Virginia Woolf on T. S. Eliot by Robert Crawford

 

Both in America, where he had been born in 1888, and in England, where he lived from his twenty-sixth year, many people found it hard to get to know this poet on familiar terms. Even if they did so, some were unsure what to call him. ‘Will he become “Tom”?’ Virginia Woolf had wondered in 1923, after she had known him for well over two years. By the time The Waste Land appeared in 1922, Thomas Stearns Eliot, the young, London-based, St. Louis-born, Harvard-schooled poet who had seemed so formal and reserved, was certainly ‘Tom’ to her, and in the following year she typeset his remarkable poem for  its earliest British publication as a book.

The Waste Land speaks of ruin, broken-ness, pain and wastage, but, substantially thanks to Ezra Pound’s editorial guidance, it possessed form and order, repeatedly and tellingly aligning past and present.  Overworked and exhausted, order was what Tom sought. It was what his bank work demanded, as he attempted to identify patterns in Europe’s financial turbulence. He worked – officially for  forty-four hours a week- at Lloyds, Head Office Employee number 239- in a small financial intelligence unit, investigating and monitoring settlement of Great War enemy debts in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles, a task required reading ten or fifteen papers a day, writing, printing, publishing and supervising a staff of three or four women. Often he came in early and worked late.
 
An essay he worked on for considerable time before publishing it in 1923 argued that the sort of ‘mythical method, exemplified by Joyce’s Ulysses (‘the most important expression which the present age has found’) offered ‘ways of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’; The Waste Land attempted this too. For Tom, faced with potential ruin of all sorts (‘He is like a person about to break down,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in February), this search for order was paramount.

His sphinx-like smile, like his  wearying sense of having to ‘live in a mask all one’s life’, helped him conceal intimate worries:to compound the economic and social stresses of the post-war situation, the uncertainties of ‘the profession of the poet’, Tom married ‘wrong’; a woman –Vivien- with many physical and mental problems and his religious scruples disallowed divorce. 

 

‘I am worn out, I cannot go on, he told his virulently anti-Semitic supporter John Quinn, adding splenetically with regard to  The Waste Land’s publisher Liveright, ‘I am sick of doing business with Jew publishers who will not carry out their part of the contract unless they are forced to.’ Drawing  on his parents’ anti-Semitism and falling in line with Quinn’s complaints about ‘Swarms of horrible-looking Jews’, he wished he ‘could find a decent Christian publisher in New York.’ Displays of despair, anger, and prejudice at this time were symptomatic of his being, as Virginia Woolf put it on 13 March, ‘on the verge of collapse’. He seemed to her ‘broken down’ when she and others plotted to have him installed as literary editor of the Nation; thanking her ‘on the telephone’ ( a means of communication he disliked), he ‘couldn’t speak for tears.’

Tom was exasperating, Woolf complained: he ‘let drop by drop of his agonized perplexities  fall ever so finely through pure cambric.’ Dealing with him was ‘dreary work’. She wished ‘poor dear Tom had more spunk in him. He did show a flash of anger that march  when Ben Hecht, a Chicago journalist with a Jewish surname, wrote of  The Waste Land as ‘a hoax on the American public’; its poet was a man  who ‘hates Americans.’ Tom the admirer of boxing denounced Hecht as a ‘liar’, mentioned ‘legal action, and implied he would like to take ‘physical action.’

Eliot found his imaginative freedom pressured by other demands. He joshed about this with Virginia Woolf, but in 1934 she and Leonard  also had a much more serious conversation with him when 'suddenly T. spoke with a genuine cry of feeling. About immortality: what it meant to him - I think it was that : anyhow he revealed his passion, as he seldom does. A religious soul: an unhappy man, a lonely sensitive man, all wrapt up in fibers of self torture, doubt, conceit, desire for warmth & intimacy. And I'm very fond of him - like him in some of my reserves & subterfuges." Even though Woolf found his religion hard to take, she understood him with a perspicuity few could match.

A stinging letter from his brother Henry detected a determination in Tom to appear unsullied by everyday life: 'Sometimes you remind me of a gentleman in full evening dress and white gloves attempting to put something right with the kitchen plumbing without soiling his attire. Repeatedly people canvassed Tom's public support for urgent causes but he remained temperamentally loath to commit. He owned up, self-mockingly to having a 'costive kind of mind', not 'satisfied to day anything at all unless every possible shade and qualification demanded by the strictest criteria of scruple can be got down on paper.'


In distress, Eliot turned to reading poetry.  In mid-May on the train between London and Chichester he devoured the Poesies de A. O. Barnabooth by Valery Larbaud, one of the Criterion’s European contributors. One particularly striking poem expressed ‘a feeling which I have felt myself very strongly. The persona in ‘The Gift of Myself” speaks of something ‘de’infiniment aride’ (infinitely arid) at his heart: an inner being with a life of its own nonetheless lives the speaker’s life and listens impassively to his conscience, appearing

 

(A being, if it is possible, made of nothingness,

Indifferent to my physical sufferings,

Who does not cry when I cry,

Who does not laugh when I laugh,

Who does not blush when I commit a shameful act,

And who does not groan when my heart is injured;

Who stands stock still and offers no advice,
But seems to say eternally:

Here I am, indifferent to it all).

  Many artists feel in themselves such a phenomena. For Tom this feeling was coupled with acute self-consciousness, and a conviction he had to keep a part of himself steeled to go on working, earning, and conducting everyday affairs-otherwise everything world be lost but not everyone found his coping mechanism attractive. When he dined with the Woolf’s on 17 May, Virginia, knowing ‘Mrs. Eliot has almost died at times in the last month’, found him ‘infinitely considerate,’ yet also ‘perfectly detached’; she likened him to a monk in a ‘chilly’ cell.

It vexed Tom that Vivien had not revealed until long after their wedding just how extensive had been her history of ill health. In mid-February, just after he had been ailing, Vivien ‘got out of bed and fell down’; a week later, he wrote, she ‘has been sleeping most of the time ever since. He was at his wits end, his ‘judgment and will’ were ‘paralysed’. Virginia Woolf, who wrote of Tom on 30 March as having about him something ‘hole and cornerish, biting in the back, suspicious’, later joked to Mary Hutchison about his ‘mamoreal heart’, but, however much he hid his feelings, he was deeply unsettled. He worried that he was behaving ‘like a frightened rat.’**

Attending a performance of King Lear together both Woolf and Eliot jeered the performance but subsequently Eliot reviewed the performance as ‘almost flawless’ then went on to complain ‘that the incapacity for surrender or allegiance to something outside of oneself, which is a frequent symptom of the soul of man under democracy.’ When Woolf taxed him ‘lightly’ with contradicting his earlier reactions, she was annoyed at his suspicious, elaborate, uneasy manner. Woolf’s frustration with Tom was exacerbated by his having published Wyndham Lewis’s ‘masterpiece’ of satire on Bloomsbury, apparently without having time to ‘read  and expunge’ it. Tom tried to smooth things over with a degree of flirtatious self-mockery, caricaturing himself as someone likely to make Woolf ‘expire of boredom', and jokingly indicating she knew he had developed  a taste for ‘Divine Service on Sunday Morning’ and as the result of publishing the satire he might be found ‘dismembered’, like a hero of Grecian Tragedy.

Eminent within the literary world now, Eliot had learned how to operate its levers of power. Yet his judgment was not infallible. Few today would choose to read Lewis’s One-Way Song, which Tom selected for Faber’s 1933 poetry list, rather than the poems of the Eliot-detesting William Carlos Williams which Tom confessed meant very little to him.  The poetry of Dylan Thomas- which he encouraged- slipped through his editorial hands. But he did sign up and take under his wing George Barker, Michael Roberts and Janet Adam Smith. He had an unsettling insightful way of presenting the ‘dark embryo’ that develops into a poem and he discussed sympathetically with the authors on his list the challenges, droughts, and demands that accompanied the writing of poetry – including his concern that the poet ‘may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.’ 

 

Often uncompromising, even as he strove to be fair and through his writings, taste and networks he shaped the poetry of his era. Few, however, saw the full, complications of his personality. To Woolf, who had his measure, he revealed more than most. Virginia went on sensing ‘the heavy stone of his self-esteem’. Later in 1934, after they had dined together, she recorded how he sat ‘very solid- large shoulders- in his chair, talks easily but with authority. Is a great man, in a way, now: self-confident, didactic. But to me, still, a dear old ass.’

 

 She also recognized that Tom was ‘not a dramatist. A monologist’,  as The Times’ critic judged The Family Reunion: though ‘intellectually intriguing, it was an arid essay lacking ‘stage vividness’- the intensification of illusion which is the only purpose of any dramatic convention.’ More than one reviewer located in the character of Harry the same fault Eliot had found in Hamlet: ‘an  emotion which is inexpressible, because in excess of the facts as they appear’.

Back from a vacation in Wales in September 1934 Virginia , aware that ‘dear old Tom looked 10 years younger: hard, spry, a glorified boy scout in shorts & yellow shirt, was struck, nevertheless, by how maintaining ‘some asperity’ towards Vivien, he would not ‘admit the excuse of insanity for her –thinks she puts it on’. She described Tom as now ‘tight & shiny as a wood louse’, but she detected in him both the  ‘well water in him, cold & pure and an exclusive hardness’. “Yes I like talking to Tom. But his wing sweeps curved & scimitar like round to center himself. He’s settling in with some severity to be a great man.’ Later in her diary entry she added, with a rhetorical flourish, ‘when you are thrown like an assegai into the hide of the world – this may be the definition of genius- there you stick; & Tom sticks. To shut out, to concentrate –that is perhaps – perhaps- one of the necessary conditions’. Woolf was sensitive about her (not entirely inaccurate) intuition that Tom, even though they had published each other’s work, substantially shut out her own writing.Yet despite this indifference and disagreement about religion they remained friends.

Visiting his new lodgings at 9 Grenville Place with Aida Monro the following year, Virginia, while appreciating Tom’s tea and ‘rolls in frills on paper’ found his small angular room ‘not a lovely one’  It had ‘dark green blotting paper wall paper’; bookcases with missing shelves contained ‘rather meager’ books; there was a gas fire, and a bathroom shared with curates: ‘The hot water runs very slowly.’ Tom sat on a ‘hard chair.’ Conversation was difficult. As the women left, he showed them his small bedroom ‘with the railway underneath it’. He seemed to Woolf ‘priestly, ill at ease with the presbytery’s ‘maid in cap and apron.’ It ‘all’, she wrote in her diary, ‘somehow depressed me.’

Ottoline Morrell feared Tom was now ‘a queer lonely isolated figure’ in ‘complete removal from the ordinary world’- ‘an Ostrich who hides his head to prevent himself seeing Life.’ She blamed his ‘Calvinist forefathers’. They made him, for all his ‘kind side’ perceptibly ‘cruel’. And ‘a very sick man.. Yet as a publisher and editor he had to deal with day-to-day work in away that Lady Ottoline did not. His massive brain-power, stamina and nimbleness – one minute considering ‘The Theology of Economics’, the next magisterially surveying eighteenth and nineteenth Shakespearean criticism – remained dauntingly effective. Still, Morrell was hardly wide of the mark. ‘To surrender individual judgment to a Church is a hard thing,’ Tom stated in an early 1934 Criterion ‘Commentary’; but he was sure.’ What ultimately matters is the salvation of the individual soul.’ Later that year he described himself to Faber as ‘by temperament but not in doctrine, and old-style hellfire Calvinist.'

This seems to me an inaccurate assessment because the creed of the Anglican Church IS Calvinist, nor is Calvinism, by temperament ‘gloomy’ or ‘hard-hearted. The most striking Calvinist features of Eliot’s character was his religious imagination combined with  Humanist learning and attraction to church governance in which ‘seculars’ play a significant role. But that's a complicated historical analysis which I will pursue in connection with Hugh Trevor Roper's biography of Thoedore de Mayerne.


Visiting the Woolfs in Sussex in 1939 he enjoyed ‘hilarious small talk’, and Virginia though him ‘more subtle, less caked & rigid than of old. His teaching, he told me, is one that improves with age.' Like his flatmate John Hayward she remained a determined non-believer and noted Tom’s customary sense of ‘the working of the divine spirit which as usual he adored at 8 on Sunday morning, receiving communion from Mr. Ebbs  [ the local vicar] – who did not impress him.’

By February 1940, when Tom sniped in print that the prose idiom of the sixty-five-year old ‘Mr. Churchill” was ‘like a court dress of rather tarnished grandeur from a theatrical costumiers’, the ‘Woolves’ had returned temporarily to 37 Mecklenburgh Square, a short walk from Russell Square. The blackout meant ‘no lighted windows;, which ‘depressed’ Virginia. At her dinner party for Tom and other friends, conversation turned to ‘Civilization.’ Most of the diners were pessimistic. Tom had grown concerned about whether it was possible to maintain ‘a common mind’ between England and France as war pressures increased. Tom had been following the debates, too, about American neutrality. The American ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, expected that Britain would be defeated. Though the Christian News-Letter had just reported on a dissenting “Declaration of American Christians’, most American Episcopalians, like many other Americans, inclined towards neutrality. Tom’s strong-willed US Episcopalian correspondent Dr. Iddings Bell took this stance, describing the conflict as ‘this relatively insignificant brawl going on in Europe.’ Tom had written to the Church Times that January, stating he considered Bell ‘grossly mistaken’, yet declaring himself among Bell’s ‘English friends’. Emily Hale was hinting Tom should come to Princeton. “If I had lived in America, and come to anything like my present position, I believe that it would have been the Church of Rome that I should have accepted and not the Episcopal Church’, he mused, once again resisting her overtures. This, he knew, was not what she ( a Unitarian and hoping he would marry her one day) wanted to hear.’ Virginia Woolf's opinion of Emily was not favorable, ascribing to her the persona that Ottoline Morrell inscribed on Eliot.

With America reluctant to intervene and Germany so strong, Britain’s situation looked unpromising. At the Woolf’s dinner party on 14 February the consensus seemed to be that ‘the barbarians will gradually freeze our culture’, with ‘the light going out gradually.’ Virginia watched Tom closely. A couple of weeks earlier, around the time he wrestled with the phrase ‘Taurus ire’ in the poem ‘East Coker’, he had been reading Rupert Gleadow’s forthcoming Faber book Astrology in Everyday Life; his star sign was Libra and he had joked to Virginia glumly that he shared it ‘with Hitler’. Now scrutinizing his face, she observed:

Tom’s great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve drawn; dropped face – as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; & thought. A very serious face. & broken by the flicker of relief, when other people interrupt.

Since just a few days later Tom sent Hayward a complete draft of ‘East Coker’, Woolf’s pen-portrait depicts the poet during the period when that poem took its full form. What she saw on Tom’s ‘scaffold’ face was a more profound version of what Tom in ‘East Coker’ noted on the faces of wartime London Underground passengers: ‘you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen’. It was a look of blankness and worry- not an uncommon expression on British faces in the early months of 1940.


In London on 3 April 1941 Tom received the news that shocked him at least as much as the loss of Joyce. ‘The death of Mrs. Virginia Woolf’ was reported in The Times. ‘For myself and others,’ Tom wrote to Leonard the next day from Shamley Wood, ‘it is the end of a world.’ He felt ‘numb’. Woolf had gone for a walk by the River Ouse on 28 March, leaving a note telling Leonard she feared the onset of another episode of ‘madness’; her body was not found until 18 April. Virginia’s death depressed him, more than he realized at the time. He had come to regard Woolf ‘like a member of my own family’. Even though, he confessed, he ‘did not know her work very well’, and his interests was ‘entirely personal’, he had felt at ease with her’ in some ways even more than with his kith and kin. He found it hard to express how intensely he missed her.

Though Tom would not have seen the letter, Woolf had written to her sister five years earlier, rather wistfully making clear how close she felt to her sometimes infuriating friend: ‘I had a visit, long long ago from Tom Eliot, whom I love, or could have loved, had we both been in the prime and not in the sere: how necessary do you think copulation is to friendship?’ Their closeness is affirmed by the body language of a telling photograph, taken in the late summer of 1932. Tom is smiling, standing very close to Virginia. They look every inch a couple. Also in the picture is Vivien, but she stands apart from them, as if an interloper. Now Virginia was gone.







Eliot After The Wasteland by Robert Crawford; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2022

Amos Bronson Alcott by Ralph Emerson

 

Here now prepares A B A to go to England after so long & strict acquaintance as I have had with him for seven years. I saw him for the first time in Boston in 1835. What shall we say of him to the wise Englishman?

He is a man of ideas, a man of faith. Expect contempt for usages which are simply such. His social nature & his taste for beauty & magnificence will betray him into tolerance & indulgence, even, to men  & to magnificence, but a statute or a practice he is condemned to measure by its essential wisdom or folly.

He delights in speculation, in nothing so much and is very well endowed & weaponed for that with a copious, accurate, & elegant vocabulary; I may say poetic; so that I know no man who speaks such good English as he, and so inventive withal. He speaks truth truly; or the expression is adequate. Yet he knows only this one language. He hardly needs an antagonist, - he needs only an intelligent ear. Where he is greeted by loving & intelligence persons his discourse soars to a wonderful height, so regular, so lucid, so playful, so new & disdainful of all boundaries of tradition & experience, that the hearers seem no longer to have bodies or material gravity, but almost they can mount into the air at pleasure, or leap at one bound out of this poor solar system.

I say this of his speech exclusively, for when he attempts to write, he loses, in my judgment, all his power, & I derive more pain than pleasure from the perusal. The Boston Post expressed the feeling of most readers in its rude joke when it said of his Orphic Sayings that they ‘resembled a train of 15 railroad cars with one passenger.’

He has moreover the greatest possession both of mind & of temper in his discourse, so that the mastery & moderation & foresight, & yet felicity, with which he unfolds his thoughts, are not to be surpassed. This is of importance to such a broacher of novelties as he, & to one baited, as he is very apt to be, by the sticklers for old books or old institutions. He takes such delight in the exercise of this faculty, that he will willingly talk the whole of a day, and most part of the night, & then again tomorrow, for days successively, and if I, who am inpatient of much speaking, draw him out to walk in the woods or fields, he will stop at the first fence & very soon propose either to set down or to return. He seems to think society exists for this function, & that literature is good or bad as it approaches colloquy, which is its perfection. Poems &  histories may be good, but only as adumbrations of this; and the only true manner of writing the literature of a nation would be to convene the best heads in the community, set them talking, & then introduce stenographers to record what they say. He so swiftly & naturally plants himself on the moral; sentiment in any conversation that no man will ever get any advantage of him unless he be a saint as Jones Very* was. Every one else Alcott will put into the wrong.

It must be conceded that it is speculation which he loves & not action. Therefore he dissatisfies everybody & disgusts many. When the conversation is ended, all is over. He lives tomorrow as he lived today for further discourse, not to begin, as he seemed pledged to do, A New Celestial life. The ladies fancied that he loved cake; very likely; most people do. Yet in the last two years he has changed his way of living which was perhaps a little easy & self indulgent for such a Zeno, so far as to become ascetically temperate. He has no vocation to labor, and, although he strenuously preached it for a time, & a made some effort to practice it, he soon found he had no genius for it, and that it was a cruel waste of his time. It depressed his spirits even to tears.

He is very noble in his carriage to all men, of a serene & lofty aspect & deportment in the street & in the house, of simple but graceful & majestic manners, having a great sense of his own worth, so that not unwillingly will he give his hand to a merchant, though he be never so rich, - yet with a strong love of men, and an insatiable curiosity concerning all who are distinguished either by their intellect or by their character. He is the most generous & hospitable of men, so that he has been munificent in his long poverty, as Mr. Perkins in his wealth, or I should say more munificent. AS for his hospitality, every thing in tye form of man that entered his door as a suppliant would be made master of all the house contained. Moreover every man who converses with him is presently made sensible that although this person has no faculty or patience for our trivial hodiernal labors, yet if there were a  great courage , a great sacrifice, a self immolation to be made, this & no other is the man for a crisis, - and with such grandeur, yet such temperance in his mien.

(Such a man with no talent for household uses, none for action, and whose taste is precisely that which is most rare & unobtainable, could not be popular, he could never be a doll, nor a beau, nor a bestower of money or presents, nor even a model of good daily life to propose to virtuous young persons. His greatness consists in his attitude merely; of course he found very few to relish or appreciate him; and very many to dispraise him.) Somebody called him a ‘Moral Sam Patch.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Patch

Another circumstance marks this extreme love of speculation. He carries all his opinions & all his condition & manner of life in his hand, &, whilst you talk with him, it is plain he has put out no roots, but is an air-plant, which can readily & without any ill consequences be transported to any place. He is quite ready at any moment to abandon his present residence & employment, his country, nay, his wife & children, on very short notice, to put any new dream into practice which has bubbled up in the effervescence of discourse. If it is so with his way of living, much more so is it with his opinions. He never remembers. He never affirms anything today because he has affirmed it before. You are rather astonished, having left him in the morning with one set of opinions, to find him in the evening totally escaped from all recollection of them, as confident of a new line of conduct, & heedless of his old advocacy. Sauve qui peut (run for your life!).

Another effect of this speculation is that he is preternaturally acute & ingenious to the extent sometimes of a little jesuitry in his action. He contemns the facts so far that his poetic representations have the effect of a falsehood, & and those who are deceived by them ascribe the falsehood to him: and sometimes he plays with actions unimportant to him in a manner not justifiable to any observers but those who are competent to do justice to his real magnanimity & conscience.

Like all virtuous persons he is destitute of the appearance of virtue, and so shocks all [persons of decorum by the imprudence of his behavior & the enormity of his expressions. . . .

This man in his spirit entertained all vast & magnificent problems. None came to him so much as the most universal. He delighted in the fable of Prometheus; in all the gigantic pictures of the most ancient mythologies; in the Indian & Egyptian traditions, in the history of magic, of palmistry, of temperament, of astrology, of whatever showed any impatience of custom & limits, any impulse to dare the solution of the total problem of man’s nature, finding in every such experiment an implied pledge & prophesy of worlds of Science & Power yet unknown to us. He seemed often to realize the pictures of the old Alchemists; for he stood brooding on the edge of discovery of the Absolute from month to month, ever & anon affirming that it was within his reach, & nowise discomforted by uniform short comings.

The other tendency of his mind was to realize a reform in the Life of Man.

This was the steadily returning, the monotonous topic of years of conversation. This drew him to a constant intercourse with the projectors & saints of all shades who preached or practiced any part or particle of reform, & to continual coldness, quarrel, & non-intercourse with the scholars & men of refinement who are usually found in the ranks of Conservatism. Very soon the Reformers whom he had joined would disappoint him; they were pitiful persons,  & , in their coarseness & ignorance, he began to pine again for literary society. In these oscillations from the Scholars to the Reformers, & back again, he spent his days.

His vice, an intellectual vice, grew out of this constitution, & was that to which almost all spiritualists have been liable, - a certain brooding on the private thought which produces monotony in the conversation, & egotism in the character. Steadily subjective himself, the variety of facts which seem necessary to the health of most minds, yielded him no variety of meaning, & he quickly quitted the play on objects, to come to the Subject, which was always the same, viz. Alcott in reference to the World of Today.

From a stray leaf I copy this: Alcott sees the law of man truer & farther than any one ever did. Unhappily, his conversation never loses sight of his on personality. He never quotes; he never refers; his only illustration is his own biography. His topic yesterday is Alcott on the 17th of October; today, Alcott on the 18th of October; tomorrow, on the 19th. So it will always be. The poet rapt into future times or into deeps of nature admired for themselves, lost in their laws, cheers us with a lively charm; but this noble genius discredits genius to me. I do not any more such persons to exist. Part of this egotism in him is a certain comparing eye which seems to sour his view of persons prosperously place, & to make his conversation accusing & minatory. He is not self-sufficing & serene.

* Jones Very (1813-1880) was the oldest of six children of Jones Very, a ship’s captain, and Lydia Very. He entered Harvard his sophomore year and finished second in his class in 1836, then served as a tutor in Greek while he studied at Harvard Divinity School. In April 1838, he met Emerson through Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Emerson took an instant liking to him, and wrote to Peabody that he felt ‘anew’ in his company. In the fall of 1838, college authorities decided that Very- overcome with religious enthusiasm – had gone insane, relieved him of his duties, and committed him to the McLean Asylum for a month.. Over the next year and a half Very would produce a unique body of religious poetry – all the product, he would claim, of the ‘holy spirit.’ In 1839, Emerson selected and edited these poems and saw them through the press; Very’s Essays and Poems received almost no critical attention at the time but was highly regarded by Emerson and his circle. By the mid-1840s, Very’s religious enthusiasm had waned, he moved back in with his family in Salem, filling temporarily vacant pulpits in the neighboring towns when need arose, and continued to write poetry.

 

The Garden

I saw the spot where our first parents dwelt;

And yet it wore to me no face of change,

For while amid its fields and groves, I felt

As if I had not sinned, nor thought it strange;

My eye seemed but a part of every sight,

My ear heard music in each sound that rose;

Each sense forever found a new delight,

Such as the spirit’s vision only knows;

Each act some new and ever-varying joy

Did my Father’s love for me prepare;

To dress the spot my ever fresh employ,

And in the glorious whole with Him to share;

No more without the flaming gate to stray,

No more for sin’s dark stain the debt of death to pay.

………………………………………………………………..

Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), the son of poor Connecticut farmers, was largely self-educated. He began working in a local clock factory at age 14, and left home at 17, earning a living as an itinerant peddler in the Carolinas and Virginia. He returned to Connecticut in 1823, and accepted several teaching positions. Soon after his marriage to Abigail May in 1830, he began to set up experimental schools, doing away with rote leaning and corporal punishment. The most successful of these, his Temple School (where he was assisted by Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller),operated from 1835 to 1839; it closed amid controversies over his heretical methods and his admission of an African-American girl. Emerson met Alcott in 1835 and soon after called him ‘the most extraordinary man, and the highest genius of the time.’ After the failure of his experiment in communal living, Fruitlands, in 1844, Alcott and his family barely managed to make ends meet (in the mid-1850s, Emerson helped to raise money from local citizens to help support them). Those circumstances were relieved in 1859, with his appointment as Concord’s superintendent of schools. Though Emerson was sometimes irritated by Alcott’s egotism ( he ‘never loses sight of his own personality,’ he noted) they remained close friends throughout their lives; the day Emerson died, Bronson’s daughter Louisa May Alcott wrote in her journal that Emerson had been ‘the nearest and dearest Friend father has ever had.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Journals 1841-1877; Lawrence Rosenwald, editor; The Library of America, 2010; Journal K, 1841, page 91-95/ Biographical Sketches.

Intro to Best American Crime Reporting 2008 by Jonathan Kellerman

A small proportion of human beings – perhaps 1 percent of any given population- is different from the rest of us in ways that wreak havoc on the rest of us.

The cardinal traits of this bunch include superficiality; impulsiveness; self-aggrandizement to the point delusion; callousness; and, when it suits, outright cruelty. Truth and principle don’t intrude upon the world of disrupters. When they don’t lapse into tell-tale glibness, the more socially adroit among them come across as charming, sometimes overwhelmingly charismatic.

They project a preternatural calm that isn’t an act. Their resting pulse rate tends to be low, they don’t sweat readily – literally and figuratively – nor do they react strongly to pain and fear.

Because of their eerily quiet nervous system, they don’t learn readily from experience.

If anybody can fool the polygraph, they can.

Intellectually, they understand the necessity for rules and regulations, but only for others. They are exempt from all that nonsense because they are special.

The smarter ones among them  eschew violence. Not because they abhor bloodletting, but because they realize violence is usually a counterproductive strategy. Some of the cleverest among them run successful Ponzi  schemes or engage in hugely profitable insider securities trading. Others rise to the boards of corporations where they coordinate felonies of a subtler nature.

The most ambitious and, arguably, the most dangerous among them fix their eyes on the Oscar of amorality known as political power. Chameleons adroit at tailoring their behavior to the needs of others, they often win elections. Sometimes they simply take by force. In either event, when one of them runs a country, things get really ugly.

The stupid ones, on the other hand, opt for offenses that range from petty to horrific and rarely pan out. They’re more likely to end up behind bars.

The disrupters don’t comprise the majority of incarcerated criminals. That distinction belongs mostly to people who make poor choices due to bad habits.

When the nasty 1 percent do commit crimes, the offenses are frequently stunningly audacious, cold-blooded, vicious, and terrifying to the rest of us. Because their actions are beyond our ken, we are sometimes seduced into believing the circular logic of their defense attorneys:

Anyone who could chop up six women has to be insane.
Anyone who could poison her own children for insurance money must be crazy.

 

Wrong.

Insanity – a legal, not a medical concept- simply refers to the inability to understand the essential wrongness of one’s acts. The disrupters understand damn well.

They just don’t care.

People who get paid to produce jargon have termed the disruptors psychopaths, sociopaths, possessors of antisocial personalities. For the most part, the labels are interchangeable and emanate from political points of view.

Psychopath implies an internal mental state. Jargonmeisters who favor an emphasis on individual responsibility go for that one.

Those who prefer to blame an external force, typically that nebulous bogeyman known as ‘society,’ prefer sociopath.

Antisocial personality is a stab at sounding medically diagnostic without giving away one’s bias.

“Bad Guy’ would be just a good a label.

Foolish bad guys  commit the crimes that bore us.

High-level bad guys – who view crime as a job- begin their iniquitous careers with misdemeanors, but they learn quickly, zipping up the criminal ladder, because they’re smart but lack an effective stoop mechanism.

The most evil among us commit outrages that enthrall, capturing our attention precisely because the internal world that motivates them is so chillingly barren that they might  as well have been reared on Pluto.

The most evil among us do the stuff covered by the media genre known as ‘true crime.’

Back in the good old days, ‘true crime’ meant delightfully lurid  and judgmental pulp magazines, frequently marketed with covers depicting scantily-clad women in the grips of slavering brutes. Think  Thrilling Detective. A secondary outlet was true-crime’ books, generally paperback originals, with authorial and editorial emphasis on the bloody and ghastly.

The occasional masterpiece of reporting that ventured beyond the ghoulish explication of body fluids and viscera to skillfully explore the events, persona, and sometimes the sick-joke happenstance leading to ‘senseless’ crime did occasionally elbow its way above the slush pile.  (Think of the books of the late Jack Olsen.) But that was the exception; this was low-rent territory.

That hasn’t changed, but the vehicle of delivery has. Nowadays, ‘true crime’ most frequently refers to that ironically cruel Grand Guignol mislabeled ‘reality TV.’ And since television is a cheap, quick high for those simply interested in a violence fix, it has achieve rapid dominance. (A fact that might also be explained by the prevalence of amoral, even psychopathic, individuals in what’s known in my hometown, L. A., as ‘The Industry.’ What better way to capture psychopaths than to have their portraits painted by other psychopaths?)

The pulps and softcover originals may not have been refined, but they did possess a certain shameless charm. Sadly, they’ve been wounded grievously, perhaps incurably, by trash TV. But an occasional full-lengthy true-crime masterpiece continues to surface and thrive for the same reason that high quality crime novels seem impervious to the video onslaught and remain staples of any best seller list: a great book is able to plumb the depths of human motivation in the way that TV and movies- essentially impressionistic vehicles- cannot.

For the most part, though, the best true-crime writing today appears on the pages of magazines.

This book showcases the best of the best.

While the ultimate goal of crime-beat reporting – understanding what drives people toward evil – is eons away from being achieved and may in fact never be achieved, the stories in this book will satisfy you intellectually and emotionally because you will be moved to think, feel, puzzle, and sometimes to self-examine.

Everyone of these gems is penned by an individual with a strong distinctive voice, leading to a varied and fascinating lot, stylistically and contextually. And the topics are a deliciously eclectic mix. Sure, there are a few serial lust killer tales. How could there not be? But each has something especially provocative to say about that most terrible of patterns.

At times, the accounts in this book explore crime in the highest places, reminding us that a geopolitical focus should not obscure the fact that evil deeds emanate from evil people. Particularly fascinating is an account of the strategic planning leading to the capture of the Islamo-fascist kingpin Abu Musab al Zarqawi – a tale that is unquestionably one of the finest police procedurals ever written.

The always provocative essayist Malcolm Gladwell has produced a compelling examination of a topic near and dear to my heart: exposure of the confidence game that is criminal profiling. But even if I didn’t agree with him completely, I’d love the piece because it’s witty, incisive and beautifully written.

The eminent humorist Calvin Trillin abandons any pretense of levity in his fascinating look at the genesis of violence on an isolated Canadian island – one of those obscure locales, struggling for its very existence in the face of a rapidly changing world, that few of us are likely to visit. And even if we did ferry over, we couldn’t capture the place, or the people, the way Trillin does.

Two of the stories deal with life in prison. One illuminates the perspective of a complex man who’s spent a good part of his life on death row – as a custodian of the condemned. The other allows us to peek into the mind of one of the most dangerously violent offenders in the United States and offers a hint of what it might be like to occupy his private hell.

There’s a great unsolved mystery – an eerily suggestive psychological autopsy exploring the death of an emotionally tortured, one-shot-wonder master novelist, that manages to leave the reader grandly satisfied. To unforgettable portrayals of habitual liars, one of whom just might be telling the truth when the truth is most devastating, will leave you thinking about them long after you’ve read their final paragraphs.

The morally complex account of the painful intersection between public outrage and the attempt, by an undeniably evil man, to do something good leaves us with more questions than answers, but they are questions that need to be faced.

All in all, a page-turning look at the myriad faces of evil.
This is the new face of quality true crime literature.
Bad guys at their worst, writers a their best.