Guy Davenport's new edition

 Becca Rothfeld of the Washington Post says Godine Nonpareil has brought out a new edition of Guy Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays.

My old edition, battered and dogeared, is 43 years old. I suppose it’s time.

The archives of this collection turned up 17 other notes on Davenport. So I’ve shown a little restraint.

I think “Finding” is one of the great American essays. (You’ll find it in this book.) I also think his “John Charles Tapner” is one of the great American short stories. (It’s in the collection Da Vinci’s Bicycle.)

John Jeremiah Sullivan, who wrote an introduction to the edition, mentioned Davenport’s academic credentials, but then said: 

 

At the same time, I think he was someone who sincerely believed that
You can learn something interesting from every person you ever meet,
And that no thought is really interesting until you can discuss it plainly.
Curiosity was his philosophy, a way of being alive and liking the world.

I love that way of liking the world. 

• Sources: Becca Rothfeld, “He joked that he had 13 readers. He deserves millions,” The Washington Post, Jan. 11, 2024. The article is here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/01/11/guy-davenport-geography-imagination-review/

John Jeremiah Sullivan, “The labyrinth of Guy Davenport’s mind” was published on unherd.com with a note saying that it’s the introduction to Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays. It’s here:

https://unherd.com/2024/01/the-labyrinth-of-guy-davenports-mind/

I do not have the new edition, but the battered old one is: Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination; San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. In my mind, the best place to start is his essay “Finding.” My note on it is “Davenport’s search for arrowheads,” March 15, 2022.

Lamb: 'The Old Familiar Faces'

 I think of Charles Lamb as an essayist, rather than a poet. But he was a poet, and he wrote a remarkable poem on grief and mourning. Those are recurring themes on this site.

Lamb’s poem is “The Old Familiar Faces.” It has this recurring line:

 

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

 

Eric G. Wilson’s account mentions the recurring line.

 

This poem depicts the repetition compulsion of inconsolable grief. If there is any hope in the poem, it is the possibility that we can choose how to mourn, and some forms of mourning are more soothing than others. There is nothing you can do about the darkness, but you can decide to whistle or not, and some tunes sound better. 

 

I understand nothing about grief.

But the poem and Wilson’s account of it sound right.

I whistle.

• Sources: Charles Lamb, “The Old Familiar Faces,” in The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch; Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1912, p. 668. The Poetry Foundation has it here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44519/the-old-familiar-faces

Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022, p. 126.

Wilson’s book is the subject of several notes, including “Charles Lamb’s Voice,” Jan. 10, 2024, about how Lamb’s writing was shaped by tragedy.

Stone Mountain, after the storm

 The storm blew through during the night. I walked through the woods south of Stone Mountain to see what had happened.

Small twigs and big limbs were down everywhere. A few trees had fallen, but this wasn’t a catastrophic storm.

The forecasters had said 60 mph winds were possible, but the highest gust measured at the Atlanta airport was 38 mph. My old friends in Galveston would smile, thinking that’s not much of a blow.

The volume of brush on the ground was a reminder that the forest is constantly renewing itself. Weaker and diseased limbs come down. New growth will take advantage of the sunlight that comes through the newly opened spaces in the canopy. This storm was just part of the cycle.

The other remarkable thing about the walk was the sound. Earlier in the week, the forest had been still, dry and quiet. But as the poet said:

 

Stones in the throat make the hill burn sing.

 

Every little rill coming off Stone Mountain was a torrent running over granite stones. It’s music to me: not as loud as a rock concert, but getting there.

• Source: The line is from Norman MacCaig’s poem “A noise of stumbles” in The Poems of Norman MacCaig; Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005, p. 156.

An attempt to assassinate King George

  One of the wonders of Eric G. Wilson’s biography of Charles Lamb is his recreation of Lamb’s time.

Lamb lived from 1775 to 1834. Some of the commonplaces of his day are barely comprehensible to us.

In those days people could pay two pence admission to a large insane asylum. Admission entitled people to run through the wards and make fun of the patients.

Another example of the barely believable is the attempted assassination of King George in 1800.

The king was at Royal Theatre to see a comedy.

In those days it was the custom to sing “God Save the King” before the show. The orchestra struck up the tune, and everyone stood to sing. The king rose to receive the honor.

As he did, a veteran who’d served honorably and been wounded several times drew a pistol and shot at the king. The shot missed, and the old soldier was hauled off.

King George insisted that the show go on.

Many people enjoyed it, but King George did not and nodded off.

Imagine being a fiction writer and having to cover the same material today. If the story were set in our time rather than in Lamb’s, security officers would have to cancel the show for reasons of national security and  King George would have to suffer horribly from the trauma.

Fiction writers would have to tell the story that way for it to be believable.

• Sources: Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022, p. 86. Several posts mention this book, beginning with “A new biography of Charles Lamb,” Aug. 20, 2022.

Charles Lamb’s voice

 Eric G. Wilson’s biography of Charles Lamb is fascinating and heartbreaking to people who care about Lamb.

I’m among them. Lamb was one of the writers who made me realize that I’m more interested in essays than novels. (Montaigne, Thoreau and Baldwin were among the others.)

Lamb’s life was limited by tragedy.

When he was 21, he came home from the office one day and found that his beloved sister, Mary, had stabbed their mother to death. He heard the cry and took the knife out of Mary’s hand. Mary would struggle with her mental health the rest of her life. Charles knew on that day that the rest of his life would be devoted to taking care of her.

Charles Lamb had difficulties with his own health. His earliest letter that survives is to his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lamb reports that he’s spent six weeks in an asylum.

There’s more, much more, in terms of tragedy.

What interests me about Lamb is that his Essays of Elia are written in a warm, humorous voice. It’s a distinctive voice. Wilson says it’s a combination of whim and melancholy, which sounds about right.

Sometimes I think it’s just impossible that such a wonderful voice could have come from such tragedy. Sometimes I think it’s the only place that such a voice could have come from. 

• Source: Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022. Wilson’s book is the subject of several notes. The first was “A new biography of Charles Lamb,” Aug. 20, 2022.

The other Judgment Day

As a boy, I heard plenty of sermons about Judgment Day. Preachers did not like to be accused of scrimping on the hell, fire and damnation, so I got my share early.

Judgment Day, as the preachers presented it, is a future event. I was in college before I heard about the other Judgment Day.

Socrates told about it, as recorded by Plato in Gorgias. Socrates said that in the days of Kronos and even in the early rule of Zeus, people knew the day they would die, just as they knew the day they were born. On the last day, a person would be judged — by living judges.

With a lot at stake, people in the dock tended to dress up as if they were going to church. They also brought out their best possessions, hoping that the judges might be confused about the difference between a richperson and a good one.

Eventually, Pluto, god of Hades, and his top staff came up to complain about the officiating — just too many blown calls. 

Zeus looked into it and saw that Judgment Day was a disaster. The whole concept had to be overhauled.

Socrates told the story as a warning that human beings tend to judge by appearances. That’s one of the reasons I’m reluctant to make any claims of knowledge about a Judgment Day in the future.

Some people claim to be good at foreseeing the future, but I’m not. I suppose I judge too much by appearances, but I was sure the St. Louis Cardinals would finish at the top of the standings last season, instead of at the bottom. I tend to be wrong so often in my predictions about trivial things that I’d hate to bet the farm on something important.

But I do wish that more people knew something of the history of the concept and could provide, especially if they feel called upon to preach, some perspectives on lessons learned from past mistakes.

I think the best part of Zeus’ Plan B was a provision for a court of appeals.

• Source: The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns; Princeton University Press, 1978, pp. 305-6.

Aeschylus: ‘Prometheus Bound’

 “Prometheus Bound” is without a doubt the greatest play that opens with a crucifixion.

Prometheus, a god taken down by a stronger god, is being nailed and chained to a boulder. He is being punished by Zeus for befriending humans. Zeus had planned to exterminate humanity and try something else.

And so Cratos (Might) and the unspeaking Bia (Violence) supervise Hephaistos, who is apologetic but has to do the dirty work of fastening Prometheus to the rock.

It would be a risky thing for a dramatist to do now — immobilizing the hero in the first scene. It’s also hard to image a contemporary playwright introducing the hero and not allowing him to speak through the opening scene, but that’s what Aeschylus does. Hephaistos, the smith god, hammers away, hating what he’s doing, while Cratos explains how Prometheus got into such a spot. Prometheus, contemptuous, refuses to talk to either one of them.

It’s an odd opening gambit for a dramatist. But this is Old Tragedy, and as Professor H.D.F. Kitto puts it, the drama is in the emotion, not in the events.

 

The real dramatic movement here is one which takes place in the mind of the immovable Prometheus, and Aeschylus’ presentation of this is one of the greatest achievements of the Greek stage.

 

Kitto says the play has two themes:

• Zeus’ tyrannical cruelty and Prometheus’ resistance to it.

• Long-range hope, the basis of which is a secret that Prometheus knows and Zeus doesn’t.

The Chorus of Oceanus’ daughters, who are kind of like mermaids, comes to console Prometheus, and then Oceanus himself arrives, riding on a hippocampus. (Imagine a sea monster: half horse, half fish.)

Oceanus is a Greek cousin of Job’s friends. He argues that it’s best to learn from your misfortune and seek to appease, rather resist, stronger forces. Resistance only invites more torture, more cruelty, more heartbreak.

Finally Io, the cow-horned maid, wanders in, wondering where she is. She, too, has been wronged by Zeus, turned into a heifer by the lusty god and pursued by a gadfly sent by the god’s jealous wife.

Prometheus alludes to the secret throughout the play. But he shares it clearly with a fellow victim: Tyrants fall.

In myth and in this play, Prometheus can see farther than anyone. He knows the day will come when Zeus will need his help. But Aeschylus was writing in a day when tyrants had fallen all over Greece. Peisistratos was an ugly memory in Athens.

Kitto reminds us that the Greeks had a primitive conception that Necessity was stronger than the gods. It’s almost a natural law. Tyrants are cruel and abuse people. They hate their enemies, of course, but they can never trust their friends. Inevitably, their greatest suspicions focus on those closest to them, those helping them hold on to power, the enablers who prop up the regime.

Such is the foundation of tyrannies. And with such a foundation, it’s only a matter of time.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on “Prometheus Bound” is on pages 57-67. The quotation is on p. 60.

“Prometheus Bound,” translated by David Grene, is in Aeschylus II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1956, pp. 132-79.