Reading to understand

 My friend Melvyn Schreiber, who died last fall at 93, was known as an excellent doctor and teacher. He was also a perceptive reader.

He read constantly, and his medical students were sometimes surprised to find that he knew writers young enough to be his grandchildren.
He wrote:

 

Reading is not a diversion for me. When I am not at the hospital working, it’s what I do. And that for a lifetime. I do not think I live vicariously in the characters I read about, but my understanding of life and people is certainly informed.

 

Melvyn was only mildly interested in literary criticism, but he was serious about understanding life and people.

Melvyn left some of himself behind for friends. He left four collections of essays. Some of us have letters.

He would be pleased to know that his friends are sharing notes and quotes.

• Notes: For more, see “Dr. Melvyn Schreiber,” Oct. 8, 2023.

The Piedmont, early April

 The dogwoods are blooming in the Georgia Piedmont, reminding me of the woods of East Texas.

The splashes of white blossoms are fun, especially when the dogwoods have invaded a beech grove, where last year’s leaves, bronze and khaki-colored, are still holding on.

The forest is greening. Hickories and sweetgums are putting out leaves. In the coming weeks, 200-yard views through the forest will be cut to 20 feet.

The wild azaleas in genus Rhododendron are lovely. The most spectacular blooms were in a stand of Southern Pinxter azalea. I’d describe this plant as small trees, rather than a bush. The little trees we saw were about 12 feet tall and were in a creek bottom.

The showiest bloomer in the forest might be the black cherry. The biology textbook speaks of white flowers in drooping racemes, which doesn’t do the cherry justice. Imagine a flowering raccoon’s tail.

The forest floor has smaller blossoms that are easy to overlook: brambles, buttercups, bittercresses. Mouse-ear chickweeds, in genus Cerastium, are putting out tiny white flowers here. They are all over North America. Some might be blooming near you.

Beating the bounds

 In some places, people still practice the ancient custom of beating the bounds.

The parish was the basic unit of society in medieval England. Maps were rare, as were people who could read them. But it was important for common people to know where the boundaries were. A parishioner might have the right to graze a cow on the commons of his parish, not on the commons of the parish next door.

So once a year the older folks who had learned the landmarks as children led younger folks around and showed them. The bounds of the parish were kept in living memory.

I like to think I’m doing something similar.

I don’t own any of the land I tromp on. The public does. But as a member of the public, I have a right to walk the land, and it seems to me that I have a balancing obligation to know something about it.

So I’ve been in the woods to see what’s blooming.

Incidentally, the origin of the phrase “beating the bounds” interests me, but I haven’t found anything convincing. I’ve run across articles describing how violence can help imprint memories and so children were taught to beat the boundary stones with switches. In some cases, the adults thrashed the children, allegedly to help them learn. But it seems to me that the beat we’re talking about probably is in the sense of a “regularly traversed round.” The cop patrols her beat, while the reporter covers his.

A writing lesson from Allen Ginsberg

 Allen Ginsberg told the story of his family’s laundry business in Newark, N.J. The family had immigrated from Russia during the pogroms of the 1880s.

The business model required a horse. The clean laundry went out to customers by horse and wagon. When Ginsberg’s grandfather Pincus was young, his job was to carry the laundry from the wagon to the customer’s door.

A horse was a big investment, and the family decided to buy from a fellow immigrant from the old country.

The first horse looked healthy but had epilepsy and died. The second refused to pull the wagon. It would lie down, rather than work.

The family feared ruin when it discovered, after money changed hands, that the third horse was blind. But the blind horse could hold the route in memory. The horse didn’t have to be told when to turn or stop.

Ginsberg’s point in telling the story is that all families have such stories. As they are told, generation after generation, all but the most telling details are lost. The story of a complex life is reduced almost to an abstraction.

Ginsberg thought Charles Reznikoff’s early poems were brilliant examples. Each was a sweeping novel told as a short narrative poem.

Reznikoff’s “She sat by the window,” which is about a woman facing an arranged marriage, is an example. It has setting, manners, character and a dramatic situation within a dozen lines.

Ginsberg recommended this exercise to his students:

• Make a list of 10 stories that were told by family members.

• See if you can turn them into short narratives, remembering William Carlos Williams’s maxim that one vivid phrase is better than pages of inert writing.

• Sources: “Allen Ginsberg with Marie Syrkin on Charles Reznikoff,” recorded July 2, 1987, is part of the Naropa University Digital Archives and is available here: 

http://archives.naropa.edu/digital/collection/p16621coll1/id/2634/

Poems 1918-1975, The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff, edited by Seamus Cooney; Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1996. “She sat by the window” is in Vol. 1, p. 32.  Ginsberg was right. It’s a stunning poem.

Citation needed

 Marie Syrkin, Charles Reznikoff’s wife, was a scholar. Her Wikipedia entry says that when she was in her late 80s, she attended a conference on the Objectivist Movement at the Naropa Institute, “often disagreeing the Allen Ginsberg on the subject of her husband’s poetry.”

That line is flagged with a “citation needed,” but it’s solid. There’s a recording of the exchange.

At the 59:50 mark, Ginsberg has gone on about some lines of Reznikoff’s. Ginsberg admired the lines so much he used them in teaching. He finally asked Syrkin whether she liked them.

She replied, “No.”

Brevity, in response to a long question, can sound definitive.

Syrkin had her own views about what made Reznikoff’s poetry work. And, as you might expect, she didn’t think that everything her husband wrote was good.

• Sources: “Allen Ginsberg with Marie Syrkin on Charles Reznikoff,” recorded July 2, 1987, is part of the Naropa University Digital Archives and is available here: 

http://archives.naropa.edu/digital/collection/p16621coll1/id/2634/

Wikipedia’s article “Marie Syrkin,” updated Feb. 25, 2025, is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Syrkin