Summer Reading - Geoff Dyer’s Human Condition

At the age of twenty, Geoff Dyer conceived the ambition of emulating William Hazlitt, a man who had loitered his life away doing things that he enjoyed and then writing essays about them. To judge from the contents of this new collection of essays and reviews, during the last quarter-century Dyer has succeeded pretty well in doing just that. The editor of an earlier, slimmer collection had urged him to organize his scattered pieces into some sort of theme, but Dyer, on the contrary, was keen to emphasize how diverse and unrelated they were.

“If there was one thing I was proud of in my literary non-career it was the way that I had written so many different kinds of books: to assemble a collection of articles would be further proof of just how wayward my interests were.”

I think it’s fair to say, on the basis of this stout collection, that Dyer’s position as a "late-twentieth-century-early-twenty-first-century man of letters” is secure. Among the subjects under review are D. H. Lawrence; photographer Joel Sternfeld; Rebecca West’s rambling travelogue about Yugoslavia, Black Lamb, Gray Falcon; Rilke and Rodin; jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s career; Albert Camus’s Algeria; the Polish journalist-raconteur Rysard Kapuscinski; the literature produced about the invasion of Iraq; and an assortment of personal pieces about comic books, book-collecting, being an only child, and other such effluvia. In one penetrating piece, Dyer examines the widely-reviewed book by W. S. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, in light of Austrian heavyweight Thomas Bernhard’s personal memoir of the period, showing that many of the things Sebald claims Germans never talked about after the war, Bernhard actually did talk and write about.

For the most part, however, Dyer approaches his subjects in an engaged yet light-hearted, almost conversational way. His own restless personality can be felt throughout, though he usually steers clear of the flippant asides that make his shorter travel pieces (not included in this volume) so funny.

Is Otherwise Known as the Human Condition destined to become a classic of world literature? Perhaps not. Then again, how many essayists and reviewers have been granted ingress into that pantheon since Montaigne invented the genre? How many of us read Hazlitt nowadays?

I just now lifted my Centenary edition of Hazlitt’s Collected Essays from the shelf (Nonesuch Press, 1930) and immediately notice that whereas Hazlitt’s subjects are of a general nature—“Why Distant Objects Please,” “On Hot and Cold”—Dyer’s are almost invariably about particular writers or works of art. For now I’ll take Dyer’s collection. And I’ve found it far more mature and engaging than Martin Amis’s The War Against Cliché (2001), for example. Dyer can’t quite match the vast erudition to be found in Anthony Burgess’s 600-page collection, But Do Blonds Prefer Gentlemen? (1986) Then again, who could? As Dyer remarks in another of his books: “That’s one of the things about traveling, one of the things you learn: many people in the world, even educated ones, don’t know much, and it doesn’t actually matter at all.”

Yet essayists need to know things. And Dyer knows his chosen subjects well—or well enough. When he doesn’t know something that seems important, he might simply say, “I forget.” Or “I should know that, but I don’t.” The approach is personal and candid, devoid of attempts to make definitive statements. Quite the contrary. In a recent interview he remarked, “I've always just been temperamentally disinclined from having this separation between ‘stuff you live with in your actual life’ and ‘stuff you study.’ ”

No doubt we’d learn more about European history and culture by reading Charles Rosen’s recently-published anthology, Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature, which has the same page-count as Dyer’s collection. But I suspect it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.

This juxtaposition of “old” culture and “lived” culture leads me on to a second comparison. In a small way, Dyer’s occasional writings might well be compared to Stendhal’s diaries. Like Stendhal, Dyer is a great enthusiast who enjoys a good party though he’s also prone to boredom, introspection, and love-affairs that sometimes take place largely inside his head. The observations are penetrating while the style occasionally teeters on the edge of “flighty.” A buoyant clarity keeps everything moving ahead. Perhaps some Charles Rosen of the future might write an essay about him?

In any case, Human Condition would be a perfect choice to take to the cabin or the beach. If you grow tired of reading about the Indian vocalist Ramamani, flip a few pages and we’re at a fashion show on the outskirts of Paris. What next?

Yellow-Billed Cuckoo, Minnesota-Style

I’ve seen a few cuckoos in my time. (What do they say: Takes one to know one?) The sightings have been so infrequent, however, that for the most part, I remember exactly where I saw each one.

• In the willows on the south side of the Luce Line, west of County 19.

• In the willows on the bank between the railroad tracks and the Mississippi at Reed’s Landing.

• On a branch above the little pond near the lower gate in Eloise Butler Wildflower Sanctuary.

• In a slough on the NW corner of Blueberry Lake in Webster County, Wisconsin.

• In a slough on the St. Croix near Oseola, Wisconsin, while canoeing with our nieces Liza and Sarah.

• In the underbrush by the Root River southwest of the open fields at Forestville State Park.

All of these were black-billed cuckoos, and all were perched.

Then, last spring, on the Natchez Trace, a few miles south of Jackson, Mississippi, I saw a yellow-billed cuckoo high up in a tree. I could clearly see its pearly-white breast and the double-row of white lozenge-shaped circles on its very long tail. “Oh, they have those birds down here!” I said to myself, a little joyously, presuming we’d see quite a few more in the course of our visit. But that was the only one we saw.

The cuckoo is a beautiful and exotic bird, and when I look off into swampy willows I often say to myself, “There could be a cuckoo down there,” fully aware that if there is, I probably won’t see the secretive creature.

But this morning, Hilary and I were birding with her folks at a county park on the Cannon River south of Miesville. It was mid-morning, the temperature was rising fast, but there was bird song everywhere.

A rowdy bunch was just putting their tubes into the river at the end of the road, a little ways downstream.

“Care to join us?” they shouted, with devil-may-care insouciance.

“Next time,” I shouted back.

Goldfinches and yellow warblers were zipping here and there, a red-bellied woodpecker was shrieking from the top of a dead tree. We picked up an indigo bunting, three rose-breasted grosbeaks in a merry group, phoebes, a red-eyed vireo. Then I saw something—a lithe, mid-sized bird—fly across the river. At first I thought it might have been a kestrel, though it wasn’t that bulky or determined in its flight. All at once it occurred to me—the thin frame, the very long tail—“That was a cuckoo.”

I had never seen a cuckoo in flight before. Wasn’t at all sure. It almost might have been a bird from the tropics, or an imaginary one from Green Mansions. It vanished into the foliage, but a minute later we heard its weird song again. It sounded to me like someone knocking two hollow coconuts together.

“I’m going to track him down,” I said.

“I think I saw him fly into those trees over there,” Hilary’s mother, Dorothy, said, pointing to a stand of mid-sized walnut trees at the edge of the forest.

I took a few steps forward across the grass, turned my attention in that direction, and began to scour the trees, slowly, branch by branch.

Then I saw it. Plain as day. White breast, yellow bill, huge eye. A very good sighting, side-on, unobstructed. Suddenly, as I watched, a second cuckoo appeared within my binoculars’ field of view and landed on top of the first one.

“I found them. Here they are. They’re mating!” I exclaimed. “See those two trees on the far side of the path. Bring your binoculars up through the foliage about 30 feet directly between them.”

Soon everyone had the bird in their field of view. Just then the second bird reappeared, landed on the back of the first once again, and fed it something. Then vanished once more. Wow!

We watched the first bird for a while, it occasionally flipped its tail upward almost to vertical. And I noted that though the bottom bill was bright yellow, the top bill was black. These are the kinds of details you look for, when you’re really not sure what you’re looking at.

But you also can’t help noticing how damned beautiful the thing is. One might almost say “demure.” A bird said to nest in Minnesota as far north as Mille Lacs, though you’ve never seen it before—at least not north of Jackson, Mississippi.

In the course of the day we saw thirty-seven bird species, ate lunch at The Tavern in Northfield (I had the duck), visited the huge Cambodian temple outside Hampton, and watched for half an hour as the Hampton Cardinals, already trailing 10-2, attempted to get a third out off the Miesville Mudhens. (Only later did I learn that the big draw of the day was that Hampton’s Joe Robinson—whoever that is—was letting people admire the new bling rims on his “pick-em-up” truck.)

But the sighting of the yellow-billed cuckoo—that made the day.

It might have made the summer.