Topical Guide 148
Mark Dorset
Flattery
I went to the hall and picked up the phone. “Hello,” I said.
“Oh, hello, Mr. Leroy,” said Clarissa. “I wanted to speak to Peter.”
“This is Peter,” I said.
“My goodness!” said Clarissa. “I didn’t recognize your voice. You sound so grown-up on the phone. Say something else.”
“Uh—what should I say?”
“That’s amazing!” she declared. “You sound so strong and firm. Of course, that’s the way you sounded this afternoon, when you were on the stage. I was really impressed. I think everybody else was, too.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said. She delivered the words with lots of air, making herself sound out of breath, as if she’d been running. …
“I feel as if I haven’t seen you for days,” she said. “I miss your smile. You have that cute little dimple.”
“I do?” I said. I tried to drag the phone over to the hall mirror.Little Follies, “The Girl with the White Fur Muff”
Flatterers were damned to the eighth circle of Dante’s vision of Hell, where they were “smothered in a filth that out of human privies seemed to flow”:
We were already where the narrow path
Crosses athwart the second dike, and forms
Of that a buttress for another arch.
Thence we heard people, who are making moan
In the next Bolgia, snorting with their muzzles,
And with their palms beating upon themselves
The margins were incrusted with a mould
By exhalation from below, that sticks there,
And with the eyes and nostrils wages war.
The bottom is so deep, no place suffices
To give us sight of it, without ascending
The arch’s back, where most the crag impends.
Thither we came, and thence down in the moat
I saw a people smothered in a filth
That out of human privies seemed to flow;
And whilst below there with mine eye I search,
I saw one with his head so foul with ordure,
It was not clear if he were clerk or layman.
He screamed to me: “Wherefore art thou so eager
To look at me more than the other foul ones?”
And I to him: “Because, if I remember,
I have already seen thee with dry hair,
And thou’rt Alessio Interminei of Lucca;
Therefore I eye thee more than all the others.”
And he thereon, belabouring his pumpkin:
“The flatteries have submerged me here below,
Wherewith my tongue was never surfeited.”Dante, Divine Comedy, “Inferno,” Canto 18, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Do not let any lionizers stampede you. Hide and write and study and think. I know what factions do. Beware of them. I know what flatterers do. Beware of them. I know what lionizers do. Beware of them.
Vachel Lindsay to Langston Hughes in a letter dated December 6, 1925, after Lindsay had read several poems that Hughes passed to him at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC, when Lindsay came to give a reading and Hughes was working as a busboy there. (From Hughes’s autobiography, The Big Sea.)
[more to come on Thursday, December 9, 2021]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.