A
Lifetime of Reading:
Sweet Marjoram: Notes & Essays
by DeWitt Henry
by
Michael Steffen
One
of the many virtues of DeWitt Henry’s new book Sweet
Marjoram
(ISBN 978-1-941196-72-4, MadHat Press, 2018) is its liberally
associative arrangement. It allows us, like our favorite books of
lyrical poetry, once we’ve read it through and are on
to this welcoming element, to open its pages where we will and just
start reading. Skipping through a book is a good way to allow its
individual passages to surprise us, to get by or around, in some
cases, the author’s control freak editor and modesty, to get at the
book’s heart, or “meat.” In the case of Sweet
Marjoram,
one may even on a first perusal jump to the 17th essay, “On Meat,”
where our sources of fascination knock against our weaknesses and
guilt.
—la
carne,
in Spanish and carne
in Italian, echoing the Latin carn-
or
caro
(flesh), as do carnal in English (having a relation to the body as
opposed to the soul), carnival (a time of feasting and fleshly
indulgence as opposed to Lent and fasting), carnivorous and
carnivore…Among flora, the carnation is a flower as red as raw
meat, as blood.
Meathead
suggests more muscle than brains. Sexual organs are called meat…
(Antony even calls Cleopatra cold leftovers on dead Ceasar’s
trencher)... [page 94]
I’ve
left ellipses instead of A1 sauce. The line of thought cools down in
the course of the essay with sobering references to Benjamin Franklin
and his pragmatic advice, “Rarely use Venery except for Health and
Offspring; Never to Dullness, Weakness, or the Injury of your own or
another’s Peace and Reputation,” Saint Augustine’s spiritual
sense of love with allusion to another kind of “meat,” and
further discussions involving Noah, Henry’s daughter, Tolstoy, a
grad-student memoir of a friendly neighbor meat butcher, and more. In
the wake of any one of the essays, on reflection, we marvel again and
again at the variety of Henry’s sources and multiplicity of his
angles of consideration on his subjects. The logo for NPR’s
flagship news program, All
things considered,
would be a good subtitle for the book.
This
is true, and so its opposite: an uneasiness at the seeming authorial
absence, a lack of point of view, an omission of agenda, of logical
or narrative sequence. Topics are announced in the titles: “On
Weather,” “On Conscience,” “On Falling”…“On
Privilege”…“On Cursing”… Henry’s meditations encompass a
wide topical range, from the ordinary, “On Handshakes,” to the
lofty, “On Dignity,” and the ironic, “On Folly.” A source of
inspiration, it may soon dawn on the reader, lies in the 16th
Century, in the French and English essayists Michel de Montaigne
(“Of
sadness,” “Of friendship,” “Of cannibals”) and Francis
Bacon (“Of Truth,” “Of Death,”
“Of
Revenge”).
The
epigraph of the book, taken from Shakespeare, citing the origin of
the author’s title, is telling of this inspiration from the
Renaissance, an age in its writers characterized by a spirit of the
revival of classical philosophy and literature and its attitudes of
open inquiry into all subjects, its copious and liberal curiosity.
The title comes from a recognition scene in the beginning of the
denouement of King
Lear,
as blinded Gloucester’s inward senses are being restored to him,
and Lear is still simmering after the storm:
Lear:
Ha! Give the word.
Edgar:
Sweet marjoram.
Lear:
Pass. (4.6.93-95)
“Sweet
marjoram” (Marjoran
hortensis)
refers to a mint-like herb, which annotators believe was used as a
medicinal cure for madness or mental illness. The title’s useful to
its author also because it echoes the title of an earlier book, Sweet
Dreams,
a memoir of Henry’s youth and family, centered around his father
who owned and operated a candy factory.
Literature
and commonplace phrases and sayings serve as springboards for a good
deal of the texts, offering a wide range in citations from the Bible
to contemporary films, novels, essays and science, references of
expressions spanning from early English, “Fair-weathered friend,”
to our day’s greetings with fist bumps. Sven Birkerts praises the
book’s display of “the accrued benefits of a lifetime of reading,
teaching, viewing and thinking,” noting its “Shakespearian
breadth of interest subjected to a steady inquiring pressure.”
While
the choice of inclusion in the essays is arbitrary, though familiar,
these are not “personal” essays, nor so much in academic terms
thesis essays, for their lack of method and inclusion of biographical
material. Announced topics are also freely digressed from, sometimes
at ̊180 as in the essay “On Silence,” which more or less
meditates on the impossibility of silence.
Buddhist
teasers: The sound of one hand clapping. A tree falls in an empty
forest. Sunyata.
There
is no absence of sound, except for the deaf, who feel vibrations
through the floor or other surfaces of touch.
Listen
carefully, and even in scientifically designed anechoic chambers, in
the absence of most sound, you’ll hear the roar and pulse of your
own blood. (This, of course, is amplified in ultrasound exams of the
heart, which, when I heard mine from a speaker, sounded like kicking
in a bath, glug, wash, glug.
Our
industrial and technological revolutions have increased ambient
noise, especially in the cities… [page 15]
Again,
the risk run in this manner of leaping from instance to instance is
the impression it may leave the casual or unfamiliar reader that the
author is writing simply to hear the ink blot from his pen, that he’s
not getting
to the point.
Like Gertrude to Polonius, we may prove an itch to say, “More
matter, with less art.” Or do we want to ask for More art, more
structure…?
Maybe
readers of today, used to clicking here
and
jumping from partially read story to partially glimpsed ad, will be
very much at home in Henry’s paratactic discourse.
We
are given fair warning on the title page these are not just essays,
but “Notes & Essays.” Often “paragraphs” or separate
units consist simply of one sentence. Or just a fragment.
Speak
now, we say, or forever hold your peace.
Enfolding
silence, thick silence, heavy; moments filled with silence.
Dead
silence.
We
mute the familiar, annoying commercial.
Philomela,
the rape victim, tongue-less, hand-less.
Brier
Rabbit and Tarbaby.
Hold
your tongue.
Tongue-tied?…[page
16]
Passages
like these can induce a sort of reader’s vertigo. What—where in…
Yet
Henry stirs our curiosity in this difference from the bulk of writing
which is very agenda- or purpose-driven. Harkening back to an age
whose poet characterized the function of his art “to hold the
mirror up to nature,” Henry’s writing attains in manner and
example a wide scope and variety of our sources for thought. When
these are juxtaposed, hovering, side by side, often intentionally for
contrast—old/new, ordinary/exotic, common/lofty—the reward for
the effort is comparative, a glimpse of objectivity and tolerance
rather than a dedicated referential orthodoxy to justify some
argument.
This
has been one of the primary reasons for studying Michel de Montaigne
in World Literature classes, often his essay “Of cannibals,” for
its refutation that “other” people, the natives of what was then
considered “Anarctic France” (Brazil), were inferior as humans to
the seemingly infinitely more sophisticated Europeans who were at
that time just discovering this new world and its inhabitants.
I
am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato did not know of them; for it seems
to me that what we actually see in these nations surpasses not only
the pictures in which poets have idealized the golden age and all
their inventions in imagining a happy state of man, but also the
conceptions and the very desire of philosophy. They could not imagine
a naturalness so pure and simple… [“Of cannibals”].
The
essay “On Appetite” in Sweet
Marjoram
gives us the nutshell passage from Montaigne’s essay: “I am sorry
that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we should be so blind to
our own.” [page 77]
Henry,
too, is aware of other lands and other people with their customs
which differ sharply from our own. Not unlike Montaigne:
Islam
discourages handshakes between men and women, probably to ensure
chastity. In Switzerland, when an Imam’s sons recently refused to
shake their teacher’s hand—a Swiss tradition—authorities
imposed a $5,000 fine and provoked an international controversy…
[page 11]
The
discussion occurs in the essay “On Handshakes.” Ordinarily, the
contrast, even conflict, between Muslim and Western customs and
ethics would by far outweigh the simple gesture of a handshake.
Instead of getting engulfed in all of that, Henry proceeds with his
topic, to unearth a very contemporary Western oddity in the
consideration of the gesture.
In
addition to religious customs, there are also health and safety
concerns. Handshakes spread germs. No one shook on deals with the
germaphobe Howard Hughes. Supermarkets offer wipes to sanitize
shopping cart handles as a precaution against epidemics of flu or
AIDS. Dentists and doctors wear latex gloves… [page 11]
Here
we have a case where Henry’s stylistic boldness of laying instance
out after instance comes into a powerful statement, revealing virtue
in the madness of his method. In a sense, it is writing as showing
rather than telling. These things, the conservative manner of
Muslims, Howard Hughes’s mania over germs, today’s assimilation
of that mania into expected, habitual use of sanitary wipes and latex
gloves, our somewhat de-humanizing (don’t touch me!) scientific
awareness, all emerge from the discourse as evoked in our daily
experience. The author has done little more than arrange the images
and notions together under the marginal awareness of our hands and
how we use them. Terrible importance is trivialized. The simple
unassuming takes on poetic weight, even to the point of farcical
proportions. The
ant is a centaur in its dragon world,
wrote Ezra Pound. Or, more recently, The
feet of an ant make their own sound on the earth—Jane
Hirshfield.
Sometimes,
as with questions of handshakes, social attitudes shift swiftly,
within one’s lifetime. Other beckoning changes can take
generations.
Medieval
nobles were celebrated by gisants, sculpted on their coffin lids…
The knight lies at rest in full armor… On the Smith College campus,
I loved Leonard Baskin’s gisant of a factory worker in this
traditional pose, reclining on a slab, pot-bellied, care- and
work-worn, aged, but noble also in his way… [page 21]
By
disregarding temporal as well as spatial and topical parameters, the
Renaissance/Henry essay assumes the power to see History, what is
beyond our ordinary senses, reminding us of our society’s roots in
revolution. Baskin’s gisant, elevating a common worker, may be a
memorial for Democracy and its valuation of the individual, or for
Communism and its proposed elevation of the working class. There are
spoilers of both systems of government which are not included in
Baskin’s sculpture. Further in the book, in the essay “On
Privilege,” Henry will make mention of how “the redistribution of
wealth under Communism privileged bureaucrats, commissars, and
Stalin.” [page 28]
If
America’s foundations hold up ideals for our aspirations, our
history is not without its ironies.
All
men are created equal, writes the slave-owning husband and father,
Thomas Jefferson, philosopher, scientist, architect, statesman,
politician, patrician. [page 25]
As
to himself? I noted when writing about Sweet
Dreams
the paradoxical unselfishness—for a memoirist—of DeWitt’s
manner, with a diligent regard for those around him. He bears himself
with personal objectivity. It persists in Sweet
Marjoram,
with references to himself coming off as a sociological type:
Male
and white, straight, employed and able-bodied, I should mind my
manners, consider others, and reexamine my attitudes towards
“difference.” [page 27, “On Privilege”]
Quietly
siding with Harold Bloom’s notion, with respect to literature, of
the Western Cannon, Henry entertains the opposing view:
Here
is Terry Eagleton: “There is no such thing as a literary work or
tradition which is valuable in itself… ‘Value’ is a transitive
term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific
situations…” [page 27]
But
Henry also goes about quietly defending the values of a humanist body
of writing by citing and so including Toni Morrison (“A criticism
that needs to insist that literature is not only ‘universal’ but
also ‘race-free’ risks lobotomizing that literature…” [page
28]) and Albert Camus (“Those who find no rest in God or in history
are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live: in
fact, for the humiliated. [page 28])
The
tendency—altruism, evasiveness—belies Henry’s fondness for
commonplace language, and his persistent eye for his nuclear others.
From “On Appetite”:
Your
eyes are bigger than your stomach. Biting off more than you chew.
Clean your plate. I binge on wafer-thin Pringles, unable to eat just
one. It’s better to eat smaller portions more often than to stuff
yourself. Our oldest brother Jack, however, the only naturally thin
one in our family, came home for Thanksgiving from his life 2000
miles away. He did the carving. We marveled while he out-ate all of
us, three or four portions of turkey, gravy, stuffing, cranberry
sauce, and even the roasted vegetables. [page 74]
It
is one of the foodier-for-thought books I’ve come across recently.
Henry wins our regard for settling into this tradition of essay
writing, and our admiration for making the genre useful as his own to
unlock a lot of needed conversation for our times.
