Leithauser's Reconciliations

...For instance, "Between Leaps," a poem about a frog similar to the opening scene of this book, appears in Hundreds of Fireflies...

...To recapture his own romantic fantasy...

...snapping instead, And he hit the ground, and tumbled down a hole...

...Feeling in that moment so rich a press Of feeling, perhaps no other touch (Or maybe one?—one only?—the one to come Four decades on...

...But by his 1990 volume of poetry, The Mail from Anywhere, Leithauser began to add brief character sketches, often of long dead relatives from the 19th century, to his still lifes...

...LEITHAUSER has happily resolved the problem of making a unity between verse and fiction...

...His slide into nostalgia is broken when Schrock has a stroke at the dinner table one night, his twitching death reminiscent of an insect's...

...He returns to Indiana, permanently crippled...

...The book is definitely a page-turner...

...Back in Indiana, the broken scientist certainly considers himself a failure: In time he came to see his life As borne by a pair of wings unequal to the weight Of all his dreams...

...Not so long ago, "serious" modernist poets and critics dismissed epic verses like Stephen Vincent Benét's once-popular John Brown's Body as antithetical to "true" poetry...

...Now, in Darlington's Fall: A Novel in Verse (Knopf, 320 pp., $25.00), Leithauser merges his skills...

...What was in store For such a boy...

...A poem," Archibald MacLeish declared, "should not mean but be...

...The loss shocks Russ into recognizing how much the professor meant to him, and how unfair his prudish judgments of the old man were...

...Darlington may have failed to become a major scientist, but in the end he manages to "make the final unity" of spirit and matter in love and is a happy man...

...She too has been damaged, and is not the model of purity he first imagined...

...Merwin reach out to a broad readership with their own verse novels...

...Slipping, branches that might have held him...

...He accused Russ of "schoolboy sentimentality...

...Fueled by Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode" and his own fixations, he has grandiose visions of the adventure: He'll push farther into the wild: New hills, new islands, chase the stars to even Odder constellations, new configurations of palpi And proboscis, thorax and valvae...

...You need A sort of courage, sometimes, to reject reality...

...Even Brad Leithauser's superior imagination cannot resolve this paradox—between our smallness in the scheme of things and the transcendence of our spirit—and answer the questions it raises about the meaning of existence...

...based on a principle of classification that is later disproved, it nevertheless remains an influence for sometime...

...Sentimental...

...Here, though, the jewel-like frog, gleaming on the edge of the pond, is associated in Russel's unconscious with the one remnant of his mother: a jewelry case that he and his father visit surreptitiously (but never together), trying to evoke her presence...

...the author's artful plotting holds the reader's curiosity...

...The period details are wonderfully convincing, particularly regarding intellectual trends...

...If the people are fabricated, I'd like to think the insects are genuine...

...It is the Romantic William Wordsworth's treat ment of the soul—"as of a plant,/ An 'exotic,' brought from some faraway land"—that most stimulates Darlington, reminding him of his pure and ethereal butterflies...

...He fell...

...He commissions a memorial to his father, the John Darlington Hall of the Natural Sciences, painted with murals of prehistoric life by a pupil of the great Charles Knight (whose work still enlivens New York's Museum of Natural History...

...It seemed to please Schrock when one of those foul invaders Broke from a butterfly's egg...

...Of being "soft on the pretty ones" while turning A blind eye to those others, the dark raiders— The ichneumon wasp, the flies—that hide their seed Within a host's eggs...

...Or, strictly speaking, parasitoids, since in most Cases in the insect world, guest kills host...

...In fact, the very natural force that drives us makes us believe, despite ourselves, in our own uniqueness, so that we may struggle to survive...

...But the old enchanter is not about to let his pupil go so easily, and at the last moment somehow lures him into staying at "Old U"—first as an undergraduate, then as a professor...

...Darlington increasingly mourns his youthful fantasies, indulging in the popular music of Cole Porter's "Let's Fall in Love...

...That is the greatest attempt that ever failed...

...Darlington's Fall is a philosophical novel about the way individuals reconcile their dreams with the vicissitudes of living in a universe where they are not pampered darlings—the focal points of creation—but tiny cells in a vast, randomly developing organism, indifferent to the fate of its components...

...we know Leithauser has written about ancestors previously...

...The whole of his life has guided him to this lost Island that nobody he knows knows...The child Is father of the man, who reaches his final instar Only in the jungle, far from everyone, far From evetything but the eyes of heaven, Where he molts a final time, into manhood at last...

...Darlington's misunderstanding of evolutionary natural selection as a kind of genetic and ethical progress mirrors the 19th- and early 20thcentury optimism that scientific advances and technology could overcome all obstacles we face...

...On his way to Malay a in 1912, Darlington surveys the Micronesian island of Ponape, a mere two years before it would become a German battlefield...

...The author has long been enchanted by natural science, and it remains a fertile source of his poetic reflections...

...The final passage, by Robert Frost, may well express Leithauser's own feelings: "Greatest of all attempts to say one thing in terms of another is the philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms of matter, to make the final unity...

...There he falls, while in pursuit of a butterfly, and breaks his back...

...His ex-wife is now in an institution after several more failed marriages (insanity turns out to be the family secret...

...or of studying trailblazing scientists and explorers...

...Dar lington resolves to make the expedition he has dreamed of since childhood—to the jungles of Malaya, where undiscovered butterflies still lurk...

...Oh, every cell in his body understands What he himself cannot begin to guess: This instant lasts forever, there are some Encounters that configure your soul...

...Life in small Midwestern towns, especially in the past, is another recurring motif...

...Who could say what fabulous form this Omnivorous caterpillar of a child would take By the final metamorphosis...

...His name, Brad, and certain details—such as the date of his graduation from Harvard—tempt us to suspect that Darlington's Fall is really a novelized biography...

...Biographical or not, the new novel is a compendium of Leithauser's poetic and fictive preoccupations...

...Science reveals our insignificance, and yet, as Leithauser acknowledges, we are programmed to resist that knowledge in molding our own destinies...

...That episode introduces the hero's obsession with the natural sciences—an attraction that distracts him from the death of his mother and the grief of his bereaved father, a wealthy undertaker...

...it also causes us to feel transfigured by love, so that we propagate and nurture our own kind...

...Alas, as with many a child prodigy, maturity brings disappointment, starting with an unsuitable marriage to a belle from St...

...Where another man might turn to drink, philandering or work, this one takes consolation in reading poetry, "that meted, paced-off plot/ Where nothing enters save by invitation...

...Darlington's Fall starts with three epigraphs suggesting the poet's choice of themes...

...Through a rib cage opened like a tomb...

...But an Author's Note assures the reader that "all the characters within these pages—including the narrator—are fictions," although the writer has "tried to get the science right...

...Shortly before that catastrophe, the reader is intraduced to the hitherto anonymous narrator, gradually revealed to be the hero's great-great-nephew...

...But his marriage is over, and he feels trapped forever: by his unremitting physical pain, by the tortures of celibacy, by the provincial boundaries of his circumscribed life...

...The first, by Wordsworth, links the impulses of science and poetry...

...But the pleasure he provides in the attempt is akin to the delight of watching a pupa split and seeing its butterfly emerge into the light of day...

...This gargoyle of an Austrian immigrant, whose face was kicked in by a horse, is a noted entomologist...

...The times looked auspicious for Leithauser to try his accomplished hand at the genre...

...It is 1898, after all, when science seems an exciting new religion...

...Leithauser captures the presumptions and prejudices of the day: unselfconscious racism, an abiding concern about "moral" failures like alcoholism (or indeed madness...

...In the beginning, the father has hesitations about his son's infatuation with insects, but he too is caught up in the era's deification of scientists: Leeuwenhoek, Darwin...

...What could be more ridiculous, they asked, than returning to the days when schoolteachers assigned Hiawatha and Evangeline, or shorter narrative poems like "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" and "Barbara Frietchie," to help animate American history...

...Somersaulting over buried family lives...

...Schrock had the expertise, he had the tools, He was the troll who knew the path Into the mountain's core where the jewels Of the world are plucked from a fiery bath...

...Every night he dines with Schrock, now a gluttonous monster who cruelly reminds his former student of those disgusting aspects of life that Darlington tries to avoid: He wanted Russ' work to follow where His own was headed more and more: The study of lepidopteran parasites...

...The townspeople note a connection between the father's profession and the child's urge to preserve and classify specimens...

...Eventually, Rüssel finds a butterfly he cannot identify, so his father takes him to his alma mater, a nearby small-town university, and introduces him to Professor Emst Schrock...

...ever will thrill him quite so much...

...of seeing paintings that re-create prehistoric scenes from a world we never saw...

...Initially his verse collections—Hundreds of Fireflies (1982) and Cats of the Temple (1986)—featured lyric, unpeopled vignettes from nature...

...Butterflies, say...

...Recent decades have seen such arbiters of taste as Robert Lowell, James Merrill and WS...

...Having spent his childhood under Schrock's tutelage, Darlington plans to head East for college—a common aspiration of Midwestemers...

...First air, then leaves...

...Meanwhile, novels like The Friends of Freeland (1997) and A Few Corrections (2001) enhanced their plots with evocative touches that revealed a poet's sensibility...

...Even Darlington's idealistic desire to pursue a subject unsullied by decay echoes Leithauser's persistently transcendent view of life...

...Yet after all, the thrust of the life force is ultimately toward mating and, for social animals like humans, companionship...

...Darlington's Fall begins in 1895, with the seven-year-old Rüssel Darlington in bounding pursuit of a frog near his Indiana home...

...This epiphany does not result in Darlington's realizing his ambitions of discovery, but it does at least lead to personal fulfillment in the winning of Marja...

...The second, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, speaks of Mother Nature's appalling side: "She tells us that God is disease, murder and rapine...

...Named for the naturalist Alfred Rüssel Wallace, he dreams of exploration in exotic places...

...Leithauser evokes the romance some children find in a subject that promises a better understanding of the world around them: Schrock had the magic, he had the microscope, He was the genie who could float you down Until you stood, as on a flying carpet, upon The tapestried dust of a butterfly's wing...

...Two story/poems, Vikram Seth's Tlie Golden Gate and Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, were bestsellers...

...He also writes a textbook, Life's Kingdoms...

...The summer morning when his little hands Clamped on the creature and held it whole...

...Louis who becomes bored with the inbred college social life...

...We are again reminded of the book's opening epigraphs, where poetry strives against impossible odds "to make the final unity" between irreconcilables...

...On Poetry Leithauser's Reconciliations By Phoebe Pettingell In the 20 years since he published his first book, Brad Leithauser has written novels as well as poetry, and been equally successful at these rather different forms...

...Maybe so, But a better alternative, surely, than learning To relish such infernal ingenuities—oh...

...Temperamentally inclined to avoid the unpleasant, he has chosen lepidopterology because these winged creatures appear untainted by the ugliness and evil that elsewhere pervade the web of life...

...Towns, taxonomies, down, the scattered wrecks Of outsize extinctions, and reached the salt shores of Hell, And kept falling...

...In the arts as in dress or decor, however, fashions are always changing...

...This sounds like the kind of reverie that precedes disaster, and it is...

...Hypercritical, with a sadistic streak, he will nonetheless shape Rüssel Darlington's education from now on...

...Pasteur...

...Russ nurses a hopeless crush on the teenage Marja Szumski, daughter of his Polish housekeeper, though he knows she must soon move on to her own life...

...Ironically, in several respects the years after his accident are marked by Darlington's most important achievements...

...By age 10, the boy has focused his love on butterflies, especially those from remote parts of the world...

...Or a sweet girl, barely in her teens...

...He saved his narrative skills for increasingly effective fictions like Equal Distance (1985), an account of a Westerner's life in Japan...

...He understands its enthusiasms as well: the heady exhilaration of reading Jules Verne, or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World...

...The Odd Last Thing She Did (1998) branched out into full-blown narrative poems, in which his exquisite, but sometimes static, observations of detail came alive because they were intrinsic to the story...

...Above all, Darlington intended to cling To the quaint notion that our Universe Admits a few objects without flaw or stain...

...He begins to view the Austrian as an embodiment of the life force, with his gargantuan appetites and relish for the less attractive features of the world...

...Those children not hoping to discover an unnamed fossil or a new species of fauna fantasize about emulating the great engineers, whose skyscrapers were starting to define city skylines, or inventors like Thomas Alva Edison, whose creations were seen as almost godlike...