Properly, we shd. read for power. Man reading shd. be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one’s hand (55).1
Reading Pound’s Guide to Kulcher, I was perplexed; partially because it is an odd book, aimed at those who don’t mind attending the university of the brain of Ezra Pound (which is a strange place, of many prejudices). Mostly, though, I just wasn’t (and ain’t) sure what to make of it, how to reconcile those parts I can (reservedly) agree with and those which strike me as outcroppings of the fashion of the times or mere idiosyncrasies.2 It jumps here and there, following a logic which I don’t quite see (and am too lazy to look for),3 and digresses on subjects with a force not quite necessary to the task of guide – as though Virgil cracked wise at every opportunity, and made opportunities to do so where none were before.
When I can agree with him, though, I find that generally agree pretty whole-heartedly. Some notes:
I suspect that the error in educational systems has been the cutting off of learning from appetite […] Real knowledge goes into natural man in titbits. A scrap here, a scrap there; always pertinent, linked to safety, nutrition or pleasure (98f).
Then there is education as apart from learning. By learning I assume in some measure that he means learning how to think about things, rather than being educated into a brittle edifice of apparent understanding. It’s impossible to force-feed knowledge; one gets prescient indigestion.
About thirty years ago, seated on one of the very hard, very slippery, thoroughly uncomfortable chairs of the British Museum main reading room, with a pile of large books at my right hand and a pile of somewhat smaller ones at my left hand, I lifted my eyes to the tiers of volumes and false doors covered with imitation bookbacks which surround that focus of learning. Calculating the eye-strain and the number of pages per day that a man could read, with deduction for say at least 5% of one man’s time for reflection, I decided against it. There must be some other way for a human being to make use of that vast cultural heritage (53f.).
Also how ideas of things become mixed up with the things themselves. There is the vast cultural heritage as an idea and then there is the representation of it, locked behind imitation bookbacks. There is the thing that is and the thing that seems and, though it seems that one can grasp it by a diligence of buttocks, that is the idea of an ass.
If the affable reader (or a delegate to an international economic conference from the U.S. of A.) cannot distinguish between his armchair and a bailiff’s order, permitting the bailiff to sequester that armchair, life will offer him two alternatives: to be exploited or to be the more or less pampered pimp of exploiters until it becomes his turn to be bled. ¶ The bailiff’s order may be openly such, or it may be a bailiff’s order heavily camouflaged, but homo not completely sap-head will smell, divine or see clearly the difference between his roof and a mortgage (244).
***
The supreme evil committable by a critic is to turn men away from the bright and the living. The ignominious failure of ANY critic (however low) is to fail to find something to arouse the appetite of his audience, to read, to see, to experience (161).
Death overtook him just as he was working his way to a lucrative discovery after spending several years at scientific research. He was trying to find a cure for all kinds of gout. Gout is a rich man’s disease, and rich men will pay any price to recover their health once lost. And so, among all the problems which had given him subject for meditation, he had singled out this one for resolution.
– Honoré de Balzac
Lost Illusions (Penguin, 20f.)
Balzac’s novel focuses on a young poet losing his way in the tinseled Parisian publishing world, the quotation above, about the poet’s father, drew my notice. Admittedly it does appear early in the book, before I’ve settled – when my attention is still at its sharpest. It reminded me of this passage in a book published almost thirty years later:
Lydgate’s hair never became white. He died when he was only fifty, leaving his wife and children provided for by a heavy insurance on his life. He had gained an excellent practice, alternating, according to the season, between London and a Continental bathing-place; having wrritten a treatise on Gout, a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side.* His skill was relied on by many paying patients, but he always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do.
– Middlemarch, (OUP, 920)
Gout is the point of failure for both men; Monsieur Chardon fails to enrich his family because he dies before registering his cure in Paris. Tertius Lydgate, meanwhile, fails in his humanitarian mission to provide medical treatment for the poor of Middlemarch. Although Lydgate succeeds as Chardon would have liked, but his interests are no longer individual – his success is a greater failure. I cannot think of any other literary examples of doctors succumbing to the temptation of gout, so I can’t tell whether the difference between Chardon and Lydgate is a matter of national temperment, of genre (between society and social novels)†, or entirely of character. Perhaps I should consult a book such as Gout: The Patrician Malady‡ or some other texts on the subject, but at present I think I’d rather let the matter rest in the mire of suggestive speculation.
* See, e.g. Bleak House (Penguin, 271):
Sir Leicester receives the gout as a troublesome demon, but still a demon of the patrician order. All the Dedlocks, in the direct male line, through a course of time during, and beyond which the memory of man goeth not to the contrary, have had the gout. It can be proved, sir. Other men’s fathers may have died of the rheumatism, or may have taken base contagion from the tainted blood of the sick vulgar; but, the Dedlock family have communicated something exclusive, even to the levelling process of dying, by dying of their own family gout. It has come down, through the illustrious line, like the plate, or the pictures, or the place in Lincolnshire. It is among their dignities. Sir Leicester is, perhaps, not wholly without an impression, though he has never resolved it into words, that the angel of death in the discharge of his necessary duties may observe to the shades of the aristocracy, ‘My lords, and gentlemen, I have the honour to present to you another Dedlock certified to have arrived per the family gout.’
Less literary documents should probably have been appended here, but my interest in gout does not extend so far.
† Not that I dismiss Balzac as a ‘mere’ society novelist, but his intention seems documentary rather than didactic.
‡ Another review appeared in that gouty rag the NY Times.
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ego hoc feci mm–mmx
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