a 4-
posterful of infant sib-
lings, a Christmas story  
works best in manifesting 
its miracle, in a vacancy 
rather than in an author-
ity of prophesy. I think, 
"Who knew," is its pitch, 
and that only untrumpeted, 
is its interlineation in 
the incidents of everyday 
life, a possibility. 

Prophesy didn't cause it, 
couldn't define it, can't 
help it. Now, there's pow-
wer without force.

I expect to be wrong, but
I still can be glad.

Joonas Paraviainen
Kathmandu, 2012

If Paris is worth a Mass

could one spare
one's pants for
a Mouton?

She'd met the French Rothschilds because 

Jacob Rothschild, of the English Roths-

childs, was the son of Barbara Hutchinson 

by her first marriage and Maro's mother 

knew her; and Jacob had introduced Maro to 

his cousin Beatrice, when she had gone to 

Paris to study. One day, Wolfgang Reinhardt 

came for drinks at the Rothschild house on 

the Avenue Marigny. Wolfie was a film pro-

ducer, said Maro. Her mother had had an af-

fair with him when John Huston was shooting 

his movie on Freud [with Montgomery Clift, 

need I say; Ed.]. 

When Wolfgang appeared, 

Beatrice told Maro that unfortunately she 

couldn't stay for lunch, because she was 

wearing trousers. Her parents always in-

sisted that women wear skirts at meals. 

Wolfgang told Maro: come with me and I'll 

give you lunch with Sartre instead.

Matthew Spender
A House in St John's Wood
  In Search of my Parents
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015©

Michelangelo Antonioni
Monica Vitti
Alain Delon

Evan Harman

Wishbone in Baccarat
Photo Laurent

A Christmas Cracker

Readers who are not disarmed
already by this year's Christ-
mas Cracker from the Mayfair
bookshop, Heywood Hill, are
welcomed to revisit previous
seasons of its writer's wis-
dom, here. The post is bound
to reach us all eventually,
with mirth of 5th Form rib-
aldry, from the perspective
of a very well-traveled ton-
gue in cheek. His Sicily, A
Short History was our runner-
up as book of the year, and
would have won, if the men-
aces commingled in its sub-
title held a candle to the
winner's merry tribe. Alas, 
mere gangsterism is not e-
nough in times of high re-
ligious dudgeon, to Cruz 
our barren dungeon as a lad-
der day saint, which is not 
the same thing (in any way)
as Gérard's rehearsal for a 
redeeming ladder day upon 
the earth. Somebody's always 
campaigning above his rank.

Each day I hesitate to

turn the key in my post

office box, in hope of

my Cracker's arrival, is

a day precariously rele-

gated to my own imagina-

tion. Mine can only wan-

der in this season, to

Norwich's adopted Venice,

and we know why: for the

perfection of the perman-

ence of its permeability,

often construed as peril.

Expecting my Cracker, I'd

cite another traveler on

this necessary principle,

with an eye for simile we

value so much in Norwich,

in whom a spree of mis-

chief always bares a sim-

ple offer of delight, un-

campaigned as an embrace.

Merry wishes, in all the

ways we truly wish them.

        The music subsides; its twin, however, has risen,

        you discover upon stepping outside - not signif-

        icantly, but enough for you to feel reimbursed for 

        the faded chorale. For water, too, is choral, in

        more ways than one. It is the same water that car-

        ried the Crusaders, the merchants, St Mark's rel-

        ics, Turks, every kind of cargo, military or plea-

        sure vessel; above all, it reflected everybody who

        ever lived, not to mention stayed, in this city,

        everybody who ever strolled or waded its streets

        in the way you do now.

        Small wonder that it looks muddy green in the day-

        time and pitch black at night, rivaling the firma-

        ment .. It really does look like musical sheets,

        frayed at the edges, constantly played, coming to

        you in tidal scores, in bars of canals with innum-

        erable obbligati of bridges, mullioned windows, or

        curved crownings of Coducci cathedrals, not to men-

        tion the violin necks of gondolas.

Joseph Brodsky

Watermark

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992©

John Julius Norwich

  (né Cooper)

Sicily

  A Short History from the

  Ancient Greeks to Cosa Nostra

John Murray, 2015©

Hanky-panky in the book of the year

I realize, I am offering a

nomination too late to max

out its sale, but the book

of my year would not, in a

town with our pity, draw a

large audience, anyway. It

is Nick Stargardt's second

popular history of the war

in Europe, 1939-1945, from

the perspective of Germany

- a ringside seat, if ever

there were one.

For readers in this field,

The German War, adorned as

it is, by not one, but two

whole subtitles, makes for

necessary reading, even if

some will find it disturb-

ingly familiar.

Some years ago, in another

publishing house, our Nick

brought forth Witnesses of

War, with no more than one

subtitle; but the book won

attention, deservedly. Af-

ter Rossellini (Year Zero) 

and Grass (Tin Drum), some

historian of childhood was

bound to write of Germany.

It was very well done, and

I'm a little surprised, to

have omitted mentioning it.

But who knew, that in this

new text, I would have the

chance to praise the first?

     I think we all understand, when a guy repeats himself in a long political campaign. We tolerate these regurgitations as the stump speech, the spiel that would simply be ungenerous not to be sure we were fed. We know the refrain in song, we know the prior work's return, in footnotes or selected quotations, on the same page or in an appendix. How often do we appreciate, in fact, the trail-blazing provenance in an anthology's list of prior publication, to say nothing of the convenience of corralling Trevor-Roper between two covers? What we sort of don't like to think we might undergo, is the word-for-word redumping of entire blocks of text, from the copyright of Knopf, 2005, to that of Basic Books in 2015, without so much as a wave of the referring hand, an admission in the introduction, an assertion of right on the title page.

     It isn't that we're finicky. But of course it's one thing, for a guy to steal from himself, and something else, to adduce the same tissue of words to represent a different investigation. Is there so little connection between the work of selection and statement of evidence for A, that selection and statement can be abandoned as a warfare accomplished for B, ever after? I don't suggest laziness in this, I wonder about the risk of critical lethargy; and I certainly don't care, that he holds an Oxford chair. Some of our neediest cases did the same.

     The thrust of the book for Knopf was the description of the diversity of suffering of children under the Nazis in Germany and in the East. The thrust of the book for Basic is how Germans, self-identified as subjects of the regime, conducted their lives and sustained their minds in that same period. The Germans were Germans in both books; but they were miles apart in identity, under these two distinct vantage points.

     What are the conditions of the evidence, swapped from this burner, when evolved on that burner, without the same predicate, the same seasoning, the same destiny? What on earth is the structure of discussion doing, playing musical chairs with suggestive fragments? The risk in fiction, we recognize as blinding; but is this because we distrust fiction? Or do we hold history in worse contempt? In both, something greater than narrative elegance is at stake. Interpretation and judgment travel very, very badly when they change trains without notice. That is not a politician's redundancy. That is diagnostic mayhem, in any thought involving words.

     And this is regrettable, because a book doesn't rise to this level of consideration without extraordinary felicities. Stargardt's hunger to understand shines through his haste to explain, and for me - guardedly, but decidedly - this instinct closes gaps that his own weaknesses might open. For readers in this field, no return to it can be undertaken with pleasure, but it can be rewarded. The reward in this extremely humane book rises to a par with literature which really is implicit in the conduct of history. We think it strange, to be exemplary despite contradiction. But it is not strange at all, if you were German, and this were 1942. And we are not strange. 

     We just have an alarming politics. To endure its infinitely fatuous assertions of common sense, its grotesque temptations to excess, its monstrously vulgar seductions to force, a little leavening in history's registry of experience is not amiss. This citation comes from page 210 of the book of the year. It had 360 more pages to go:

     The farmer's son confessed to his diary in order 'to

     keep a balance of my life, to consider what is right 

     and wrong and to keep perspective'. Fumbling in the

     cold to get the words down, Albert Joos concluded,

     'Very rarely are people subjected in their lives to

     such brutalisation [Verrohung] and forced to live in

     such primitive conditions .. the continual lying in

     wait for the enemy, in order to do him in at any op-

     portunity, that lets one become properly harsh [roh]'.

     Existential fear now turned Nazi propaganda about

     Jewish-Bolshevism, treacherous civilians and danger-

     ous partisans into common sense. However nagging the

     lingering scruples of individuals, who recognised 

     with distaste how 'hard', 'harsh', 'brutal' and

     'coarse' they had become, the collective self-trans-

     formation of the eastern front was complete.

Nicholas Stargardt

Professor of European

  History, Magdalen

Witnesses of War

  Children's Lives under

  the Nazis

  Cf., Klaus Seidel's story,

  pp. 229-231

Alfred A. Knopf, 2005©

The German War

  A Nation under Arms, 1939-1945

  Citizens and Soldiers

  Cf., Klaus Seidel's story

  pp. 366-368

Basic Books, 2015©