Shel Silverstein

            Shel Silverstein (1930-1999) will be remembered for the children’s books he wrote and illustrated, but he also had a successful career as a song writer whose songs, performed by Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and many other artists, often reached the top of the country and pop music charts.

            The children’s books have sold tens of millions of copies. In our house, Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974) was one of the most thumbed.

                        Silverstein’s poems are sly enough to please adults because they intelligently as well as playfully aim at what children like. It’s a cliché that kids like oral humor, and Silverstein serves it up big time. A sure kid’s favorite is the poem in which the narrator describes the process as he’s being eaten by a boa constrictor. ”Hungry Mungry,” the Alexander of eaters, eventually eats everything—even himself—so there is nothing left. Other poems dealing with eating include one about writing a poem from inside a lion after getting too close, “Recipe for a Hippopotamus Sandwich,” and “Eighteen Flavors…Lying there (sniff) on the ground.”

            Kids are also fascinated with the impossible and with little tales that do not end with everyone singing “tutti contenti saremo cosí.” They like unusual critters, such as Silverstein’s wren that swishes a razor-sharp tail or the beast who feeds on poets and tea. His drawings are often as entertaining as the poems, and the drawn image sometimes mediates with the imaginative content as when the boy warns his sister he’s going to erase her, and does. Several themes come together here, too, such as the bad end for the annoying (sisters, dentists), the appeal of the impossible, the defamiliarization of the ordinary such as pencils and erasers. A mother’s warning that her child would lose his head if it weren’t attached becomes literal. We see another angle on things in “Point of View,” where we look at “dinner / From the dinner’s point of view.” Poems are written on long noses and on giraffes’ necks. “Instructions” for washing an armadillo include using “72 pads of Brillo.”

            Some of the poems are about storytelling, about tall tales or about a story’s reception. One of my favorites is “The Battle”:

                                    Would you like to hear

                                    Of the terrible night

                                    When I bravely fought the—

                                    No?

                                    All right.

A few of the poems are a couple of pages long, but some are as short as this.

            A Light in the Attic (1981) may be a better book to show how Silverstein gets into children’s heads—if indeed he needs to go beyond his own, which may not have changed since childhood. There are poems here that your parents don’t want to hear: “How Not to Have to Dry the Dishes,” “Prayer of the Selfish Child,” “Always Sprinkle Pepper in Your Hair,” and “The Nailbiter.” One of them, about the little girl who dies because she doesn’t get the pony she asks for, ends with the tip that you might want to read this one to your folks when they don’t get you something you want.

            Silverstein understands that the literal often fascinates a kid; to take a non-Silverstein example, why do the grown-ups get so exercised about a cereal killer? The baby-sitter who thinks she’s supposed to actually sit on the baby is the subject of one poem; another is about Geraldine, who shakes the cow to get her milkshake. The pet one child’s dad brings home turns out to be an aunt eater, “And now my uncle’s mad!” Are wild strawberries really wild? Do they claw or scratch?

            We hear what the carrot said (“Lettuce rest”) and what the paper said to the pen, but when we get to what the teapot said, we’re brought up short with reality: “teapots can’t talk!” There’s a very convincing tension in Silverstein’s poems between the urge to “put something silly in the world / That ain’t been there before” and the fact that teapots can’t talk. He recognizes that children always live in two worlds at once, and generally manage it better than spies or double agents.

            Looking at things upside-down or backwards has always been a characteristic of Silverstein, who wrote “A Boy Named Sue.” The boy looking down at his upside-down reflection in a pond wonders whether he’s the one upside-down in another kid’s world. Maybe my hair isn’t wavy at all, but it’s my head. There’s “Backwards Bill,” who rides his horse backward with his hat on his toe and his boot on his head. The “Strange Wind” that left my hat on blew my head away. The baby bat is scared of the light.

            Defying the happy ending, the socially acceptable, and the moral of the story are typical Silverstein moves. So here are poems about children who come to a sticky end, like “Ticklish Tom,” who’s tickled by all and sundry until he ends up on the railroad track, and now he isn’t ticklish anymore. “Clarence” sends for new parents by mail order. Other poems play on the attractiveness of the forbidden, the scary, the outrageous. The pirate is a terrible man who makes people walk the plank and maroons them on islands, but “if you invite him to dinner, / Oh, please sit him next to me!” What do I do with the 24-foot python whose body spells out for me “I love you”? It is the face that asks the questions in “Who Ordered the Broiled Face?”

            This combination of the wildly unexpected with the unnerving shows up also in the poem that asks what do I do when the signal light turns not red or green, but blue with lavender spots, or the one about the gumball machine with the eyeball among the gumballs: “You don’t need any more gum today.”

            Among the cautionary tales, my favorite is about the Whatifs that crawl into your ear when you’re trying to go to sleep. Another is about the child who is so afraid of things that he won’t try anything but stays in his room—where he drowns when the room fills up with his tears.

            Silverstein’s illustrations convey as much as the words of his poems, as in “Buckin’ Bronco,” where the poem’s speaker is only visible as his or her boots flying out of the drawing on the left, or “The Man in the Iron Pail Mask,” who is in fact a child with a wooden sword nearly completely covered by the bucket on his head, or the four-page illustration of the kids’ trip through the “quick-digesting Gink.”

            The most popular of Silverstein’s children’s books was The Giving Tree (1964). Its popularity is a puzzle to some of us. The Giving Tree works like a touchstone to reveal the hobby-horses of its adult commentators. A boy loves a tree that reciprocates by providing shade, branches to climb, and apples to eat. But the boy grows up and wants more, so she gives him apples to sell, then branches to build a house, and ultimately, her trunk to build a boat, all as the boy, now a man, ages. Finally, when the old man returns, the tree, now a stump, provides a place to sit.

            Is the story about man’s rape of nature? Is it about unconditional love? Is it about incompatibility of generations? Is it about too-indulgent parents?

            Despite the ambiguity, the book makes it on many lists of the best children’s books and has sold millions of copies. It’s a story that, like a lot of Silverstein’s poems and stories, does not end happily. And even if it’s not one of those books that the kids clamor to have read to them again and again, I can see them, when they get to the end, nodding as if to say, “Yep. That’s the way it is.”

 

 

A Startling Book of Poems in a Fine Translation

 

            My friend and one-time student Daniel Parker has sent me a translation he and his wife, YoungShil Ji, did of Jin Eun-young’s We, Day by Day (2018). It’s volume 25 in The White Pine Press Korean Voices Series.

            This book was shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk prize in translation in 2019. The judges wrote that “YoungShil Ji and Daniel T. Parker have created a wonderfully supple, lasting music through their translation.” As Ji and Parker suggest in the Introduction, we have to find a new way to read these poems, quieting our rage for understanding as we go. There are progressions of images in the poems, and sometimes images—a wounded forehead, glass petals and glass flowers, the nipple of a balloon—carry over from one poem to the next. I wonder, too, with her, why “Washed clothes take so long to dry,” and about the shoe seller’s fixations with time—drunken time, a Big Ben clock, the cuckoo’s funny cries, and the wristwatch memory never wore. Eun-young drops a delightful color into nearly every stanza of her poems. She’s not merely a visual imagist poet, though; these poems are full of sounds, textures, tastes, and fragrances as well. And more than once an image as from a surrealist painting surprises: “birds soar through the hole pierced in my back” (“Before the Rooster Crows”).

            Some of these techniques may be from the surrealists’ playbook, such as the incongruous image: “the moon’s eyelashes are long.” But others are definitely not, as when she reverses time, playing the tape backward: “Like the smell of blood from a temple firing into the round muzzle of a black pistol” in “A Muffler Named Vladimir.”

            “A Day When I’m Sick and Alone” reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s attempt to capture in an essay the feeling of illness approaching delirium, in “On Being Ill.”

Eun-young makes fun of the critic’s attention to unimportant details in “To a Critic,” and suggests the critic’s pronouncements might be less than respectable: “Be sure to feel the whoosh of something whooshing through the crotch of your thin pants.” She makes a note to herself in “To Me”:

                        Burn the hardback book.

                        predict something,

                        love contingency.

The epigraphs she gleans from her readings in philosophy—Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Descartes—are also like notes to herself, especially the one by Spinoza about being careful not to mock or execrate what is, after all, merely human. And to love the human is also to love contingency. And in “Friend,” she revises Descartes’ first principle so that the presence of a friend, rather than doubt, assures us of our existence. Eun-young has a Ph.D. in philosophy, so these are not a dilettante’s interests.

            The conceit of one poem is a letter to Ludwig Wittgenstein, written by Rainer Maria Rilke and found in Rodin’s studio. The writer scornfully rejects the offer of a grant from Wittgenstein’s foundation because it’s too small. While other poets may be content to write ekphrastic poems describing a painting, Eun-young’s “Painting” is a regular mashup of the arts, as the people in two competing paintings read or recite Neruda and Eliot while playing the cello well and the piano badly.

            I don’t want to suggest all these poems are light or funny. They are not, and some evoke the lost innocence of childhood, the death of immigrants as they attempt to find a better life, and the futility of contemporary poets ever developing the power of Goethe’s Werther, that drove readers to suicide.

            These poems cannot have been easy to translate. But Parker and Ji give a sense of sureness to the images and turns of Eun-young’s lines. We are startled, we wince, we laugh, and we marvel as she surely must have intended.

           

Reading in the Time of Coronavirus

 

             During 2020, or more precisely during the time from March 15, 2020, when my wife and I began to impose a lockdown and mask mandate on ourselves (followed the next day by such state measures in Kentucky) until the middle of March 2021, two weeks after my wife and I had received our second vaccine inoculation, I read 80 books—more than in any year I can remember.

            I read mostly for amusement, including a dozen P. G. Wodehouse books—Jeeves and Wooster, Ukridge, Blandings Castle, and Monty Bodkin books. The biggest chunk of my reading was mysteries, from the end of the nineteenth century up to J. K. Rowling’s first Cormoran Strike book and Derek Miller’s Norwegian by Night. There were a couple of Graham Greenes in there, and a few abstruse entries such as Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, by H. Bustos Domecq—a Jorge Luis Borges collaboration, and Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok’s The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. I read Martin Edwards’s The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, which sent me to many mysteries that were new to me. And I also read some true crime books: William Roughead’s Classic Crimes and Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City.

            I read some good fiction—Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and Louis de Bernieres’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin—and revisited some, including Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat, four Aldous Huxley novels, and my third reading of Death Comes for the Archbishop. A couple of take-me-back-to-Sicily books by Leonardo Sciascia. Some Shakespeare plays.

            I read two books about maps: Jerry Brotton’s A History of the World in Twelve Maps and Mark Monmonier’s How to Lie with Maps. One autobiography—Malcolm X—and one autobiographical/fantasy, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.

            The nonfiction included a fascinating book on The Sarpedon Krater by Nigel Spivey, which combines grave-robbing and art-world intrigue with the tracing of visual motifs up and down the centuries. I also enjoyed Peter Murphy’s The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem, which traces Wyatt’s ”They Flee from Me” from its original manuscript form, through changes made by friends who copied it, through other changes made by editors, to the final, sensible return to what Wyatt actually wrote. What we also get in Murphy is a history of the beginnings of English Literature as a subject of study, and a condensed look at the move from scholarship to criticism in the school subject of English Literature in the twentieth century. Another book I found engrossing, though dense, was Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life, a look back at a pervasive prejudice in American religion, politics, education, and popular culture. One of these nonfiction books was in manuscript, my son Matt’s The Silence of the Miskito Prince; you’ll be seeing it soon, I think, on the University of Minnesota’s offerings in Early American Studies.

            One curious thing about my reading during that long Covid year was the number of books I began and stopped reading after thirty, fifty, or a hundred pages. These included mysteries such as Peter Lovesey’s Wobble to Death (my tolerance for details about Victorian walking races might have been sustained for five or six pages, but not the first forty), The Benson Murder Case (just dull), and Tracks in the Snow, an Edwardian detective novel. I read a big sticky chunk of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Manservant and Maidservant before I grew tired of her method of unrelieved dialogue to tell a story that didn’t seem to have much point. And I also got tired of Chekhov’s buffoon of a narrator in The Shooting Party after thirty or forty pages, but I will surely revisit this one, perhaps in another translation, perhaps via audiobook. I couldn’t get very far in one of Elizabeth Peters’s mysteries about her Victorian archaeologist Amelia Peabody; Peters’s idea that late Victorian discourse consisted of unrelieved clichés makes for unrelieved tedium. The pandemic gave me lots of time, but also left me impatient with less than really entertaining books.

            Sometimes my truncated reading is more than irritation that a book is not better. I got thirty or forty pages into Younghill Kang’s East Goes West and probably not so far into Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, although these are books I will probably take up again. Because I am an immersive reader rather than a resistant one, it sometimes takes me more than one try at a book to surrender to its world for the whole experience.

            When I finish a couple of books at nearly the same time, I sometimes cast about for the next thing to read, and at such times I often consult others’ recommendations, such as Martin Edwards’s that I mentioned above. I had read somewhere that Graham Greene, when he worked as an editor for Eyre and Spottiswoode, proposed a series of neglected books for publication as The Century Library and managed to publish fifteen of his proposed titles. One of the suggested titles that didn’t make it was John Meade Falkner’s The Nebuly Coat, from 1903. I found it free on Kindle and an audio version on LibriVox, which is also a free service. I spent a very enjoyable several days reading and listening to alternate chapters, with frequent belly laughs. It’s about an architect who goes to a village church to do some restoration, and the people he encounters, including the church organist, who imagines he’s being followed by a man with a hammer who wants to bludgeon him. There is also the local nobility in the form of Lord Blandamer, a mysterious peer whose title may be as unsteady as parts of the church, where his coat of arms, the “nebuly” coat of the title, adorns the stained glass windows (the “barry nebuly, argent and vert” are bars of silver and green that have a stylized likeness to clouds, or nebulae). The church characters are worthy of Trollope, and the others are depicted with Dickensian enthusiasm. There is also a mystery, enough about church music and architecture to interest without being tedious, and a pretty girl named Anastasia, whose lineage might be more than it seems, though she’s not a Romanoff. The Nebuly Coat was a great find, and I will be back to sample other titles from Greene’s The Century Library.