Common Place No. 26

Reflections on E.M. Forster’s Commonplace Book COMMON PLACE Number 26 | SUMMER 2020

In 1940, in the Commonplace Book that E.M. Forster kept from 1925 through 1968, he writes, “My duty is plain enough: to talk this late nineteenth century stuff [civilization as being greater than ‘the ancestral wisdom of barbarians’ in a twentieth century voice, and not to be shoved out of believing in intellectual honesty and the individual.” When I read this, I thought that, transposed to today, this is my duty, too. Hence these notes.

The paintings on the cover are Elizabeth Snowden’s, photographed by her in Crete in late fall, 2018.

Reflections on E.M. Forster’s Commonplace Book

“Immediate Past is like a stuffy room, and the succeeding generation waste their time trying to tolerate it. All they can do is to go out, leaving the door open behind them.”—E.M. Forster, 1926 What I can remember of what I’ve experienced goes back to the late 1940s. As the child of expatriates, I lived for three formative years in a milieu still largely colonial, although on the cusp of changing—a world that has vanished and yet lives on in certain aspects of postcolonial life. I was my granddaughter’s age when I set out for Norway, living with my father’s family in the company of my grandfather. A year later, by train and ship, I went to Singapore. I bring this past along, an image of the mid-20th century at odds with its American version, which I lived in later.

My mid-century may have been closer to the prewar first half than it would have been growing up on the American mid-Atlantic coast. It was notably

diverse—I came away from it with a clear sense that the planet was filled with peoples whose existence and ways of life I didn’t question. God’s command to Noah had clearly been carried out. But something else stayed with me: how lives were led happily in widely varying circumstances. That they varied was obvious, but what happiness required was not much.

This may have reflected how World War II was like an extended pandemic: bringing death closer; causing deprivations that were more equally shared than usual; and even creating opportunities for those excluded—women and people of color, for example.

The memory of this, as well as the need to repair the damage the war had done, carried over, holding back the consumerism that took over later in the 1950s.

America, which suffered the least damage, boomed, influencing others and prompting competition with the Soviet Union and the inward turn of China, for which American consumerism was a contagion.

The “Immediate Past” Forster describes is more likely to be the assumptions the sum of each cohort’s assumptions about its own value in relation to others who preceded and might follow them. In some eras, it’s claimed, the long shadow of a genius stunted his successors or shunted them to unsuitable careers. I read that Schopenhauer should have written novels, but was put off from a literary career by Goethe’s preexistence. This doesn’t seem possible now. Is it that genius isn’t what it used to be, or that our world is too big and complex to encompass the idea of it?

Still, the successors of a cohort routinely rubbish the self-elected canon of its predecessors—them and the predecessors they saw an important. There’s a desire to reorder everything. This seems understandable. It sparks debate. At a suitable interval, reputations are salvaged as the dust settles, some of them. Intervals vary, though, and people can simply disappear.

Copies of Poets & Writers arrive, speaking to the crowd gathered around the already visible. The latter reflect the sheer multiplicity now of visibility, and P&W makes becoming visible seem plausible and the focus of considerable enterprise. It’s echoed by the New York Times Book Review, an arbiter of reputation when I was young and now an index of plausibility and a showcase of genres or categories, each a vehicle for the aspiring or invisible writer.

In his Commonplace Book, Forster—now 50— considers writing another novel. About what? He lists and then rules out various possibilities, asking himself what would be suitable both to him and to his readers. He notes how Lytton Strachey struggled with his final book, Elizabeth and Essex. Meanwhile, he writes what he calls his “commonplaces.” In his introduction, the editor wonders if this was really it, the content that might have appeared in fiction. It’s not an idle question. Musil delayed and delayed his long and discursive novel because, although he kept a diary, the novel was a better vehicle for working out his ideas. And this outweighed his need to finish it, it seems. (This is my impression. He may have thought he had the time, waiting for the war to end. Compare with Tomasi di Lampedusa, who only wrapped up his great novel when finally handed a real deadline.)

I always come back to Stendhal, confounding his dismissive successors with a second masterpiece. He and Tomasi di Lampedusa have in common that they wrote what they had to write, regardless.

` The need simply to set it down has precedence over any desire for visibility. The latter follows from a conviction that what you write has value beyond oneself, without worrying too much about who will value it or when. Stendhal foresaw a distant audience for which his work would resonate more than it did for his immediate successors. Tomasi di Lampedusa died not knowing if his novel would be published, and indeed it was rescued by an editor who saw its value despite its departure from current tastes.

The need simply to set it down has precedence because you bring to writing the entirety of your own experience, constantly starting where you are. The Commonplace Book Forster wrote isn’t a diary—he kept one separately. It seems clear that he intended it to be read by others, whereas his diary was private, an artifact that might be read later, but not by anyone who figured in its contents. (My diary is a mix. Like all diaries, its entries are prompted by events and their aftermaths. My Tumblr blog and this journal are closer to Forster’s handwritten epic.)

The “Immediate Past” Forster mentions is a collective past shared by a cohort with its own loves and hates. The diaries of Anthony Powell rehearse his chronic concern for his reputation, particularly in reference to Evelyn Waugh—love and hate being closely linked. Forster compares himself to Eliot, a comparison that looks odd from here, given that we see them as very different writers. We compare him now to Virginia Woolf and remember Katherine Mansfield’s comment that his novels lacked heat. But they’re still read, still filmed. He has a reputation.

(Mansfield, dead of tuberculosis in her mid-30s, wrote a masterpiece of a story “Bliss”; like Sylvia Plath or Francesca Woodman, an artist cut off, but not deliberately in her case: she had more to say.)

I don’t want to appear to put down visibility. It comes with certain territories, almost a requirement.

It should probably be placed in a separate category from the need for self-expression and rumination. It can be independent of that need or that need can be superfluous to it if the driving force is exposure pure and simple, for reasons beyond creativity. “Creative work” in general aligns with this, with people rising partly on talent and partly on being noticed, but not always or even often because their need to create is their primary motivation. That motive can still be hidden there, of course, waiting for its moment.

“When the music stopped I felt something had arrived in the room: the sense of a world that asks to be noticed rather than explained was again upon me, my restless and feeble brain was at peace for a tick or two.”—E.M. Forster, 1927.

This is the other side of visibility: to be noticed as a natural act, part of finding love and sustenance. We could leave it at that: Poets & Writers like sex tips in Cosmopolitan, style tips on Instagram; “How to.”

There’s no need to see it as oppressive, because it’s like every other thing in nature that tries to keep the game going on an individual or hive level. Gardeners meddle in this, as do others, but bees ply their trade methodically, homing in. A vast if precarious trade, I think, reading the latest issue, decked out in creative but wearing a sandwich board and making a pitch. So much is explained that strikes me an unexplainable.

Does it come down to finding a teacher? It may.

Or finding a tradition, something to hold on to while you gather your forces, find your voice or recover it.

A friend recently wrote and published a series of brilliant poems—not simply remarkable to read, but the way she put them together was novel and fitting.

This came at the end of a hiatus, with trepidation. In the beginning, the need was to work with a residue of something at the border of good and evil. In life, that border is a leitmotif, more of zone we wander in and out of, with its patches of goodness and tarpits or smooth patches of quicksand. Wander out of if we’re lucky, and sometimes mired or coated with it, whatever the hell it was, having to take the time to loosen its hold or find our own skin again.

Part of the need to write is to explain the world we noticed, that made us notice it, sometimes by our lips and genitals, and we made it notice us, hence a hesitation about the narrative, about ourselves in it.

We are never entirely convinced, and one way we recognize monsters among us is by their conviction.

We waver, because we know the breadth of motives we bring to these occasions, how desire undoes us, how we never really learn and yet grow slowly wiser.

“The social fabric, personal relationships, and our place in the universe … are the three subjects for serious literature.”—Dante, circa 1309, quoted by E.M. Forster in 1930.

Earlier today, a throng of mostly African-American high-school students marched uphill, passing near me. I heard them but had no idea what it was. It sounded like a party or a sports event. Where could it be happening, I wondered, walking from the barn to the house. They were protesting the segregation of the Berkeley hills, which were downzoned in the 1970s or early 1980s to prevent the proliferation of apartment buildings that occurred in residential areas of the city south of the U.C. Berkeley campus.

Busing was how the city dealt with segregation, bringing students from the south and west districts to schools in better-heeled districts like this one. As the older residents die off, they are turning over. The newcomers are more diverse, but probably no less wealthy. Inequality is backed in to this region. They are barking up the wrong tree, although it’s the tree closest to them. In their favor, they didn’t come to trash it, but to demand action on our parts.

The first thing I read this afternoon was E.M. Forster’s 1941 Rede Lecture on Virginia Woolf. He says that she being of the upper middle-class defined who she was and what she wrote, unapologetically.

She could relate to others as individuals, but made no effort to cater to them except as “crowds.” She saw writing as activism, sometimes polemically so, but also by challenging preconceptions about outsiders, whether lesbian or shell-shocked.

Forster categorizes her as a poet and says that her best novels open out from poetry, finding it hard to sketch characters well and yet capable of making them come memorably alive. Her characters don’t live on, as some novelists accomplish—he cites Jane Austen’s Emma as an example. But they pervade the senses. To me, they’re like films, unfolding visually.

In Mrs. Dalloway, London is the universe that Dante speaks of, but within it are the social fabric and the personal relationships. The result is both ethereal and pyrotechnic, a book that always seems on the verge of disintegrating, held together by a fabric that’s gossamer and relationships that are tenuous, yet both cohere, the universe exerting a gravity that’s aided perhaps by elective affinities.

My great-grandfather on my father’s side pulled his family into the upper middle-class; his son was a product of that milieu, but moved to America. His granddaughter married into a family of industrial entrepreneurs. German and well-to-do, while his grandson married a Scotch-Irish engineer. This is my lineage. My father lives in Oslo as a kid, meeting his father’s family, so they stayed in the picture. My parents expected us to have a university education and a profession. They valued writing and culture.

They were middle class when I was young—I believe that’s how they defined themselves. I would call my father a member of the professional class, although less highfalutin than Sir Leslie Stephen. (Woolf was a Lady, Forster notes. My great-grandfather was also knighted by the Danes, I understand, but my father’s father was a younger son. These distinctions mean less here than they did in Europe, but his daughter told me that he was considered courtly. He studied in Berlin, not just in Oslo, and then worked in New York City before settling there, so cosmopolitan.)

I recognize that while I become attached to a place, I live in it as if I’m still something of a visitor.

This is comical, of course—I’ve lived in Berkeley for almost 50 years—but I’ve never really felt truly local and the things that stir up the locals don’t stir me up.

This attitude scales up. I am as concerned as anyone else with a brain about our deplorable government, but my activism against it is mostly through writing.

The delusions that put it in power don’t surprise me.

Every locality has some version of what we have here.

Those who identify with it are driven mad by it. This is what it means to be local, this mad urge to scratch the itches that local creates, the sheer irritation.

With it comes the urge to disrupt, overthrow, and wreck obvious signs of what exists that reads as exclusion to those who have it. or tiresome, old, an obstacle to commerce—any number of reasons. I’ve seen a lot of wreckage. The results are appalling if you compare most of them to what they supplanted, but you have to have lived through them to see this.

Appalling to whom? That’s the salient question.

To me. Appalling to me. I’ll be dead soon enough, but I saw it and knew it. Trying to keep some of it is what concerns me—a belief that what I saw and knew had value and is worth preserving, not in a museum sense, but as qualities that find renewed expression as social fabric, personal relationships, a universe.

“Today 29-9-34 in the garden, rockery side, looking up to the house where Bone was working, sky bluish, light gentle, I looked without theories or selfconsciousness. This happens very seldom, though I can prolong the delight if I prevent my engines from restarting.”—E.M. Forster The back garden accompanies my writing whenever it isn’t too cold or too hot to work in the barn that looks out onto it. The sun moves seasonally around, so I sometimes begin upstairs and then come down.

There’s usually a point of emptiness that can be a prelude to a nap or the beginning of something new.

Reading especially, which I often do in the barn, is a source of ideas, but there’s an awareness of the rest, particularly when something within it moves. Today, among other things, there were the white butterflies and the neighbor’s substantial cat, which wandered in, looked around, and left in a slow, deliberate way.

Behind the barn, a neighbor to the west has commissioned an elaborate retaining wall cum fence,

part of a complicated scheme that includes a hot tub and meditation area. Her project, which takes form day by day, prompts me to consider how this part of the back garden might be developed. Currently, it’s more or less a dumping ground, but it could be a contained sort of place, elongated and hidden away.

When I’m there now, I ask myself how it could be.

What I picture is a terrace with a bench or a table and chairs, or both, and beds of plants, perhaps a series of trellises set out from the neighbor’s fence, so there’s still access behind them if need be, as this strip could otherwise become unkempt. I’m not sure about this, and should make some sketches of what I have in mind. It would be nice if the barn opened out on both sides, but this is impractical in relation to all the bookshelves—not enough for all the books. So, I’ll have to content myself with looking out on it and walking around the barn to enjoy it. The barn has a small deck to the east, but I never sit on it. I could remedy this. Give gardens rooms, I read, but here the setting is the room. (See the back cover.)

“A good prose style doesn’t hurry to make its point straight away and it’s difficult to say where it does make its point.”—E.M. Forster, 1934 or so.

“From 51 to 53 I have been happy, and would like to remind others that their turns can come too. It is the only message worth giving.”—E.M. Forster, 1932.

In his introduction to Forster’s Commonplace Book, Philip Gardner says in effect that Forster wrote to find out what he thought. Forster himself remarks that he’s not much good at thinking per se—he gives an example of setting himself that task while waiting for a train, with no success. The emptiness I cited previously in an instance of this and also relates to Forster’s remark, quoted previously, about not starting his engines. We share these traits. I make no claim to a good prose style, but I’m never in a hurry to make my point because I’m rarely sure what it is.

A while ago, I went back through old papers, discovering an early draft of an essay and comments on it from someone with whom I was attached, but not at that time. Attachment figures in the draft, but less so than I feared at the time. The draft also stood on its own, although the comments led me to rewrite it completely. Both versions, I thought, have their validity and so perhaps I should revive the first one.

Forster too finds fragments of himself here and there—things written on scraps, for example, in the manner of Emily Dickinson. He also remembers things he said in dreams, apparently on waking. I only remember things said to me, usually in a declarative way. “Give up your European self!” said in a dream by W.H. Auden, is an example of mine. I never have understood this, but I did consider living in Europe and then stayed in Berkeley. I may in fact have given up my European self at last, but this is to be seen. Many of my travels result from something that occasions them rather than something intended.

Giving something up is always provisional. It is a statement you make to yourself that can and will be reversed if the situation is too compelling. But the threshold rises with experience—never so high that you can’t imagine some possible exception, but it is hard to picture, whereas earlier it had a clearer form.

A garden is a good metaphor for me as a writer, indeed as a human—a biodynamic process, as Steiner might term it, that is attentive to conditions, loosely planned, slow and appreciative of small things, the way a garden unfolds and folds back into itself. Not always slow, but then slow because appreciation is. A garden is like a cosmos in that it’s always becoming.

I was 54 when I plunged in a second time, trying to cure my unhappiness without making it worse. I was happy and then I wasn’t, but happiness wasn’t really the point. Another explained it as recovering from wounds received. I felt I was pursuing an intuition that events seemed to confirm. I can’t recommend it.

But the nature of this caution is like being given directions that bring you to a destination by a route that afforded every kind of unrepeatable experience.

If you ran into the one who gave you the directions at some later point, what would you say? I think you’d have to be grateful for them, despite everything. I suppose this could read as fatalism or a denial of agency and responsibility, but life unfolds around our intentions, revealing their idealism and folly. If later you hold back from plunging again, it’s owing to these revelations. You know too much. On some level, the knowing also shifts, imagined with less need to be proven in the flesh, to risk the damage that comes with knowing, the Angel with its sword.

It chases you hither and yon, but you know and remember. Unrepeatable, and at a certain point you have no more need to live in that outland, or so you tell yourself. It’s when you give it up that it comes out to find you and drag you back, or so it seems.

I could write, “At 73, I am happy.” Inexplicably given the pandemic and I could of course be dead, but I’m not, as yet, and the apparent constriction of life proves the “I could be bounded in a nutshell” theory, my dreams being only occasionally bad. And this happiness is in contrast to prevailing misery, if the papers are to be believed, although it has been misery by proxy, a transmitted misery, real enough.

When Forster described his happiness, he was also aware of the festering world around him. It’s never unalloyed, never not an irony that you happen to be at this fraught moment, yet you are, unavoidably.

So too unhappiness comes wantonly ignoring every good thing around it. Forster notes how pain comes in and ruins the party. Being human, we’re stalked by our predators, from our own bad habits to every kind of untoward ailment or contagion that has us constantly in mind, if it had a mind—with a view of devouring us in its own sweet, inevitable time.

“Dryden has no personal standpoint, nor yet is detached: a series of attachments is all he provides. If he regrets anything he has said he apologizes in a rapid manly way and passes on. Good smoking room style.”—E.M. Forster, 1930 The photo above is by Amy Sylvester Katoh, who owns the Tokyo arts-and-crafts store Blue & White and has written books on the arts and crafts of Japan.

I met her in November 2018, a friend of friends.

What it shows is an old house being carted away after being taken down to make way for “progress.”

I went during that trip to two districts of Tokyo, one managing to hang on to its older housing and the other succumbing to redevelopment. In Tokyo, this means that small sites are assembled and a tower is built. The district becomes a forest of them, amid remaining older buildings and remnants of early redevelopment—mostly office building of lesser quality. The newest ones are beautifully detailed, but generic in the sense that you can’t tell one from the other. Early in the last decade, a wonderful housing complex in prewar Bauhaus style was taken down and replaced with a Tadao Ando retail center. At a

conference in Manhattan in 2005, a Tokyo historian spoke and I asked him why the complex was allowed to be plowed under. He hemmed and hawed. I think saving it was never seen as feasible. The developer kept a remnant of it, the kind of gesture we used to see in San Francisco—a piece of the older building left as a gesture without any real meaning.

An analogy could be made between the way we treat the past in cities and our exit strategies from human relationships—parents, children, loved ones.

We treat them affectionately until life loosens our attachment. When push comes to shove, as they say, we are notoriously prone to choosing expedience. If possible, we make ourselves scarce when the truck comes to haul off the wreckage. If only. Sometimes we are the wreckage or in the midst of it. If we make it to shore, we note that survival in possible. Perhaps that old house will reassemble itself somewhere else.

Life could be viewed as a series of attachments that we pass through, some celebrated by rituals and others viewed with nostalgia or regret, depending. If life in transient, as the Buddhists advertise, then our attachments are delusive, our comings and goings so much froth on the glittering sea we’re crossing. The house, the Bauhaus apartments, the relationships are sure to go anyway, whatever we might do to preserve them, so why bother beyond a certain point? Better to face the facts and convenient that the trucks idle is within earshot in the alley. “Don’t give it a second thought”: Harold Ross in best smoking-room style.

It’s odd how life ends up as a collection of ruins, a dumping ground of memories tinged with regret. If delusive, they remain an Inquisition-worthy auto-dafé worthy, except no one brought matches. We’d burn with it if we could, we tell ourselves, but this is too dramatic. Even on the receiving end, neither balconies nor trains were sufficiently inviting. No, we soldier on, regretting and regretting, praying for some new attachment to help us forget the last one.

Cities too lurch on, another cohort wondering why that absurd thing is attached to this other thing, and why one district looks bafflingly like six others.

But the cohort is local, for the most part, with its own concerns for which much of what surround it is mere backdrop. Memorable can be anything. Often, it’s a song that, heard at some later point, has the flavor of some excitement that defined an era or an afternoon.

We can briefly sense what comes along with it. Then it’s gone again or we replay it to wear off the effect.

“And what do I believe? That sainthood is ineffective against diabolism but that diabolism will lead to exhaustion, and a tired harmless generation will arise and begin to look around them. Date? 1980 at the earliest.”—E.M. Forster, 1941.

My sister and I were babies in the 1940s. Our father was away in between our births, fighting the Nazis.

No saint, but he was effective against these devils. I don’t think our cohort, loosely speaking, was tired.

We had our parents as examples, a generation that was quite comfortable running the planet. When I came of age, I never doubted I would run the planet, too, in some fashion. This seemed like the luck of survivors: the shared agonies and camaraderie of the war made those who fought it more liberal, I think, than others of their generation. Those others set about undoing what fighting the war had done for women and African-Americans—given them a real place in the economy, and showing clearly how they could contribute to it as much and as well as anyone.

This was forgotten after the war ended, and only revisited later when those re-excluded had finally had enough. Now that’s repeating as the appalling racism and regressive policies of Trump and his enablers oppress women, African-Americans, and others who don’t fit their fiction of America as a white enclave.

Revising internal narratives is a lifelong affair. I think empathy is particularly useful in doing so, as a lot of the resistance that arises comes from looking at the challenge to an earlier narrative in its terms.

Seeing present conditions through another’s eyes clarifies why that narrative can’t adhere any longer. If the transition carries risks, then the challenge is to deal with them without derailing necessary changes.

It’s sometimes the case that relieving one injustice creates another, but more as a side-effect than the systemic failure the first injustice reflects.

Revising is a personal decision. It’s portrayed as something forced on people by angry ideologues, but it’s really a version of Lord Keynes’s “When the facts change” comment. You see the other’s point. It may take some dialogue to get there, and those who take the time to have one have my lasting gratitude.

On some societal issues, my hope is to raise all boats. This was the ethos I was raised on. Ideas like the Green New Deal speak to it, as the New Deal spoke to my parents. If there are systemic issues, it said and says again, then let’s change the system.

“After Tobruk Sebastopol and the search for something small enough to do, such as the arranging of a vase of flowers.”—E.M. Forster, 1942.

It’s July 8, 2020. My granddaughter Sarah Gray is a month old. The election that may sweep Trump out of office is less than four months away. The sweep, if it occurs, is some two months later. Half a year, that is, until we are possibly relieved of this autocrat, his minions, and their enablers. If we’re lucky, Congress will be lost to the Republicans, aiding the rebuilding.

Writing this, I’m aware that every day sees a new effort to force through some baleful measure. They are checked in the courts, some of them. The latest, which would expel foreign students attending classes online, has been challenged by several universities, including the University of California. Meanwhile, China clamps down on Hong Kong, ripping up its 1997 agreement, and makes noises about Taiwan. My sense is that Hong Kong is lost, as was foreseen. The action reveals a CCP that feels beholden to no one.

I find this depressing—much more so than the recurrence of Covid-19 and the need to be cautious, to live the truncated life it demands of older people.

A free city like Hong Kong snuffed out is a tragedy.

But we too have brushed up against the same wanton disregard, only checked because our democracy is older, our defenses from autocracy better grounded.

Or so we hope. When the opposing candidate asks openly if the incumbent will try to keep power by force, one has reason to be concerned. It has too many echoes of other autocrats who slid into power and then remained there, unmoving and unbending.

The garden these days resembles a painting by Bonnard, especially in the early evening when the western sun slants across parts of it, setting up a shifting contrast of light and dusk. The bees and white butterflies are the leitmotif, but all of it is in motion. The gardeners gave us bouquets of roses and lavender, but it’s the garden itself that’s the real source of pleasure, the “something small enough” that is a refuge from the looming, all-too-large rest.

“Floating above the depths of myself and unable to sink into them. All the opinions I can arrive at, arrived at. Sense of my own smallness, and I must preserve it or lose touch with reality. Sense of my own greatness and I must preserve it or cease to act. … Wisdom, when acquired, proves incommunicable and useless and goes with our learning into the grave. The edges of it occasionally impinge on people, though and strike a little awe into them.”

—E.M. Forster, 1943 Much that I do is done from necessity. Lately, inner necessity has replaced outer necessity in relation to writing and editing, which I formerly did for a living.

When I look at it, inner necessity has three aspects.

The first is to write as a form of practice—what I do and have always done, much as an artist paints or a musician plays purely for herself, to exercise a skill.

The second is address an imagined audience, to be known to it, now and in the future. Faith is required.

The third is to make sense of my thoughts, to bring them out so I can look at them and share them with others. Beyond an imagined audience, there are small circles of friends and collaborators, prepared to read and comment, and even to coauthor. I now have the title “visiting scholar,” and a friend sharply reminded me last winter of the obligations it carries.

I’m not an academic and the conventions of writing for other academics don’t come naturally, but I was mortified to be accused of using her work without proper attribution when I wrote in reality in tribute, so moved I was by an account she wrote of her ties to the village she’s studied. So, I’m now more careful.

When I look back at my career, there are a few instances of endurance amid an ocean of ephemera.

Marketing is really about enabling an enterprise to roll on—ideally, to break into new things and grow.

Communication has the same basic goal, but within it, I created two broad vehicles for communicating that have persisted, even as they’ve changed form. I also founded a quarterly that miraculously found a renewed existence as an online archive, just as it was on the cusp of being erased from collective memory.

I helped perpetuate my family, but my wife has done the lion’s share of anchoring it in prosperity. Family matters to both of us—children and their children, those hostages to Fortune, as others have noted. I’m not ashamed to say that I pray for their safety nightly.

“God willing” is my favored hedge against hubris.

I often say to other writers—indeed, to anyone who takes up her own creative work, whatever it is— that it will inevitably reflect who they are, and the more specifically it does so, the more likely it is to be interesting. In an interview I read, Robert Duncan says he borrowed a lot from other poets as a way of making progress in his own work—their influence flowed through him. Reading The Japan and India Journals, 1960–1964 of Joanne Kyger, I was struck by the way her writing arises from everyday life closely observed—not in isolation from influence, but never imitating it, with a sharp eye for self-delusion. She’s much more obviously enlightened than her husband!

Small and great could be glossed as the self and Self, the one unfolding with life, the other wanting to be visible in it—immediate resonance as a proof of existence. Between them is this inner necessity that I see in Kyger—the need to discover what she’s about, and how that is probably life’s only reliable passion.

Forster’s Commonplace Book is described by its editor, Philip Gardner, as equivalent to a last novel.

Kyger’s Journals have a comparable stature to me.

Viewed at close range, the Great Men of her era— Gary Snyder and Allan Ginsberg in particular—are there with all their foibles, stripped of the gravitas they later acquired. Their spiritual pretensions are seen through. (In one memorable scene, Ginsberg lectures the Dalai Lama on spirituality; Snyder’s blindness to her emotional life is also recorded.)

Diaries, journals, novels, short stories, and poems are different forms of writing. The first two are the most obviously inner-directed, although in Forster’s case he appeared to anticipate readers for the Commonplace Book, left as a public document.

The others are audience-optional. Forster wrote Maurice “for the drawer,” although it appeared after his death and was made into a film. It may be better to say that the others are audience-intentional. For a writer who’s been published, publishers or agents appear to push for more. (Even Forster’s friend Bob Buckingham pushes for “one more novel,” but this from a desire to see Forster creatively engaged.) I don’t think the desire to be published or to reach an audience is the reason writers write, the comment about “only blockheads” notwithstanding. Writers write because a sense of their greatness outweighs their reservations. The Commonplace Book was Forster’s halfway house between great and small.

A poem … likes to remember, … takes pleasure in resemblances and echoes. … Now and always, many big things, chaos, intelligence, sentiment, seek to smother the little poem and prevent it from playing with its memories.—Charles Marron, Forster’s French translator, in a letter to him, 11 June 1929.

I received the photo above from Sallyann Wright, the wife of my second son. This is their back garden on Terry Street in Dudley, a big town in the orbit of Birmingham. Their house is from the 1840s. It was a council house, and she bought it from the state when she was 25, I think. When I saw the photo, I noted what might be called a family resemblance between our two back gardens. This centers on their both having a place to sit, an abundance of plants, and a painterly quality. Our back garden reminds me of Bonnard; theirs of 19th-century European paintings that sought a likeness of what the artist actually saw.

Our back garden is a source of some poems in which its flora, fauna, and atmosphere figure. Sitting in or looking out at it, I’m often aware of life moving in and through it, from the motion of the air to the way lavender stems bend when bees land on them. A variety of birdsongs are audible across the day, with a pattern of their arriving and departing. Butterflies flit in twos and threes, playing between their beelike errands. A jay thumps down, stakes out a neighbor’s tree in search of insects. These small poems make no claims, but then very few poems I write do so. What I say was written from nature has humans and their thoughts, because we’re just another species with a comparable variety. In some seasons we’re decked out and then intentionally naked; in others, we’re all purpose, serious, and annoyed to be disturbed. All this is grist for memory, resemblances manifest year after year, harvests gathered, sorted, pressed, and aged, waiting to be uncorked and written out.

“The real defense: that art is important in itself, even if it does no good.”—E.M. Forster, 1945 Forster was commenting on Shelley and proposing his own defense of poetry. The entry follows efforts in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to enlist the arts in general for political and didactic purposes, but of course with vast imperialist and religious precedent. (Keep in mind that many of the Odes of Horace were written to glorify his imperial patrons.)

The phrase “art for art’s sake” is condemned as superseded especially by the political use of art—art as agitprop, for example, multiple examples of which are visible now. Their tendency to repeat as memes is striking. Poets can jump on this bandwagon, as the pages of Poetry, which I receive monthly, show. But poets like Yeats and Yevtushenko did it, too. Events cry out to be noticed and poets aren’t immune. But political poems like “Easter Sunday” are captive to their moment. (I would except Yevtushenko’s Bratz Dam, an epic political poem, because it captures a giant work of infrastructure in an everywoman given a memorable story and a memorable voice to tell it.)

Art is important in itself, as Forster asserts. Art gives license to a poet to stake out the ground of her art a word, a line, a stanza, or a poem at a time, to be free to disregard whoever came before or to immerse themselves in an earlier art in order to rethink it—for example. Criticism is an imposition where poems are concerned, reflecting the critic’s biases. Editors may be more helpful, but only as helpful as close readers.

The one who really matters is the poet herself. She makes her way, finds her reasons and voices. (Follow Pessoa’s lead if voices want expression.)

I was inspired by a painter friend who told me he simply paints and then takes stock. Another painter calls these small, preliminary pieces “studies.” I have several, as beloved as her larger work. They’re not tossed off, although art is a form of play. If it isn’t, then what really is the point? May as well sell out.

I generally prefer prose to poetry. I like Forster because his everyday prose is written with such flare, as if a poem is struggling to emerge. My own poems are closer to prose than most poems that I’ve read.

An editor described them as “sentences piles up.” A sister-in-law asked if they scan. A critic said they felt constricted, but that’s not always true. I take none of this to heart. To me, they are poems beyond a doubt.

“I am asked to give up my advantages so others may have things I don’t want; to help build a world I should find uninhabitable.”—E.M. Forster, 1945 His subject is Cambridge, the English university city where he’d studied. He found refuge there after his family’s house was taken back by its owner following the death of his mother. It too was under siege, but Forster’s sense of the future as an onslaught goes way back. He wrote, “Shelley and the Liberals

assumed that, once the chains had fallen, art, scenery, passionate personal love, would become popular.” Instead, he implies, we will get the industrial wasteland of Antonioni’s Red Desert, home to stylish, alienated humanity. In reality, not even that Dystopia survived. The earth is imperiled, but art is debased, scenery exploited or mass-consumed, and love—well, it alone may have survived in all its permutations, only to encounter Covid-19 and its distancing.

(Like AIDS before it, but faster to manifest.)

It was my business to know the trends. As an enneagram seven, scenarios for the future came to me quite naturally, but increasingly I disliked what I foresaw. In my imagination, the one who inhabits tomorrow is still fully human, but what this means is particular to me. We spend life in partial adaptation to circumstances, as Forster coped with losing a family house and grounds, the latter shaped by him directly over 25 years.

Our relationship with the unfolding present is supported or undermined by its continuity. If the Buddhists argue that this is an illusion, it’s a powerful one, reinforced by seasonal rather than precipitous or even cataclysmic changes. The latter are most likely to occur when the cohort that valued continuity loses life and influence.

Its waning powers are drained still further by the insults it suffers from a younger one with new ideas. Yet the old are old enough to have heard the regrets of their elders: “What have we done to old Singapore?” Lee Kuan Yew asked aloud, having drastically rearranged it. “Did we go too far?” Destruction is hard to reverse. A recreated or fossilized past is inevitably a stage set.

“The night is again dark, unbothered by stars or thoughts of light years. The earth and all that lives and has lived on it is enclosed in a capsule of clouds.

Man, excellent man, unpuny man, sees a few yards around himself and tries to think.”

—E.M. Forster, 1961.

The pandemic has been the all-purpose backdrop to my writing this. While foreshortening my daily life, it has opened it up in time and drawn me to media that compensate for people’s physical absence. I found that much of the everyday that fell away I didn’t miss.

In its place is the intimacy of one-to-one talks in which my upstairs writing desk joins that of another.

Or our rooms become attached, a friend in situ, as I am to her. And these rooms are particular to us. One friend is likely to head off into the world, but the very portability of our conversations makes the distance less daunting. Indeed, we bridged it with letters in the past. That will continue, but our writing places will continue to touch, even as their orbits widen.

My friend came by and gave me a brushwork she made that I placed next to her calligraphy in the shed where I also write. The barn, as I call it, is filled with light, so I don’t have much art in it, but these pieces will resist it. I used drafting tape to put them up, in honor of their handed-over-ness. The barn is sort of an archive of meaningful things, from my own diaries to letters and gestures from close friends. There are folders of old poems, a disorderly but packed library, and other prompts. The overall effect is ruminative. I do more writing upstairs, although this varies.

My friend and I use the digital media at hand, yet it seems to me that how we interact still comes down to notes, letters, and conversations. The first are of course dashed off, but the letters and conversations are orchestrated in a way to assure their informality.

Slow, a term invoked by Italians tired of the trials of contemporary life and picked up here by others who wanted to recover pleasure from its relentless push, is applicable to a discourse which is never rushed yet brings us to unexpected places.

Common Place No. 26 | Š 2020 by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com