By Jeremy D. Clough
Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us be because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know. – T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”
In a perfect world, I’d be sitting on a balcony in Venice with an endless supply of espresso and tiramisu, idly shooting floating targets with a suppressed Beretta 71 while my wife, in a little black dress, languidly murmurs her approval. For bonus points, Dr. Dabbs would be in a suite down the hall under similar circumstances, but likely eating Count Chocula.
You may note this is decidedly not the world in which we live: it is raining outside, some variant of check engine light is on in every running vehicle I own, and the soundtrack to my life is not the gentle slap of gondola oars but generally the dissatisfied meowing of a disconsolate cat and of small children with a volume knob broken off at 11. There are, however, small moments of beauty: rare opportunities to make a deposit in your soul, so you can live off the interest in leaner days. At their best they provide richness and connection that simply isn’t available in our largely disembodied world.
Touchstones of Words and Men
One of those opportunities happened the year I graduated from college and spent a couple-three weeks running amok in England and Scotland, part of it in the lovely Lake District of poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others. I wasn’t an English major (at my college, that required wearing a strange hat and smoking clove cigarettes, only one of which I was good with). But I had written and published poetry and was introduced to Matthew Arnold’s idea of “touchstones,” the classic standards by which we judge our own work.
I found them there in the UK. I stood in Coleridge’s bedroom, experienced the visceral delight of piloting a rowboat in a small storm on Derwentwater Lake, and actually touched the stones of a ruined 13th century Scottish castle, where I climbed up into a window and wrote by the light of a Zippo in the long fade of twilight. Walking in the cloister at Iona and among the shattered arches of Lindisfarne, the places where the monks kept The Bible. I capitalized it because it was basically the only one they had in Britain at the time until it was stolen in a Viking raid and recovered later with its jeweled cover ripped off. Attending Communion in the thousand-year-old Carlisle cathedral, a place half as old as the faith itself.
It was my first contact with the ancient. Wordsworth was no longer a dusty name in the Norton Anthology, and to whatever degree I chose him or Coleridge as a standard, they had become touchstones not only because they were good at their craft, but by sheer nearness.
I came home to purgatory—to the murder of a friend, other deaths, other close passes by violence, all in a brief window ending with the brutal three-year slog of law school, which has its own numbered circle in Dante. In those lean, hard years and others that were to come, I lived off the interest of that near magical time in the UK, when greatness became real in a new and tangible way.
Touchstone of Papa’s Double Gun
Another one of those opportunities came a few weeks ago when I held Ernest Hemingway’s .577 double rifle. I’m not a particularly mystical person. I did not imagine his shade peering over my shoulder, telling me how to hold it correctly as Papa Hemingway was wont to do…but a man with an imagination could have smelled the gin and terse prose. He focused on that same front sight and snugged that same buttstock into his shoulder with a hard cheek weld. In a sense, I was closer to him than I would have ever been if he was still alive, as I somehow can’t see myself being cheek-to-cheek with Ernest Hemingway.
I was deeply influenced by the Lost Generation writers, and read much of what Hemingway published, including his less-known early poetry and dispatches. I made the pilgrimage to his home in Key West where that .577 lived for many years.
Hemingway is a complex figure whose greatest heroism lies less in his tremendous physical exploits than in the unflinching honesty with which he faced his own deeply flawed character. His “Clean, Well-Lighted Place,: with its haunting refrain of “nada, y nada, y pues nada,” not only echoes Spain’s revered saint Juan de la Cruz, but also candidly addresses the specter of suicide that stalked Hemingway’s family so inexorably they came to call it the family exit.
His shattering regret over cheating on his first wife, which he recounts near the end of “A Movable Feast,” required a more profound courage than the doomed Francis Macomber finally attained in Hemingway’s most famous African short story, which was itself based on a true story he’d likely heard whispers of while on safari.
Near the height of my personal hubris, in my early twenties when I could craft flawless iambic pentameter, I wrote that “nothing ever ends but life: this is fundamental yet misunderstood.” Papa is gone, prey to the merciless and ultimately irresistible revelation of nada that laid him too early in Idaho dirt. But his words live on, and his example, both in the good and bad ways, feels closer than ever now that I’ve wrapped my hand around the forend of his rifle, into which his own palm sweated under the blazing heat of Africa and the strain of facing dangerous game.
Papa lies not far from the grave where many years before he famously eulogized another man killed by a shotgun. Of Gene Van Guilder, he wrote “Best of all, he loved the fall…the fall with its tawny and grey, the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods, leaves floating on the trout streams and above the hills the high blue windless skies…now he will be part of them forever.”
Part of them—and part of us.
