• In which Christian interprets Mary interpreting Christian interpreting Coleridge interpreting his dream, as interpreted by John Livingston Lowes, with help from the Tao.

At the age of 64, in 1934 (why did those numbers have to rhyme? it spoils the whole opening), my great-grandfather Christian K. Binkley tried to figure it all out, by starting a notebook. In item 1 he explained that he intended to compare it with the notebooks he kept in his thirties, “with a view to estimate of growth and for the practical purpose of deciding upon the course of the remainder of my life.” Item 2 gives his theory of life, the universe, and everything. There’s no time for that here, as we’re on our way to item 3, to build out a character sketch of Christian as a poet and as a husband.

In item 3 he recounts a domestic incident. His feelings had been hurt by his wife Mary, whose insight into his character is, I’m guessing, spot on. The issue was the accuracy of a quotation from Coleridge; when Mary challenges his authority, he gets lost in defensive philology and can’t answer her. The item builds to his ideal of a human relationship: “the glad strengthening of thought by thought, the 1+1 that is more than 2”, a formula he uses in other writings about marriage. It is an ideal he feels Mary has violated.

Here’s the text; I’ve expanded his abbreviations and generally tidied it up.

3) I was a good deal upset all afternoon by a chance remark by Mary. Robin T had used the word ‘meander’; it suggested Kubla Khan to me and I repeated the lines ending “. . . And sank in tumult to a lifeless Ocean.” Only, I said, “Nine miles meandering” and immediately corrected myself to “five”, saying that Coleridge would not have written “nine”. I mentioned the sound and tried to show the difference. But Mary thought “nine” was better and said, “You know how easily you can convince yourself that what you want to have right is right,” – “right,” of course, meaning “true”. The hopelessness of helping her to see under those conditions shut me up. I said nothing about Coleridge’s other reasons for saying 5 instead of 9 – the sense of reality which would have been weakened by the cheap magic of “9” and the difference in emphasis, nor, what I suspect, although I have not yet corroborated it, that the source from which the picture probably transferred itself to the Kubla Khan, as given by Lowes, really gives nine, or at least some other number than five. But of course, if the Kubla Khan was composed in a dream and merely copied after Coleridge’s awakening, then probably the mere F-V .. m-d-ng .. w .. m-z – m-sh, instead of N-N (and the rest as before) would account for it. (BUT HOW COULD HE KEEP HIS DISCIPLINED PURPOSE OUT OF THE TRANSCRIPTION?)

But the point was not the difference between the F-V and N-N, but the attitude, as if truth could be changed by silencing the one who does not see eye to eye with you. I suppose the psycho-analysts would talk about inferiority complex and defense tactics sunk in, but that doesn’t make life a glad strengthening of thought by thought, the 1+1 that is more than 2.

(“Robin T” is probably Robin Taber, a boy who attended the Binkley Ranch School, son of Doctors Lauren and Louise Taber of San Francisco, who were listed as references for the school on the Binkleys’ advertisement.)

I’d like to unpack the cause of the argument. The passage Christian quoted from Coleridge’s Kubla Khan runs like this:

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.

So, Christian was right and Mary was wrong: Coleridge wrote “five”, not “nine”. Is Christian’s point clear to you, dear reader, that it couldn’t possibly be “Nine miles meandering with a mazy motion”? And that only the consonants matter in making this determination? My tongue and lips have to work a little harder to manage the transition from nine to miles than they do for five to miles, but I don’t have the phonetic chops to analyze this.

Christian’s confidence in his poet’s ear, though, was strong. This is clear in his notes for his translation of the Tao, where he determines how the Chinese text is to be transliterated based on his sense of what it should sound like. On one passage he notes in the margin:

These g’s are not English g’s – gh comes nearer. But I shall keep Karlgren’s transliteration throughout, then find something less barbarous to the English ear looking to the American eye.

On another:

ling (Simons) It rimes with [character] in the Shih Ching, which Karlgren’s dictionary makes t’i and his researches ting, which last I think hardly possible for a word with the function of ’s. The English “Burns’s” is bad enough, but the zing-tings and zwing[?]-tings would be worse – in Chinese, in which the musical element was so strongly at work. Therefore as possessive and as an accusative inclined to be rather light, I make it t’i.

Christian had a copy of Karlgren’s Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese (1922) and had consulted other works (“researches”) in which Karlgren reconstructed the sound system of Middle Chinese (see Wikipedia), in the libraries at Stanford and Berkeley.

It was obviously dangerous to get into an argument with Christian about how poetry should sound.

He refers to John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (1927). Lowes’ interest was in Coleridge’s retention of images from his reading: he wrote that “Coleridge’s memory was tenanted by throngs of visual images derived from books” (Lowes, p.357), and that “it was inevitable that flashes of association should dart in all directions, and that images endowed with the potentiality of merging should stream together and coalesce” (Lowes, p.359).¹ Now, Coleridge famously composed Kubla Khan in a dream, prompted by a passage in the book he had been reading when he dozed off. This book was Purchas His Pilgrimage, on which the opening of Kubla Khan, with the “stately pleasure dome” was clearly based (Lowes, p.358). But the meandering river comes from another work by John Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes:

a creek four or five feet depth of water, and near twenty yards over, which meanders six miles through green meadows, pouring its limpid waters into the great Lake George” (Lowes, p.368)

(The rest of the passage confirms that this is in fact Coleridge’s source). This passage confirms Christian’s intuition that Coleridge’s source had “some other number than five”, and therefore “five” comes from Coleridge’s poetic judgment: either as a conscious choice in changing it as he wrote out the poem from memory of the dream, or an unconscious choice in the dream itself. Either way the change was made for the sake of the sound. Christian’s reference to “the source from which the picture probably transferred itself to the Kubla Khan” perfectly captures Lowes’ conception of Coleridge’s process.

This leaves only the final parenthesis in capital letters: Christian cannot avoid questioning the authenticity of Coleridge’s gesture in making the change from “nine” to “five”: could he (Coleridge) keep to his true dream-begotten poetic intuition as he wrote out the poem, or would his conscious intention always interfere? Fresh from his failure to help Mary to perceive the truth, he reverts to the pattern of his poems of daily life on the Binkley ranch in his Works and Days: he tells us, his readers, what he wishes he had told someone else in a recent conversation. In his own writing he valued authenticity, and felt that he at least came close, but he always questioned it.

In the end, what shut Christian up was not Mary’s challenge to his poetic authority but her psychological insight into his claim to authority: “You know how easily you can convince yourself that what you want to have right is right”. He was right this time, for reasons too complicated for him to explain, but the ideal wife with whom he could be “the 1+1 that is more than 2” would not have chosen to “strengthen [his] thought with [her] thought” by pointing out a flaw in his methodology. I think she was right, and he should have listened.