Val - thank you, rest in peace

Muse, benefactor, saint -- the poetry world lost Valerie Eliot this week, and it is a big loss.

A lovely piece by David Morley in the Guardian lays it all out: how "Val" proved to be the ideal spouse for T.S. Eliot, how she was enthusiastically engaged with the poetry world and an important supporter of many writers.

She was Eliot's safe haven, emotionally and psychically.  Without her, Old Possum's last eight years would have been bleak.

Without her, he'd have been stuck in a gray landscape, realm of the martyrs. He'd have been stuck, writing about broken stones and old women in vacant lots.  Or muttering to himself, as he does in "East Coker":

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,

The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed

With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness...

This moment, like so many in the "Quartets," is stunning. Powerful.  I'm just so glad that the poet didn't have to live there, in the dark, for the rest of his life. It's not worth it, even if it produces great art.

I'm glad he found a little light with his Val.

 

Relic, relique, reliquus: Part I

Recently, two unusual objects entered my life: an icon, and an old newspaper article.

The icon, of St. Nicholas  (good name), was made in Minsk -- the gift of a Belarus friend. The saint's holy image is painted on a thin slip of parchment that's been pasted to the smooth side of a piece of birch. There's still bark on the rough side, and when I close my eyes, I almost can see the forest in which that tree once stood.

The other item is a 50-year-old newspaper article showing a Pennsylvania church committee. There's my father, slim, trim and bow-tied, standing in the back row. I once stuck that article in a book to protect it and ensure that it wouldn't get lost -- and then I nearly lost it. I'm so glad I didn't.

It's not hard to understand why these two objects are important relics to me. The personal and religious meaning are pretty accessible.

Not all artifacts, however, yield their meanings so easily -- and a writer like Umberto Eco has spent his career examining, often excavating, the meanings in cultural objects past and present. In his latest book, "Inventing the Enemy: Essays" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Eco takes readers on another of his pleasing travels in the worlds of arcana. Is "The Name of the Rose" on your list of essential novels? If it is, then you're going to love this book.

What's one of the natural enemies of an old relic? Eco tells us.

It's science. An aura clings to old objects: when I place a lit votive candle in front of St. Nicholas, the icon glows. Too much analysis dispels the light, blows out the candle. As Eco says, in the essay "Treasure Hunting," "we should not approach...reliquaries with a scientific mind; otherwise there's a risk of losing faith..."

"As I child," Eco says in another essay, "Imaginary Astronomies," "I dreamed over atlases. I imagined journeys and adventures in exotic lands..."

That essay goes on to examine versions of our imagined orld in the work of many thinkers--among them Dante, Cosmas Indicopleustes (say it three times fast), Copernicus. It is a spectacular survey from Eco, our foremost explorer of terra incognita.

This essay collection demonstrates why Eco is among the best practitioners of nonfiction today. I wish I could say the same about his fiction. Once, he was a sublime craftsman of fiction and nonfiction: His novels struck a marvelous balance between plot and antique morsels about the way the world used to be (or never was).  That balance has tipped in recent years. Though I admired the 2011 novel "The Prague Cemetery" (despite its repulsive narrator) in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, I was more interested in the research than the story. That's where Eco's passion seemed to be in that novel, too.

Which is why "Inventing the Enemy: Essays" is such a welcome book: Here you'll get the writer's engaged, inspired considerations in the raw -- all free from any plodding novelistic apparatus.

Related articles

The true writer is always a student

....That's the lesson I repeatedly get from cruising the writers of WordPress - there's a community here aimed at exchanging ideas, not self-promotion.

It's also a lesson glaringly obvious on every page of the latest book by Ursula K. Le Guin, "Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which was published in September. Did you know that she was a poet in addition to so many other things - essayist, book reviewer, acclaimed author of science fiction and fantasy?

This is a substantial collection that spans 50 years and reminds us how writers are different from the rest: Most people are intellectually curious, sure, but not everyone can take that curiosity and transform it into an assured art form, which is what Le Guin does in every poem contained in this book:

I feel so foolish sitting translating Vergil,

the voices of ancient imaginary shepherds,

in a silent house in Georgia, listening

for that human sweetness

That comes from "Learning Latin in Old Age," a poem written not very long ago - perhaps even around the time she wrote her novel "Lavinia," her retelling of  the "Aeneid" from the perspective of the woman at the center of the duel between Aeneas and Turnus.

I love the image of Le Guin, seated at a table with a basic Latin reader in front of her. (In my previous life at the L.A. Times, I had several opportunities to work with her on book reviews, and when I approached her to ask if she would consider writing one, what was her reaction? Almost always it was: Sure! Send it to me!)

This lovely volume is a reminder of the reason why we should commit to learning anything: for the love of it, for the greater understanding it gives us of our place in the world. (There are far too many people who simply want to impress us with how smart they are.)

And, one more thing: All knowledge helps us wrestle with our fate, our mortality. Le Guin's collection is undeniably about that as well, which shouldn't be a surprise (she is in her 80s). In the title poem, she writes poignantly about the costs of knowledge, about a painful kind of knowledge that comes only with the passing of many years as loved ones die and you remain:

I can't find you where I've been looking for you,

my elegy. There's all too many graveyards handy

these days, too many names to read through tears

on long black walls...

Beautiful. Painful. Beautiful.

Vague horrors on Halloween

Henry James couldn't write a ghost story (all you Jamesians out there, my apologies - I can't help saying that), but another James could. Not William. Not Alice. I'm talking about Montague Rhodes -- neither kith nor kin to the other three.

James was the fellow who impressed H.P. Lovecraft - an old Etonian, bachelor and textual scholar who never strayed very far from the world of King's College Cambridge. He straddled the old and new centuries - born in 1862, dying in 1936. He's one of many included in the fine new edition, just in time for Halloween, "The Big Book of Ghost Stories" edited by Otto Penzler (Black Lizard/Random House). Penzler includes an anthology staple, "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" - a story that finely illustates the following rule: "If you  ever discover an artifact in a pile of ruins, you'd best leave it where you found it."

Why, you ask? Simple: Somebody will want it back.

Still, there are so many other James stories that are even finer than that one - "Casting the Runes" (which gives us a fictional encounter with Aleister Crowley) and "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas," which is a better tale of an ancient riddle than Dan Brown could ever write.

Ok, so, just a final word, before you set off in search of a collection of his stories (easily and inexpensively gotten in paperback editions from Penguin Classics) - James is a master of vague horror. He trafficked in the kinds of words that a writing teacher circles with a red pen: "thing," "something," "seemed," "appeared." Uncertainty isn't appreciated in most writing workshops; for M.R. James, however, it was a key to his art.

Here's a chilling moment from the above-mentioned story in the Penzler anthology, in which Parkins, the main character - who has absconded from a seaside ruin with a strange, little whistle - sees something coming behind him:

"...now there began to be seen, far up the shore, a little flicker of something light-coloured and moving to and fro with great swiftness and irregularity. Rapidly growing larger, it, too, declared itself as a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined. There was something about its motion which made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close quarters. It would stop, raise arms, bow itself toward the sand, then run stooping across the beach to the water-edge and back again..."

I love the fact that, no matter how many times we read this, we can't get a clear picture of what this menacing figure is. That's exactly the point: Who likes a ghost story that's fully explained? Aren't the gaps in the explanation what we crave, especially on Halloween?

Or, as M.R. James himself once advised, in a short essay on the topic: "Ghosts - Treat them Gently!"

P.S.: On hobbit heroism

The epics of old weren't just good fireside entertainment: They were instructive. The stories of the Bible, the Trojan War, the founding of Rome, the ring of the Nibelung, the British warrior-king Arthur presented listeners with stories of the origins of the world, the history of their people, or just examples of heroism, of how to act nobly and true. (Think of all those sweaty, bloodthirsty knights who learned to calm down and act chivalrous because of Arthurian legend.)

Which is what Noble Smith's book about the Shire and the halflings who live there (described in my previous post) manages to do, in its own way. That's something I forgot to mention before, and that I felt deserved a post-script item. Smith's book draws on the courage of characters like Frodo Baggins to teach us all how to be.  (Of course, if I were sitting by a fire right now, I'd probably want to hear Tolkien's original stories instead of an explanation of them.) He does an expert job of balancing accessibility with details that any serious Tolkien fan will appreciate.