Bring Back the Old Words

          

 

KUNG-FU IN ITS HIGHER AND LOWER FORMS

  

  

My good friend Dr. T. K. Chu, whom I hope soon to introduce to my readership in a more formal fashion, recently drew my attention to an article concerning the philosophical meaning of kung-fu.  I refer to the Mandarin word, not the supposed “martial art,” which, it turns out, is merely a pallid and limited application of a broad ethical concept.  “Real kung-fu,” Chu explained to me, “is a state of ethical, spiritual, and physical being achieved through long discipline, mental acuity, ascetic preparation, and concentration of the will.  A person’s kung-fu remains hidden until absolutely demanded by circumstance, when its confident display astounds all witnesses.”  In other words, nobody knew that Clark Kent had kung-fu before he stepped into the phone booth.  Or maybe the Monty Python rabbit.

 Leporine Kung-fu

            In my opinion English speakers would do well to welcome and naturalize two crisp syllables which their current resources require some fifty words merely to approximate.  In fact there are many words we need, and the pity of it all is that we used to have several of them.  I refer to some of the highlights of the Old English vocabulary.   Since the invaders led by the frenchified Viking bastard William couldn’t get their piratical tongues around them, they simply threw away a couple of thousand great words and the very phonic elements that gave them distinction.  For example, there were a whole bunch of wl--- words.  The initial sound wl is intrinsically beautiful.  Hence the superior beauty of the word wlitig, meaning “beautiful”.  Who would ever use the trite pretty, were wlitig available?  And don’t forget the great gn—words, rare but irreplaceable.  What could be sadder or more mournful than gnorn?  And how could there be a better word for a prison than gnorn-hof?  Or for a poetic lament than a gnorn-word?  The idea that the initial g in such pitiful survivors as gnat or gnash should be “silent” is more Francophone fascism.

            I haven’t taught Old English in at least thirty-five years, but in my earliest days at Princeton, there was always a small class of enthusiasts who actually arrived at the ability to read Beowulf by the end of a single semester.  As that is probably harder than preparing to read the German text of Goethe’s Faust in the same length of time, it required no small reservoirs of kung-fu.  We had our little sport.  Each year’s class would pick out a single highly desirable but long vanished Old English word and, without further comment, simply adopt it as part of their working vocabularies.  It takes but twenty linguistic kung-fuists to infiltrate the lingo of a whole campus.  One great success, I remember, came with wod and wodnesse (crazy and madness).  I knew our benign sabotage was working when in a speech on the faculty floor one of the deans actually denounced some suggestion or another as “absolute wodenesse”.

            This idea occurred to me because of the nature of my own introduction to Old English at Oxford, which was not nearly so much fun.  My eminent but terminally humorless tutor began at the beginning, which apparently meant the year 755 as dealt with in the Parker manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.  (This appears to be a mistake for 757, but our older historians were free of the constricting accuracy fetishes of our age.)  

It was Cyneheard over Cynewulf, one-nil

In this year there was a major dust-up among the petty princes of Wessex.  The story begins with marvelous incoherence: “In this year Cynewulf, with the consent of the West-Saxon council, deprived Sigebryht of his kingdom for unrighteous deeds-- except for Hampshire, which he retained until he slew the alderman who remained the longest with him.”  This led to hard feelings between Cynewulf and Cyneheard, Sigebryht’s brother.  Many years later Cyneheard killed Cynewulf under somewhat peculiar circumstances.  “þa geascode he þone cyning lytle werode on wifcyþþe on Merantune.”  This means “he [Cyneheard] discovered that the king [Cynewulf] was with [only] a small band of men at Merton”.  The perfect opportunity for an assassination!  But what was Cynewulf doing there?  Well, he was on wifcyþþe.  I asked my tutor what that meant, and the man actually blushed.  In an instant, intuitively, I knew.  Something that could get an emotional reaction out of this guy really had to be good!

            Well, wif was obvious—woman.  Old English cyþan means “to know;” and a form of it survives in our adjective “uncouth”.  “Uncouthe, unkiste, sayde the old famous Poete Chaucer.”  With that (mis)quotation Spenser began his own famous Shepherds’ Calendar.  The clear implication is that what is couth might well be kissed, an implication by no means contradicted by the way the King James Bible used the verb to know.  “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived…” (Genesis 4:1).

            Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, the compilers of the great old Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Based on the Manuscript Collections, were both proper Victorian gentlemen.  For them wifcyþ was “a visit to a woman.”  But I saw in an instant that our Anglo-Saxon forbears had an excellent, no-nonsense word for an important aspect of human life for which we now have only obscenities, medical technicalities, or the absurd expression “having sex”.  I mean, really.  Everybody “has sex”.  You are born with it.   Wifcyþ and the equal opportunity mancyþ, on the other hand, may require at least the most elementary progress in kung-fu.

Wifcyþ presented Google Images with an insuperable challenge but they did their best with wlitig wif, aka Swiche wenche

Justice or Grace?

 Cranach: "Law and Grace" (Prague)

            Attempting to squeeze out the last succulent drops of a short stay in Paris, we mounted an artistic double-header one day just before leaving.  In the morning we took in the show at the Pinacothèque about the Romanovs as art collectors.  It was an engaging show, but of course as scattered and eclectic as the collection in the Hermitage itself, the residual monument of their activities.  Far more memorable to me was the show we saw in the afternoon, at the Senate Gallery in the Luxembourg Palace: “Cranach and His Times”.   There, in one of the exhibition’s more modest rooms, I had a significant aperçu.

            Most of my thinking and writing these days has to do with intellectual developments of the eighteenth century.  That is the century, I have long believed, that witnessed the principal shifts in mental perspective that, in conjunction with dramatic changes in material culture, constitute the most important differences between the Old World (“my” world of the Middle Ages) and modernity (“my” world of existential experience).

            Here’s a little aphorism for your collection, to be filed alongside Aristotle’s “Men by nature desire to know” and Augustine’s “All teaching is about things or signs”.  All history is about change or stasis.  Yet by a dramatic ratio historians and their readers prefer change.  How much luck would a writer have, with either publishers or readers, with a title like Three Centuries of Monotonous Stability in a Westphalian Monastery or The Horseshoe Crab: Still the Same After Millions of Years? Many historians, including several of my colleagues, think that their job is not merely to explain change, but to effect it.  Here they follow the historian Karl Marx in the eleventh of his Theses on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”  (And now having gotten that off my chest, I solemnly promise my readers never, ever, to mention the name of Feuerbach in a blog post again.)

                   Jules Michelet                                 

and Lucas Cranach the Elder                                                                                                     

  


I am currently writing about a period of dramatic historical change, the Enlightenment, which fed upon another, that of the Protestant Reformation.  Lucas Cranach the Elder got in on the ground floor of the Reform: he was a close personal friend of Martin Luther himself, of whom he painted several portraits.  And one of his most conspicuously “reformed” paintings destroyed a chapter I had nearly completed.  Damn!

The greatest event of the eighteenth century, and probably still the iconic event of modern history, was the French Revolution.  Its relationship to Enlightenment is obvious if imprecise, if you see what I mean; and whether you think the Revolution was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing will depend in part on how “enlightened” you think it was.  My own thinking has been much influenced by the great historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874), who clearly thought it was a Good Thing.

One of the prefaces to his brilliant and contentious History of the French Revolution is entitled “Concerning the Religion of the Middle Ages”.   According to Michelet the still essentially medieval world of the Ancien Régime was governed by the notion of grace, that of the enlightened revolutionaries by the notion of justice.  In the Old World, God and his temporal vicars (the pope, the king, the clergy, the privileged aristocracy, etc.) doled out grace and favor as they saw fit, benignly of course, but under no controlling obligation.  The rain fell upon the just and the unjust alike.  But the architects of the new world of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality believed in justice.  Every Frenchman had rights.  These were the famous “Rights of Man and Citizen” (1789)  —later universalized by the United Nations in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).                       

Now Michelet seemed to me not only so very right but so very right on!, to use the proper revolutionary lingo, that it was very disconcerting to have to think hard about Cranach’s painting (normally housed in Prague Castle) entitled “Law and Grace”.  Cranach did several versions of this tableau.  Its reflexes elsewhere in Reformation art number in the scores, for it perfectly captures what is perhaps Luther’s most famous doctrine: “justification by faith alone.”  As the gloomy German friar brooded over the fourth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans, a light flashed within his mind.  “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.”  You cannot do anything to be saved except believe that you cannot do anything.  Giving up wine, women, and song for the austerities of monastic life won’t save you.  Certainly building a huge cathedral in Rome won’t.  The only channel of salvation is divine grace, absolutely arbitrary and unmerited, not for sale in any store.

Martin Luther as seen by a friend

Indeed to hope for justice is to ask for death.  In the left (“Law”) side of Cranach’s image there is death everywhere, including the left half of the tree that divides it.  Only the gratuitous grace of Christ’s sacrifice offers hope.  Pictorial art often expresses complex ideas with a clarity denied to mere discursive prose, and Cranach made me see in a split second a complication I would be happier to avoid.  The complication is this: if Martin Luther overthrew the religion of the Middle Ages by discarding justice in favor of grace, and if two hundred and fifty years later Michelet’s revolutionaries overthrew the religion of the Middle Ages by discarding grace in favor of justice—well, you perhaps see my problem.

Cranach: "Law and Grace" (Gotha) 

 "Law and Grace" (Popular print after Cranach)

Generational Thought

ABRAHAM BLOEMAERT: Allegory of Youth and Age

 “Youth is a wonderful thing.  What a pity to waste it on the young.”  Google as you will—through Mark Twain, Wilde, Shaw and Alfred E. Neumann—you’ll never find a reliable attribution of any of the numerous variants of this “quotation,” which after all expresses a commonplace that, perhaps in less witty form, must have occurred to every sentient person above the age of forty.  Chaucer puts the matter more succinctly, and more brutally: “…for youthe and elde [old age] is often at debaat.”

            I haven’t been back in America long enough to figure out what happened in my absence; so I must be reduced to talk about what I discovered on the way over.  At the end of the Open Skies gangway at Orly airport, just at the spot where a flight attendant usually stands ready to tell you that the bag you are pretending is a carry-on isn’t and must after all be checked, there was instead a table laden with assorted newspapers and journals.  These are “free” in the sense that they are among the petty perquisites, such as a little plastic pouch of such accessories as earplugs, an unusable toothbrush, and the world’s smallest tube of Colgate toothpaste, designed to help you rationalize spending an extra eight hundred dollars on Business Class. 

It was going to be a long flight.  One can never count on airline movies, even the large menu offered by the high-tech individual viewers, and the prospect of eight uninterrupted hours of Henry James intimidated even me.  Joan snagged the International Herald Tribune.  In a final gesture of Parisian pretension, I grabbed Le Monde.  Our choices eventually led to a commodious congruence of thought, though an unsettling one.

The Trib republished David Brooks’s recent column entitled "The Modesty Manifesto".  In the weekend magazine of Le Monde was a spirited interview with Raymond Aubrac, now ninety-six years old.   I’ll deal with Brooks first, but before touching upon his essay’s content I have to say that of the many popular columnists whose work I regularly read, Brooks seems to me consistently to muster more genuine ideas per square column inch than any other.  I shall avoid the obvious invidious comparisons, except to say that there is a difference between an idea and a predictable opinion, however artfully repackaged.

The main idea in “The Modesty Manifesto” grows out of the observation that Americans tend to be rather full of themselves—and perhaps on the basis of insufficient data.  Hence it might be a good idea to cultivate a little humility.  Brooks suggests that this is particularly true of young people.  “American students no longer perform particularly well in global math tests,” he writes.  “But Americans are among the world leaders when it comes to thinking that we are really good at math.”  You have probably seen some of the abundant and embarrassing data behind this observation, which any college professor could corroborate with telling anecdote.

Since Brooks is a “political” commentator, he naturally has a political point, and one worth thinking about--in my opinion.  He suggests that an habitual “enlargement of the self” may be related to Americans’ extraordinary contempt for the historical compact of the generations.  “Every generation has an incentive to push costs of current spending onto future generations.  But no generation has done it as freely as this one.”  There are few things more shocking than our national fiscal situation; but one them surely is that there is not a currently seated elected official of any stripe prepared to talk about it in a serious way.

Lucie and Raymond Aubrac: youthe

Brooks is an allegedly “conservative” thinker.  Raymond Aubrac, a life-long leftist and long-time Communist, is one of the official heroes of the French Resistance.  Yet at thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic I found in them a certain meeting of minds. Together with his recently deceased wife Lucie he was active in the Vichy zone, where he ran afoul of the notorious Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo “Butcher of Lyon”.  Probably all popular national histories lapse at certain cardinal moments into mythology; our own certainly does.  But as I learned while conducting research for The Anti-Communist Manifestos, few historical topics have been more thoroughly and intentionally obfuscated and mythologized than the French Résistance.  In the immediate post-War period in France there was not a closet in the land sufficiently capacious to hold the surfeit of skeletons.

               The history of clandestine operations is necessarily murky; and clandestine operations in which international Communism played a significant role are the murkiest of all.  Unsurprising the heroism of the Aubracs has not escaped the suspicion of revisionist history, but that is largely irrelevant to what I found striking in this interview: a certain generational theme.  Aubrac begins by saying “When you get to be seventy-five, your opinions concerning the present and the future no longer interest anybody.  By way of compensation, people start asking you about the past.”  

Lucie and Raymond Aubrac: elde

Aubrac seems to resent that reality, and given the fact that I am now seventy-four and ten months I cannot say that I blame him.  For though I have made a profession of studying the past, I do have fugitive thoughts about the present and the future myself.  Furthermore I am not convinced that they are necessarily inferior to the one implicitly advanced by many of my juniors seated in the halls of Congress: “What, me worry?”  There’s no doubt about the attribution of that quotation.  It really is Alfred E. Neumann.

 

“What, me worry?”

Republic of Letters

 







in re...

THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC

versus

            the COMTESSE DE LA FAYETTE

“They order, said I, this matter better in France.”  That’s the opening sentence of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), a book that did as much as any to establish “travel writing” as a great literary genre.  That alone would make it a relevant epigraph for this expatriate post.  The sentence is furthermore an appropriate introduction for an essay concerning an aspect of civilization better ordered in France, indeed.  I mean the dignity of a national literature.

            Here in Paris the month began with a notable publishing event: a new edition of Les liaisons dangereuses of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos in the prestigious “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.”  Laclos was a military officer and spare-time writer of the late eighteenth century.  He published Les liaisons dangereuses, perhaps the most famous of all epistolary novels, in 1782.  Fame (or infamy) was immediate.  Depending on one’s perspective the book was revolting pornography, brilliant psychological insight, or probing social critique.  When Laclos departed the scene in 1803 he had certainly achieved the whimsical aspiration of Hilaire Belloc:

            “When I am dead, I hope it is said, ‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read’.”  

            You have probably read it yourself--or seen the Stephen Frears film (1988) of the Christopher Hampton dramatic adaptation with Glenn Close, John Malkovich, and Michelle Pfeiffer, which captures the work’s moral essence without challenging an audience with unfamiliar literary conventions.  

 Can you spot the dangerous ones?

            The point of this essay is not, however, the work itself.  What interests me is its exemplification of an essential difference between literary culture in France and America, a difference so marked that I can propose an analogy only by hypothesis, a what if sort of a thing.  What if one of the great trade publishing houses in New York were to bring out a magnificent edition of (say) Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, or some other classic work of early American literature already available in fifteen competing paperback editions and anyway generally regarded by our educational authorities as too difficult, too boring, or too monocultural for today’s students?  A book elegantly bound in thin leather-covered boards and printed on bible paper, with two Prussian blue silk marking ribbons?   An edition including in addition to Hawthorne’s relatively brief text a learned critical apparatus of about five hundred pages?  Imagine further that with realistic hope for commercial success the book be put on sale for a brief period at $50 as an early-bird special, before the price is jacked up to $65 for many more years of expected sales.   Imagine finally that the new edition be widely noticed not merely in specialized literary journals but in the major newspapers.

            You have to conclude that in France “they” take literature seriously in a way that “they” simply do not take it seriously in America.  And here’s another example.  The echo chamber of French intellectual life is if anything even more monophonic than in America.  If all the Republicans on the Yale faculty could dance on the head of a pin, all the Sarkozy voters teaching Sciences Humaines at Paris IV could probably have a picnic on the point of a needle.  But the parallel reaches an abrupt limit, as a recent political episode involving a work of even earlier French prose can demonstrate.

            In 1678 a brilliant writer named Marie-Madeleine de la Fayette (Madame de la Fayette, or Lafayette) published, anonymously, La Princesse de Clèves, an historical novel set in the Valois court about the middle of the sixteenth century.  The Princess of Clèves is a beautiful and virtuous young woman forced by conventional expectation to marry the Wrong Man, who then finds herself falling deeper and deeper in love with the Right Man.  There’s nothing more fraught than a love triangle, and the author’s delineation of this one is a masterpiece of emergent sentiment.  La Princesse de Clèves is usually reckoned an important book for the development of psychological fiction.

            In France, as everyone knows, there is a large civil service.  One important group among civil servants are the attaché(e)s d’administration—roughly “administrative secretaries.”  Most of us are familiar with the highly competent mid-level “assistant” who actually runs the show for the appointed or elected “leader”, but in France there’s an actual job description.  Now President Sarkozy seems just as determined as President Obama to “win the future”.  In fact he was talking about it first, and he seems to think that winning the future for France might involve scraping the sclerosis out of the arterial system of the national bureaucracies.

            Some time ago President Sarkozy came upon a copy of the civil service exam devised for aspirants to the qualification of attaché d’administration.  He was amazed to find therein a question about this seventeenth-century novel—a question placed there, in his opinion, by “a sadist or an imbecile”.  How often, he wondered aloud, are you likely to discuss the Princesse de Clèves with the lady at the Post Office counter?

            Any literature professor can be indignant at the philistinism of a remark that indicates so thorough an ignorance of or disdain for the ideal of a liberal education.  But an American professor may not make it that far, having already succumbed to stupefaction at the evidence of a popularly elected politician who has read the Princesse de Clèves, even if he didn’t like it.  The implication that the local postal clerk might have read it is too radical even to entertain.

            The reaction to Nicolas Sarkozy’s off-the-cuff literary criticism was not limited to academic departments of literature.  There was a national reaction.  La Princesse de Clèves is a fine novel, but it’s really subtle.  Most of the action is mental.  It lacks the in-your-face sex of Les liaisons dangereuses.  It was perhaps fading a bit in the French national consciousness.  President Sarkozy changed all this.  There was an immediate spike in sales.  At least two publishers fast-tracked new editions.  Round tables of television pundits discussed Madame de la Fayette’s masterpiece.   At various places in the land there were public marathon readings.  Le Monde opined that among the President’s most conspicuous achievements to date was the “salvation” of La Princesse de Clèves.

 Volumes of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade: Read your heart out

They order this matter better in France.

 

Penultimate Polka in Paris

an apartment in Paris, at a semi-undisclosed location, outside and in

the bloguiste's lair (Photo credit: the bloguiste)

            I am now in a position to take up a Parisian narrative, though it will not be life-threatening in its level of excitement.  I managed with the help of a brief nap to get through Tuesday so as to begin Wednesday in synch with a tolerable sleep rhythm.  Joan and I began the day with the most fundamental necessity of Parisian life—reanimating our expired French cell phones.  This is an experience I could recommend to anyone needing to get his French stereotypes up to speed very quickly.  We were confronted with great economy of time by the shop that was not yet open, the shop that was open but incapacitated by a machine that didn’t work, the arrogant queue-jumper, the je m’en fiche employee, and a few other generally unadvertised aspects of local life.

     The Reading Room of the American Library Paris in its normal configuration 

       It was all smooth sailing after that, and has been ever since.  On Wednesday night I was scheduled to give (and in fact did give) a talk at the American Library about my book The Anti-Communist Manifestos.  On such occasions the Reading Room is miraculously turned into a small lecture hall.  That was a jolly event as the talk was well received and I saw several old friends and met a number of interesting new people; but it features in this blog post only in a tangential way.

            Shortly before we left America I was struck by a newspaper article that reported the controversial decision of the editors of a premier scientific journal to publish a paper about ESP.  I have a vague, untutored interest in the topic, and I also had the occasion once in my professional life to witness the intense hostility with which many scientists react to it.  The phenomenon of coincidence particularly intrigues me.  I am fascinated by Arthur Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence: An Excursion into Parapsychology, which attempts a kind of “scientific” explanation.  A few months ago I published a little essay about one of my Parisian coincidences, and I must now report a second.

            It was mid-morning as we walked home triumphant from the phone shops, and we decided to drop into a small café for a small midmorning coffee.  It was a place in which we had never before set foot, in our neighborhood but sort of out of the way therein.  I think that “nondescript” is probably not overselling it.  Only two of the tables were occupied, one by three French workmen on break, the other by a graying couple, side-by-side, speaking softly in American English, sharing a computer.  In my experience 3/2 is a not uncommon linguistic ratio in public eateries here.  We would have tipped the balance except that Joan, whose French is superb, decided she would phone an old French friend of ours with a short-notice invitation to my talk.

             I took advantage of the moment to visit the facilities, so I didn’t hear her conversation, but as I was passing the Americans on my return the man addressed me, tentatively.  He apologized for intruding, etc., but he couldn’t help overhearing my wife on the phone, etc., and it was all rather unlikely, but they were already planning to come to my talk that night, mainly because he was a graduate of the Princeton English Department (class of 1959)!  They were, and indeed in fact still are Gerry and Joanne Dryansky, a husband-and-wife team of expat writers, not without a certain celebrity in the local cultural scene.  Gerry’s thesis advisor had been the great R. P. Blackmur, and he of course knew many other faculty giants of my own early days.

            They did come to my talk, and we had some further conversation then.  We’ll hope to see them again during our brief stay here.  That should be easy, as they live very nearby—directly across the street from what I’ll call our “regular” apartment (currently rented out), and less than a hundred yards down the road from my daughter’s more magnificent establishment, where we are staying at the moment.

            Gerry Dryansky was interested to hear of our temporary abode, for he knew the building of old.  In his days as a journalist in the early Seventies, he covered the filming of Bertolucci’s celebrated Last Tango in Paris (1972).  If you want to see what I mean by “celebrated” read Pauline Kael’s New Yorker review—accurately described by one cinema historian as “the most famous film review ever written by the most famous film reviewer ever”.  The subject of this film is far beyond me, but I can briefly report on its content.  It’s about an aging American loser (Marlon Brando) and a nubile French nymph (Maria Schneider) who have lots of sex (anonymous, as in they don’t know each other’s names) in a spacious but seriously underfurnished Paris apartment.  In the film’s most famous scene the sex is unconventional in nature, requiring for its accomplishment the aid of some dairy-product lubricant.  The dialogue is beyond unconventional; it may best be described as post-linguistic.

Schneider with chapeau, Brando with mattress: to each his own

            And, apparently, all this happened right here in my daughter’s building.  For all I know in the very room from which I now report it to you!  You can understand the headiness of it all for a mere medievalist.  Gerry Dryanski was writing articles of the now familiar genre “The Making of Last Tango,” so he was in and out of this part of the set repeatedly.  He reports that the leading lady reeked of marijuana much of the time.  The leading man, who was too important to learn lines, made them up as he went along, aided by home-made poster-board teleprompters pinned up here or there.  In the film, the apartment is supposed to be in nearby Passy, and the opening scenes feature the Passy bridge; but the interior shots were apparently done here.  And I learn all this simply because of all the greasy spoons in all the towns in all the world I walk into this particular one.  Speaking of grease, I suppose there is no fear that any butter stains can have survived the repeated sanding  of the hardwood floors over the decades.  But at least it was in the dining room.