J.V. Cunningham: ‘Coffee’

 I get up before the rest of the house to drink coffee, to be quiet, to be alone and to think. It’s a ritual for many people, and J.V. Cunningham wrote a poem about it that includes these lines: 

           I have so often fled

           Wherever I could drink

           Dark coffee and there read

           More than a man would think.

 

If your notion of goodness or happiness requires some benefit for the common good, this is a waste of time. But the poet claims the coffee hour is his time.

 

           I waste it for the waste.

 

• Source: The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, edited by Timothy Steele; Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1997.

Conscious idleness

 Ronald Blythe occasionally forced himself to take an idle day. No answering the phone, no worrying about the important business that absolutely had to be attended to.

I feel wonderfully well — it is the inescapable result of a conscious idleness to feel wonderfully well.

 

I am learning.

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 213.

Hemingway: ‘Cat in the Rain’

 When, the gifted teacher asked, are you aware that you are being told a story, rather than an anecdote? When are you aware of what the story is?

Hemingway’s short story is in six sections, each of which is about 200 words long. Library of America has the story online, and I hope you’ll read it or refresh your memory.

Two Americans, George and his wife, are at an Italian hotel. It’s raining, and the wife notices a cat cowering under a table outside. She decides to rescue it. Her husband is busy reading.

Possibility No. 1: This is a story about a woman trying to rescue the cat.

On the way out, the wife sees the hotel owner. She makes a mental list of all the things she likes about the old fellow, including his attentiveness, his consideration, his desire to be of service. The comparison to her feelings about her husband goes unstated.

The hotel owner sends a maid with an umbrella to accompany the American wife. But when she gets outside, the cat is gone.

The wife is disappointed — and that feeling is strong.

It’s then that we see that Possibility No. 1 was no correct. This is not a story about a woman rescuing a cat.

This is a story about what a woman feels and wants and whether she will get what she wants in her marriage.

• Sources: “Cat in the Rain” is in Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918–1926; New York: Library of America, 2020. It’s available here:

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/07/cat-in-rain.html

I ran across it by reading Julian Girdham’s wonderful newsletter, The Fortnightly.

https://www.juliangirdham.com/blog/tag/Short+Stories

Heavy work, light rain

 The wonders of Georgia: It’s May, and we’re covering the tender plants to protect them from cold. Overnight lows are supposed to reach the 40s.

The Texas boy within me can’t quite believe it.

The cold front came with heavy mist, gentle drizzle and light rain. I was in the woodlot, pulling up English ivy. Getting rid of ivy is heavy work, and the cooler weather was nice. The mosquitoes, which came in clouds the day before, were absent. I’d forgotten how nice it is to work outdoors in light rain.

Readers and their ways

 I like interviews with people who talk about their books and reading habits.

I’m interested in the habits and the finds of all kinds of readers, but recently I was struck by how often celebrities are not that interesting when it comes to talking books.

The interesting Q&As are with good readers. Being a good reader is not the same as being famous, powerful, intelligent or educated.

Here are two bits of advice from good readers. The first is from Seneca, advising a friend to focus on one good book, or at most a few:

 

You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable … To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole life traveling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships. The same must needs be the case with people who never set about acquiring an intimate acquaintanceship with any one great writer.

 

The second is from my friend Melvyn, who was still practicing medicine as an old man when he wrote these lines:

 

I’ve started reading Poor Richard’s Almanack by Benjamin Franklin, making five in all the books I’m reading at once. I do it because it pleases and enlarges me, challenging me to keep my mind fresh and active. Some say that is the secret to preventing premature serious memory loss and general decay. We’ll see.

Great readers don’t necessarily think alike.

• Sources: Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, translated by Roy Campbell; London: Penguin Books, 1975, p. 33. The unpublished note from Dr. Melvyn Schreiber was dated Aug. 22, 2000. Melvyn died in October 2024 at 93. Reading several books at a time worked for Melvyn. He was sharp and acerbic until the end. He was planning a book-buying expedition on the day he died, a detail about his life that I admire.

A book that began with a map

 I’m drawn to stories about places. Robert Louis Stevenson’s first successful novel began with a map.

Treasure Island was not his first book, but it was his first successful book. He wrote it at age 31 after a string of failures.

Stevenson was in Scotland at a place called the Late Miss McGregor’s Cottage. A schoolboy came home for the holidays “and with the aid of pen and ink and a shilling box of water colours, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a picture gallery.“ Stevenson, instead of working, joined in the play.

 

On one of these occasions, I made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance ‘Treasure Island.’  I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe.

 

The map captured his imagination, and soon he had characters tromping around on it. John Silver was based on a friend. Stevenson simply deprived his friend of his finer qualities and left the raw stuff: strength, courage and quickness.

 

Such psychical surgery is, I think, a common way of ‘making character’; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way.

 

Stevenson began work on The Sea Cook, a reminder that when it comes to titles the first thought is not always the best. He wrote a chapter a day for 15 days and then was stumped. After an anguished-filled break, he picked up the manuscript again and was astonished that the story flowed. Again, a chapter a day.

 

I have said the map was the most of the plot. I might almost say it was the whole. … It is, perhaps, not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, yet it is always important.  The author must know his countryside, whether real or imaginary, like his hand; the distances, the points of the compass, the place of the sun’s rising, the behaviour of the moon, should all be beyond cavil.

 

Stevenson believed in making a map or sketch of the place before starting the narrative. If he set a scene in a house, he’d draw the floorplan.

• Source: “My First Book: ‘Treasure Island’” is in Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays on the Art of Writing; London: Chatto & Windus, 1905, pp. 111-34. Project Gutenberg has it here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/492/492-h/492-h.htm#page111

Communing with Pantherophis obsoleta

 At Panola Mountain, a 5-foot rat snake was sunning itself on the bicycle path. The snake was sluggish and seemed to be enjoying the warmth of the sun on the concrete.

Naturalists should avoid anthropomorphism. They certainly should not hear snake voices. But I’ve been removing English ivy from the woods behind the house, and the rat snake reminded me that I might meet his kin when I’m knee deep in ivy.