The Barber's Lament

I note this week a conversation in the barber's chair occasioned by the appearance of the book I held in my lap. He said he'd held one once. A paperback copy of VC Andrews, Flowers in the Attic. The sight of him holding even such a potboiler (used; $1) prompted his astonished niece to enquire solemnly, "you read books?"

I changed majors in college like socks. One month it was English. I commented in class once on a line of poetry written by a fellow student where it looked like he'd exchanged 'see' and 'hear' for deliberate effect. In order to fully grasp the picture, please envision the poet cooly sitting, Depp-ly, sporting a beret, gorgeous blonde inches to the northeast of his left shoulder, fawning professor by his side: there was no doubt we were in the presence of the star of Contemporary Modes of Modern Literature. His response, "someone actually thinks..." elicited grins if not outright smirks from Sophmore groupies. Is that why books intimidate? Is it why good common folks suspect readers, let alone writers, form an inaccessible hipster doofus clique? (If you're wondering, I switched majors to Sociology the next day, and stayed, until statistics...)

Some readers of this blog complain they don't get the references. I've been thinking about what I do here and why. The great English critic Cyril Connolly offered, "there are so few people who care about poetry in England, and fewer still who are critical of it, that one is tempted at first to make no comment." This was 1936. Cyril is the same fella who said, "There was a time when most people were ashamed to say that The Oxford Book of Greek Verse required a translation." He's got me there, and I suspect, everyone else in the world, except for, at most, ten people (excluding Greeks, themselves, of course).

It's dawning what I do is collect and share. Keith Richards (the coolest hipster of all?) says his epitath need only read, "I passed it on," referring to the blues and rock n'roll the Stones expropriated off Chuck Berry.

What started as a counter-response to the Puritan elements who destroyed our once unified parish, this blog's morphing into something not under my control. It therefore comes as a surprise I must reject, "When I am no longer controversial, I will no longer be important," as spoken by French artist Gustave Courbet, in the nineteenth century. To protest, only, for too long, bores writers and readers.

Like Dorothy Parker I similarly dismiss a responsibility in the way she alludes to Upton Sinclair's insistence to crusade by describing the urge as "a specialized soreness. He is off American authors because they do not always write of sweat-shops and child-labor, of mill-slaves and wages. Surely there is no denying that a great novel of social conditions would be a boon to American letters. But it does seem to be not especially useful to roar and stamp because certain authors choose to speak of jade and satin and the shining surface of old furniture."

Even Connolly, who creates the references others don't get, helps when he pens critics may charge writers of "triteness and banality, linked to being under the influence of popular trends -- imperialism, place nostalgia, games, beer. Now, I will not deny that many poems written under these influences have been bad, but they do not always make for bad poetry."

Such is a poem like John Henry Newbolt's 1897 Vitai Lampada:

There's a breathless hush in the Close tonight
Ten to make and the match to win
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play, and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat.
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame.
But his captain's hand on his shoulder smote
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

The sand of the desert is sodden red-
Red with the wreck of the square that broke
The gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England's far, and Honor a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks-
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the school is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind -
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

Talk about your trite. Talk about your imperialism. Talk about the banality of comparing the game of cricket to war. Yet, it moves me. I can't think of anything else, except Captain Smith's repeated exhortation on the sinking Titanic to "Be British," which captures more succintly what it means to be English in foolish and noble ways.

During the Civil War, Confederates spotted Union counterfeits easily since the bills looked better than the real thing. At the end of a path in an Irish woods I've passed through in Killarney, there's an ordinary tea room. Whenever I see the sentimental harmless kitsch of a Thomas Kincaid painting depicting a glowing cottage on the edge of a forest at twilight, I'm reminded of the tea room, and smile.

There are universals to which we involunatarily respond no matter the source. Philip Stanhope, the Fourth Earl of Chesterfield, wrote about dying, in 1770, "I feel the beginning of autumn which is already very cold. The leaves are withered, fall apace, and seem to intimate that I must follow them; which I shall do without reluctance, being extremely tired of this silly world."

A poem Alexander Pope wrote about the same time, at first glance, contains references totally out of our reach:

Oh! could I mount on the Maeonian wing,
Your Arms, your Actions, your Repose to sing!
What seas you travers'd! And what fields you fought!
Your Country's Peace, how oft, how dearly bought!
How barb'rous rage subsided at your word,
And Nations wonder'd while they dropped the sword!

I have no clue what a Maeonian wing might be. The remainder was equally meaningless until Connolly placed the poem in context by alluding to Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich, waving a piece of paper, declaring, "Peace in Our Time."

On the way to a family reunion last summer in Decatur, Illinois, we traversed highways along the Land of Lincoln trail. In Springfield, we toured the modest house in which he lived, and gazed in awe upon the small triangular desk where he wrote famous words. We then visited the massive Lincoln library to watch a hologram of a ghostly Lincoln gliding through the same house accompanied by stirring narrative and song. Which of the two experiences leaves the most indelible mark? That they both leave something can't be denied.

When I read an article incorporating references I don't know, I explore where they lead. In this, I seem to be alone. What I convey, inspired by subsequent findings, provides pleasure to the author, if not the reader, and so, that may be an end in itself.

Joyce writes in Finnegan's Wake that "Michael Roberts remembers forgotten beauty. He presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world." To rediscover and post lost treasures doesn't turn the world on its head on as Sinclair Lewis would have liked, but, perhaps in an era when even a reader of VC Andrews is a suspect egghead, and someone who reminisces wistfully after gazing upon a Kincaid is by rights a connoisseur, it remains quietly useful to to pass it on.