The bloguiste in Intermission

Today is blog day, but it is also the day we fly to an as yet undisclosable destination for an event of great significance in the Fleming family. My aim now is to achieve a little pseudo-mystery that can be unveiled and reported on in detail next week, but I must do it in a jiffy since we soon leave for the airport. Under these circumstances I fall back upon the genre of the unsolicited book report. Every private library should have three or four books suitable for brief and random multi-tasking during calls of nature, shuttle-bus rides, theater intermissions, grocery checkouts, and the hideous waits in car-inspection queues. I grabbed one last night as we set off for the Richardson Auditorium to hear the Leipzig Quartet play Haydn, Webern, and Beethoven. It was André Blavier’s indispensable Les fous littéraires, or Literary Nut Cases. This is a huge bibliography, compiled with equal measures of affection, erudition, and irony, of all the genuinely certifiable books that have been written by Frenchmen over the years. I need hardly add that the number of such books is very large. We badly need such a monument of English authorial eccentricity. It would probably be even larger.

The Leipzig quartet was superb, and the intermission hardly less so. There is a passage in Tolstoy’s War and Peace that I must now ask you to call to mind, check out, or simply take my word for. In Book 9, chapter 19, Pierre Bezhukov—for vulgarians, he’s the one played by Henry Fonda--hatches the plot to assassinate Napoleon, now the master of Moscow. He has determined that Napoleon is the Antichrist because the French phrase l’Empereur Napoléon (subjected to Hebrew gematria learned at his local Masonic lodge) adds up to 666. But it only does this if you include an extra e, the e dropped by elision and represented by the apostrophe. The phrase le Empereur Napoléon might be bad French, but it’s great gematria! Likewise he discovered that the French cardinal number 42 (quarante-deux) renders the same result. And (three exclamation points!!!) Napoleon, born in 1769 is forty-two years old in 1812, if one elides the year in which Napoleon completed his forty-second year of life and the year during which, in popular parlance, he “was” forty-two years old.

It’s pretty obvious that old Pierre must have been consulting one or more of the fascinating French writers detailed in Blavier’s lengthy chapter on “Prophets, Visionaries, and Messiahs”—maybe even my favorite, the abbé J. W. Würtz, author of The Precursors of the Anti-Christ, or, The French Revolution Predicted by St. John the Evangelist and other anti-Napoleonic works.

The fifth edition of Würtz's book is in the open stack of Firestone Library

The abbé Würtz was a native of Germany, then, after the restoration of French Catholicism, the vicar of Saint-Nizier in Lyon. There had been a large population of aristocratic émigrés in Germany, and it is possible that Würtz had returned with some of them after the Revolution. There were quite a few non-native Roman Catholic clergy involved in the process of “rechristianization” in France, so that this possibility, though of course speculation, is quite plausible. It is likewise possible that Würtz had had some connection with Lyon before or even during the Revolution. If so he would have been familiar with the terrible destruction unleashed upon the town as a punishment for its counter-revolutionary activities. He was certainly aware that in their bloody revels some of the Lyon revolutionaries had shouted out “Vive l’enfer”, or “Long live Hell”, an antinomian blasphemy perfectly designed to outrage Würtz, who was clearly a reactionary in civil and an ultramontane in religious politics.

“We know in advance that this explanation will drive many people into a rage,” he writes, setting off to prove that the Corsican upstart was actually the Anti-Christ. “We should prefer to accommodate and spare them the shame of having prostituted the incense of their admiration on one of the most criminal beings who has ever lived. But when the power of the truth commands is not the time to stop.” Far from stopping, he moved on with a detailed analysis. Was it not obvious that the words Appolyon and Napoleon were virtually identical? How much clearer a hint could be demanded of the Holy Ghost? Appolyon means “the Exterminator,” and was not Napoleon the person in all of human history who most appropriately might claim the title? Who had exterminated more people than he? This was the man, the Angel of the Abyss, whom the philosophers had recognized as their king. Furthermore they had done so at a perfectly anti-Christian ceremony held nearly 1000 years to the hour from that in which Charlemagne had been acclaimed Holy Roman Emperor. (This was a typology that had hardly gone unnoticed by Napoleon and his followers who, however, had put upon it an altogether different interpretation).

Würtz had anticipated the fact of a furious reaction, but not the power of its results. For the average Frenchman Napoleon was a great national hero. For the higher Catholic clergy he was the restorer of religion after a godless Revolution and even for a few a potential candidate for sainthood! (One of the reasons that some Englishmen were willing to entertain the notion that the Emperor had been the Antichrist was precisely his re-establishment of Catholicism!) The intemperance of the priest’s attack seemed an insult to the civil state and a threat to a still tentative ecclesiastical hierarchy. Würtz was for a time banned from sacerdotal functions. But the conservative Catholic revival continued. His book went through multiple editions. And when he died in 1826 he had been fully reinstated in his ecclesiastical functions, if not in universal favor. You can learn a lot in a good intermission.

Würtz's ideas were still current in this book by Louis Cavens (1909)

Sensory Cascade: Progress or Change?

...the ever-whirling wheele of Change...

Some common phenomena almost universally experienced yet lack an identifying name. Everybody knows what déjà vu is, but what do you call that experience of searching for a word that is “on the tip of your tongue” but can apparently make it no farther than that? The experience with which I begin is one I know to be widely shared. You encounter a new word, a new idea, a new historical personage, a new medical condition, a new—whatever. You are sure you have never encountered it before. But all of a sudden the floodgates seem to open, and you are encountering it everywhere. This experience needs a name, and I invite my readers to make nominations. For the time being I’ll call it “sensory cascade”.

I awoke this morning with the vague intention of writing a blog about two aspects of progress. The first aspect, an abstract one, relates to the curious misuse of the word “progressive” (noun) in current political discourse. The second aspect, entirely concrete, or at least petrine, relates to the current state of the stone wall last mentioned on July 7th. I don’t ponder the linguistic history of the word “progress” very often. Hence I was somewhat astonished when I opened the editorial page of this morning’s NY Times to find an essay by one John McWhorter entitled “The Dreaded P-Word.” Definitely sensory cascade.

I won’t try to link the op ed piece, since that would force me, and you, to “register” with our national paper of record. Tastes differ, but I work my way through the Times editorial page very much in the spirit that I work through my morning laps, or might work through a session of head-butting a brick wall. The experience stimulates the adrenaline, and you feel much better when you stop doing it.

McWhorter’s essay is excellent, however. He is identified as a “contributing editor at City Journal”. This fact unleashed another sensory cascade, since until recently I had never heard of City Journal. But then out of the blue one of my most brilliant former students, now the journal’s managing editor, invited me to write a little piece for it. I actually got paid coin of the realm for dashing off a mini-blog. Since then references to the journal have been popping up everywhere.

Mr. McWhorter’s subject is the recent attempt of so-called “liberals” to rechristen themselves as so-called “progressives”. He is, I assume, a so-called "conservative." Naturally he has a political point, but he writes as a linguistic historian, and this is what gives charm to the essay. The vulgar understanding of the word “progress” begins with the assumption that change is in and of itself a good thing. This is a proposition dubious in the extreme. President Obama campaigned as “the candidate of change.” Not merely that, he was the candidate of “change you can believe in,” presumably the best kind. Change is dynamic and kinetic; change is hopping all over the place. Yet there is an aspect of all this that seems insufficiently considered. When the new president took the oath of office he promised to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” This is a commitment not to change but to an unwavering stasis. The Bill of Rights: the same old same old, since 1791.

Most of our ancestors regarded change, in the abstract, with something approaching horror. There are some fragmentary stanzas that we believe Spenser intended to incorporate into his Faerie Queene. They are usually called “The Mutabilitie Cantos,” and they begin thus:

What man that sees the ever-whirling wheele,

Of Change, the which all mortall things doth sway,

But that therby doth find, and plainly feele,

How MUTABILITY in them doth play

Her cruell sports to many mens decay?

That was the classical Western attitude to “change”.

One can make progress only with regard to fixed goals. If you are in Allentown PA you can make progress toward your goal of Keokuk IA, for instance. Progress toward fuzzy or ambiguous ends—“the greatest good for the greatest number,” for instance, or “affordable, quality health-care for all Americans”—is likely to be as slippery and uncertain as the ends themselves. That is, it is relatively simple to effect change. Achieving progress is something else altogether. I spent a good deal of the week moving a large number of heavy bricks from one pile to another some twenty-five yards away. I guess that is change I can believe in, and I now have a random brick pile that was once at point A and is now at point B. But you can definitely make progress when your goal is the completion of a stone wall, and this week I have been a progressive.

CHANGE

PROGRESS

Great Men, Great Books

Dante begins one of the cantos of the Inferno by congratulating the Florentines for achievements so remarkable as to gain for their city a great reputation through all of Hell. “Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche” apparently approaches such celebrity. I have just had my second electronic proposition to “monetize” it. Is monetize a word?

Commercial shilling is beneath the dignity of this blog, but I do allow two easements. I continue to try to drum up business for the non-profit Library of America. They publish beautiful editions of the literary patrimony of our nation, and no literate citizen of the Republic should be without at least a few of their volumes. And if there is anyone in the world still unaware of the American Book Exchange, let me aid in stamping out that fragment of culpable ignorance. Abebooks combines the best of capitalist competition with the comprehensive capacities of the Internet in the service of great reading. It is as it were the biggest, and I do mean awesomely big, second-hand bookshop in the world, and I do mean world.

Despite draconian downsizing, I still have quite a few books and inadequate space to store them. One result of the situation is that I sometimes cannot lay my hands on a book I know I own but lack the leisure to search for. Under these circumstances I have been known on occasion simply to buy another copy from Abebooks. Sometimes two copies, in case the second one should get lost as the first one did. Such was the circumstance last week when I could not find a copy of Leonard Bacon’s wonderful translation of the Lusiads of Luís de Camões (Hispanic Society of America, 1950). I did not realize at the time that my dilemma would lead me to the perfect Christmas gift for my son Rich. The force of this remark will be clearer if I tell you that Rich is (a) a world-class birder, and (b) an enthusiast for Antarctica.

Avoiding the numerous copies priced at fifty or sixty dollars apiece, I was able to pick up two exemplars of the hardcover edition for a total cost of $18.95 including postage. (Did I mention the advantages of capitalist competition?). By the time they arrived, I had found my missing copy, plus another paperback version; but better safe than sorry is what I always say. And excess sometimes pays off; one of my “new” copies is a gem.

Bacon wrote a poem each year as his "Christmas card": Christmas Greetings, 1952

It is a presentation copy from the translator, Leonard Bacon, to his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Cushman Murphy. Bacon (1887-1954) was a “minor” American poet of the period between the Wars, a person in whom considerable literary talent joined with cosmopolitan cultivation. He traveled widely in Europe, and lived for several years in Florence. He published many books of original poetry, but this medievalist first “met” him through his erudition. His mastery of the Romance tongues is exhibited in his translations of the Chanson de Roland, the Cantar del mio Cid, and (his masterpiece as translator) the Lusiads of Camões.

Robert Cushman Murphy (1887-1973)

The recipient of the gift, Robert Murphy (1887-1973), was among the greatest ornithologists America has yet produced. He was also a prolific and elegant writer whose learned works make important contributions to ornithological study and whose popular journal articles did much to foster interest in bird-watching, natural history, and conservation generally. His most famous feat came early, in 1912. In that year he sailed on the New Bedford whaler “Daisy” to the subantarctic, where he spent several months studying the unique bird-life. This experience is the subject of an engaging recent book—Eleanor Mathews’ Ambassador to the Penguins: A Naturalist's Year Aboard a Yankee Whaleship. It is also memorialized, in cameo, in the sea lion on Murphy’s bookplate, executed in line etching by John W. Jameson (d. 1939). You can see why my son Rich must have this treasure.

The word that comes to my mind in thinking about the giver, the gift, and the recipient is gentleman—a lexical endangered species in a world becoming ever more coarse and cynical. These two guys were obviously gentlemen. The phrasing of the Christmas inscription—“the Robert Murphys from their Friends the Leonard Bacons”—compounds its fustiness with an offense against peecee. But it bespeaks a real friendship, and Murphy pasted it onto the book’s fly-leaf, just as he pasted onto the back fly-leaf the accompanying letter, written on elegant paper, embossed with a laureated “B” and an address: The Acorns, Peace Dale, R. I.

May 22^nd, 1953

Dear Bob,

Your letters always please. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your observations on “anting” and kind remarks on the verses. This is a rich year for birds. I have seen, apart from Persian Armies of Robins, the Baltimore oriole, rose-breasted grosbeak, scarlet tanager (both sexes, the lady being the more aggressive) flickers, hairy woodpeckers, nuthatch, black and white warbler, chickadee wood thrush, hermit thrush, brown thrasher, goldfinches, and catbirds almost as numerous as the robins. Warblers and sparrows still remain too difficult for me to identify. But I notice that the English sparrow has become rarer than the chipping sparrow. The hordes of starlings have broken up for the mating season and they are only seen in two and threes. We have a grackle or two. All the birds listed were seen within fifty yards of the house. I wish I had your eyes, for I fancy I could then multiply my list by four or five. I don’t think many fly catchers have arrived.

I hope to be in N.Y. on the 27^th and 28^th. It would be fun to see you at the Club.

Meanwhile, our love as always to Grace and you.

Cordially yours,

Leonard Bacon

The final paragraph sent me to my current Century Club yearbook, where I was pretty sure what I would find. Leonard Bacon was a member from 1927 to 1954, Robert Cushman Murphy from 1923 until 1973.

Perils of Relaxation

Forget Colonel Mustard: Joan did it in the back yard with the hammock

I was a pretty laid-back, easy-going kind of a lad. My mother claimed I was “too serious,” but that was as they say “code,” meaning that I read a lot of books. Reading was a great form of relaxation, so much so indeed as to be preferable to most officially sanctioned “amusements”. For that reason, perhaps, a similar hypo-tension characterized my years of higher education, despite their ostensible rigors. But then finally, aged twenty-seven, I found myself in Madison WI with a wife, a job, a prospect of paternity, an unfinished book manuscript, a clicking tenure clock, rent payments, and a car that kept breaking down.

I felt stressed. I suffered praeternatural fatigue and insomnia. I experienced, or imagined, an irregular heart beat. This sent me to a doctor, who administered my first-ever EKG, a procedure I supposed as probably of similar magnitude to a liver transplant. His diagnosis was that there was nothing wrong with me, except that I need to exercise and to relax. It was winter. This was the great Midwestern Tundra. Opportunities for health-giving winter sports were abundant, and he named a few.

I invested in a pair of ice skates. They cost $29—no mean figure, given that my annual salary was $7500. I bundled up, went to frozen Lake Mendota, put on the skates, and started gliding. Forty-seven seconds later I fell, hard, breaking my left wrist. That was the first of many experiences with health-giving exercise—tennis, squash, running, working out on machines--that landed me in or near a hospital. It took me a few years to discover swimming laps. As far as I can determine swimming laps is as close to risk-free exercise and relaxation as it comes. Of course I could drown, or I could die of boredom; but I’ll just have to risk it.

Actually, I usually get quite a bit of relaxing exercise around the house and garden. One of my things is building stone walls, an occupation requiring a certain amount of brain as well as a certain amount of brawn. First you have to drive around various slag-heaps in central Jersey scoping out appropriate detritus schist. You wouldn’t believe the stuff you come upon in the wilds of New Jersey. Many of the individual stones weigh a hundred pounds or more, and you have to dig them out and schlep them to the pickup. In the course of building you probably move each one another four or five times. And you don’t even have to have a gym subscription.

section of wall "in progress"

The walls I build are at best pseudo-functional, but in my opinion they really look terrific. Something there is that really loves a wall. And if you are going to put women on a pedestal, as I tend to do, the pedestal is just as important as the women.

Lulu and Cora Fleming-Benite rampant

Well, last week saw some pretty heavy-duty wall-building. My number-two son Luke (I refer to C.L.O. Fleming, Ph.D., the linguistic anthropologist) is with us at the moment. He is generally up for some good, health-giving, relaxing fun, and he helped to put on the capstone (approximate weight: 470 pounds) of a section of our latest effort, a new perimeter for an out-of-control compost heap at present contained only by an ad hoc brick pile.

The relaxing fun also includes removing the bricks and the concrete blocks by wheel barrow to a new, tidy, remote location. As some of you will be aware, the weather has been hot in the northeast, and after two or three hours I was apparently showing signs of fatigue. My affect alarmed my spouse. “You know,” she said, “you never relax. You’re supposed to be retired. Why don’t you lie down in the hammock? You never lie down in the hammock.”

section of "finished" wall

It is not quite true that I never lie down in the hammock. I distinctly remember doing so on at least two occasions. But I do what I am told. I went over to the hammock and tried to lie in it. Unfortunately, I mismanaged the physics, maldistributing my not inconsiderable avoir-du-poids. The hammock went into a rapid spin and spilled me hard on my left side. Sharp, agonizing pain shot through the left side of my torso. I think I probably cracked a rib. Many bodily movements are now painful, conspicuously including those needed for the Australian crawl. So, forget swimming. Lifting even light stones is out of the question. Relaxation has struck again.

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Changing the subject entirely, I need to do a little literary pimping for my number-one son Rich (I refer to Richard A. Fleming, the travel writer and journalist). Readers of his remarkable Walking to Guantanimo will want to know about his latest excursion in the Antilles basin. It is an essay accompanying Leah Gordon’s amazing photographs of Kanaval—a kind of Haitian Mardi Gras on steroids. One of the other contributors is the famous novelist Madison Smartt Bell, author (among much else) of Freedom's Gate: A Brief Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, not to mention a 1979 senior thesis “directed” by Prof. John V. Fleming.