Vain enough to hope for better from myself, I continue to hack away. There was a time when I could take an opening like the one here and just run with it. Where I ended up might be no great shakes, and maybe that is part of what is going on now. I am less willing to settle for what is no great shakes. Mon dieu, I have standards, perhaps even ambition, and the consequence is a kind of paralysis, a profound sense of inadequacy, when those standards can never be lived up to and the ambition is beyond reach.

As often, I think of Dylan, this time “tryin’ to get to heaven / before they close the door.” I am trying to paint my masterpiece before the time runs out, before the rivers run dry, a canvas spread against night sky dusted with stars, beyond reach, beyond grasp, far from me as as time or love. I am realistic enough to acknowledge that age likely has something to do with this state of affairs. The capacity to go at the vision with focus and intensity for extended periods is diminished, to say the least, from whatever physiological and mind-bent causes.

The barrenness of the last several winters is the source of much distress. My work cycles are based on the school year. Summer has never been a productive season. I look to late September and early October for renewal of the spark, as the light softens and days grow a little shorter, the evenings cooler, and here in Portland on into October as the rainy season sets in. Last winter’s Brontë project was fruitful and rewarding, but even that was dug out in fits and starts and stands in bleak isolation. In the aftermath summer’s lethargy is more than little annoying.

I must grant that this summer much focus and energy is devoted to training to take a crack at the San Antonio Marathon with Big T in November. However much I relish running at a level that I have not known in years, it comes at the expense of the scholarly and creative work. The trade-off bugs me to the extent that it prolongs an already extended period of discontent with an aspect of life that is at the heart of what is best in me. Is it good or bad that running myself to near exhaustion is my primary means of satisfaction these days?

Some may think it kind of nutty for a fellow approaching advanced middle age to be taking a crack at his first marathon, and maybe it is. On the other hand, it is fairly amazing what those of us fortunate to be in reasonably good health at an age older than dirt can do. Arthur Webb at 67 (maybe 68 by now) has run 12 consecutive (maybe 13 by now) Badwater Ultramarathons. The Badwater is a 135 mile race through Death Valley for which Webb prepares by, among other things, running 15 miles in too-small shoes to loosen the nails on his big toes so he can yank them out with pliers because they tend to crack and bleed as the toes swell during the race. (Chris Ballard, Defying Death Valley, Sports Illustrated, 31 August 2009). Okay, so we are not necessarily talking about good sense here. Take the case of legendary grappler Abdullah the Butcher, who at 73, or maybe 69, still hoists his considerable girth, some 400 pounds, into the squared circle to wreak mayhem and stab opponents with his signature dinner fork, which after the match he offers to sell for ten dollars. (Mike Tierney, Still the Butcher After All These Years, New York Times, 26 July 2010). I do not know that it speaks all that well of me, but I find something kind of cool in this.

At one end of a spectrum there is William Wordsworth, who wrote his best poetry by his mid-thirties. He continued to write poems for the remainder of his life, and much of what he wrote on the back end of quite a long life was not very good. At the other stands Picasso. “In the main, Picasso only got better. That’s the take-away from the staggering exhibition of Picasso’s late paintings and prints at the Gagosian Gallery.” (Roberta Smith, Going All Out, Right to the End, New York Times, 16 April 2009, a review of a show featuring paintings from the last decade of Picasso’s life). Smith’s take is that the Gagosian Gallery show proves that “Picasso didn’t skitter irretrievably into an abyss of kitsch, incoherence or irrelevance after this or that high-water mark.” Rather, he “painted, as usual, for his life.”

When I come to the end of an essay such as this one, I must ask if this is anything more than narcissistic whining? Is it, maybe, honest self-appraisal, legitimate criticism from which something of value might be derived? Perhaps in the end you never know, no more than you know if a poem you have written is really good or not. In the end I come down on the side of the latter, that there is something of worth here, fully aware that this may just be a lot of wishful thinking.

The marathon course in San Antonio is billed as flat and fast, a good one to try for a PR or to qualify for Boston. Big T will be looking for a fast time. I will be looking to find the finish line. From where I stand now, I can conceive doing it. The image that torches my heart, the one that reaches into my spirit, is of Picasso painting for his life right up to the end. I can conceive that too, putting brush to canvas stroke after stroke, putting one foot in front of the other, putting one word down on the page after the other, mile after mile, page after page, and finding delight there.

Those who come to this space regularly, from time to time, or by fair chance or foul may note that your oft humbled scribe has not been scribing much of late. The flame of inspiration flickers and wanes. The grim specter of oil saturating the gulf and and washing into Louisiana’s wetlands and marshes where Bobby Jindal screeches like the pencil-neck geek manager of a villainous professional wrestling tag team is enough to render even the peacocks mute, much less a man of poetic sensibility and artistic pretension, I mean, ambition.

* * * * *

It seems the company formerly known as British Petroleum invoiced its Deepwater Horizon partners for their share in costs related to the debacle, hitting Texas-based Andarko for $272 million and Moex, a subsidiary of the Japanese company Mitsui, for $111 million. Andarko fired back:

BP Plc, the project’s operator, should pay the costs from the spill because it acted recklessly and unsafely at the drilling site…

BP didn’t monitor or react to warning signs as the Macondo well was drilled, Chief Executive Officer Jim Hackett said yesterday in a statement. BP is responsible for damages under such conditions.

“BP’s behavior and actions likely represent gross negligence or willful misconduct and thus affect the obligations of the parties under the operating agreement,” Hackett said in the statement.

Needless to say, BP “strongly disagrees” with Andarko’s position. [Edward Klump, Andarko Says BP Should Pay After Being Reckless (Update 1), Bloomberg Businessweek, 19 June 2010].

* * * * *

Meantime, in Afghanistan, where the counter-insurgency roils on, the Wall Street Journal reporting on l’affaire McChrystal offered this intriguing tidbit:

Even before the Rolling Stone article surfaced, Pentagon officials had become concerned with what one senior military official Thursday called a “cult of personality” that had surrounded Gen. McChrystal.

“That atmosphere is not just about McChrystal; it’s about that team, it’s that culture,” said another U.S. military officer who has worked with Gen. McChrystal. “The environment alienated other conventional commanders.” (Peter Spiegel and Jonathan Weisman, Officials Promise Unity Amid Afghan Shuffle, 25 June 2010)

Aha, the cult of personality. Maybe we need some Red Guards to root out the running dogs and lackeys and exile them to the hinterlands where they will be reeducated harvesting rutabagas and reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest.

President Obama’s choice of General Petraeus to replace General McChrystal was a savvy political and tactical move. The policy, however, remains dubious, though I acknowledge that this is one of those “damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t” situations, where any course is liable to come to a bad end.

* * * * *

Even The Economist, not exactly a publication of a liberal bent, suspects that the rush to Hooveresque policies prompted by the fad for deficit reduction and fiscal austerity is not a good thing. The magazine reflexively charges that Keynesian critics of of this approach, such as Paul Krugman, oversimplify in making their own case, and tries to put the best face of the budget hawks’ policy, saying “The result probably won’t be another Hooveresque Depression. But it could be a recovery that is weaker and slower that it should have been.” When we consider the source, the indictment is stronger that it appears at first blush. (“Austerity Alarm,” The Economist, July 3rd–9th 2010, pp. 16-17).

The Economist fails to note that not all deficit hawks act in good faith. Not a few see the deficit issue as a golden opportunity to roll back, if not dismantle entirely, social programs to which they object on philosophical grounds. This leads to some preposterous positions, such as the argument against extension of unemployment benefits beyond 26 weeks on that grounds that it would give the unemployed the perverse incentive not to look for work. Cutting off benefits at a date certain, say the established 26 weeks, provides a positive incentive for the unemployed to look harder for work, or so the argument goes. Precisely how pushing the unemployed to look harder for jobs that by all accounts do not exist will solve the problem is blithely ignored by these ideologues of extreme laissez-faire and a naive individualism. Quelle surprise.

Hammett’s Sam Spade, Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and Macdonald’s Lew Archer were cool, flippant, and irreverent, governed by an idiosyncratic code of honor and the determination to live life as much on their own terms as one is able. They were outsiders and loners whose moral compass not infrequently put them at odds with conventional morality, mores, and the letter of the law in a world where the cops were apt to be crooked, the politicians seedy and corrupt, and society’s upper crust decadent and depraved. They were more likely to show their toughness by taking a beating than by handing one out, and they solved cases less by clever deduction than by poking around the hornet’s nest until they stirred up a denouement.

After Spenser came a new golden era of such finely drawn figures as James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux, Walter Moseley’s Easy Rawlins, Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawksi, Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone, and Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole, to name but a few. Burke, Paretsky, et al., may not rank with the very best novelists of their generation, but they may not be so far behind either. As Parker noted (Charles L.P. Silet, Robert B. Parker Author Interview on Writing Mysteries: “Five Pages a Day”), the quality of the writing is what matters, and this is limited only by the author’s talent and ability, not by genre. I would quibble with Parker only by way of extrapolating that the best writers transcend genre, as for instance, Dostoevsky with Crime and Punishment, Robert Stone with DogSoldiers, and Cormac McCarthy with No Country for Old Men.

Some of the real action these days is in Europe, especially Scandinavia, where the protagonist is likely to be a cop but remains an individualistic outsider, bound by a stringent code, whatever his quirks, flaws, and all too human foibles. To my mind the best of them writing today, American or European, are Ian Rankin, whose John Rebus prowls the streets and pubs of Edinburgh while listening to music played in the dorms when I was in college 1970–1973, and Henning Mankell from Sweden, who I think of not as a writer of mysteries or thrillers but simply a novelist, and quite a good one.

On the cusp of the 21st century, Carol O’Connell debuted Kathy Mallory in the 1994 novel Mallory’s Oracle. Some ten years later Mallory was joined by her Swedish spiritual cousin Lisbeth Salander, one of the two protagonists of Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy now all the rage, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest.

Mallory was abandoned on the streets of New York at the age of six, cared for to the extent she was cared for at all by prostitutes, a child sociopath living by her wits and thievery until taken in by a cop and his wife who became her foster parents. She followed in the footsteps of her foster father and became a police detective, but she plays by her rules. Mallory’s maxim is, “If you didn’t catch me, I didn’t do it.” She instinctively bucks authority, and authority puts up with her only because she gets results. She has no scruples about breaking the rules if that is what it takes to get them.

Salander’s childhood was every bit as harrowing than Mallory’s. A victim of rape and abuse, with a history of violence, she is determined by the authorities to be mentally incompetent and placed under a guardianship. Her first guardian is a kindly man who is sympathetic to this strange, clearly troubled and just as clearly very bright girl with multiple piercings and tattoos, but when he suffers a stroke, he is replaced by a middle-aged weasel who does not have her best interests at heart, for which Salander will see that he receives his just desserts. She supplements the Taser and mace packed in her knapsack with a hammer on the principle that you can take care of a lot of problems with a good hammer.

Mallory and Salander are women others cross only at their peril. They are loners who keep a small circle of friends at arm’s length while remaining in their way fiercely devoted and protective. They are not inclined to explain themselves, much apologize for anything. To be open is to be vulnerable, and vulnerability must be guarded against at all costs.

Both women are freakishly intelligent, among other things world-class computer hackers. Mallory is drop-dead beautiful, Salander less conventionally attractive but no less desirable. If all this seems to require a bit much suspension of disbelief, well that rather goes with the territory. Spade, Marlowe, and Archer routinely shrug off the effects of being sapped and pistol whipped with no more than a passing headache, while Korean War vet Spenser beats the crap out of hooligans half his age and enjoys terrific sex with the love of his life, lovely übershrink Susan Silverman, in some pretty contemporary settings.

What Parker traced to Natty Bumppo is itself part of a broader tradition of the Romantic outsider who sometimes flaunts and is sometimes merely indifferent to the conventions and approval of society. The Byronic hero, bohemian artist, and hard-boiled detective are not so distant kin. They may be jaded and made cynical by the ways of man and the world. The hard edge they adopt to protect themselves from being hurt may condemn them to turn away from those for whom they care most (Spenser being a notable exception to this last trait). Yet they are after their fashion idealists too who take their stand against hypocrisy and philistinism and evildoers who are rich, respected, powerful, and seemingly immune to justice. They never give up on the quest for authenticity, whatever its cost and whether it is to be had in the end or not. They are heroes for a dark time.

postscript 1 June 2010

A better title, or perhaps a subtitle, for this one would be “notes toward a future essay.” Or perhaps multiple essays, considering themes of kinship between the hard-boiled detective and the bohemian and of Mallory and Salander as distinctive variations on the type, just as Spenser represented a substantive variation on his predeccesors. To do that I would have to go back and reread some Hammett, Chandler, McDonald, and O’Connell, at the minimum. That would be fun but would require time at the expense of other projects. Maybe some day.

Can we imagine a novel having such an impact in our time? Can we imagine someone even saying such a thing about a contemporary novel, justified or not?

The Minerals Management Service, the government agency that oversees offshore drilling, in recent years moved away from requiring specific safety measures in offshore drilling and instead set broad performance goals that it was up to the industry to meet.

…

In joint MMS-Coast Guard hearings into the Deepwater Horizon accident, Michael Saucier, an MMS official, testified that the agency “highly encouraged,” but didn’t require, companies to have back-up systems to trigger blowout preventers in case of an emergency.

“Highly encourage? How does that translate to enforcement?” Coast Guard Capt. Hung Nguyen, who is co-chairing the investigation, asked at the hearings.

“There is no enforcement,” Mr. Saucier replied.

That seems to about cover it.

Directed by Vittorio de Sica, The Bicycle Thief was made in 1948 and released in the U.S. in 1949. The setting is Rome just after the war, where armies of unemployed men are desperate for work. Antonio Ricci is offered a job for which he needs the bicycle he pawned to buy food for his family. His wife pawns the bedsheets to get the bicycle out of hock, and Antonio happily goes to work plastering film posters featuring Rita Hayworth on building walls, only to have some lowlife steal his bicycle the first day on the job.

Antonio files a report with the police, who do not have resources to spare to search for a stolen bicycle. The only good the police report will do is to serve as evidence if he finds the bicycle himself. So Antonio and his son Bruno embark on a desperate but fruitless search that takes them all over the city, to bicycle markets, a mission, the river where a boy almost drowns, a cafe, and a brothel.

The camera loves Bruno, a tousle-haired little boy in shorts and a jacket, with a scarf worn jauntily around his neck. Somewhere in the neighborhood of eight years of age, the little fellow has a streetwise air and just a little bit of a swagger as he runs after his father, eyeballs an assortment of bicycle horns looking for one that belongs to the stolen bike, hastily genuflects before the cross as they are chased from the mission when Antonio disrupts the service questioning an old man he thinks has a connection to the thief, eyes a little girl from a well-to-do family enjoying a sumptuous meal in the restaurant where Bruno and his father eat bread and mozzarella as Antonio  exclaims today we are free and pours a little wine into a glass for Bruno.

Antonio is not a deep thinker, just an ordinary fellow trying to provide for his family. His thoughts are in the main pedestrian, his focus entirely on the job and getting the bicycle back. At the film’s end he and Bruno find themselves outside a stadium where a soccer match is in progress. Antonio spots a bicycle leaning unattended against a building around the corner and up the street and is overwhelmed by temptation. Anguished, he turns away from the bicycle and back to Bruno, sitting on the curb. Then back to the bicycle. He gives Bruno money and tells him to take the streetcar to a place where they will meet up later. It goes badly, and the film ends with Antonio walking grim-faced, without hope, through the darkening city, Bruno at his father’s side, clutching his hand.

Somerset Maugham said there are three rules to writing a novel and nobody knows what they are. There are many ways to go about making a novel or movie or a poem or a painting. The Bicycle Thief is devoid of dazzling pyrotechnic special effects. The dialogue is not snappy, the plot turns neither convoluted nor complex. The characters do not exhibit the psychological and spiritual torment we find in Bergman or Fellini’s special brand of ennui mixed with joie de vivre. The Bicycle Thief succeeds as the unadorned but compelling story of an unexceptional man caught up in the most human of conditions. When I walked from the theatre I felt moved…and alive.

Roger Ebert’s 1999 review is an exceptional tribute to exceptional film.

With spring comes the transition out of the winter running routine, when I cut back my mileage a bit. I do not recall when I began doing this. It was not so much a conscious decision as something I sensed was happening only after the fact and thought, yes, that seems reasonable. The weather is less than optimal, cold and often as not in Portland raining, runs on workdays are in the dark, and there is almost without fail at least one ratty cold that causes me to take enough time off to lose a little conditioning and some of the mental edge that comes with routine.

The challenge in winter is getting myself into the running clothes and out the door. It is way too easy to come home from the office tired, cold, and damp and think this would a good day to take a day off. Once out and putting one foot in front of the other, most days it is good even in cold and rain as long as it is not too cold and the rain holds back to that Portland drizzle we know and love, but there is an element of that which is to be endured in even the best of the winter runs. They are worth enduring, and more, if only as preparation to enjoy running in the early mornings and late afternoons of spring, summer, and autumn.

Backing off a bit from time to time also gives my body a break, and it is not just the body that benefits from it. By late winter when we are tantalized by brief spells of warmer, sunnier weather, I find myself eager, anxious, excited at the prospect of jacking up the mileage and getting back into those longer runs that are qualitatively different from the shorter ones. Talk of mileage is always relative. I have run at a pretty low level for years. Thanks in part to Big T’s Memorial Day visit when he tried to peer-pressure me into training for a marathon, I put in more miles in 2009 than any year going back at least to 2004, and that was largely due to a fairly modest 25-30 miles a week July through September, as satisfying a period as I have enjoyed in a long time.

Ten days into May and I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I’ve run in t-shirt and shorts. I’m looking forward to more of those days, but I’ll take the ones I’m having. Temperature was around 45, not cold but coolish, when I set out on the Springwater Corridor to Sellwood run the last two weekends, a glorious loop somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve miles. Yesterday marked only the third time I have gone that distance since September. The run started off somewhat problematically with discomfort in my right Achilles tendon area. This first cropped up Thursday, toward the end of a 5.5 mile run. I stopped to stretch a bit then and was okay the rest of that run. Yesterday the discomfort appeared not a half a mile into it. I paused to stretch, continued a few blocks, then stretched a bit more, and was fine until near the the end when I felt it again as I built some character coming out of Ladd’s Addition up Harrison to 30th, but heck, I’m supposed to feel discomfort on that mother of a hill. Aches and pains and injuries are part of the deal. It is important to pay attention and back off when it’s called for, difficult as that may be this time of year. There is a fair chance the current discomfort is nothing serious and can be resolved with some special attention, a little extra stretching. We’ll see how that goes.

The sky was blue and cloudless, the streets quiet, the air bright and fresh. I sighted a dragon boat on the river at the Hawthorne Bridge as I turned south along the Eastbank Esplanade and another as I ran down past OMSI to pick up the trail that would take me on to Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge and Oaks Amusement Park with fellow runners, bicyclists, walkers, three kids with fishing poles clambering up from the river bank, two geese with three little ones in the grass. Two cats were there at the food and water bowls just the the other side of the fence that separates the trail from the railroad track where the week before I saw two women filling those bowls.

I have yet to encounter two women I regularly met last summer coming up the trail as I approached Sellwood. One was a tiny Asian woman a bit older than I am, the other a middle-aged woman who runs like a fury. Both women ran alone, as do I. We smiled and waved as we passed and continued on our way. A gesture, a small thing, yet each week I found myself looking forward to that part of the run. Maybe some Saturday soon we will meet again.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R–SC) said at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing this week that he believes Miranda warnings are counterproductive. Graham told POLITICO he is working on legislation to redefine the public safety exemption to Miranda warnings “so law enforcement can go to a judge somewhere and make the case that the detainee is a suspected member of Al Qaeda or the Taliban and have the judge approve continued interrogation without Miranda rights.” The law would apply to U.S. citizens as well as foreign nationals. (Sen. Lindsey Graham: Miranda rights ‘counterproductive’).

The law would be directed only at those who join terrorist organizations as designated by the State Department. “It would be members of Al Qaida — not Timothy McVeigh,” said Graham, without explaining why the exception for a McVeigh type.

Meantime, a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report states, “Membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law. However, for homeland security and other purposes, the FBI is notified when a firearm or explosives background check involves an individual on the terrorist watch list.” Of background checks on 1,225 people on the watch list, 91 percent were approved for gun transactions.

Even Joe Lieberman thinks this “dangerous loophole” is “stunning and infuriating.” (Huma Khan and C. Byron Wolf, ABC News/Politics, Guns and Terror: Should People on U.S. Watch List Be Barred from Buying Firearms?). The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, of which Lieberman is chairman, is considering legislation to bar people on many U.S. watch lists from purchasing guns.

Whoa, nelly, says Graham, concerned about the bill’s impact on constitutional rights of individuals whose names may be on the watch list in error. Graham said, “Before we subject innocent Americans who have done nothing wrong, I want us to slow down and think about this.”

Graham and his ilk like to carry on about the sanctity of the Constition, the founders’ original intent, and all that. Yet they tend to be almost blithe in their consideration of which parts should be held sacrosanct and which might be treated as more open to, I am tempted to say “liberal,” interpretation.

Graham rears up in righteous umbrage at the possibility that suspected terrorists might be accorded protection against self-incrimination guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment (no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”). We might speculate as whether this is the source or the consequence of his conviction that terror suspects should be regarded not as criminals but as enemy combatants, but the relevant point here is that the Fifth Amendment is not one the good Senator is willing to go to the wall for. Not so the Second, whose inviolability demands that no law or regulation may be enacted to make it difficult for a terrorist to obtain guns if that would so much as inconvenience an innocent American who wishes to purchase a firearm.

Not everyone sees these issues the way Graham does, but he is far from alone, and  I am unable to fathom that kind of thinking. Once more I feel myself a man out of tune and out of touch with his time.

Many years ago the editor of a magazine to which I submitted a small selection of poems replied with a handwritten rejection note that went on for several pages whose gist was that some people are well advised to stick to reading poetry and not try writing it. The poems must have made some impression to prompt the handwritten note instead of the standard rejection slip; perhaps he thought them not just bad, but real bad, bad beyond redemption. I have no record of the poems that comprised the submission, only the recollection that they were dark in theme and, in fairness to the editor, in all likelihood pretty poor. My knee-jerk reaction was something along the lines of “screw him.” Soon enough I concluded that the poems should never have seen the light of day, in that my critic was correct, and the decision to submit to that particular publication was a poor one. My spirit was not scarred. I kept writing.

Robert Southey (1774–1843) was an English poet of the Romantic school who in his youth palled around with the likes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, with Coleridge was involved in Sir Humphrey Davy’s early experiments with nitrous oxide, and was  appointed Poet Laureate in 1813, though only after Sir Walter Scott refused the post (bio notes lazily lifted from Wikipedia). In December 1836 twenty-year-old Charlotte Brontë wrote to Southey asking his opinion of some verses she sent him. This would be akin, I suppose, to my writing in 1972 to someone of the stature of, say, Robert Lowell, had I been presumptuous enough to do so. I can scarcely imagine it; nor can I imagine that I had at that time any writings that might have elicited even a lukewarm reception.

No mention of Southey should pass without noting Byron’s dedication to “Don Juan”:

I
Bob Southey! You’re a poet — Poet-laureate,
And representative of all the race,
Although ’tis true that you turned out a Tory at
Last, — yours has lately been a common case, —
And now, my Epic Renegade! what are ye at?
With all the Lakers, in and out of place?
A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye
Like ‘four and twenty Blackbirds in a pye;

III
You, Bob! are rather insolent, you know,
At being disappointed in your wish
To supersede all warblers here below,
And be the only Blackbird in the dish;
And then you overstrain yourself, or so
And tumble downward like the flying fish
Gasping on deck, because you soar too high, Bob,
And fall, for lack of mositure quite a-dry, Bob!

Ah, but I digress. Southey wrote for the most part encouragingly to Charlotte:

You evidently possess & in no inconsiderable degree what Wordsworth calls ‘the faculty of Verse’…[but] Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: & it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it…But do not suppose that I disparage the gift wh[ich] you possess…Write poetry for its own sake, not in a spirit of emulation, & not with a view to celebrity: the less you aim at that, the more likely you will be to deserve, & finally to obtain it.”

Notwithstanding the statement that literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life and ought not to be, however unexceptionable that view may have been at the time it was expressed, Southey’s words offer more than faint praise and the  sound advice to write poetry for its own sake, not in the spirit of emulation and not with a view to celebrity, and trust that recognition will come in due course.

Charlotte in her reply notes that on first reading Southey’s letter she

felt only shame, and a regret that I had ever ventured to trouble you with my crude rhapsody…but after I had thought a little and read it again and again ― the prospect seemed to clear. You do not forbid me to write; you do not say that what I write is utterly destitute of merit; you only warn me against the folly of neglecting real duties, for the sake of imaginative pleasures — of writing for the love of fame & for the selfish excitement of emulation: you kindly allow me to write poetry for its own sake provided I leave undone nothing which I ought to do in order to pursue that single, absorbing exquisite gratification: I am afraid Sir you think me very foolish — I know the first letter I wrote to you was all senseless trash from beginning to end. But I am not altogether the idle, dreaming being it would seem to denote. (letter to  Southey, 16 March 1837)

She closes by thanking Southey for him for answering her first letter and assuring him that his advice will not be wasted. She is gracious and deferential without being obsequious, reflective, and cognizant of her shortcomings, yet secure in her own intelligence and talent.

Jane Eyre was published in October 1847 under the pseudonym Currer Bell, followed by Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Ellis and Acton Bell, respectively, in December of that year. From the beginning there was much speculation about the identity of the Bells, the authors’ sex, their relationship, whether there were three authors or only one. Jane Eyre achieved immediate commercial  success accompanied by some favorable and some dubious reviews. Charlotte’s sisters did not fare so well. Wuthering Heights “was regarded as the product of a dogged, brutal and morose mind,” while Tenant was deemed “insipid, and both were received with indifference.” (Phyllis Bentley, The Brontës)

Digging up contemporary reviews of the Brontës and offering my own take on them would be interesting and the more intellectually responsible course; however, there are limits to the time and resources at the disposal of your oft humbled scribe. With that somewhat lame excuse in hand, I rely on Margaret Smith, editor of Selected Letters of Charlotte Brontë, to give an idea of the critical reception received by Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:

The Scottish advocate James Lorrimer (1818–90) reviewed the three novels in the North British Review for Aug. 1849. He praised Fanny Hervey; or The Mother’s Choice (1849) by Mrs Stirling, gave moderate praise to Anne Marsh’s Emilia Wyndham (1848), considered that she wrote “as an English gentlewoman whould write,” and admitted that, unlike Marsh, Currer Bell [Charlotte] was never tedious. He praised and found fault with JE by turns, finding in it elements of the revolting and improbable, but acquitting the author of the Quarterly‘s charge of vulgarity.

The Economist for 27 Nov. 1847 praised JE enthusiastically. Though the reviewer found some coarseness, and some too-obvious art in construction, he wrote nothing resembling CB’s sentiment here [Charlotte wrote: “I am reminded of 'The Economist.' The literary critic of that paper praised the book if written by a man ― and pronounced it 'odious' if the work of a woman.”].

Lorimer found the faults of JE “magnified a thousand-fold” in WH and Tenant, despite the vivid realism of their sketches of nature “in her rougher moods.” He did not finish reading WH, repelled by a “perfect pandemonium of low and brutal creatures” and disgusting language. Tenant had a better beginning and “poetical justice” at the end, but it brought the reader into “the closest possible proximity with naked vice,” with coarseness never really found in gentlefolk, and a style marked by vulgar slang and provincialisms. (editor’s notes for Charlotte’s letter to William Smith Williams, 16 August 1849; Williams read Jane Eyre for Smith, Elder & Co. and recommended it to George Smith)

To critics who speculated whether the author of Jane Eyre was man or woman and whose evaluation of the novel’s merits and defects was conditioned on the author’s sex, Charlotte was uncompromising:

To such critics I would say ― “to you I am neither Man nor Woman ― I come before you as an Author only ― it is the sole standard by which you have to right to judge me ― the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.”

Anyone whose soul is not a clod, to borrow from Keats, will take seriously criticism and advice offered in good faith. However, it is not a given that it is the critic who gets it right. The onus is on us to weigh that criticism and its source and decide whether and how to act on it. To accept criticism blindly is no better than to reject it blindly. Criticism can present an opportunity to reflect on what we are doing and try to articulate the principles that guide our efforts, and we may thus profit even from criticism that we reject when push comes to shove.

Charlotte’s letters give every indication that this is exactly what she did. As in the exchange with Southey, she is never cowed or intimidated. She acknowledges other points of view, but she stands her ground and holds to her principles. She is, in the words of my old history teacher, a real tough baby.

To the pedestrian advice to write about what she knows, “not to stray too far from the ground of experience,” she answers thoughtfully:

…is not the real experience of each individual very limited? and if a writer dwells upon that solely or principally is he not in danger of repeating himself and also of becoming an egotist?

Then too, Imagination is a strong, restless faculty which claims to be heard and exercised, are we to be quite deaf to her cry and insensate to her struggles? When she shews us bright pictures are we never to look at them and try to reproduce them? ― And when she is eloquent and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear are we not to write to her dictation? (letter to G. H. Lewes, journalist, novelist, dramatist, and writer on philosophy and physiology, 6 November 1847)

Likewise, she minces no words when sharing strongly held views on her literary contemporaries. To Ellen Nussey she recommends Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, Goldsmith, Pope (though noting that she does not admire him), Scott, Byron, Campbell, Wordsworth, and Southey; “[f]or fiction — read Scott alone all novels after his are worthless. For Biography, read Johnson’s lives of the Poets, Boswell’s life of Johnson.”

She did not care for Jane Austen and compares her unfavorably to George Sand:

Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point.

What induced you to say that you would rather have written “Pride & Prejudice” or “Tom Jones” than any of the Waverly Novels?

I had not seen “Pride & Prejudice” till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book and studied it. And what did I find? An accurate daguerrotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers ― but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy ― no open country ― no fresh air ― no blue hill ― no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses. These observations will probably irritate you, but I shall run the risk.

Now I can understand admiration of George Sand ― for though I never saw any of her works which I admired throughout (even “Consuelo” which is the best, or the best I have read, appears to me to couple strange extravagance with wondrous excellence) yet she has a grasp of mind which I cannot fully comprehend. I can very deeply respect; she is sagacious and profound; Miss Austen is only shrewd and observant. (letter to Lewes, 12 January 1848)

She goes further in another letter to Lewes six days later:

You say I must familiarize my mind with the fact that “Miss Austen is not a poetess, has no ‘sentiment’ (you scornfully enclose the word in inverted commas) no eloquence, none of the ravishing enthusiasm of poetry” — and then you add, I must “learn to acknowledge her as one of the greatest artists, of the greatest painters of human character, and one of the writers with the nicest sense of means to an end that ever lived.”

The last point only will I ever acknowledge. Can there be a great Artist without poetry? What I call — what I will bend to as a great Artist, there cannot be destitute of the divine gift. But by poetry I am sure you understand something different to what I do — as you do by “sentiment.” It is poetry, as I comprehend the word, which elevates that masculine George Sand, and makes out of something coarse, something godlike. It is “sentiment,” in my sense of the term, sentiment jealously hidden, but genuine, which extracts the venom from that formidable Thackeray, and converts what might be only corrosive poison into purifying elixir. If Thackeray did not cherish in his large heart deep feeling for his kind, he would delight to exterminate; as it is, I believe he wishes only to reform.

Miss Austen, being as you say without “sentiment,” without poetry, may be — is sensible (more real than true) but she cannot be great. (to Lewes, 18 January 1848)

Charlotte speaks here of poetry in the sense the Romantics before her and the Surrealists after used the term to suggest some heightened element in a work of art that speaks to us, touches us, moves us, what is also called the sublime or the marvelous. I see in this not a shying away from the world of everyday experience but rather a reawakening of the mystery inherent in it but often forgotten and lost in our daily busyness. Charlotte Brontë stands for an art that is more than just another commodity in the marketplace of amusements and diversions available for our pursuit. She represents an integrity of spirit and art whose example we might cherish in a time where notions of spirit and art are too often trivialized, reduced to the narcissitic commonplaces of a therapeutic culture or to brain chemistry or to goods to be bought and sold the same as automobiles and houses, video games and sexy lingerie.

The blog Memo from the Fringes was launched Memorial Day weekend 2005. From there through the end of 2009, I posted 392* entries, not including the fictions Next Time We Talk and the unfinished Sketches from the Days and Nights of Charlotte Reine. Alas, quantity by no means implies quality. Too much was filler, gibberish, rant, invective, and drivel. Even so, it kept me busy and consumed a fair portion of my resources of time and talent, and I am vain enough to believe some of it justifies the expenditure.

A reasonable person might endeavor to polish and market the best of those essays in hope of generating income that might purchase a measure of freedom from the wage-work that would translate into more time to devote to this kind of work. I confess I am just not up to that task, which would in all likelihood be Sisyphean in nature anyway. The situation is as Dostoevsky found it when he wrote for money while trying to reestablish himself on the literary scene after his return from exile:

I don’t like it [the novella Uncle's Dream, for which he had received an advance], and it saddens me that I am forced to appear in public again so miserably…. You can’t write what you want to write, and you write something that you wouldn’t even want to think about if you didn’t need money…. Being a needy writer is a filthy trade. (quoted in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, Princeton University Press 2010, pp. 256, 257)

Were I a young man, I might make an effort to ply that filthy trade, albeit with no assurance that things would turn out more satisfactorily than they did with the course that led to where I now stand. While I am not so very old ― I like to think I can still lace up my ASICS and run whiskey-swilling, cigarette-puffing poet friends half my age into the ground (smiling as I type) ― it has been a while since I was young. My inclination from where I stand today is to devote what resources of time and talent lie at my disposal to the writing, undertaken in Camus’s terms as one of the few pure things in my life. I can hope that readers who find their way to this space will find something here of interest, as I hope that those who happen on my little writings when on occasion they appear in other publications will enjoy them.

The prickly issue is not whether to try to write for money but the extent to which the time, focus, and effort demanded by  essays and forays into fiction comes at the expense of the same kind of time, focus, and effort demanded by poetry. I believe that my greater talent as a writer is as poet, not essayist, and certainly not novelist. But as Emerson put it, nothing is got for nothing. Have I made a trade-off these past five years? Is that trade-off one I want to continue to make? What I want, of course, is everything, to recultivate the poetry and see it bloom anew while penning essays, reviews, and maybe even fiction that I hope hits on something in some sense informative, entertaining, amusing, if nothing else by way of turning people on to some good books to read and good films to see. “You must go on. I can’t on. I’ll go on.” (Samuel Beckett). What else I’m gon’ do?

memo from the editorial desk

The next essay in the Brontë series remains in progress. I had thought that piece, focused on Charlotte and Jane Eyre, would close out the series until Ceylon Anderson, editor of Venetian Blind Drunk (which can be found at Powell’s Books), advised  that I  must read Anne, in particular The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, stating flat out that she is the best novelist among the three sisters. Thus, the Brontë project goes on.

*Oops. The figure given when this was first posted earlier today was 492. That seemed a lot for just over four-and-a-half years, and a recalculation proved it to be in error.