Exegi monumentum aere perennius

Even groggy and sleepless I was glad to land in Paris this morning, and for many reasons, beginning with the bright sunlight.  The air is still bracing, but there’s a hint of the vernal in the quality of light.  However, I doubt that my jet-lag would make compelling reading, so I shall have no actual Parisiana to report until next week.  The weather of our last few days in Princeton was unsettled: deep snow and deep freeze followed by a chill, soiled thaw and two days’ gusty wind that blew off the chimney lid and brought a tree down across the electric lines.  An early riser, I had a pre-dawn Ravenesque experience.

On Sunday in the dawning early, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my garage door.

There was, however, no mystery about it.  “Bird thou never wert,” said I to myself.  I knew it had to be Sir Thomas Bullen.  He always knocks creepily at the back door when rattled by the wind gusting into the carport.

We have lived in our nondescript modern house in our faculty ghetto for only a couple of decades.  For nearly as long we rented a huge and decadent Victorian mansion on University Place.  The vastness of the house, its obvious opulence of storage space, and its proximity to the campus and student dormitories encouraged graduating seniors of our acquaintance—usually within half an hour of discovering that there was no way they could fit all their possessions into the parental vehicle that had come to fetch them—to seek to borrow, always on a temporary basis, of course, a square yard or two of our available attic.  Naturally we never heard from any of these people again.

                           Student self-storage facility on University Place (artist: Annabelle Filer)

Mainly this didn’t matter, since what they had left behind—boxes of plastic plates, large, stuffed animals, broken lamps, jars of petrified peanut butter, and mildewed organic chemistry textbooks--would have embarrassed the organizer of a self-respecting yard sale in Lawton, Oklahoma.  But sometime in the late 1970s, one guy—and as I have long since forgotten who, I can but hope against hope he might read this post and reclaim his property—left Sir Thomas Bullen.

Sir Thomas is a very large (six feet by two feet, eight inches) brass rubbing, framed and glazed.  When our rooms were thirty feet long and twelve feet high he was barely tolerable as an indoor ornament.  But ever since we moved to our bungalow more than twenty years ago he has had to hang in the open air of our carport, near what we call our back door, gently rapping, rapping whenever a norther blows.  His longevity under these circumstances must be regarded as approaching the miraculous.

                                         The Fleming carport boasts (inter alia) a 1990 Toyota, a 1998 pendant We-no-nah, and a 1540s Bullen

Sir Thomas Bullen himself lies buried in St. Peter’s church in Hever, in Kent.  You may recognize him more easily under the alternate spelling favored by historians when writing of his more famous daughter, Anne Boleyn.  The good news, which Sir Thomas did not live to appreciate fully, is that he was the grandfather of Gloriana, the great Queen Elizabeth I.  The bad news is that he was Henry VIII’s son-in-law. 

He appears to have been a thorough-going swine.  In the DNB James Gairdner, author of the still magisterial Lollardy and the Reformation in England (4 vols., 1908) wrote thus of Bullen’s meteoric rise in the early 1530s: “There cannot be a doubt that not only his elevation to the peerage, but several earlier tokens of royal favor besides, were due to the fascination his daughter had begun to exert over the king.”  That is perhaps as close as an Edwardian gentleman-scholar is likely to come to the blunt truth that Sir Thomas had pimped out his daughter to great temporary advantage.  He behaved disgracefully in other ways too.  Thomas Wolsey’s downfall was probably sealed by Henry’s irrational fury at the cardinal’s failure to secure papal sanction for an annulment so that he could dump Catherine of Aragon.    When Wolsey died in disgrace, Bullen celebrated by commissioning for the amusement of his house guests an after-dinner pageant depicting the cardinal’s soul being carted off to hell.  That is what is known as “moderate Anglicanism”.  Mercifully for Sir Thomas, he died shortly before his daughter Anne was beheaded by the Calais hangman in May, 1539.

One of the many blessings of this life for which I give thanks at the weekly Eucharist is that my brother-in-law John Newman—who after all might have been  a used car salesman or a proctologist like other people’s brothers-in-law—is instead an eminent architectural historian, the general editor of the “Buildings of England” series, and the author of its two volumes on Kent.  So take my absolutely second-hand word for it that Bullen’s monument is “one of the finest C16 brasses anywhere.”  (vol. I, p. 309).  I shall go further.  I shall claim that this rubbing of the monument is the finest to be found hanging in any garage on three continents.

A signal feature of the Bullen/Boleyn brass is that it shows the defunctus in the full regalia of a knight of the Order of the Garter.  According to one expert there are only five “Garter” monuments in all Britain.  (Another claims six).  One can clearly read the Order’s famous motto: Honii soiit qui mal y pense (“Shame on hiim who thinks eviil about iit”).  Unless historians are simply pulling our leg, the it in the motto is King Edward III’s horsing around with the Duchess of Salisbury’s garter.  

Medieval alloys are not indestructible, and repeated abrasion, however respectful of motive, has degraded many old monuments.  For this reason brass rubbing is now rarely allowed in British churches.  You have to go to a “Brass Rubbing Centre” (BRC) where, for a fee, you can rub away to your heart’s desire at various fakes or replicas in durable modern epoxies.  Somehow the old thrill is gone.  Fortunately the antique market is, well, brazen in its spirit of innovation.  When a copy of something gets old enough, it takes on bragging rights of its own.  What we have hanging in our garage is indubitably a genuine secondary antique—a pre-BRC rubbing of one of the most important funerary monuments in the Isles.  These are highly collectible.  Any chance at all that the owner will read this and come collect it?

Old Friends, Old Rivers

Some famous books would be justified by the brilliance of their titles alone.  One such is Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River (1935).  Should you have to choose between the title and the book, I have to advise you to go for the former.  Though Wolfe’s life was brevis, his art was longa indeed, perhaps excessively longa.  Isaac Watts, who lived twice as long as Wolfe, was considerably more succinct in literary expression.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.

            This post will be about time and rivers, the utility of Christmas letter exchanges being merely a supporting theme.  But first I must effect for my readers a breathless introduction to two old friends.
 Oxford    

 

                                                                                         



                                                                                                     Montpelier

 


                                                                                                                                                                                         





                                    

BRIDGES TO AN ANCIENT FRIENDSHIP

Among the thirty-two American Rhodes Scholars who “went up” to Oxford in the autumn of 1958 was Charles Fish, a recent graduate of Northwestern, though elected through his home state of Vermont.  We were both from rural backgrounds, and both students of literature; and we fell into an easy friendly relationship, though we didn’t actually hang out much together in Oxford.   Chuck, as I then called him, was at Hertford College, with its wonderful faux-antique “Bridge of Sighs” spanning New College Lane.  I was at Jesus, in the Low Rent District.  We both submerged ourselves in Oxford life, but later resurfaced and reconnected in graduate school at Princeton.  Fish began there in the fall of 1961, and his reports were among the encouragements leading me to join the program the following year.  He had by then married Eleanor, and I spent my first night in Princeton under their roof.  Life later took us in different directions.

Now think of the late 1960s: Vietnam War, SDS, Back to the Earth, hippies, yippies, and the Democratic Convention of 1968.  The Flemings, including two small children, are spending their summers encamped in the deep backwoods of the Arkansas Ozarks, ostensibly building a log cabin above the wild Buffalo River.  They have joined together in an intensely bonded mini-commune with a small group of undergraduate friends, including a handsome and accomplished Floridian from the Class of 1970, one W. Dale Allen. This man loved the wilderness, worked like a dog, preached the green gospel; often of an evening he stood atop a crag in the wilderness playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” on a flute!

Once again life moves on, and we are out of touch for years at a time.  Fleming sinks ever deeper into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  The Fishes have removed to Vermont where Charles has been a professor, a dean, a house restorer, a real-estate manager, a writer.  Dale has returned to his native parts, but he has never abandoned his bliss or the public good.  He has, indeed, made his career working for the Trust for Public Land. 

Two streams of old friendship converged at Christmas in the annual exchange of news.  In a coincidence obviously worthy of more than a blog post, I discovered that these two long-lost friends—one at either end of the American East Coast—have been working to celebrate, preserve, or enhance our precious but threatened American rivers.

Author Charles Fish (in what I very much hope for my sake is an older photograph) with book jacket (in an indubitably quite recent  photograph)

 

I have just finished reading, with the keenest of pleasure, Charles Fish’s published account of his efforts: an elegant book entitled In the Land of the Wild Onion: Travels Along Vermont’s Winooski River (2006).  The Winooski flows through northwest Vermont, and mainly in a northwesterly direction, debouching into Lake Champlain in the general vicinity of the Burlington campus of the University of Vermont.  Not long before that it meanders through Fish’s boyhood home in the village of Essex Junction.  In its time the Winooski has performed the confused tasks assigned to so many of our rivers its size: it powered mills, watered cattle, flushed away the filth of riparian civilization, not least that of Montpelier, the state capital.  At some places it is as fresh as a fisherman’s daydream, at others boxed into concrete culverts like a storm sewer.  Fish covered every inch of it, apparently mastering along the way an impressive amount of history, woodcraft, hydrology, sociology, ichthyology, soil conservation theory, and industrial archaeology.  His true forte is human ecology—interacting with the people who go with the river, so to speak.  Fish is an expert in American literature, and his deft writing recalls some of our best naturalists—Thoreau, John Muir, or Wendell Berry, perhaps.  (Lest the high seriousness threaten to intimidate, I should add that his actual navigation sometimes recalls Jerome K. Jerome.)  A wise man once said: “All true patriotism is founded in the love of locality.”  I recommend this beautiful and patriotic book.

The Winooski may be new to you, but everybody knows about the Suwannee River of northern Florida.  That’s because Stephen Foster knew about it.  Well, actually, he knew the name, which, when mispronounced as a disyllable, served his metrical purposes. It rose in his imagination as the perfect emblem of the sentimentalized Southland, in which chattel slaves were picturesque accent details of his musical folklore, like the Italian peasants in Victorian watercolors of the Baths of Caracalla. The actual river rises in south Georgia, then meanders and loops through some Florida counties, through the state capital (Tallahassee), finally opting for a southwestward flow to the Gulf of Mexico.

There are many indicators of increasing antiquity, some more deniable than others.  It is impossible not to notice that my own former students are now retiring after long careers.  In his retirement Dale Allen hopes to return to a project long ago conceived but suspended midstream, as it were. The Suwannee’s banks have probably supported human communities for thousands of years, and certainly far back into the pre-Columbian period.  It has experienced many of the vicissitudes of American “development,” yet its surrounding wilderness has cushioned it from others.  The Suwannee is constantly refreshed by a large number of pristine springs—one of its most fascinating features.  And though long stretches of the river banks were heavily logged, much of the resultant “waste” came into the possession of the state and is now reforested with a formidable second growth.  It is in these riverside forests that Dale Allen intends to continue his life-long amateur project of finding, reclaiming, or refining wilderness hiking trails.  The Suwannee is already famous as one of the world’s great paddling rivers; Dale Allen wants to see it famous, too, for it walkability, one of the nation's memories of Paradise.   So, you see, it isn’t just pompous blather when I claim many former students are making the world a better place.

 

Recreational map of Florida's Suwannee River

Dale and his wife Karen are traveling in Panama at the moment, and he lacked the time or vanity to send me a current digital photograph.  I can offer you only this example of the platonic decay of forms, a shade of a shade.  You can see why the Philosopher-King would brook no artists in the Ideal Republic.  But Dale did tell me that his project was at least in part inspired by those long-ago summers on the unspoiled Buffalo, which, on March 1, 1972, became America’s first National River, including within its permanently preserved precincts Prince Fred’s Knob, the mountain on which we so mightily labored.

 Marion County, Arkansas, ca. 1970.  W. Dale Allen horsing around with the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor in United States History and the College at the University of Chicago (Photo credit: Matthew Brady)

         

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A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT.  Mr. Richard A. Fleming, alias They Say It’s a Cold World, currently birding his way through Viet Nam, has a particularly engaging cluster of recent blog posts at antarcticiana.blogspot.com.

Varietal Onions for Fun and Profit

VARIETIES OF ONIONS (from left to right): Oliverian, Satirical, Vidalian

You doubtless remember Mark Twain’s cynical definition of a literary classic: a book that everybody wants to have read but nobody wants to read.  Now and again when my writing seems stalled and my “official” reading is insufficiently compelling, I pick up something of that sort from a convenient shelf.  Yesterday it was the Modern Library Book of Famous Ghost Stories.  I am not a great ghost-story reader.  Once you have read The Turn of the Screw and maybe some Arthur Machen or Walter de la Mare there doesn’t seem to be much adult literature in the genre—though I’d welcome the advice of other readers.  However, the classic ghost tale I had been putting off for the last half century, known to be in this anthology, was the long story or perhaps novella “The Beckoning Fair One” (1911) by Oliver Onions.

It is indeed a great story, and worthy to be mentioned (as it often is) in the same sentence with James’s masterwork.  It is in some ways reminiscent also of the widely anthologized classic of early feminism: “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  I’ll say no more, as Onions and his story offer the occasion rather than the subject of this post.

We all have at least two vocabularies—an ear-vocabulary of words we learn from hearing and use in our speech and an eye-vocabulary, usually much larger, that we can understand in our reading.  In a literate society, the eyes have it.  Many novice readers pronounce the word quay as though it rhymed with say rather than see, and that is creeping into educated speech. Most people know the word for a pottery oven: a kiln.  But if you pronounce the final n, as most of us now do, you have allowed the eye to conquer the ear.  Oliver Onions (1873-1961) fell victim to this phenomenon.  His surname since time immemorial had been pronounced Oh-NIGH-unz in the language of speech, but most people knew him only from the eye-language of the printed page and thought it was UN-Yunz like, well, you know the famous southern writer of romantic tear-jerkers, Vidalia Onions.  Oliver Onions had his name legally changed to George Oliver.

Not so his more courageous contemporary kinsman, Charles Talbut Onions (1873-1965), the great philologist and one-time editor of the O.E.D., still living and venerated in the Oxford of my day.  He knew how to pronounce his name, and so did some others.  When I once referred to the compiler of A Shakespeare Glossary in vegetable fashion, I got a quick correction from my future father-in-law.  I try to find a lesson in most of life’s experiences, but this one stumps me.  I suppose the lesson might be this: although there are few Englishmen named Onions, those born in 1873 were particularly durable.

The central character of “The Beckoning Fair One,” Paul Oleron, has taken an apartment in a badly haunted house.  It was a part of Onions’s account of the things that go bump in the night—italicized by me below--that caught my attention.

Here, quite apart from such recognizable sounds as the scampering of mice, the falling of plaster behind his paneling, and the popping of purses or coffins from his fire, was a whole house talking to him had he but known its language.

Say what?  Purses?  Coffins?  My resident Englishwoman was as nonplussed as her husband, and that meant it was time to get serious.  To get serious in such a context means to consult the inestimable Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.  Alas, even that gushing fountain ran dry on such subjects as fiery purses and burning coffins.  Only tardily did it occur to me that to demystify one Onions might require the expertise of a second; so I turned to

The word coffin proved a dead end, so to speak; but then at purse (sb. I, 5) I found gold: “a fragment of live coal starting out of the fire with a report; regarded as a prognostic of good fortune (1766).”

            Even in this oil-addicted Age of Hot Air almost everyone has had the experience of sitting near an open fireplace from which a small projectile fragment has alarmingly popped forth with a bang.  That is why folks less tolerant of singed carpets than we use fire-screens.  An old English superstition, which apparently reflects the vestiges of ancient fire divination, held these errant embers to be omens.  The vaguely round-shaped ones were purses, and were good omens.  The rectilinear ones were coffins.  I probably don’t have to tell you what kind of omens they were.

            Folkloristic augury was common in the old world, and applied to many aspects of material life.  Even with the advance of the tea-bag (a miniature version of the fire-screen) we sometimes talk of “reading the tea leaves.”  A floating leaf fragment in your cup meant you should expect to encounter a stranger—if hard to the touch, a man, if soft, a woman.  Since I don’t want to spoil “The Beckoning Fair One” for you should you happen not yet to have read it, I’ll say no more.  Anyway, it’s not as though I needed to draw you a picture.

 

Annals of Academic Infighting

My adjustment to the productive tranquility of retirement has been nearly painless.  Just now, however, breaking news from California (where else?) has me as it were awash in nostalgia for the good old days of infantile political intrigue, backstabbing and simple bar-room brawling—otherwise known as “departmental politics”--in the ivied Halls of Academe.  Perhaps there is opportunity here to branch out in my writing?  Let me pitch my idea for a three-part TV mini-series entitled The Stakes So Small, taking my title from a hoary academic Q&A joke:

Q: Why is the infighting in Academe so fierce?

A: Because the stakes are so small.

Malmesbury Abbey: John the Scot's Last Stand

Episode One: The demise of John the Scot, or how “Rate My Professor” worked before the days of the Internet.  The scene : the grammar school, Malmesbury Abbey, in present-day Wiltshire, England.  The time: ca. anno 875.  John the Scot springs a pop quiz on his novices, with unhappy results.  John the Scot is my favorite medieval philosopher, for the obscurity surrounding his person is perfectly matched by the incomprehensibility of his doctrines and the opacity of the modern scholarship devoted to him.  We call him John the Scot because his name was Erigena and he was an Irishman; that’s the way it works in my field.  Erigena was one of the great intellectuals of the ninth century.  (Yes, I hear the clown at the back of the class asking who the other one was.)  He was unusual in that he knew Greek, and spread it pretty thick around his writings.  So he called his most famous work the Periphyseon, which is rendered in Latin De divisione Naturae.  But the choristers didn’t want it in any language.  They wanted to render John the Scot instead, and they stabbed him to death with their sharp-pointed writing tools.  John, who had had a rather monochrome life, thus achieved a most stylish death.  Unfortunately the account of the historian William of Malmesbury may actually be about another John the Scot, as there were lots of people who were not named John and who were not Scots.

The stilus was used to write upon wax tablets.  It could make a deep impression on a philosopher.

Episode Two: The birth of the modern Democratic Party.  The scene: telegraph office, Salem, Massachusetts.  The time: May, 1910.  Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton University, and Andrew Fleming West, dean of its nascent graduate school, are both sons of the manse.  Furthermore, they are of that stripe of Calvinist who, while firmly upholding the doctrine of the Total Depravity of Mankind, is pretty sure that he himself, personally, has never made a mistake.  They have been warring for a decade about where the residential buildings for the Graduate School will be placed once the money is found to build them.  Wilson wants to build in the heart of the undergraduate campus.  West insists on a site some hundreds of yards distant atop of mound of earth with aspirations to become a hill.

 

Woodrow Wilson with Andrew Fleming West behind him.  He should have watched his back.

Both cite unassailably high-minded reasons, but West has just won.  Over many years he has assiduously cultivated a real estate tycoon in Salem MA (Isaac Wyman, Princeton Class of 1848).  Wyman’s dear old granddad had fought for our freedom at the Battle of Princeton (1777), and West has successfully insinuated the thought that building a memorial Gothic dining hall somewhere vaguely in the vicinity, or at least direction of the battlefield would be the best possible use of the Wyman fortune.  West has just hotfooted it from Wyman’s funeral to telegraph the news back to Princeton:  Wyman, naming Andrew Fleming West as executor, has left a bequest of millions provided the money is spent as West directs.

 

General Washington points to the site of the future Graduate College

The reproof is too much for Woodrow Wilson to bear.  He must find a new job, and the rest is history.  In the good old days the Democratic Party had done quite well, thank you very much, bearing the standard of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, though branching out occasionally to pioneer powerful political machines in the burgeoning great cities of the Republic.  When the Rebellion turned out rather badly it became the regional party of the Solid South, State Sovereignty, and Segregation.  Woodrow Wilson began to change all that.  He was one of the first American politicians to make a religious virtue of telling other people and indeed other nations how to live their lives.  They have not stopped since.  That is why ethanol production, which might be classified as a scam midway betwixt itinerant aluminum siding contracting and three-card monte, has been hailed as an ethical insight roughly comparable to the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant.

Episode Three.  A sea of troubles and irrational numbers.   The scene:  Santa Susana Hall, home of the Mathematics Department, California State University (Northridge),  December, 2010.  As this is a current event, I must count on readers to supply their own allegeds or allegedlys as liberally as needed.  The star of the episode is an algebraic geometrician who, though in fact a binomial, will here and for obvious reasons be referred to simply as Professor Ρi. Professor Pi has been conducting a dispute with his colleague Professor Phi in a neighboring office.  Custodians report repeatedly finding, on their early-morning rounds, suspicious puddles of acrid-smelling liquid pooled at the base of Professor Phi’s office door.  It seems possible, shockingly so, that in Shakespearean terms "the gilded puddle which beasts would cough at" might in some way be related to the ongoing quarrel, Pi/Phi.  Acting upon these suspicions, innovative campus police take bold action.  They install a closed circuit security camera that scans the moistened hallway. 

 According to reports, “[ Pi] was captured on videotape urinating on the door of another professor's office on the Northridge campus. School officials had rigged the camera after discovering puddles of what they thought was urine at the professor's door”.

In the state of California performing an irrational number on a mathematician’s door is not felonious; but Professor Pi is nonetheless in plenty of hot water, so to speak.  He faces two misdemeanor charges.  Even such baleful episodes of academic animosity as this one may advance the cause of science, however.  The Northridge campus police , for example, seem to have raised the concept of peer review to an altogether new level.  On the whole, however, your bloguiste is quite happy in his retired state, and to be laboring in the solitary calm of his home study.

and that's just for starters...