Cimmerian 'Stravaganza: The Comics - Part 2!

"Conan the Barbarian" (the phrase is synonymous with the character, and yet, in classic "Elementary, my dear Watson," or "Beam me up, Scotty" style, it was never actually used in the original material) became a modest, surprise hit for Marvel Comics shortly after its debut. Fans responded not only to the whole sword-and-sorcery sub-genre but to Roy Thomas' specific vision of the Hyborian Age created by Robert E. Howard for the pulp market decades before. The four-color comic sold well enough, in fact, to sustain a spin-off: "Savage Tales of Conan" was another great Thomas idea, a larger-format black-and-white magazine designed to showcase longer and more visually opulent stories than the regular comic book would usually do. And both "Conan" and "Savage Tales" drew sustained life from the pencilling talents of the same man: Marvel Comics' heavyweight fan favorite, John Buscema.

Buscema was already a legend when he came to the "Conan" titles, but they gave him a range usually unavailable in super-hero comics. In the pre-historic world Thomas was fleshing out from Howard's writings, Buscema was free to let his considerable imagination soar, without needing to conform to the super-strength and eye-beams norms of titles like "The Fantastic Four" or "The Avengers." He was far less meticulous than his predecessor Barry Smith had been, but he also never ran the risk of stylized, static lapses into which Smith's art could sometimes fall. At the height of his powers, Buscema could scarcely draw a cup sitting on a table without viewers worrying it would spill on them - his panels virtually vibrated with movement.

The result was the visual conception of an entire world - and of a character. Gone was the epicene rock star of Smith's run on the title. In his place stood a far more solid adult man, broad in the chest, wide in the waist, less the lithe superhero, more the thickset tavern-brawler. This Conan might still at certain angles have looked young, but he was unquestionably seasoned - he sported a shaggy Prince Valiant haircut, a fur loin-cloth, wide lips, and a broad, oft-smashed nose. He was a stoic, no-nonsense man of violence, and the visuals Buscema came up with issue after issue helped Thomas to refine his idea of the character to an immediate perfection seldom achieved by other writers with other characters (instinct and luck play a certain part too, and timing - think of Claremont and Byrne's Wolverine, or Miller's Daredevil). To most of us reading these issues eagerly every month, this was Conan.

The world Thomas and Buscema helped to create (the working partnership between these two was an amazing fluke on its own - both imperious control-freaks who fundamentally disliked collaboration, and yet here they were working in what seemed to be perfect tandem) was an enormous elaboration on the one Smith had begun to sketch. Monsters roamed everywhere - Buscema's talent for drawing most animals stood him in good stead as Thomas' scripts called for a veritable Noah's Ark of gigantic bears, moths, rats, lions, eels, squids, lions ... as well as the perennially-popular dinosaurs. Conan fights sabre-toothed tigers, pterodactyls, slugs the size of rhinos, and even, in a breathlessly-paced sequence, a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

And through it all, Buscema's Conan is as far away from Smith's virginal quester as possible. This is a man much closer to Howard's original conception (and, with any luck, the version we'll see in only a few days when the new movie adaptation opens in a theater near you): a boisterous creature of huge appetites - some of them frankly sexual. Buscema was able to indulge to the fullest his oft-announced affection for drawing sultry women - including every kind of evil-eyed seductress imaginable (one of them ends up being made of sea weed), a stunningly re-imagined Red Sonja (Buscema replaced the jerkin-and-skirt Windsor had given the character with ... nothing much at all), and, in a long and satisfying story-arc, the corsair-queen Belit, whose death and brief resurrection marked the 100th issue of "Conan the Barbarian."

The run was immensely successful, and it defined the character for an entire generation. Even when the vogue of sword-and-sorcery started dying out, those Marvel issues kept coming: "Conan the Barbarian," "Savage Sword of Conan," "King Conan," and countless stand-alone specials and spin-offs (Thomas and Buscema spent less than a year on an adaptation of one of Howard's other great creations, King Kull, for instance, and it was a joyous event for fans of the character). Conan was drawn in this same period by other great pencillers - Gil Kane, Jim Starlin, Gene Colan, and many others tried their hands at the Cimmerian - but he belonged to Buscema, and of course to Thomas. When their time with the character finally petered to an end, it seemed almost like a Hyborian funeral was in order. Those of us who'd loved the era thought: there might be crappy knock-offs in the future (done more to keep the copyright alive than out of love or craftsmanship), but this kind of genius won't come again.

We were wrong, of course. But we had to wait a while.

The Gentleman in Trollope!

Our book today is The Gentleman in Trollope, a delightfully inclusive 1982 volume by the late, much-lamented Shirley Robin Letwin that bears the slightly alarming sub-title "Individuality and Moral Conduct" and yet still manages to be a very enjoyable read. I compulsively read 'literary studies' of authors or genres I like, and it's a mysterious compulsion, since I so very seldom like the studies themselves. Something there is in living literature that does not like a post-doc trying to make his bones; far too often, an academic 'study' of something manages only to be an autopsy - and usually a botched one at that. Readable explicators are thin on the ground. The great 19th century novelist Anthony Trollope, for example, has never received the kind of rollicking, entrancing public critical invitation he deserves - he's always just that one crucial step back from the friendliest names, the Dickens and the Wells. He stubbornly seems the province of professors and slightly dotty enthusiasts, and with the possible exception of certain parts of "Barchester Towers," his works have never achieved that first-name-basis iconic status that insures an author invulnerability from the worst that academics can do to bury him with high praise.

I should point out right away that Letwin's book is not that open invitation. It's more closely worded, more narrowly circumscribed - but it's the closest thing we have, and it's great fun.

Its subject is that elusive ideal in Trollope, the gentleman. Much to his chagrin, Trollope was living through an age in which industrial and mercantile advancements were changing the traditional English ideas of what constituted a gentleman. Johnson's famous dictum that 'gentleman' meant 'established lineage' (and that any other idea was merely 'whimsical') was coming under fire from broader and broader swaths of the growing middle class, and Trollope was too keen a social observer not to respond. Time and again in his books we find characters who've achieved their ability to dine and hunt with dukes not through ancestry but through sudden acquisition of money, and these characters (especially the many heiresses among them) are never a priori bad. Time and again we find characters making the same assertion Elizabeth Bennet makes at the climax of Pride and Prejudice - that upright personal character is the great leveller, and that anybody who possesses such a character need defer to nobody.

Letwin understands the fluidity of this point in Trollope:

Nor can it be denied that Trollope's own characters are far from clear-cut or perfectly steady in either virtue or vice. Right and wrong, prudence and folly regularly get scrambled. Plantagenet Palliser, who, we are told, is a perfect gentleman, torments his daughter, unjustly accuses and old friend of treachery, and is rude to a guest.

Although we must immediately point out that this summary is unfair, rigged as it is to make a rhetorical point. Palliser doesn't 'torment' his daughter so much as not immediately capitulate to her; he unjustly accuses an old friend of treachery - until his error is demonstrated to him, at which point he freely apologizes; and he's rude to a guest who was first unconscionably rude to him. The contrast is necessary, of course, because any discussion of 'the gentleman' in Trollope must center in large part on this character, Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium - Trollope himself wrote that if he'd ever created a perfect specimen of the English gentleman, it was this character. And sharpest and best harrowing of the whole question of 'the gentleman' happens in the splendid novel (in my opinion Trollope's finest) The Prime Minister, where chapters swap between the travails of the too-honest and morosely upright real-gentleman the Duke of Omnium and the slick, fraudulent faux-gentleman Ferdinand Lopez. Despite the fact that the former is a timidly entitled grandee and the other a risk-taking adventurer, Letwig is right to see that the main dividing-line between them is personal courage. There's a bracingly moral tone throughout The Gentleman in Trollope that's all too rare in 'studies' of this kind:

Trollope has nothing but contempt for the notion that squeamishness about recognizing and dealing with evil is a gentleman's way. What he really condemns throughout The Way We Live Now is neither 'modern industrial society' nor 'the rise of new men', but the disposition to equate gentility with an unwillingness to recognize and fight evil.

And the writing is snappy throughout. Letwig placed great importance on this quality of her performance, and it shows in every memorable line:

... the true reason for Trollope's return to popularity is more likely to be that the descendants of those late Victorians who disparaged Trollope for shallowness, having had enough of heady pantheist profundities, are now trying to recover that moral understanding which, though it suffered the curious fate of having nearly disappeared without having been recognized to exist, once made a gentleman, like the century that bred him, such an admired oddity.

Although she avoids the scene herself, for me the quintessential discussion of the very topic of the gentleman in Trollope comes in The Duke's Children, where the Duke of Omnium's son, the feckless Lord Silverbridge, is pressing the American millionaire Mr. Boncasson for permission to court his daughter (one of those rich heiresses we mentioned). Mr. Boncasson, who fancies himself "a true-born Republican," is ironically forced by Silverbridge's impetuosity to bring up the subject of social equality. Under ordinary circumstances, he says, back home in America, he would consider his daughter a good enough wife for any man. But in England? As the proposed bride of the heir to the greatest dukedom in the land? He asks Silverbridge if she might not be thought - rightly - as unequal to the position, and Silverbridge's reply is unwittingly telling:

"People don't always know who are their equals."

"That is quite true. If I were speaking to you or to your father theoretically I should perhaps be unwilling to admit superiority on your side because of your rank and wealth. I could make an argument in favour of any equality with the best Briton that ever lived - as would become a true-born Republican."

"That is just what I mean."

"But when the question becomes one of practicing - a question for our lives, for our happiness, for our own conduct, then, knowing what must be the feelings of an aristocracy in such a country as this, I am prepared to admit that your father would be as well justified in objecting to a marriage between a child of his and a child of mine, as I should be in objecting to one between my child and the son of some mechanic in our native city."

"He wouldn't be a gentleman," said Silverbridge.

"That is a word of which I don't quite know the meaning."

"I do," said Silverbridge confiently.

"But you could not define it ..."

Ultimately, Letwin can't define it either, but her book provides the reader with a great deal of learned fun while she tries. No lover of the novels of Trollope (or his non-fiction! Joyously, his biography of Cicero gets some attention from Letwin) should miss this book, and all lovers of Trollope should lament the fact that its broader, longer, and even better general-invitation Trollope volume never got written.

The Gentleman in Trollope was given a very handsome "Common Reader Edition" reprint in 1997 by the Akadine Press, although it would have been nice if that press had taken the trouble to clean up the typos that littered the book's original printing. Perhaps the next publisher will give this wonderful text the edition it deserves.

Cimmerian 'Stravaganza: The Comics - Part 1!

Our Cimmerian 'Stravaganza of 2011 kicks into high-gear this week in anticipation of the new Lionsgate spectacular premiering on the 19th and starring Iowa's own Jason Momoa in the role that made a certain once and future California governor a star. And the most natural place in the world for our ongoing 'stravaganza to, um, go next is the medium where the character, the world, the very concept of Conan the Barbarian flourished - comic books.

And when we enter that medium, one thing becomes glaringly obvious: with all due respect to creator originality and meaning no disrespect to Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian as he exists in the popular consciousness has a fully equal co-creator, and that co-creator's name is Roy Thomas.

Thomas will be familiar to the more nerdy among you (and to those of you who dote on my frequent comics-postings here at Stevereads)(i.e. the most nerdy among you). He was the organizational and conceptual workaday genius who pretty much inherited the mantle of Marvel Comics from Stan Lee when the company was bought and Lee was promoted to Publisher. Thomas took all the bursting creativity of Lee and his artistic collaborators, added a much more intuitive and comprehensive grasp of inter-title continuity, and almost single-handledly created the next great age of Marvel titles. And in 1970, he managed to convince Glenn Lord, the literary manager of Howard's estate, to allow Marvel to put out a comic titled "Conan the Barbarian."

Despite a significant amount of reader demand, publishing a sword-and-sorcery literary adaptation in 1970 was a bit of a risk for a mainstream company like Marvel, so Thomas originally had a tight budget - too tight, in fact, to allow him to have the company's first choice of artist, the fan favorite (and correspondingly expensive) John Buscema. And in retrospect, this was a blessing: it forced Thomas to 'settle' for a sexy young Brit named Barry Smith, whose pencilling work (especially when he handled his own inking) was only just starting to show signs of the lavish, unique brilliance it would achieve in part because of the leeway Thomas gave the artist on this book. As Thomas remarked at the time when presented with the choice of artists, if he'd gone with Buscema in those early days, he'd have sold more issues and won fewer awards.

Looking at that initial Smith run on the book, it's utterly amazing how fast he throws off the unconvincingly Kirbyesque style he was using in issue #1. In a remarkably short time, Smith starts to show readers the sinuous, glittering detail for which he would later become famous. Most artists mature more slowly, but even by issue #4, the landmark "Tower of the Elephant," there are clear foreshadowings of Smith's more mature look.



Those earliest issues give us a very young Conan - lithe, boyish (indeed, many of Smith's '70s big-hair panels make the character look like the baddest-ass Bee Gee of them all), savage but inexperienced, and as such they make the perfect companion to this new movie, which features a Conan just at the beginning of his incredible career. He's not yet the preposterous monolith we were given in the last movie adaptation, and let's hope he never becomes it: the real Conan was far more than a simple strong-man - he's much more a lion than a bulldozer.

And magnificently sustaining Smith's evolving visuals was the scripting of Roy Thomas, who took a personal love of the character in Robert E. Howard's stories and re-created that character and his entire world for a much, much broader readership than Howard had ever reached. Long before the original movie and long after, mention of Conan was as likely to conjure the world Thomas created as visions of Austrian weightlifters. That world, like Howard's is full of torch-lit taverns and fantastic creatures who've survived from even earlier eras in Earth's troubled history. And more: it was Thomas who perfected the driving tension in the background of Howard's stories - the tension represented by Conan himself, a mortal man without super-powers who encounters all these fantastic creatures, these stubborn hold-overs from earlier times in which even Conan the Barbarian would not have survived ... encounters them, and defeats them. Not for heroism's sake (Thomas' Conan, like Howard's, is usually indifferent to heroism), but because he insists on dominating his own world. As paradoxical as it may seem, this Conan was both a representative of Everyman and an avatar of the 'modern' world.

For all his genius, Smith was never cut out for regular comic book series work, and everybody knew it (it's precisely this quality in his work that makes his frequent forays into the genre so instantly memorable). Luckily, as "Conan the Barbarian" sales blossomed, Thomas was able to acquire an artist who was not only cut out for regular series work but gloried in it, and that artist would go on to create as definitive a visual of Conan as Thomas had created a mental one. That artist of course is the aforementioned John Buscema, and we'll look at his contribution in our next chapter!

The Window Box!

Our book today is Diana Stewart's lovely little 1985 instruction manual, The Window Box: Pot, Tub & Basket Book, with twining, intricate illustrations by Marilyn Leader. The book's subject is terra incognita for me - the successful growing of house-plants, which I group with 'successful cooking' and 'successful music-making' as talents I must regretfully admit I'll never possess. Although even there, plant-growing occupies an especially lonely shelf in that group; dint of sheer perseverance has allowed me to whip up a passable bacon-and-eggs breakfast if the need arises, and a scrupulous observance of my own limitations has allowed me to carve out a small repertoire of songs I can sing without complete disaster. But plants I instantly kill.

Stewart would have it be otherwise. Her book (a slim pretty rectangle of a thing, designed to evoke the very boxes it champions) is full of practical advice and level-headed encouragement for novice and expert alike. Here, presented in a calm, congenial voice, are the facts on everything from choosing a container to laying down the proper composting layer to anticipating any possible problems with that most crucial of all container-gardening needs: frequent and copious watering. She stresses the watering issue repeatedly and makes a basic point I'd imagine is lost on many beginners: soil exposed to the air on all sides evaporates moisture a lot faster than soil that's in the ground. Our author wants to make sure you've factored in that frequent watering when choosing where your plants will be displayed - and she wants you to consider the sheer bulk of what's involved as well:

 You have selected your box, or boxes, and decided roughly what you will grow, spring bulbs, summer annuals or whatever. Now comes the time to put the box in place and fill it, and how you tackle this may be between you and your osteopath. ....

And although she's primarily focussed on getting her readers started with creating their container gardens, she spares thoughts constantly for the plants themselves, which she's obviously come to like in the course of her years of gardening:

An oak tree will probably survive in a 10 inch clay pot for a few years but eventually its roots will break it. Even before this happens it may well not be a very happy oak tree.

Of course, even so slender a book as this one - on so healthy and anodyne a subject as this one - can't escape striking a wrong note with Steve! This author makes her slip-up with the innocent-seeming line "For summer evening scent there is really nothing to beat the tobacco plant ..."

But she makes it up and more with the sweet, sensible conviction she brings to every aspect of small-container plant-growing. Window-boxes, urns, troughs, hanging baskets, even bonsai - every aspect of urban, small-space plant-tending is covered in this sunny, delightful book, and all of it is done with such an encouraging, happy tone that I actually keep and re-read the thing, even though I'm certainly never going to succeed in actually having a window-box garden. Maybe it's the reassurance of how deeply Stewart loves creating order out of chaos (even if it's just a little bit of order), or maybe it's the fact that container-gardening books must perforce be celebrations of urban living, which I love. Or it could be something deeper, something essentially bound up with the art and science of making things grow. Every time I re-read this book, I catch hints of that essential something in lines like this, and it never fails to perk me up:

If you get the propagation bug badly you will need more detailed information [on utilizing cuttings] than there is room to give here. Hanker after camellias from cuttings, or bay, or azaleas or magnolias and you may find you are in a different ball-game. But there is never any harm in trying, for hope is what we all live on.

 

 

 

Precious Bane!

Our book today is Mary Webb's 1924 novel Precious Bane, one of the most beautifully-written books of the 20th century. It was highly praised after its first publication (including, most famously and a bit pathetically, by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin), it's been reprinted many times, and it's been adapted for stage and screen many times as well - and yet it doesn't often appear on lists of great novels, and no major publisher currently as it in print (as far as I can tell, the only in-print edition is a hideous self-published version that couldn't possibly entice a single uncommitted reader to give it a chance). I fear it's being forgotten, perhaps reduced in academic courses to a 'regional' novel of correspondingly limited appeal.

I'd hate to think that. I might accept that fate for the rest of Mary Webb's life's work, but this, her last completed novel (she died in 1927, and I think one book came out posthumously), is a masterpiece that should live forever.

The story is told by its main character, Prudence Sarn, who's intelligent and quite attractive - except for her harelip, a troubling sign and distinction in her rural north Shropshire setting. The simple crofters and farmers of the Ellesmere district mistrust and fear Prue Sarn's twisted lip, and she's been hearing their superstitious comments her entire life, whispered behind her when she all she's trying to do is warm herself at the village pub. The loneliness of it hasn't curdled her loving spirit, but it does make her dream of a different life:

The folk inside looked each at other, and I wished I could die. For all the bitter cold and my thin gown and us being far from the fire, I was all in a swelter. For indeed I loved my kind and would lief they had loved me, and I felt a friendliness for the drovers and for the gentry, and the host and his missus. For they were part of my outing and part of Lullingford and of the world, that ever seized my heart in its hands, as a child will hold a small bird, which is both affrighted and comforted to be so held. I would lief have ridden forth and seen new folk, new roads, new hamlets, children playing on strange village greens, unknown to me as if they were fairies, come there I knew not whence nor how, singing their songs and running away into the dusk; old folk wending their way along paths in the meadow of which I knew not so much as the name of the owner, to churches deep in trees, with all the bells a-ringing, pulled by men I never saw afore.

The key to that different life is the strapping young village weaver Kester Woodseaves. Prue loves him desperately and - she believes - hopelessly, until the day he beholds her shapely young body (but not her face) and is obviously interested. Webb revels in her characters' raw, trumpeted emotions (her portrayal of Prue's corrosively self-destructive brother is painful to read or even to re-read), and the most emotional of those characters is Prue herself, who transports with ecstasy when Kester first regards her with favor:

I wondered if aught would have happened me in my outward life by the time the water-lilies came again, lying along the edges of the mere like great gouts of pale wax. There was but a mockery of them now, for amid the frozen leaves lay lilies of ice. Yet as I thought of Kester Woodseaves and what he had come to mean, I seemed to hear and see, on this side and on that, in the dark woods, a sound and a gleam of the gathering spring. There was a piping call in the oak wood, a bursting of purple in the tree-tops, a soft yellowing of celandine in the rookery. When I was come into the attic, spring was there afore me, though it was so cold that my hands could scarce write. None the less, I put down in my book the words, 'The first day of spring.' And I wrote it in the best tall script, flourished. So I should ever call to mind the second time of seeing him I loved, and the first time of his seeing me. Not only had he looked at me, but he had looked with favour and longing, and though I knew it was only because the truth was hidden from him, yet I was glad of what I had, as a winter bird is, that will come to your hand for a little crumb, though in plenteous times she would but mock you from the topmost boughs.

I took my crumb, and behold! it was the Lord's Supper.

The character of Kester is something of a masterpiece as well - he's proud and fierce like a Gothic hero, but he's also open and kind ... we never doubt that he'll look past Prue's disfigurement if given half a chance, and when he finally does (and saves her life in the bargain), readers will be strongly tempted to weep and cheer. Webb's prose style soars and dips according to the mood of each scene, but readers who have followed poor valiant Prue's trials from the beginning will shiver at the significance of the book's magnificent, plainly-worded final line, as Prue and Kester ride off to their life together:

"No more sad talk! I've chosen my bit of Paradise. 'Tis on your breast, my dear acquaintance!"

And when he'd said those words, he bent his comely head and kissed me full upon the mouth.

A very nice new Penguin Classics edition of the book would begin to address the problem of its comparative neglect (hint, hint). And in the meantime, you're all strongly urged to go out and find a copy and soak up its lyricism to the last line. I strongly suspect that all novels are 'regional' novels, but even if I'm wrong, there's no denying brilliance, regardless of its home address.

Comics! Fear Itself Accelerates!

I know what-all I'm supposed to be noticing in this week's release of the 5th issue of Marvel's increasingly entertaining "Fear Itself" mini-series about an Asgardian super evil-god (who happens to be uncle to the mighty Thor) and his attempt to take over Earth by transforming a handful of heroes and villains into mindless, hammer-wielding agents of destruction. At the end of the previous issue, we saw several plot-lines cranking up the excitement: Captain America was charging into the fight to avenge his fallen friend and former sidekick Bucky, Tony Stark was sacrificing his hard-won sobriety merely to gain the listening ear of Thor's near-omnipotent father Odin, and Thor himself was squaring off against both the magically-transformed hammer-wielding Hulk but also the magically-transformed hammer-wielding Thing. This current issue has been billed for the last month as exactly what its title suggests: a mammoth brawl.

So I duly paid attention to Tony Stark's wonderfully testy dialogue with Odin ("I can't express to you how disappointed I am that you actually showed up")(which is met by the perfectly imperious, "You are a war-brother of my boy, Stark, and thus I grant you special dispensation. But don't push it"). And I duly paid attention to Thor's scenery-exploding battle with the possessed Hulk and the possessed Thing, which was done in the Stuart Immonen style to such perfection that I begin to wonder if Marvel currently has a better artist. When Thor blasts his hammer right through the possessed Thing, he's fairly businesslike about it, noting that things are different with the possessed Hulk ("And him I liked. But you? You were always a giant pain in the ass")(a far cry from the Stan Lee style 'thees' and 'thous' of cherished memory). And I duly paid attention when the mad god bad guy shatters Cap's supposedly indestructible shield like cheap china (difficult to get worked up about it, since this is the third time in thirty years Marvel's pulled that particular surprise).

But despite all that, I couldn't help feeling distracted by one other scene, one that wasn't heralded by the fanboy press but is in its own way far more significant, in terms of Marvel continuity. The possessed Thing lies dying, and his 'niece' and 'nephew' Franklin and Val Richards rush to his side. And Franklin makes an astonishing revelation: "'Member how I told Mom and Dad that I wouldn't use my powers? That I knew how powerful they made me, and how dangerous that was until I got older, so I wouldn't ever, ever, never use them? I lied." And then, in a burst of white light, he not only heals Ben Grimm but completely undoes the Asgardian enchantment that had transformed him.

I'm not sure how old mini-series author Matt Fraction is, but some of us remember the original story of Franklin's mysterious powers like it was yesterday. Gigantic, reality-warping powers on a level to worry the Watcher and prompt the boy's father to put him in a coma for a while, to save all life in the universe. Fraction's deus ex machina here is a far more drastic measure than I suspect he realizes - in that one panel, he raises the possibility of a far greater threat to the Marvel universe than some dime-a-dozen crazy Agardian. The powers that be at Marvel have said over and over again that "Fear Itself" will have lasting consequences for continuity, but I just bet this particular consequence hasn't been thought through at all. How could it be? Franklin could simply disintegrate Thor's crazy uncle - and restore Bucky to life, and restore Manhattan to its pre-invasion state of repair, etc. Fifty years of Fantastic Four stories have characterized Franklin Richards as the ultimate ticking time-bomb, and in this issue of "Fear Itself" Fraction detonates that time-bomb without seeming really to notice what he's doing.

A great, enjoyable issue, of course ... but some things distract from the main events ....

A Vision of Light!

Our book today is Judith Merkle Riley's 1989 historical novel A Vision of Light, and it falls into the ever-broadening category of 'second chance' books I like upon re-reading even though I disliked them when I first read them. Granted, 1989 was one of the worst years of my life for a new book to win me over, and quite a few deserving titles from that year got chewed up and spat out with less fairness than they deserved. But ideally, a dedicated re-reader will steadily correct such injustices, since fixed prejudices in reading are every bit as odious as fixed prejudices in walking-around life. So when I found a sturdy hardcover copy of this novel at the bottom of a heaped donation bin, I forked over the 25 cents, cleared two hours of my time, cracked the crust of old resentments off my reading mind, and jumped right in. Back 20 years ago, I thought the book was morose and sappy and creaky with anachronisms - so my guard was up for all three of those things, and naturally there were initial moments when I wondered whether I should re-read it at all.

I'm glad I did. Rather predictably, I missed quite a bit the first time through - and all three of my judgements were just plain wrong. What I thought were anachronisms were only the usual slight loosening of factual punctilio that historical novels do all the time (long before this book, in happier reading years, I'd forgiven a good deal looser stuff - hell, I'd laughed my head off during the whole of No Bed For Bacon) - no crime at all if the story carries it off. What I thought was sappy was merely openly sentimental - the openness of emotion, not the bathos of wallowing in it. And I don't know how I considered this book morose - a sparkling humor winks on practically every page.

In short, A Vision of Light is a wonderful, warm novel - exactly as good as half a dozen trustworthy bookstore customers told me it was, back when it first came out.

The story centers on Margaret of Ashbury, the vivacious young wife of a wealthy 14th century merchant with a kind nature ("It was fun to please her," he thinks), a young wife who one day hears a voice telling her to create a book. Not a book of sermons or love-visions, but an honest, everyday account of her own life and times. Those times have been remarkable by any standard - Margaret has been a midwife, channelled almost miraculous aptitude for healing, survived the Black Death, and survived the inquisition of the Church - but that hardly matters in 1355, when a woman's place is to keep her home running smoothly and her mouth shut. Margaret's husband Roger Kendall happily indulges her, which means the only thing she has to do is find a scribe willing to do the actual writing.

This proves instantly difficult. The first few scribes she approaches disdain the very idea of a woman writing a book. When she finally finds Brother Gregory - young, spare-boned, sharp-tempered - he's equally sceptical, but he's also poor and hungry, and in the initial stages of their working relationship, Margaret isn't above exploiting those facts to get her way. She doesn't do it to be conniving, but she wants her book written - and she's instinctively caring, if slightly maddening:

 "You haven't had breakfast, have you? You're much too tall to go without breakfast. You'll become weak and ill." (She told short people they were growing, when this mood came upon her.) "No, you just turn around and sit over here, while I see if Cook has a little something."

It is impossible to deny a woman in a feeding mood. It is as if they look right through you, to that small, weak part that has been there since you were a baby and that doesn't know how to defy authority. Brother Gregory was completely docile as she sat him down while bread, cheese, and a mug of ale were brought. She stood over him while he ate, and when it was clear that his mood was rapidly becoming mellower, she said, "There! Isn't that what you needed? Now, if everybody in the world ate breakfast, there would be no more wars."

Her new scribe, a caustic man who doesn't suffer fools gladly, doesn't even finish his last mouthful before he's going after this easy philosophy, with predictably frustrating results:

Brother Gregory's natural contentiousness had returned, and with his mouth still half full, he responded, "That is an entirely illogical statement. The Duke of Lancaster, who is a great warrior, eats breakfast every day. But I know of a holy abbot who goes without eating for days at a time, and he doesn't even kill flies."

"You can't prove anything with just two examples."

"You just tried to prove an outrageous non sequitur with only one example - me," said Brother Gregory primly.

"Oh, Latin, that's what you've run to hide behind."

The two set about writing Margaret's book, and the novel settles into a gentle, extremely assured alternating between Margaret's fascinating life-story and the complicated, very entertaining relationship that grows between Margaret and Brother Gregory. He is ready at all times with intellectual disdain and quick judgements (and his own personal history is also fascinating - his hilariously irascible father is the book's main scene-stealer), and he's constantly stymied by Margaret's bewitching combination of wisdom and innocence, as in the coda to her story about losing her baby:

Margaret looked up suddenly at Brother Gregory, and he lifted his pen from the page. Her face was very agitated. Her hands, clasped beneath the Byzantine gold cross she habitually wore, showed white at the knuckles.

"Do you think so, Brother Gregory? Do lost babies grow when they go to heaven? Does someone teach them and hold them? Or do they stay the same size, wetting their swaddling clothes forever and ever?"

Brother Gregory was appalled. This foolish woman was a wellspring of superstition. Spiritual beings, of course, do not wet, and the kind of mind that could even entertain such a supposition was capable of any idiocy.

"Do you know, I still dream about my lost girl, even now, sometimes?"

A Vision of Light deserved a better reading than I gave it in 1989. It's a sweet, welcoming, and deceptively well-researched story, one that's not at all ashamed of its basically theatrical simplicity (and right at the end the author throws in a gripping, gory climactic bit of action, like a gunshot in a Merchant-Ivory film). I'm glad I happened upon it again, and I hope I can get around to the rest of that blighted year in due time. Meanwhile, I contritely recommend this book, should you encounter it yourself.

Owl!

Our book today is one I've mentioned several times here at Stevereads: it's William Service's slim, gemlike 1969 book Owl, about the year he and his family spent sharing their house with a tiny orphaned screech owl. From the first day, a drama of mutual discovery unfolds, and Service records it all in brief, impressionistic jump-cut segments, many of which are as sharp and well-turned as poetry. "I enter it here," he tells us at one point, "that an owl on a stump has many acquaintances but few friends" - but it's quickly apparent that Owl (no other name seemed right) has found an entire house full of friends here - Service's narrative is unabashedly affectionate, and the book critics of its day responded in kind. Hal Borland called it "One of the most thoroughly delightful books I have read in years," the Boston Herald reviewer said it was slim and gemlike, and the great Richard Schickel said, "I cannot think of a book this year that has delighted me more than Owl." There were reprints, there was a brief vogue, hundreds of copies were given as holiday gifts, and a generation of hapless and doomed screech owl chicks found themselves in cages at pet stores. All of which was rather strange given the subject, as Service himself is the first to point out:

An owl is an odd creature to keep about the house. Also for forest, hedgerow, meadow to keep. An odd creature anywhere.

The heart of the book's appeal is the perfect match between Service's lean, quietly wonder-struck reports and that odd little creature he's scrutinizing. We've already seen the owl-memoir when it's written at meaty length by a trained naturalist. What we have in Owl is something very different: this is much closer to the list of initial observations Dr. Watson makes about his new flat-mate Sherlock Holmes in "A Study in Scarlet." Both chroniclers are mystified by their subjects, and like Watson, Service eventually comes to accept that he won't know everything:

Many people want to pet Owl, which sometimes he likes and sometimes he doesn't. His early way out of too much handling was to squawk and take off. Now, more likely than not, and depending on how well he knows the person, he will simply turn and walk a few feet away. Trust is too strong a word, but he has the expectation that he will not be chased and hugged to death. If it's my wife involved, Owl will most likely get his "huggle" no matter what. From inside the embrace he glares yellow outrage. Or perhaps he has found bliss. He is inscrutable.

Nevertheless, this short book is full of warm little memories that cluster in the mind long after the book is closed:

A Screech Owl Is Not a Lap Dog

... ours, nevertheless, does not conform to the image of the lonely hunter in his forest who has just two questions for anything that moves: Can I catch and eat it? Or can it catch me? Owl, as we have seen, likes to be tweaked and groomed, especially around the head and neck. Pull away before he has had enough, and a claw flicks out to retrieve the finger (You're a nice bird, Owl.)

Readers of living-with-animal books like this one will know how it all ends, of course. One day Service and his family are enjoying "that trivial, emphatic presence" same as always, and the next day it's gone. The whole thing is managed with such fine, gentle brush-strokes that it can take the reader a couple of readings to feel the pain underneath the words:

He has left a very small blank - precisely owl-shaped - in the daily routine ... a discontinuity which things still get caught on. And memoranda. A feather may yet swirl from a suddenly opened closet door, or come down with a book from a shelf. A fleck of lime in an angle somewhere. Punctured houseplants and page corners nipped off. We keep finding one more pellet.

Readers won't learn the evolution and natural history of owls or even screech owls in this book, nor will they learn much about Bill Service or his family. Owl is the story of pure intersection - brief, unpredictable, and surprisingly powerful. As far as I know, the book is out of print - but you should hunt down a copy and spend an hour reading it. Small as it is, you'll remember this book vividly for the rest of your life.

Back to some familiar faces in the Penny Press!

Predictably, the short story "Reverting to a Wild State" in the 1 August issue of The New Yorker has the gay literary world all a-twitter (we can't use that word anymore, can we? Not without sending dozens of people scurrying for their feeds). The story is by Justin Torres, and it's about a cute young gay man who begins to cheat on his nice, normal boyfriend with an older man who likes to pay him to clean house in his skimpies ("The man passed comment on all the usual parts of my body, but the unusual as well - my calves, the notch at the top of my spine. To comment is not necessarily to compliment, we were both aware"). The narrative is rather pretentiously fragmented into four numbered parts counting down backwards (we start at 3 and end up at 0), but readers can ignore such details and concentrate on the important stuff. There are four important things about this story, and the first two are the ones getting it so much attention this week: it's gay-themed, and it's published in The New Yorker. Those two things don't coincide very often (New Yorker readers of any standing will remember the first story to break that particular barrier), and this occasion is made all the more noteworthy due to the third important thing: the story is well-written - it captures with agility the mercurial flashes of breaking up, of the weird little things you remember when a relationship is ending, and the weird reactions those memories produce:

Nigel was always finding discarded plants and taking them home to regenerate. Everywhere in our apartment were plants, thriving. This, too, infuriated me - and when Nigel instructed me not to come home that night, when he told me to come by the next day, while he was at work, and remove all my shit and never come home again, I thought of those plants, of a space in the world without them.

"It's over," Nigel said. "You're free."

[caption id="attachment_3352" align="alignleft" width="249" caption="illustration by autumn whitehurst"][/caption]

It's the fourth important thing about the story that bugs me, however: it's bigoted. The main character is in a long-term relationship with a loving partner, and then - out of the blue - he reverts to a wild state, apparently the wild state from which all cute gay boi's come, a wild state that's always with them, calling them to abandon their lovers and start polishing some rich guy's woodwork for pocket money. The main character doesn't leave poor earnest Nigel because he's in love with someone else or even attracted to someone else - he leaves a stable, caring relationship for a cash-and-carry arrangement in which he's mainly a sex object, and the title of Torres' story leads us to think he does this because it's his nature, like a salmon. There's a segment of the American population that believes all gay men are by nature shallow, sex-obsessed bed-hoppers, and that segment of the population has used this characterization to deny gay men civil rights and equal legal treatment (in addition to denying them jobs, physical safety, and sometimes the right to go on breathing). I'd bet my last basset hound Torres doesn't consider himself a part of that segment of the population - he went to the University of Iowa, after all, and trained dogs, and worked in a bookstore. So why this story? Something he himself experienced but lacked the patience to transmute? Or is it that a significant chunk of The New Yorker's subscribers come from that aforementioned segment of the population, and what little gay fiction they ever force themselves to read must be of this 'I can't help myself' blackface variety? Neither answer is good enough, and I find myself wondering about a third.

Leaving a magazine wondering something unsavory is of course part of the risk you run when you read as many magazines as I do. But there's one that almost always leaves me feeling the clean, uplifting kind of wonder - National Geographic, of course. Specifically, the current issue, the one with the polar bear on the cover - only NO! That's not a polar bear - it's a white black bear, a "spirit bear" from the deep rain forests of British Columbia! In an article by Bruce Barcott, I learned there may be as many as a thousand of these remarkable animals roaming the forests and feeding on fish, and that nobody quite knows why they've developed their distinctive coloring, and that their existence was largely kept a secret by the local tribes, who venerate the animal and don't want outsiders hunting it (a laudable intent utterly undone by this issue - if even 1 percent of the world's insane trophy-hunters read this article and realize there's a whole new kind of bear they've never killed, the spirit bear will be extinct before the next issue of National Geographic hits the stands). I myself have trekked all over those very same rain forests of British Columbia (with beagles in tow), and although I was perfectly well aware of all the other animals lurking about, I had no clue I was sharing those mossy glens with a creature I'd never even heard about. Leave it to National Geographic to show me something that wonderful.

I've likewise been staring ardently at the moon for a very, very long time, loving the light it sheds in the night, taking a comfort I can't explain from its placid stability - and yet before this issue of National Geographic, I would never have guessed that the moon had a liquid outer core just bubbling there at some 2,600 degrees F. The accompanying article mentions the possibility that in the distant past, the moon might have been actively molten, although speculation is that it's core is stagnant today and has been for millions of years. But still - the idea that the moon, this planetoid that for my entire life I've considered beautiful in large part for a tomb-like beauty dependent on the lack of a beating heart, actually has a fire burning under all that grey rock ... the idea is jarring, although not necessarily in a bad way. Thanks to this issue, the world around me will be different in my mind because it contains a big, fierce animal I never knew existed, and the moon itself will be different because I now know it harbors a fire to match its rock.

National Geographic makes me burble like this, as some of you will know.

Not Quite the Usual Suspects in the Penny Press!

Long-time readers of "In the Penny Press" are probably ready to go cross-eyed the next time I natter on about some wretched tobacco addict in Esquire or the skimpiness of your average Atlantic feature article, but I can't help it: I go where my interests take me. Just the same, I ought to be more mindful of variety here at Stevereads - especially since there's quite a bit of variety to the magazines I read and enjoy regularly. Two of my old stand-bys, for instance, have scarcely ever been mentioned here: Arion and The New Republic.

Of course Arion's a natural fit: it's Boston University's square-bound Classics journal, and every issue is filled with essays on the kinds of topics only small and steadily-shrinking segment of the reading population would find interesting at all. That's too bad, because the quality of the writing in any issue of Arion is top-notch, and the current issue is no exception (in all the time I've been reading this journal - and that's all the time it's been published, a quite delightful little run - there have been no exceptions; even the mountebank Camille Paglia did superb work when writing under its aegis). The Spring/Summer 2011 issue has typically rich pickings, including a marvellous look at many of the various statues of Antinous, the Bithynian boy-toy of the Roman emperor Hadrian. The piece is written with delightful brio by Amelia Arenas, who points out that "although we know little about the young man, there are more images of him than of most Roman Emperors, so one can say that Antinous lives only in our visual imagination. Thus 'who was this boy?' and 'what did he look like?' are almost the same question. I've been thinking about Antinous for a very, very long time, and such an elegant phrasing never occurred to me. And Arenas has also given the subject a lot of thought - not only the subject of that one beautiful boy, but the subject of visual memory itself:

Consider what happens with those yellowing family photographs we keep in cardboard boxes under our beds - all those smiling strangers who will never make it into a frame simply because we don't know who they are. The same happens when we look at the pictures we took at our last party. They end up in the dump, if they don't match in some way what we think we look like or wished we looked like - whatever it is that we see in the mirror when we strike our flattering morning pose after we finish shaving or putting our makeup on.

Every issue of Arion features a handful of more ruminative pieces like this one, plus a scattering of original translations, and some book reviews that are toweringly magisterial - and that can be summarily devastating, as in this issue's long review of a book called Monotheism Between Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity. You wouldn't think a book with a title like that could spark ire - let alone wit - in any critic, but the always-entertaining Colin Wells rises superbly to the challenge. His review - called "Spotting an Elephant" - is the single most entertaining piece in this issue (unless you happen to be one of the hapless editors of the book in question), and its opening salvo deserves to be quoted in full:

 Is it possible to say anything meaningful about a book on the spread of Christianity in which the word "miracle" does not appear even once? The nine scholars whose essays comprise Monotheism Between Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity have a lot to say about modalities, hermeneutical processes, hegemonies of discourse, even "theopantistic" ideas. About miracles, however, not a sausage. Without a doubt, they are good academicians. They peck at the right buttons, they jump through the right hoops. They've apparently read the sources, though how they missed all those miracles is perhaps something of a miracle itself. As for what is obviously the main object of the exercise, I'm sure that most of those without tenure or its equivalent will find it forthcoming in due course.

Rightly so, I would add resignedly. As you may have guessed, this book comes out of an academic conference, one that was held at the University of Exeter in July 2006 and that also produced a companion volume, One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire ... Neither is an actively bad book, which is about the best that can be said.

Wells - who goes on to describe himself as a professor of Nothing at No University - goes on, in fact, to say a great deal that's meaningful about this book, and about the dangers of approaching a big, living subject while wearing academic blinkers and spouting academic jargon, and even though it's shooting fish in a barrel, it's a hoot to watch. There's a very large amount of intellectual rigor underneath his razor-sharp levity, and that kind of thing is to be embraced wherever it's found. I find it all the time in Arion.

I find it all the time in our other periodical today, the venerable New Republic. I've been a reader of The New Republic for a very long time (a dear old friend of mine used to write for them regularly and eventually wore down my resistance to overtly political periodicals), and just as with Arion, I don't think I've ever read an issue that didn't mentally thrill me in some way. The front half of every issue is devoted to fire-throwing essays and analysis about current political news stories, and the friends of mine who hate TNR hate it for those stories - apparently, they conform to some sort of political philosophy or other. Since my own political philosophy has, sadly, completely vanished from the Western world, I can view that half of the magazine with benign indifference. This frees me to concentrate on the back half of every issue, which is nothing short of amazingly stimulating, memorable, quotable, even ... dare I say it? anthologizable. The back pages of every issue are devoted to long-form book reviews, and those reviews are a positive joy to read whether I agree with the reviewer or not (of course, the long form makes it particularly trying when I disagree - earlier this year, a reviewer bashed a book I liked, and the bashing kept going on and on, and my agitated marginalia kept going on and on, the reviewer getting funnier and more serious, the marginalia getting shriller and more uppercased - the proprietors of the Chinese food hole-in-the-wall where I read my periodicals would have thought I was insane to get so worked up over a magazine article, except they've long since already decided I'm insane).

This latest issue has a long, virtuoso piece by Evgeny Morozov - it's ostensibly reviewing two books about Google, but it's really a magnificent meditation on the subject (but without slighting the job of actually reviewing the books - that's the trick of long-form reviewing, a trick that eluded many of that dear gang at the old Saturday Review), complete with caveats about the dangers of meditating on the subject:

Eric Schmidt once quipped that "the Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand." To a large extent, this is also true of Google. Even its founders ... must be profoundly confused about Google's impact on privacy, scholarship, communications, and power. It is for this reason that writing about Google presents an almost insurmountable challenge.

He meets the challenge, just the same. Likewise Franklin Foer, who takes an equally juicy subject - the literary feud between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman - and has a blast with it. He dramatizes the appearance McCarthy made on "The Dick Cavett Show" in which she infamously commented that every word Hellman writes is a lie, and he sets up the coming story with the wonderfully understated line, "When Lillian Hellman heard the quip in her bed, she laughed." There follows a corker of a narrative that remembers to be dutiful toward the book it's nominally reviewing but that's unashamedly revelling in its own independent powers to entertain the reader. There aren't enough literary journalists in the world who can do that - it requires a maddeningly complex combination of relaxing and bringing your A-game, and since most writers consider those things to be opposites, they never manage it. Foer does it like he was born doing it.

And if these back pages of TNR scintillate and entertain more these days than perhaps they did in decades past, it's largely due to one man: the section's editor and presiding spirit, Leon Wieseltier. So it's very comforting to turn to the back page of the magazine and find another instalment of his "Washington Diarist" feature - comforting because (as I've relearned just in the last four years, at a certain other literary journal) there's something elementarily reassuring when the person in charge of a literary organ is also one of its strongest writers. It's not true in many other professions - you wouldn't expect a football coach to be stronger or faster than his players - but it's mighty pleasing when it happens in book journalism.

What Wieseltier does in these marvellous little pieces is even trickier than good book reviewing - it's in fact the trickiest kind of writing there is: the personal essay. The reason the personal essay is the trickiest kind of writing is because it's poised on a razor: a bit too much personal or a bit too much essay, and the whole thing gets shredded under its own weight. That's why although America has produced many good essayists it's produced very few great ones. I'm almost ready to nominate Wieseltier to that latter category, on the strength of entries like this one. It's titled "The Night Birds" and begins with a random observation: our diarist has noticed that the birds in his garden tend to talk late into the night, rather than during the day. From there the thing gently and wonderfully unfolds in just the way a personal essay should - smart but not show-offy, disparate but fluid. "... the smart rooms in which I may sometimes be found are not lacking in people who are lonely in society," he writes (I strongly nominate "The Smart Rooms" as the title of his memoirs), and like all really talented essayists, he subtly makes you realize metaphors where you never suspected them before.

These two periodicals delight endlessly, and it's mere oversight that I haven't been telling you that all these years! There are other poor neglected stragglers out there, and I'll get to them all in due time - but first, we return to a couple of more familiar members of In the Penny Press' Rogues Gallery!

Poetry Anthologies!

I could hardly let National Poetry Month come to a close without paying some kind of tribute to the main venue where most readers encounter poetry, now could I? Once, ages ago, that venue would have been the bard in the hall, the singer on the portico, but for most readers since Gutenberg, the main place where they encounter poetry is in books - and not just any books, but poetry anthologies. Poet jostling against poet, centuries eliding into centuries, styles and movements recklessly colliding with their polar opposites. Most readers out there first read poetry in just such heterogeneous company ... it was only later, as a mature-feeling act of adulthood, that some of them began buying entire books of poetry written by only one person.

Since the poetry anthology is perfectly adapted to pedagogy, they proliferate in schools, and this forces us to specify our terms. In terms of sheer numbers in print and sheer numbers of eyeballs that have scanned its pages, by far the most important poetry anthology of all time is the Norton Anthology of Poetry, the various incarnations of which have been mainstays in schools for three or four generations. But there are two kinds of poetry anthologies: the itemized tour and the personal statement. The Norton Anthologies are very much the former - they have to be, if they're going to work in classrooms. And while I don't discount the viral vitality of all literature (you can get infected regardless of the vector), I'm concentrating today on the other kind of poetry anthology, the personal statement. These are usually no less scholarly, and in their hearts they'd certainly like to be as impartially inclusive ... but they're not boardroom-generated, so they end up being as much reflections of their creators as they are reflections of the state of the art when they're made.

The ground-breakers in (more or less!) modern times were Palgrave's Golden Treasury and Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of Verse ... and the main thing we notice about their original versions today is how narrow and parochial they seem, how limiting their personal statements are. We know there's a bigger verse-world out there than all those syrupy pastorals, but you certainly can't tell that from the neat and well-tended confines of the volumes themselves. I've got three very different - one can't help but think "better" volumes in mind.

The first is one that might actually compete with the Norton Anthology for academic sales: Hayden Carruth's hugely popular 1970 book The Voice That Is Great Within Us. There was a time when I could walk into the ramshackle apartment of any young poet and find a dog-eared copy of this book with its signature white cover. Carruth was a rotten poet himself, but with the overseeing of this particular volume, he hit a fascinating balance - like all the best 'personal statement' poetry anthologies, this one can be very pleasurably read from front to back like a novel, rather than picked and pecked through. Although I'll peck for you now, since I'd like to share one poem I love from each of the three anthologies mentioned here. From Carruth's book it's got to be Countee Cullen's quick ditty "Incident":

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee;
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.

The most august of the three volumes I'm writing about today - indeed, quite possibly the most august poetry anthology in English - is Helen Gardner's mighty successor to the Quiller-Couch Oxford Book of English Verse. I prefer the Gardner even to its own successor, since that later version seems to me to be an Oxford Book that's finally more concerned with what it's not leaving out than with what it's including, if you follow the distinction. Any personal statement that even so much as acknowledges consensus is irredeemably craven, which is why I prefer the magisterial perfection of Gardner's version. Here are all the greatest names of English poetry, to an absolutely remarkable degree unmixed with baser matter, and here, unapologetically, are all the greatest poems by those great names, one after another in an astounding, uplifting fusillade. I'll again pick only one, well-known and well-loved by me: Tennyson's "Ulysses," which starts like this:

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

And that ends, wonderfully, like this:

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;

There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me -

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads - you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

And naturally, in any post like this, we must come at last to simple personal favorites, and I have one: the magnificent 1998 soup-to-nuts update of Mark Van Doren's Anthology of World Poetry, this one edited by Katharine Washburn and John Major and full of 1300 pages of endless variety and wonder. Where the Gardner volume has one immortal standard after another, this volume is a steady stream of surprises, whole worlds of the unexpected on every page. It's broken down roughly chronologically and sprawls across the whole of recorded human history - African chants, Elizabethan madrigals, Chinese miniatures, Beat imponderables. This is my single favorite poetry anthology, the book I would hand to somebody if they stood next to me in the Poetry section of the Brattle and asked me "What one book should I get?" In part this is due to the elastic range of the contents, because more than anything poetry should be about not letting our aesthetics calcify - but mainly due to the sheer beauty of so much of what's in here. I could pick a dozen examples instantly, but I'll stick to just one: a very loose adaptation of Horace by J. D. McClatchy, a poem called "Late Night Ode" that I've loved for long enough so that some of its terms are already outdated (CNN, beepers...):

It's over, love. Look at me pushing fifty now,

Hair like grave-grass growing in both ears,

The piles and the boggy prostate, the crooked penis,

The sour taste of each day's first lie,

And that recurrent dream of years ago pulling

A swaying bead-chain of moonlight,

Of slipping between the cool sheets of dark

along a body like my own, but blameless.

What good's my cut-glass conversation now,

Now I'm so effortlessly vulgar and sad?

You get from life what you can shake from it?

for me, it's g and t's all day and CNN.

Try the blond boychick lawyer, entry level

At eighty grand, who pouts about the overtime,

Keeps Evian and a beeper in his locker at the gym,

And hash in tinfoil under the office fern.

There's your hound from heaven, with buccaneer

Curls and perfumed war-paint on his nipples.

His answering machine always has room for one more

Slurred, embarrassed call from you-know-who.

Some nights I've laughed so hard the tears

won't stop. Look at me now. Why now?

I long ago gave up pretending to believe

Anyone's memory will give as good as it gets.

So why these stubborn tears? and why do I dream

Almost every night of holding you again,

Or at least of diving after you, my long-gone,

Through the bruised unbalanced waves.

I can't recommend World Poetry eagerly enough - if you ever find a copy, snatch it up. And if you should have the option to spend a few warmly drunken nights exchanging favorite finds with a beautiful young poet, don't hesitate to do that too. It definitely adds to the experience.

The Collected Poetry of Thom Gunn!

Our book today is 1994's The Collected Poems of Thom Gunn, who was born in England and followed his lover to California at the height of the drug-soaked 'counter-culture' movement then cresting there. He dove into that movement with the same studied abandon he released on all the things that interested him, becoming at once its warden and its bard.

At Trinity College he'd absorbed phenomenal amounts of information and spent countless hours straining his way through what he called 'a thicket of forms.' He learned the names and measures of all poetic styles; he learned their limitations and their freedoms; he learned how to do them all, and how to make them do his bidding. In short, he learned what virtually no poets writing today bother to learn: the craft of poetry. Poets - especially young poets - today conceive of the status of 'poet' as something inborn, something cellular that they only need to proclaim in order to brandish. They call themselves 'poets' with the lazy arrogance endemic to work-shirkers, and they scurry from ill-lit reading to ill-lit reading with the bitter collegiality of people who've decided that as bad as 'the scene' is, it sure beats sitting down and studying quatrains. In the tangle of this misperception, "I'm a poet" is tortured into synonymity with sloth, or even disfunction. "I'm a poet" becomes the reason why "I don't write well," or even why "I don't write at all." Show me a 'poet' under the age of 25 today, and I'll show you someone who couldn't pick a sestina out of a police lineup and who thinks quintain is the crusty old shark-killer in "Jaws." And worse: if you confront them with this ignorance, you won't get shame - you'll get a sneer: "I'm a poet - I don't bother with those things."

In the bright new light of a paradise state, Thom Gunn explored all the loose verse-styles making the rounds, and I read all the results (because this is one of the 20th century's greatest poets) with interest and often pleasure, not because I like those looser styles but because I knew that with him they weren't the results of mere cowardice - only genuine craft has the right to abandon itself: poets who don't want to be charlatans learn poetry before they start crapping around with it.

Gunn paid his discipline the honor of knowing it in every quirk and detail, and his "Collected Poems" spans his whole working career, from his earliest volumes like Fighting Terms and My Sad Captains to the late masterworks he created when his fierce talents and fierce heart was confronted with the onset of the AIDS epidemic.

These styles and moods range from the urbanities of Catullus in "A Map of the City":

I stand upon a hill and see

A luminous country under me,

Through which at two the drunk must weave;

The transient's pause, the sailor's leave.

I notice, looking down the hill,

Arms braced upon a window sill;

And on the web of fire escapes

Move the potential, the grey shapes.

I hold the city here, complete:

And every shape defined by light

Is mine, or corresponds to mine,

Some flickering or some steady shine.

This map is ground of my delight.

Between the limits, night by night,

I watch a malady's advance,

I recognize my love of chance.

By the recurrent lights I see

Endless potentiality,

The crowded, broken, and unfinished!

I would not have the risk diminished.

To the deceptively delicate miniature-work of Basho, as in "Considering the Snail":

The snail pushes through a green

night, for the grass is heavy

with water and meets over

the bright path he makes, where rain

has darkened the earth's dark. He

moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring

as he hunts. I cannot tell

what power is at work, drenched there

with purpose, knowing nothing.

What is a snail's fury? All

I think is that it later

I parted the blades above

the tunnel and saw the thin

trail of broken white across

litter, I would never have

imagined the slow passion

to that deliberate process.

And all of it sadly culminates in the grey angers of his greatest book, The Man with Night Sweats, including what is for me one of the most true and agonized renditions of the sheer haplessness of surviving a loved one's death, here at the close of the poem "Lament":

Outdoors next day, I was dizzy from a sense

Of being ejected with some violence

From vigil in a white and distant spot

Where I was numb, into this garden plot

Too warm, too close, and not enough like pain.

I was delivered into time again.

- The variations that I live among

Where your long body too used to belong

And where the still bush is minutely active.

You never thought your body was attractive,

Though others did, and yet you trusted it

And must have loved its fickleness a bit

Since it was yours and gave you what it could,

Till near the end it let you down for good,

Its blood hospitable to those guests who

Took over by betraying it into

The greatest of its inconsistencies

This difficult, tedious, painful enterprise.

Thom Gunn was a resolute explorer. He sought out drugs to learn their gifts (of course they addicted him in the end), he sought out all conversations, always, to learn their speakers, he disdained no 'pop culture' until he'd searched it for both strengths and bankruptcies, and while it's true that his open-mindedness stopped tragically short of appreciating the Legion of Super-Heroes ("there's just too many of them!"), it had few other limits. And his talent, strong and resourceful to the end, met the catastrophe of its age with the only weapons at its disposal. And they were enough.

Super-Exposure in the Penny Press!

Readers who might once have been irritated by the sight of a topless Rob Lowe on the cover of Vanity Fair (the top item in a strong Penny Press week) will, like all right-thinking individuals in the world, instantly recall his fantastic stint as Sam Seaborn on the still-intensely-missed The West Wing and crack a grudging smile instead. Lowe, it appears, has written some kind of book about his various adventures in Hollywood. I haven't checked yet to see if it includes any wistful anecdotes about his tenure on one of the best TV shows of all time; the excerpt in this month's VF is about his much younger days, when he starred in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Outsiders" with a whole team of fellow Hollywood he-boys, all under the watchful gaze of their passionate (and self-evidently insane) director. While it's fun to watch Lowe contort himself to be nice-guy diplomatic rather than outright calling the young Tom Cruise a robotic authority-douche, neither the grossly overpraised book nor the soppy, ham-handed movie has ever interested me, so I quickly roamed away in search of greener pastures.

Luckily, this month's issue had plenty. There was a bitterly, sinus-clearingly angry shout-piece by Joseph Stiglitz about the gigantic gap between the top wealthiest 1 percent of Americans and everybody else. This is by a wide margin the angriest piece I've read in Vanity Fair in many, many years. Stiglitz rehearses the starkest inequities in America's financial landscape:

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century - inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called "marginal-productivity theory." In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years - whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative - went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards "performance bonuses" that they felt compelled to change the name to "retention bonuses" (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared to those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.

He ends up sounding a warning to the super-rich that their days might end in a public uprising of a kind not seen in America since Shays' Rebellion - the warning is the only major flaw in the piece. It forgets that sage line from "1776": Most people with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor." Comparatively few Libyans or Egyptians want to be military despots (I hope, anyway), so they have no ideological restraint in rising up against military despots. But virtually everybody in America - especially every young person - wants to be a plutocratic bastard who can buy a jet but can't quickly recall his kids' names. As long as that's true, the super-rich in the United States have nothing to fear from the common folk they're disinheriting.

After the fire and brimstone of Stiglitz, it was curiously peaceful to wade into Christopher Hitchens' piece on the debt Western society owes to the stately cadences of the King James Bible. It's a piece without surprises (we've read many similar things done on this, the anniversary of the publication of that epochal work), unless its own existence counts - these new long pieces from Hitchens can't help but be viewed as extremely literary progress reports on the state of Hitchens' illness. Encouraging progress reports, since for a while there last year it looked as if he wouldn't be doing much of this kind of work again. I hadn't realized until I saw this piece and his last one just how much I'd miss them if they were gone forever. And it's interesting that he's keeping up with his reading, although I imagine that would be the last thing to go in any case:

The rack and the rope were not stinted for dissenters, and eventually Tyndale himself was tracked down, strangled, and publicly burned. (Hilary Mantel's masterpiece historical novel, Wolf Hall, tells this exciting and gruesome store in such a way as to revise the shining image of "Saint" Thomas More, the "man for all seasons," almost out of existence. High time, in my view. The martyrdoms he inflicted on others were more cruel and irrational than the one he sought and found for himself).

Much less satisfying was James Wolcott's tired screed against superhero movies, which consists of him whining about how loud and confusing they all are, for all the world as if he were a crotchety 90-year-old who just wants the grandkids to settle down:

For all of the tremendous talent involved and the technical ingenuity deployed, superhero movies go at us like death metal: loud, anthemic, convoluted, technocratic, agonistic, fireball-blossoming, scenery-crushing workloads that waterboard the audience with digital effects, World War IV weaponry, rampant destruction, and electrical-flash editing.

This quintessential complaint of the elderly - wanting things to be different from the dictates of their own natures - is unlikely to yield a Bergman superhero movie any time soon; I'll just have to hope that instead Wolcott regains his sense of fun in time for the onslaught he's so correct in predicting.

The New York Review of Books, as always, provides a corrective to that kind of complaining. There's nothing quite as restorative as literary journalism done really, really well, and since I myself gravitate toward all things historical, The NYRB can often get my tail wagging - as in this latest issue, where the indomitable Gordon Wood reviews two books on John and Abigail Adams and Sean Wilentz reviews Edmund Morris' Colonel Roosevelt. Both pieces are thoughtful, detailed, and wonderfully assured, which is tough enough to do when reviewing a contemporary novel that any schmoe off the street might pick up and enjoy ("what's it about" will usually cover 99 % of their readerly needs) and is bloody murder to pull off when writing about history, about which the average reader neither knows nor knows to care. Reviewing works of history is doubly tricky: you've not only got to give your review-readers enough background on the book so they'll appreciate your observations about it, you've also got to give them enough background on all of human history so they'll know what the Hell you're going on about. Both Wood and Wilentz do a great job at this every time they turn out a review - it's an inspiration.

Of course, since nobody reads history it's those fiction-reviews that keep the show on the road, and they, too, very often elicit inspiring performances. Over in the London Review of Books, for instance, Adam Mars-Jones (easily the coolest reviewer-name we'll see today) out-does every other writer in the issue by turning in a fantastic piece on Philip Hensher's new novel King of the Badgers. This is a classic case of the review being every bit as interesting, fun, and well-written as the book it's reviewing, a contemporary novel about a crime that might have been committed in a benighted seaside town. Mars-Jones concentrates a chunk of his review on the novel's gay characters, a discussion he opens in the most inviting way, by highly literary rambling:

For a straight writer to have a gay hero is highly unusual ...The most famous and successful venture in homosexual ventriloquism by a novelist is still Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers. I had doubts about the book when it came out in 1980, disliking the easy equation of homosexuality with cowardliness, even though this was an equation accepted by many homosexuals of the generation of Burgess's octogenarian narrator, Kenneth Toomey. Terrence Rattigan was surprised to find during the war that he was brave in an ordinary way. Out of this realisation came his interest in such non-cowardly homosexuals as T. E. Lawrence and Alexander the Great.

Mars-Jones returns to this subject of 'writing gay' all through his long and fantastic review, including a great little bit on the imagined popular reception of the 1950s novels of Angus Wilson:

Wilson was running the risk of having his novels labelled sordid and unwholesome. Awkward breakfast-table conversations were on the cards, with the brigadier's wife saying brightly, 'Doesn't he do all those spivs and pouffs well?' and her husband muttering: 'Damn sight too well, if you ask me.' If he had put more homosexual reality into the book [Anglo-Saxon Attitudes], it would either have been rejected by publishers or else approached by reviewers with gas masks, pomanders and tongs.

And it's entirely fitting that right there in the midst of the best review in this issue of the LRB there's a big, beautiful ad for ... none other than Open Letters Monthly! Where readers will find many excellent reviews every single month! The ad was superbly designed by Greg Waldmann and features a generous quote from the always-discerning Scott Esposito ... and best of all, it's sitting right there, in the middle of another great review journal. The air of confraternity is salubrious, to say the least - and if the appearance of such an ad should move writers like Adam Mars-Jones and his most talented peers to peruse Open Letters, well, so much the better.