The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022, pt. 17: Mark Rich

 

Readings, 2022

By Mark Rich

 

Do I dwell too much in memory? I walk in Frost, in Wordsworth, in Milton, and in other old gardens, and do so in part for gardening discipline. The world is wide and full to overflowing with newer places I might visit. But how to find time when I cultivate the same rows over and over? "Nine bean rows will I have there," Yeats said. Why nine? He probably knew. Or he knew his limits, even in his dream of Innisfree. Or his dream was that he had the power to know them. We usually cannot quite know our limits, despite the fact that we keep meeting them, over and over, in those same rows.

 I will cease apologizing to myself, someday, for how little time I find for simple reading. But let me tell you of a path down which memory led me. It has to do with Emerson, whose importance professional philosophers take comfort in dismissing. Being unprofessional in almost all matters, I must have seen, perhaps unconsciously, an opportunity. I have not quite run with it, but have done my share of garden-walking.

This past year I began spending more time in "Self-Reliance," which ranks high in popularity among readers. I try to memorize passages, since Emerson often speaks in-between his sentences. In this case my eye caught upon a line in which I learned which context. It seemed strangely suggestive. "We first share the life by which things exist and afterwards see them as appearances in nature and forget that we have shared their cause." I often refreshed my memory of these words, in the way one pauses, in passing, to admire a curious shell in a glass cabinet.

 

Enter a package from my mother, packed with miscellaneous life-detritus. One item was an old Mentor Books paperback with my dad's signature within, and the notation, "University of Chicago 1950." I was pleased to see this book: Philosophy in a New Key, by Suzanne K. Langer. If you are one of the two or three who have read my Toys in the Age of Wonder, then you know that my effort there was to see the Modern wonder tale, which I see as a distinct form, in symbolic terms, in much the same way I was seeing Modern playthings in symbolic terms. Even though modernity is broadly traced from the 1600s, I was following Northrop Frye's impulse to speak of a "Modern Century," which for my purposes began in 1859 with Darwin's Origin, along with other historical markers, and ended with the achievement of artificial satellites: so 1957-8, for an ending point. Frye placed his beginning point slightly later than 1859; but my interest in evolutionary theory is greater than his.

 Langer's study, itself a Modern Century work, moves the study of symbolism from more traditional philosophical realms, such as "mentality," into the sphere of the arts. Since at one point she mildly chides another philosopher for not introducing his major hypothesis until midway through his book, it amused me that on pp. 79-80 of hers I found her own hypothesis. After encountering this I went on reading, and reached perhaps two-thirds of the way through when I found myself going back to those pages. Recently those pages are all I have had time for, learning them word for word. slowly, on days when I have some early-morning time. Langer condenses a great deal of carefully worded perspective into these pages. They give me insight into Emerson's koan-like statement, as well as others of his. I will attempt to set forth neither Langer's nor Emerson's thoughts, in terms of my understanding. But I have provided the pages in Langer for any who might be engaged in a search akin to my extraordinarily snaillike one. "Here is the fountain of action and of thought," said Emerson. "The fountain light of all our day," said Wordsworth.

 May I recommend a novel to avoid? After E.O. Wilson's death I picked up his Anthill. It has problems as a novel, as might be expected from one who dedicated his life to his science. The story does come alive for a time in the middle, when it follows developments among various ant colonies. Unfortunately, the hint of Southern faux-gentility and antebellum nostalgia, in the framing human narrative, finds its amplification in the ant depiction. Its supercolony picture, in which multiple queens' subjects coexist rather than battle one another, seems offered as a metaphor for social multiculturalism; and this supercolony of ants, it so happens, requires chemical eradication, in the novel. The human narrative happens to center around a character who belongs to the NRA. The "one-drop rule" receives mention. No would-be sources of such "drops" play a role in the story.

 A few weeks ago in Science News I was reading a review of a new book written by a professional biologist whose skin color is not Wilson's. He won an unprecedented full scholarship to study biology at Harvard, but ended up pursuing his degree elsewhere, since no Harvard professor would agree to be his advisor. I leave it to you to consider whether a bad novelist may have been capable of acting in bad faith within his own profession.

Drawn by its title, I picked up Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah immediately afterward, as tonic and restorative. This wonderful novel reaches for the magical, in places, in its bringing human souls to the page. Its tragedy relates to the central character who remains true to his potential, and who finds himself pitted against a friend who has betrayed his own youthful promise. The titular anthills only barely appear. (Had I read this novel as a youth, this last would have disappointed me severely.)

 

I mentioned my Toys already. In the decade-long pursuit of its ideas, I encountered no novel quite like Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods, and so never felt prompted to to reflect upon this sort of technological positivism. Taking it in this year, I found it a lovely piece of writing, full of the old-fashioned practices which I, and apparently many others, love to dwell upon. It came as a surprise, then, when — at a point in the novel when a crucial plot-matter might be expected to unfold — a new, noisy agricultural machine, large in scale, comes to the family's aid. The event provokes happiness as well as a wonder which is technologically inspired. In the Modern wonder tale, the machine succeeds, but then arrives at its point of destruction. This literary form, put into shape by Poe but fully realized by Verne, makes people think the author is embracing positivism when the actuality is opposite that. They are offering a critique and, they hope, a rebuttal.

 In Wilder, no such rebuttal appears — at least in terms of narrative. The future for the family is made whole, in a sense, by the intrusion of mechanical progress.

 

I read The Invisible Outlaw, a novel by Frederick Faust, aka "Max Brand," which interested me in part because of its vision the Old West — a vision which I suppose had origin in Faust's experience in both Western matters and in Western pulps. In this vision, ethics and ethical systems have no particular place, although they might be glimpsed in the orderly lives led by those living in orderly towns. The lonely individuals who occupy Faust's attention live, instead, by personal codes of conduct. I had a peculiar feeling come over me that in this novel, quite effectively constructed and delivered, that I was dwelling in a land of such ultimate loneliness that we might call it post-millennial. For who has a presence here, in this Old West, in exactly the same proportion as those of African descent in E.O. Wilson's novel? No whisper of the dead Native American's soul breathes in even the slightest breeziness of these woodpulp pages. The novel's events take place after the apocalypse has swept away the prior inhabitants.

 The machine had already arrived, in other words. And since the Native American response to it, in making their own critique and rebuttal, had proven to be inadequate, the machine never met its demise. The preexisting ethical system, instead, did. Unseen ghosts also dwell in Wilder's pages: for this is a nostalgic vision. Nostalgia can only exist where a situation, a fact, an environment, is irretrievable. Willa Cather's power, in My Ántonia and elsewhere, may come in part from her having been able to watch as successions of incursions upon established ways of life proved profitable enough to destroy what came before. The thought arises, now: what if Wellsian positivism, the main source for Gernsbackian and Campbellian wonder tales and itself cemented into the "science fiction" guise by the end of the Modern century, acquired its particular power and popularity due to the hunger felt in the Modern soul to escape the machine of Modernity? In our society that machine had gone unchallenged, largely uncritiqued, and almost never rebutted, except in the wonder tales which were put into the hands of children, whose capacity for wonder was powerful, but for critique, weak. But Wells broke from the Verneian mode. I guess I am asking this. What if Wells's readers saw this as escape literature, rather than as literature leading them deeper into the machine?

 I have just had the recollection that Bertie Wooster often invokes "the Code of the Woosters." I have read little in the Western genre but can hear the phrase "the Code of the West" ringing almost as clearly. And the Code of the West relates to the conquerors, not the conquered and eradicated. If Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster novels have any element of the post-apocalyptic about them it must be in the sense that the arrival of bureaucratic colonialism had already firmly altered the world, installing top-down codes of conduct which had a few whiffs of humanism about them but mainly the stiff gales of air-freshener and deodorant. To be a civil servant became a norm to such a degree that one never afterwards weighed the thought that one's servitude was so baldly stated.

 

I read Right Ho, Jeeves! this year. It had been some years since I last read Wodehouse and, because of that gap, was surprised to learn how much of the texture and character of the badinage, between fictional characters or between narrator and reader, relies on the traditional English canon. Unless you have some key works in your head, even if only dimly held in the usual manner of adult remembrance, you will sense the wit at play without knowing why it is witty.

 This novel does have a few passages that shake before the reader a snooty racism. Whether Wodehouse himself held these thoughts, they seem in character for Wooster. Can we have a proper depiction of Bertie's type without being shown this? Had Wodehouse omitted it, would he have been guilty of glossing over a weakness in his subject and, by some extension, in himself? One might argue that, given the gentrified layers of servitude put into place by colonialism, it was decent of him to bring out a few blots of blasphemy against humanistic ethics in cheery Bertie Wooster — who consistently, and forthrightly, blunders in both thoughts and actions. At the time of the novel's first release, some if not many of its readers found such passages consistent with the overall flavor. Readers now may take exception to them; but part of this comedic act involves the master's abusing the slave who then saves the master from himself. And it is in the master's nature to never quite come clean about it.

 

I fear I have too much to say, or try to say . . . and must hurry on so that I can at least mention Richard Winters, whose novel Hillborn is fascinatingly concerned with characters who might have been grotesques in another's hands, but who are fringes-dwelling, knotted-up beauties in his. I feel this has less concentration, in its paragraphs, than has his novella Sawhorse, which I hope I celebrated here last year; but my reading of Hillborn is colored by the great admiration I have for his previous version of this novel, which he named Ila. I have lacked a chance to revisit that earlier work. Something that Winters does in his writing, however, reminds me of a quality I have found in some young-adult novels by Clyde Robert Bulla. Both writers can depict characters who are, in a way, superbly able, but who, at the same time, are damaged souls. I hope it says not too much about myself that I admire both writers.

In writings about writings, I read C.E. Montague's A Writer's Notes on His Trade, a likeable little Penguin paperback originally from 1949; Philip Larkin's Required Writing; Northrop Frye's The Educated Imagination; and Chauncey Brewster Tinker's 1929 The Good Estate of Poetry. I do believe that had Tinker adopted the pen name of, say, Max Brand, he might have slaughtered Modernism in a more gunfighterly way. I like his well-educated restraint, all the same. To find similar conservatism in Larkin surprised me, a little. That he held a dear affection for Margaret Thatcher may be enough to make me invoke the Code of the Riches in favor of selective ignorance of politically questionable poets, should a full book of his poems come my way. Yet such an impulse might force me to consign too many Modernists to the dust bin.

 I seem to have made it a part of my personal code (assuming that I have one) to mutter to myself, "Know thy enemy," at least now and then — to judge from the fact that, recently, I felt I had no choice but to pick up a thrift-store copy of a work for Fundamentalist children: Dinosaurs and the Bible. I dip into it regularly, each time to emerge amused and disturbed. Albeit I sip the author's poison for perspective upon the technique of poisoning, I will not honor him by naming him. (But, O! The pictures of dinosaurs emerging from Noah's Ark! My comments in Toys about extinction and the 19th-century Church apply even now!)

 I am leaving credible and lively books unmentioned, having run short on space. (And Bach! And issues, as well: why were there so many guns — naturally in Faust/Brand, but in Wilder, in Wilson, in Achebe?) Some among my readings were novels I wanted to re-read, and did; I plan to re-read many more. The ghost of one whose centenary falls in 2023, Cyril Kornbluth, has been asking if he might visit my parlor again. The spirit of Judy Merril whispers, as well: for there remain matters to set to words, and truths to be told. It has been rude, I know, to keep my parlor barred to them for so long — even if the door's being closed seems so accidental, and the result of scrambling for a living in antiques.

 I looked back just now to see how I began this short essay, and am amused to see that I spoke of meeting limits. I have met many, including ones relating to my parlor guests. But I have run into enough walls and built up enough callouses on my forehead, now, that maybe I can blunder forward once more. For sometimes that is what one must do — just blunder ahead — despite the dreams of nine bean-rows and of Innisfree waters lapping the shore, which one hears even when far away and standing on gray pavements.

 

  In 2022, Mark Rich rescued, from pools within a block of his house, countless tadpoles — for the pools were about to dry up or be destroyed by construction. He released some to a village-outskirts pond, but ended up raising hundreds of tree frogs and American toads for release. He feels hard-pressed to say if he achieved anything else this year, at least during summer. His poems have recently or soon will appear in The Lyric, Penumbric, British Fantasy Society's Horizons, and Blue Unicorn. He lives in Cashton, Wisconsin, with partner-in-life Martha Borchardt and two partners-in-happy-hours Scottie dogs.