A Nightingale’s Song: Tributes in Honor of Ed Grover: the Second Panel of a Triptych
Written: Sep 04 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Brilliant intaglio work
Cons: One wishes it were endless
The Bottom Line: The best of Magris: insightful, subtle, tinctured with memory, loss, and wisdom
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| mshawpyle's Full Review: Microcosms Books |
As you may know – and if you do not, you ought know, for it is news of dire portent – the gracious, wise, and kindly Ed Grover is fallen ill, having been diagnosed with lung cancer. For those of us facing – and all of us here are, whether you know it or not, for Ed is no small part of what small grace this site has from time to time possessed – so grievous a loss as inheres in losing Ed’s daily presence here, it is a time for taking measure of his accomplishment, and for paying tribute well-deserved.
Ed has been a part of this site since almost the time I began, and is one of the Old Guard of the Dave Abrams - Laura Winzeler - Jeff Clow - Dwight, Esq. vintage. (It was a good year, as vintage years go.) In most ways, and many of those the most significant, the loss of which is the most sad, this site is no longer discernibly that which we joined, in our hope, innocence, and naïveté. Yet the faint taste of that faded bouquet still lingers in a few cellared bottles, stored for future use against bleaker future days, and Ed’s work remains premier grand cru.
Well, I cannot rest from travel: I will drink / Life to the lees: and
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
There is a lasting impression made by the gracious and the kind, by the wise and the open-hearted, and such is Ed. We have not always seen eye to eye, perhaps, but we are part of the Old Guard, and his mark, at least, is deeply impressed upon this site’s landscape, in ways so subtle that many will not see until too late.
The tracing of such subtle impress is pre-eminently the talent of Claudio Magris, whose Danube has meant more to me than I have ever been able adequately to convey. In Microcosms, Magris turns his eye upon the lands long debatable between the Most Serene Republic and its Italian successor, and the House of Austria: the Alto Adige, the Trentino, the headlands of the bays of Venice and Trieste.
Slav and Teuton and Italian heirs of grave Romanitas, Orthodox and Catholics, Jews and Christians, Aschenbachian Germans seeking after the end and terminus of their Sonnenreise where the citrons bloom, footloose Englishmen both respectable and reprobate, irredentists and Imperial Austrians, all have clashed, crowded, intermarried, and embraced in the lands of Magris’s fathers, and all humanity (nihil alienum) in our multifarious types are present here in microcosm. The son of Trieste is fascinated by borders and the way in which lives and kinships spill over them, like a river, like the river of his best-known work. Like Heraclitus, he knows that one cannot step twice in the same stream: how, then, can one hope to make sense of its flow and show its course, save by incisive, cameo depictions of arresting moments, notable characters, epiphanies? He knows, too, that the river’s course is relentless, from rise to its final mingling and loss and dissolution in the sea, that its course is in one direction whatever meanders it may take; he knows that life is lived linearly, episodically, and that its mortal end is death: Time, like an ever-rolling stream / Bears all its sons away….
And what of it? He is known to quote an Hasidic proverb: ‘Man comes from dust and returns to dust, but in the meantime he can drink a glass of wine.’
Magris’s work rejoices in the quotidian, as much as does Betjeman’s, as much as does Eliot’s. And like Eliot (‘And let their liquid siftings fall / To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud’) and the later Betjeman, Magris writes in elegiac mode, recalling elder days amidst the wrack of what Sir Lewis Namier, himself writing of the fallen Diarchy, called ‘vanished supremacies.’
Magris writes sparely and elegantly, with a lean and springing line. He writes of old cafés and taverns, country churches and fallow fields, of cities from Turin and Trent to Trieste that are even yet reeling from the shock of the new. He writes of faded aunts whose times are out of joint and of elderly uncles whose medals and honors came from a fallen state that no longer holds sway over their ancestral acres.
He writes of the operation of the land upon the culture and the people, and of the impress of the people and the culture upon the land; and, Lucretian, he sees all things in flux, in entropy’s fateful motion. If poetry truly be emotion recollected in tranquility, Magris is one of the great poets of our age. I have said, in the first panel of this triptych tribute to Ed, that Jan Morris, in writing of Magris’s natal Trieste, finds the freedom that inheres in repose. It is as true to say, here, that Magris, with his customary grace and elegance, his keen assessor’s eye and subtle pen, finds the grace and liberty that arises from recollection, from resignation, from remembrance.
With charity and catholic sympathy, with grace and subtlety, Magris selects his scenes with a jeweler’s eye, and places them with an artist’s genius. Here are great riches in a little room, and here is the human condition in delicate miniature. Grace and liberty arises from recollection, from resignation, from remembrance.
The past is never dead; it’s not even past. In ways not even the most subtle eye can fully tease out and trace, it sends its filaments into the fabric of things, and none but makes an impress that is lasting. Bodies cease, empires wane, states fall; but the human soul and spirit, and the legacy and genius loci of place, are immortal, and persist, influencing all that comes. Such is the lesson we take from the visionaries and the scholars, of whom Magris is one of the most evocative and inspiriting.
No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. And yet: Tribulation is Treasure in the nature of it, but it is not currant money in the use of it, except wee get nearer and nearer our home, Heaven, by it;
and
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
This is the school and wisdom of the ages, and Magris as much as any shows it forth, wittingly or no, in delicate portraiture.
Recommended:
Yes
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mshawpyle
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Member: Markham Shaw Pyle, JD
Location: Houston, Texas
Reviews written: 539
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About Me:
Historian, baseballing bon vivant, Boll Weevil, W&L man; and the Walter Mitty of field sports
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