A former colleague reminded me of the babysitting job I was given by a newspaper editor some forty years ago. I was the court reporter, covering every level from city police court to the New York Court of Appeals, plus the federal court in the beautiful Art Deco building on Broadway in downtown Albany. An exchange program with an English-language newspaper in Pakistan permitted a young reporter from that country to shadow me for several weeks. His name was Hassan Jafri. He accompanied me on my rounds and I introduced him to judges, attorneys, secretaries, police officers, law clerks and courtroom hangers-on.  One day we were sitting in police court (generally, the most entertaining of the venues I covered), waiting for the action to start. Most of our talk up to this point had been professional, with me briefing him on such things as journalistic standards in the U.S. compared to Pakistan and the constitutional basics. Hassan told me that before flying to Albany from Karachi, he had visited Baltimore. Relatives, I assumed. No, he was making a pilgrimage of sorts, not religious but literary. He wanted to visit three “shrines”:   Edgar Allan Poe’s grave, the H.L. Mencken House and the house where F. Scott Fitzgerald and his family lived while he completed Tender Is the Night. Hassan was more deeply and appreciatively read in American literature than most of my fellow native-born reporting and editing colleagues. I was surprised and delighted. I could talk books with a guy from the other side of the world. I felt a certain patriotic shame remembering the words attributed to Mencken:   “The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.”

How C. F.  Seabrook became the Lear of the vegetable fields The post The Unjolly Green Giant appeared first on The American Scholar.

Metempsychosis is another word I learned from Ulysses. Up till then I used the more plebian-sounding reincarnation. In the fourth chapter, “Calypso,” Molly Bloom is in bed reading a novel, Ruby: Pride of the Ring. She encounters metempsychosis in the text and asks Leopold, who has been serving her tea and toast, what it means. She fumbles the pronunciation and Joyce later puts a pun in her mouth: “met him pike hoses.” The word shows up in three other chapters and is a theme -- ever-changing forms -- in the novel.  In the Winter 2006 issue of Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics, the poet, painter and translator Nicholas Kilmer published “Fragments from a Correspondence,” a selection from the letters written to him by Guy Davenport between 1978 and 1983. Davenport had died the previous year. Kilmer is the grandson of the poet Joyce Kilmer, author of “Trees,” killed by a sniper’s bullet during the Second Battle of the Marne. Davenport knew as much about Ulysses (among other things) as anyone I have known. In a letter dated Sept. 6, 1980, he writes to Kilmer:   “Your theory of metempsychosis through things. It explains so much. I know drab people who have been tenement sinks and public water fountains in Arkansas. I may well have been the Wright Brothers Flyer No. 1. You know my theory that I'm a janitor in all my activities? I janitor, for instance, the Kenyon Review; and my writing is all simply the tidying up of the Modern Period, a bit of string here neatly rolled up, scraps of notes thrown away by Joyce, things dropped by Ez Pound. So I must have been a janitor sometime.”   Davenport is joking, sort of, but the theme of forms changing and evolving across time is recurrent in his essays and fiction. Among the aphorisms of the pre-Socratic philosopher Herakleitos he translated is this: “Change alone is unchanging.” And this: “Everything flows; nothing remains. [Everything moves; nothing is still. Everything passes away; nothing lasts.]” He borrows the title of his 1987 essay collection, Every Force Evolves a Form: Twenty Essays, from Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers. In a footnote to the excerpt from Davenport’s letter, Kilmer explains: “My theory of metempsychosis is that, all things having souls, we shuttle back and forth between animal, vegetable and mineral.”   [The Herakleitos quotes come from Davenport’s Herakleitos and Diogenes (Grey Fox Press, 1979; included in 7 Greeks, New Directions, 1995).

"The mind forms a whole. Its creativity must be cultivated in all directions."

Why did my teachers devote more class time to John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell – American exemplars of the Age of Thrice-Named Writers -- than to Lord Byron? After more than half a century, I can only speculate. Literary patriotism? We spent a lot of time reading such certified American products as Ralph Waldo Emerson (not Thoreau), William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and "The Man Without a Country." In retrospect I can see this reading list had likely been in place for nearly a century. We dabbled in the English Romantic poets, especially Keats and Wordsworth, but no Byron. Was the taint of scandal still attached to his name? I’m not dismissing Whittier & Co. Most are minor writers in a young country. I want to address an imbalance.  My late father-in-law left me a small library of books, including those he had won as prizes while a student at St. Andrew’s College in Aurora, Ontario. Among them is the Oxford edition of The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, the 1952 reprint, which he was awarded four years later. I’m using it to sample Byron, reading among his poems experimentally. I did something similar a few years ago with Robert Browning, another void in my education.   I do love Don Juan (1819-24), especially for its wit, occasional vulgarity and inspired rhymes. He I the inheritor of Alexander Pope’s gift. Take Canto I, Stanza 22:   ‘T is pity learnéd virgins ever wed With persons of no sort of education, Or gentlemen, who, though well born and bred, Grow tired of scientific conversation: I don’t choose to say much upon this head, I’m a plain man, and in a single station, But — Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual, Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck’d you all?”   In Canto III, Stanza 88, Byron writes thoughtfully, colloquially, racily :   “But words are things; and a small drop of ink, Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think; ’T is strange, the shortest letter which man uses Instead of speech, may form a lasting link      Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces Frail man, when paper — even a rag like this, Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.”   In a 2002 essay titled “My Roommate Lord Byron,” the Byronic poet Tom Disch writes:   “It would have pleased Lord Byron to know that, having been the most renowned, imitated, and execrated of the Major Romantic Poets, he is now, almost two centuries later, the least honored, the most ignored and deplored of that select few. For he thrived on giving offense. He was a sexy, swaggering contrarian whose wisecrack answer to the earnest inquiry of Concerned Virtue, ‘What are you rebelling against?,’ would have been the same as Marlon Brando’s: "What have ya got?’”   I should have read Byron decades ago but I wouldn’t have recognized him as a lineal descendent of Dryden and Pope.