What I Did Last Summer: an abecedarian post

The Castellans of 2010

So rapidly and so vastly has the empire of WiFi expanded throughout southern Europe since my last trip through those parts that, had I taken my computer with me, I probably could after all have scraped together blogs for the two Wednesdays past. But then I would have been worrying about the strength of the signal when I should have been savoring my cogote or lazily luxuriating in the birdsong of a soft Tuscan dawn, while you would have gained nothing more than a spiritless travelogue. Albertanus of Brescia in the thirteenth century came up with one of the all-time great book titles: De arte loquendi et tacendi. I translate that roughly as “When to Write Blogs and When to Shut Up.”

We now re-enter the realm of loquendi; and indeed this will be an unusually long post, though divided like the old menus in Chinese restaurants into the options of a Column A , a Column B, and a Column C. Column A is the travelogue; Column B is a brief account of the Princeton Dante Reunion at the Castello; Column C is a yet briefer essay on medieval Christian humanism. You may take your pick, mix and match, or choose to fast. Only the indefatigable can aspire to discover the alleged connection between them. And of course even A, B, and C cannot cover all that cries out to be included, such as, for example, (D), the doctorating of my son Luke, which took place in Philadelphia while his parents were lushing it up in a tapas bar in Zaragossa. (So for "My Son The Doctor", see "My Brother the Doctor"). Our older works of literature did not, of course, deploy themselves in “columns”. They were divided into stanzas, strophes, chapters, tituli, cantos, books, partes, among numerous other subdivisions, the most appropriate of which in the present circumstances is the fitt. So…

A, or FITT primo. Meanwhile, in old Castile, after brief anxieties that left me with the resolve to buy an i-Phone, I met up with my friend and companion (the “other John” [Meyer]) near Madrid, and we set off on a fine-tuned schedule to meet our peregrine spouses, who, after two weeks and roughly two hundred and fifty miles of marching, were to be found sipping white wine on the town square of Sahagún, a little east of Leon. Sahagún has many claims to interest and at least one to fame. It is the birthplace of Bernardino de Sahagún, O.F.M., the great missionary-anthropologist to whom we owe such knowledge as we have of the old Indian cultures of the Valley of Mexico.

But we had to get on to Italy and had no time to tarry, nor do I now. It was on to Zaragossa, with its cathedral so big and so baroque that it makes me gulp even thinking about it. Most of the next day was spent in fabulous Barcelona. Susan Saltrick (the other spouse, camarade de route extraordinaire) led us on a tour of the amazing Romanesque chapels reborn in the Catalan Museum atop Montjuic. We would have done many more fun things in Barcelona had it not been for the very tedious business of finding the wharf from which the Livorno ferry departs, guarding our possessions in its lockerless departure lounge, and then waiting endlessly for the retarded departure of the vessel.

A square of his own: bloguiste, apparently about to be shot by Falangists in Barcelona

I say no more. Simply strike from your traveler’s Book of Life the outfit called the Grimaldi Line, though it did eventually bring us alive to Livorno, the port of Tuscany, and the old Leghorn of the Romantic poets and Lord Nelson.

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B, or FITT secundo.

The seminar in session, bloguiste's toe on left

The maestro in preparation, or a place in the sun

The biennial Italian reunion of the Princeton Dante course, which just celebrated its tenth anniversary, is a tribute to the alto ingenio of Robert Hollander, the great scholar and famous teacher who taught Dante at Princeton for many years. Hollander’s published contributions to Dante studies are striking both in their quantity and in their quality. In recent years he and his wife Jean (herself a poet and teacher of poetry) completed their three-volume, copiously annotated edition and translation of the Divine Comedy to popular and scholarly applause. Among other things, Hollander pioneered the concept of the intellectually respectable reunion event at Princeton. He has happily inspired imitators, so that silly costumes, beer-swilling and really bad, loud rock bands are no longer the sole attractions of the annual pre-Commencement revelries. Some of the alumni dantisti, stimulated but unsatisfied by a single afternoon of flexing their maturing literary brain cells, came up with the idea of a week-long Dante event. Once they started thinking big, there was no stopping them. Princeton alumni tend to age as the years go by. The better news is that some of them tend to achieve financial stability as they do so. The biennial event would take place not in central Jersey but in central Tuscany. I believe that in commercial lingo that is called “trading up”.

Graduate students (even on occasion current undergraduates) and younger alumni have been able to participate in this deluxe event thanks to a generous scholarship program supervised by a certain alumnus eminence grise. Eminences grises by nature shun the limelight, and this one will go unnamed; but I will give one hint. He is a powerful Chicago lawyer and a community organizer. The community he organizes as the Castello is roughly thirty-strong, composed of alumni ranging in age from the class of 1955 to the class of 2010.

A Tuscan castle and its view

Even so only the intervention of the Spirito Santo herself can explain how they came up with the venue of the thirteenth-century castle of Santa Maria Novella in Marcialla, near Certaldo. Draw a straight line on your Rand McNally between Florence and Siena, and then bisect it at its dead center, and you’ll be very near the place. Medieval castles are hard to tear down but harder yet to keep up. This one has been being lightly restored for the last five or six hundred years, and it now has the mod cons of a cameo conference center but is still very, well, castellan. The food from the castle kitchen, generally served al fresco, tastes so good that it would be illegal in most Midwestern states.

The Castello reunion, however, is a hard-core intellectual event, especially for Professor Hollander, who lectured in seminar format for two and a half hours each day. In the afternoons preceptors (discussion leaders), of whom I was one, led hour-and-a-half discussion groups of roughly ten people each. Around the edges there were many animated individual conversations about such current topics as the Brunetto Latini, Count Ugolino, and the style of Lucan’s Pharsalia.

For the topic of Professor Hollander’s seminar this year was Dante’s Inferno with particular reference to the poet’s classical sources of inspiration. Anyone who has read even a little Dante knows that the Italian poet was greatly influenced by Virgil. Indeed the hyper-Christian Dante must have startled his contemporary readers by introducing Virgil as a principal character in his poem. “Virgil” is Dante’s guide through Hell—a remarkable but logical enough fact, since the most famous rendition of the underworld in Latin literature (in the sixth book of the Æneid) was Virgil’s invention. But how did Dante perceive the ancient pagan past, and how did his view of it inform his own poem?

The quality of the students at the Castello does credit to their master. The “student body” includes a college president, business tycoons, professional scholars at differing stages of career, passionate amateurs. We are constantly prattling about “diversity” in the academy, referring to a check-list of sociological categories. At the Castello I would extol a Pauline “diversity of gifts” that gives literary study a special zest. The fellowship is mellow and generous, the wit lively, the talent highly varied. On four of the six nights of our stay there were cultural events ranging from the sublime to the more sublime. In the latter category was an evening concert of bel canto arias by alumna Jennifer Borghi. Her old professors remember Ms. Borghi as a brilliant undergraduate and, yet more importantly, an ethically luminous young woman destined to leave our world a better place than she found it. Today she is known to her widening audiences as a professional mezzo-soprano of unusual strength, clarity, and precision. It would be a contravention of the articles of incorporation of this blog to offer a stock market tip, but I am willing to bet my penultimate pecunia that some of you will one day hear Ms. Borghi at the Metropolitan Opera. Perhaps she will even put the Dante seminar to good use. There are appropriate roles in Purcell’s Dido and Æneas and Riccardo Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini.

Ms. Jennifer Borghi, the diva of the dantisti

We left the Castello as one might leave Brigadoon, or better yet the Earthly Paradise, “with wandering steps and slow.”

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C, or FITT tertio et ultimo. Virgil is not the only pagan poet Dante uses, or even the only one he meets in Hell. Ovid, Horace, Lucan—they are all there. Furthermore Dante displays a surprising familiarity with wide swatches of classical mythology and history. Though almost everything touched by Dante’s genius is striking and original, the approbative exploitation of the pre-Christian past is actually commonplace among our older Christian writers and painters. Scholars have often been unnecessarily puzzled by their habit of mind, and a whole theory of the “pagan” Renaissance, now happily exploded, was once built upon their misapprehensions.

Dante was undoubtedly a Christian; he was no less undoubtedly a humanist. A Christian is a person who believes in the historical and supernatural theological propositions of the ancient creeds, especially as they refer to Jesus Christ; a humanist is a believer in the powers of human rationality and an admirer of the rational achievements of great human minds of the past. It is only in quite recent centuries that Christianity and humanism have come to be regarded as generally incompatible. That would have seemed a very odd notion indeed to Bede or Robert de Sorbon or Erasmus or Duke Humphrey or John Milton or the founders of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and several dozen other of the most important colleges and universities of our own land.

I am tempted to this fitful excursus partly in response to the stimulation of the Dante seminar just described, but also for two other reasons. The first is that the little book I myself am now completing deals with an author, Luis de Camões, who exemplifies the characteristics of the old Christian humanism in such a flamboyant fashion. He was a Renaissance man in every sense—scholar, soldier, lover, luckless entrepreneur, shipwrecked exile, prisoner, explorer, world traveler, imperialist, crusader. He wrote what is in my mind the greatest of the Renaissance epics, the Lusiads, and a body of lyric poetry second to none among his contemporaries. His command of the text of Virgil is stupendous. It is obviously the result of deep study from printed texts, and makes Dante’s Virgilianism seem like what it probably was, the amateur enthusiasm of a lover of poetry. Though there is not much evidence that Camões was a good man, the evidence that he was a great one is overwhelming. His achievement was an achievement of “Christian humanism.”

The second circumstance is the recent receipt of a gift. My friend Marsha Dutton of the University of Ohio, a past president of the Guild of Scholars of the Episcopal Church, just sent me a copy of her new edition of Spiritual Friendship by Aelred of Rievaulx (in the translation of Lawrence Braceland, SJ). Aelred and his old monastery at Rievaulx in the West Riding of Yorkshire played a major role in my becoming a medievalist. The story is perhaps worth a little essay of its own one day. For the moment I want to say only a word about Spiritual Friendship, his loveliest book. It is a Latin dialogue closely modeled upon the De amicitia of Cicero—a book once routinely taught in American high schools. (Ah, the pity…) Aelred greatly admires the old pagan philosopher. I will go farther and say that Aelred loves Cicero. But he knows something that Cicero did not know, and he knows he knows. The actual dialogue begins thus. “You and I are here,” says Aelred to his imagined interlocutor Ivo, “and I hope that Christ is between us as a third.”

In his very moving and effective campaign President Obama appropriated a famous phrase of Martin Luther King: “the fierce urgency of now.” Though some nows are more urgent that others, they are all urgent enough. There may be here or there a Miniver Cheevy who might seek to escape altogether; but in general the urgency of now is enough to monopolize our attention. There is actually very little danger that we will be oblivious to the now. What worries me, as I think also it worried Dante, is the oblivion of the then. We are not the first human beings to live upon the earth, and to imagine that we are the most perfect to have done so is a folly beyond the hope for a cure. If that is what you believe, you will be lucky to go through life reinventing the wheel, though that would be a great improvement on our present cultural mission: the reinvention of the flat tire.

Hands across the Water

I am past the midpoint of my brief sojourn in Paris. The last week went by in a blur. Of such blurs there are several genres: the travel blur, the fun blur, and the work blur among them. I have to confess that this time it has been the work blur. I did have one gloriously fun day. A very old family friend, Christine Stansell—once a student, for many years a Princeton colleague, and now a hyper-eminence in the Department of History at the University of Chicago—made a brief stop. (Professor Stansell is, among other things, the mother of James Wilentz, a young art historian/aficionado/entrepreneur, whose website Old Masters/New Perspectives I have commended to you in the past.)

On one of the few really beautiful days of my stay here Chris and I took in the special Chopin exhibition at the Musée de la Vie Romantique. This delightfully demoninated institution was once home to George Sand—than whose vie it doesn’t get much more romantique. The special exhibition was actually rather thin, though it had gathered together a wide range of portraits of Chopin and other musical luminaries of the first half of the nineteenth century. But the permanent collection is fascinating, and it preserves wonderful artefacts from the decades of the 1830s and 1840s, surely two of the richest in French cultural history.

But mainly I have been single minded in working away at a book on Luis de Camões. I am at the tedious stage of revision and foot-note sleuthing. It’s rather a slog; I am pretty tired of my own ideas at this stage. There is a point in the writing of every book when its faults seem scarlet and its virtues, if they can be found at all, pale-wash pastels. But I have stuck to it, spending long days at the library of the Fondation Gulbenkian, the subject of one of last year’s posts. However, I have had my last day there, and for a somewhat ironical reason: the library will be closed for the rest of the week in celebration of the Portuguese national holiday: the dia de Camões!

The only exercise I have been getting is through walking home from the library—and to it, if I get off early enough to forego the number 82 bus. Two days ago I had a Matrix-like moment in which I realized I have been living, all unawares, within some weird kind of maritime allegory. You probably know that the object of my researches, Luis de Camões, is chiefly celebrated for his great epic poem about Portuguese maritime expansion: the Lusiads, a heroic presentation of Vasco de Gama’s passage to India at the end of the fifteenth century. I am not working on the Lusiads. I’m writing about his religious poetry. But you cannot read a page of Portuguese history without hearing the flapping of sails, the creak of deck planking, and the moaning of hawser rope.

Then the street signs started talking to me. I stepped out from the library in a new direction the other day in search of a bottle of fizzy water. I found myself here:

I have been living all this time on the avenue de Suffren, a fairly major artery and the division point between the seventh and fifteenth arrondissements. Only now did I stop to inquire as to just who Suffren was. Of course you know already: Pierre André de Suffren (1729-1788), the famous Povençal admiral after whom a French nuclear submarine is named.

a somewhat petrified Admiral Suffren

When I do take the bus, I get off at the rue de Lubeck, and then walk up it toward the library. The first street coming in from the left is the rue de l’amiral d’Estaing. That would be Admiral Charles Henri d’Estaing (1729-1794), the discoverer of Suffren and (always according to French sources) the terror of the British fleet.

"Showing how to Cut the Englishmens heads off"

Between them they considerably advanced the cause of the American revolution—a fact sweetened by topographic poetry, for if you deviate up Admiral d’Estaing’s street you run headlong into the Place des Etats-Unis with its corpulent memorial to Hands-Across-the-Water. Unfortunately, the intense demonstration of Franco-American friendship is now largely archaeological. More recent topographic tributes are likely to be rather different.

"Put 'er there, George," said the Marquis de Lafayette

"Take that, George," said the municipality of Saint-Denis

The next day, for variety, I took a different route, over the Bir-Hakim bridge and up through Trocadero. This was cheating a little bit, because I knew I would have to pass the Musée de la Marine, where my granddaughter Lulu and I spent some happy hours a few months ago. What I wasn’t expecting was the little side street off the right: the avenue de Camoens.

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Perhaps there is a sea voyage in my future? Let me take advantage of the economies of scale offered by electronic communication to remind my readers, both of them at once, that “Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche” is about to go into two-week estivation. On June 16 I hope to be rambling about Romanesque sites in Navarre and Catalonia, while on June 23 the plan is to be participating in a seminar on “Dante and His Classical Models,” taught by my own friend and classical model, Robert Hollander, in a Tuscan castle. The way I intend to get from Barcelona to Livorno is by a lengthy ferry crossing. I speak of hopes, plans, and intentions. Man proposes; God disposes. Two days ago I received the crushing news that Charles Crupi, one of my oldest and dearest friends from the Golden Age of our early professional life, has died in Albion, Michigan. Charles had very recently retired from a long teaching career at Albion College. He was in effect “Mr. Albion”—teacher, scholar, Shakespearean producer, Christian humanist, husband and family man, good citizen extraordinaire and, in brief, one of the finest people I have ever known. Requiescat in pace. I found this photograph on a Facebook page put together by students to honor their "legendary" (their word) professor at the time of his recent retirement.

CHARLES CRUPI (+ 6 June 2010, æt. 71)

Scholar Gypsy

Nil admirari prope res est una, Numici,
solaque quae possit facere et seruare beatum.
Horace, Epist. I, vi.

You and you alone bring out the gypsy in me.
The Gershwins, “Embraceable You”

Horace’s famous advice to his friend Numicius—Nil admirare, “Be astonished at nothing”—became as sacred scripture to generations of European sophisticates. The advice was of course merely an elegant and classical version of the usually whispered injunction of embarrassed mothers to their gawking offspring: don’t stare. Horace’s phrase was the actual motto of one of the most admirable scoundrels of world literature, Byron’s Don Juan. It was the proper attitude of the ultimate sophisticate, the terminal cosmopolitan, the man who had been everywhere, done everything, seen it all. A group of my undergraduate college friends in a Romantic poetry course—none of us had been very far, done very much, or seen even life’s previews, let alone the first reel—invented an imaginary companion, Neal Admirary, who epitomized the sophistication for which we aspired. I suppose it is not surprising that hicks feel the fear of being thought a hick with a particular acuteness.

Well, half a century later, after many decades of life as a wandering scholar, I’m still at the aspirational stage; for on my second day back in Paris I found myself gawking in the street right in front of our apartment. I would have thought that simply having an apartment in Paris ought to be enough to assuage Neal’s savage breast for at least a day or two—but, no. Having an apartment in Paris is by no means a sufficient guarantor of the Nil admirari spirit.

The neighborhood of the apartment, very near the Eiffel Tower, is I suppose more like the upper West than the upper East side, but it is still plenty “fashionable”. In the short half-block to the east there are two grocery stores, one a cadet outpost of a large chain, the other the more typical and ludicrously named local “SuperMarché” presided over by north Africans. Both of them have beautiful fruit and vegetable stalls on the sidewalks in front.

a local Paris fruit-stall

There are two reasons that the fruit displays in French shops look so scrumptious. The first is that the fruit is scrumptious. Retarded French agriculture is years behind America in the race for the tasteless apple and the sawdust orange. The second is that the shopkeepers invigilate their wares ferociously, immediately discarding any plum, pear, apricot, or kumquat may that betrays the slightest blot, crease, wrinkle, or inappropriate softness. The rejects go into a kind of poubelle shopping cart, and thence into the large green and yellow garbage bins at street-side.

garbage can belonging to local Paris fruit stall

Early yesterday evening as I returned from a long day at the library, there were six gypsies, five women and a male teen, ransacking these garbage cans. All the women had the little, wheeled, grocery-carriers popular with French housewives. They had, in addition, several suitcases of various sizes. The young man had some kind of homemade pushcart. These they were cramming with discarded fruit and vegetables. Their attitude was utterly lacking in anything hurried, furtive, or embarrassed. They treated the well-dressed pedestrians on the sidewalk as minor nuinces to be tolerated in a spirt of noblesse oblige. This was not the pitiable dumpster-diving of a New York down-and-out. Though they seemed in fact to take everything, they still examined each piece with the leisurely expertise of Parisian shoppers. Neither the store clerks nor the numerous passersby took the slightest notice. Nil admirari. I was the only one gawking. Still, this was surely an “admirable” sight to come upon in a middle-class neighborhood of a European capital?

It is now politically incorrect to speak of “gypsies,” the authorized term being some form of “Roma people.” Certainly gypsies have been among the groups facing discrimination, and with Hitler attempted annihilation. But the weak foundation of political correctness is often easily undermined by having read a book or two. One of the favorites of my childhood was George Borrow’s Romany Rye, somewhat dated in style, but eternal in its interest. (A “romany rye” was a kind of fellow traveler of gypsidom, a non-gypsy who knew gypsy lingo and ways, as Borrow certainly did.)

Jan Yoors, scholar gypsy and gypsy scholar

Its modern equivalent is an extraordinary book by Jan Yoors, The Gypsies. Yoors (1922-1977) was a Flemish-American artist and photographer. As a young lad in the Low Countries, animated by a spirit of reckless adventure, he once ran off with a gypsy caravan. He soon enough returned home, and his avant-guard parents, instead of punishing him, agreed that on a regular basis he might spend a part of each year on the road with his gypsy friends. This he did throughout the decade of the 1930s. His account of his experiences is gripping. Several years ago I was lucky enough to find on Ebay a signed copy of his book, together with four or five of his own stunning, unpublished photographs. If Borrow and Jan Yoors can talk about gypsies, and they do, so can you or I.

Such anti-gypsy feeling as I have encountered in this neighborhood, and there is some, grows out of repeated episodes of annoyance experienced in the Champ de Mars. This is the pleasant and well populated rectangular park running between the Eiffel Tower and the École Militaire, a space sacred to joggers, nannies with children in strollers, pan-Mediterranean boules-players, hyper-hormonal adolescent lovers, Asian photographers of themselves with tower, African hawkers of tower gewgags, and gypsy beggars and ring-scammers. If you live around here you cross the park frequently, just in the course of your daily business. On approximately forty-three per cent of crossings you will be accosted by a gypsy ring-scammer.

In search of a useful photograph, never found, I happened upon another American who has written about the ring-scam at length; so if you want a whole bague-blague-blog, go here. Bref, the deal is this. As you are walking along you become vaguely aware of a person (usually male, but not always) walking toward you. Just as you cross, or are about to cross, this person suddenly reaches down to the ground and appears to pick up a gaudy gold ring. This is then shoved in your face. “Here’s your ring,” (s)he says, always, as in the miracle of Pentecost, in your own language. “You dropped it.” Since it is not your ring, and since you did not drop it, since it is indeed nearly impossible to imagine how one drops a ring while walking in a park, you are likely astonished by this person’s reluctance to take no for an answer. But if you are insistent enough your interlocutor will give up, transforming instantly from exotic gypsy ring-finder to common-or-garden variety gypsy beggar. Like most scams, this one depends upon the cooperation of the victim’s own dishonesty and cupidity. You are supposed to claim the “lost” ring with feigned expressions of gratitude. The “finder” will then suggest that an appropriate reward would speak even louder than your words. The ring being worth thirty-five centimes, anything above five euros will do. I have never seen this scam work, or heard of its working. It is impossible for me to believe that it has ever worked. But of course I have never heard of the “Nigerian banker” scam working either, though you know it must sometime, somewhere. People do not send out millions of emails or “find” three thousand rings a week just for their health.