Dead Letters

We had a wonderful family Christmas of the sort I would wish for all my readers.  The smaller ones have now departed with their larger adherents in tow; and quiet has once again descended upon my study, where I sit with all my Christmas loot tidily arranged on a composing stone behind me.  It’s back to serious work.  Well, semi-serious.  I’m trying to write about the cultural background of Valérie (1803), an epistolary novel by Julie de Krüdener.

The bloguiste’s assembled Christmas loot.  The recurrent gastronomic motif may seem compromising, but less so than the usual multiple bottles of Listerine and sticks of underarm deodorant.  Top prize goes to my two little Kosher-keeping granddaughters Lulu and Cora, who somewhere came up with a convincing facsimile of my favorite French pork sausage in chocolate.

  
I’d be surprised if you had ever heard of Madame de Krüdener.  She was at first a friend and later a literary rival of Mme de Staël, the more famous author of the more famous epistolary novel Delphine.    (I must say that I prefer Valérie to Delphine if for no other reason than that the scholarly edition of the former is exactly eight hundred page shorter than the scholarly edition of the latter.) But the form of the epistolary novel itself you surely know.  It is a narrative deployed in fictional letters supposedly written by, or to, or about the fictional characters.  The epistolary form was particular important in the novel’s eighteenth-century youth, when it enjoyed famous practitioners.  Richardson’s early blockbusters Pamela and Clarissa are in epistolary form.  In France there are famous letter-novels by Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Chodleros de Laclos.  Goethe’s Werther is epistolary.

            Well, the thing is this: a few days before Christmas I got a letter.  It was not an annotated Christmas card, but a real letter, written on real paper folded within a real, stamped envelope and really delivered to my house by Mike the letter-carrier.  It was personal, substantial, thoughtful, well written, full of interesting and surprising news and ideas.  Since not everyone welcomes even such publicity as is commanded by an obscure professorial blog, I shall identify the letter’s sender no more precisely than to say that I knew him forty years ago as an undergraduate crowned with the success of a brilliant student career and radiant with promise—meaning, incredibly, that this golden youth of memory must now be sixty years old!  Widely interspersed episodes of contact over the decades gave me distant glimpses both of remarkable professional achievements and challenging dislocations, but we have essentially been out of touch.  

As he kindly mentions an awareness of my blog, he may read this.  If so, he should know that I intend to answer the letter properly in the next few days.  In the meantime, its mere existence has crystallized in my mind a cultural apprehension vaguely forming over the past many years: the demise, the very sad demise, of the personal letter.

The chief reason there were so many epistolary novels in the eighteenth century is that the entire culture was epistolary. People who could read and write—meaning all of polite society, and large swaths not so polite—read and wrote letters. Hence if art is truly an imitation of life, as our classical criticism tells us, nothing could be more artistic than an epistolary novel.

The contribution of our great letter-writers has been enormous.  Just here on my own shelves I have twelve elegant tomes of Madame de Sévigné (seventeenth century) and nine much thicker volumes of Horace Walpole (eighteenth).  The first six volumes of the Pléiade edition of the letters of Voltaire, which take him only to the age of 65 (he died at 84, pen in hand) and are all I can afford for the moment, come in at about 10,000 pages on bible paper in an eight-point font.  Altogether we have more than 20,000 of his letters, written around the edges of what we usually think of as his “work”.

 Action: Gerard ter Borch the Younger (1671-1681)

The tradition carried on into the Victorian era and beyond.  Think of all the wonderful Life and Letters of nineteenth-century figures.  By no means is all of this material is highbrow in nature.  One of the first extensive English letter collections we have (the Paston Letters from fifteenth-century East Anglia) is as full of grubby bourgeois concerns as anything imagined by Balzac or Trollope.  Many viewers of Ken Burns’s justly famous television series on The Civil War have been struck by one feature of its documentation—namely the informal letters written by soldiers on either side of the conflict, and generally addressed to distant family members at home.  Many of these men were private soldiers of modest social station and limited formal education, raised on farms in Indiana or Tennessee.  What is likely to seem extraordinary to us is that so many of them wrote with such competence, and often enough with elegance and even eloquence.  It might be possible to draw from this evidence postulates potentially useful for such theorists of American education as the hapless Arnie Duncan, but the point here is an historical one.  These men were the late inheritors of a culture in which competence in letter-writing was among the fundamentals of literacy.

Reaction: Jan Vermeer (1632-1635)

All this is vanishing, if not in fact long-since vanished.  The great age of letter-writing was enabled by material innovation (cheap rag paper, ink producible in quanity, the metallic quill, improved carriage wheels, a regular postal service, and various other things rarely brought to mind), and it is being abandoned by material innovation.  I very much doubt that our cultivated progeny will find pleasure in The Collected Email of Jonathan Franzen, Tom Robbins’s Greatest Tweets or The Cell Phone Records of Tama Janowitz—not even if read on a Kindle.

Impressions of Christmas

Long ago in the late Sixties I became the Master of Wilson College at Princeton.  The grandiose title was more misleading than most.  Wilson College was a monument of social engineering, an “alternative” residential and dining facility designed by college administrators for students who rejected, with greater or lesser political vehemence, the old system of private, selective dining clubs on Prospect Street, a relic of the age of F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Wilson College was a club, that is, for people who hated clubs.  Being its Master was roughly like being the Chief Whip of the International Anarchist Congress. 

Several of the most enriching relationships of my life date from that period, which witnessed large strides in the more unconventional aspects of my education, including some practical ones.  For instance: we mounted numerous “events,” many of which we advertised with printed posters.  Printing costs were shockingly high.  Some students suggested we make posters ourselves in the sadly underused University typography studio.  The rest is history.  I became hooked on letterpress printing—its history, its products, and above all its practice.

A Vandercook Proving Machine with a poster-sized form on its bed

For my birthday in 1970 my wife bought me a very imaginative gift: a sixteen hundred pound flatbed Vandercook press (proving machine).  She had found this, by methods unrevealed, at what I must describe as a printing equipment morgue in Camden, New Jersey.  If this place was not a Mafia front, its proprietors deserved to be prosecuted for false pretenses.  They cannot possibly have made a living from selling the superannuated machinery occupying a couple of acres of New Jersey urban blight.  But that was not my problem.  My problem was that I had to take a truck down to Camden, load the press, transport it, and then get it up the front stairs of a large Victorian house on University Place, Princeton.

The great age of the Vandercook Press overlapped with the origins of commercial offset lithography.  The Vandercook Proving Machine was designed to produce a single very high quality sheet that could then be photographed.  My particularly beautiful press had been retired probably about 1955, since which time it had been gathering dust in Mr. Carbone’s warehouse.  With an act of terminal piety its operator had run the roller unprotected over the last form to be worked on—a somewhat ghoulish ecclesiastical poster, perfectly preserved on the ancient make-ready:

NOVEMBER: MONTH OF THE HOLY SOULS

ENROLL YOUR DECEASED NOW 

Thus began our Pilgrim Press.  And as one thing leads to another, I spent the next decade or so expanding its holdings: four more presses, several tons of old foundry type, gorgeous old printing cabinets and composing stones, and a large quantity of the miscellaneous beautiful old steel, brass, and polished wood implements that were the accoutrements of letterpress printing.   I do most of my printing these days on one of two identical, superbly maintained 14” Chandler and Price clam-shell jobbing presses.

A Chandler and Price clamshell press

The history of our printing adventures, the last chapter of which has not yet been written, might on another occasion make an appropriate subject of a weekly essay.  I raise it now in the context of wishing a very happy holiday season to all my readers.  There seems to be a surprisingly large number of them, surprisingly scattered across the globe.  I cannot send each of you one of my printed greetings cards; but please be assured of my best wishes.  The holiday I celebrate is the Nativity of Our Lord, commonly known as Christmas; and therefore I send you Christmas greetings.  For you it may be Hannukah, the Solstice, or simply the midwinter semester break.  Whatever it may be, let it be for you filled with peace and plenty.  Our world is sufficiently needy to absorb the most ecumenical spectrum of benign wishes.  So whether your thing be Baskerville or Bodoni, God bless you.

 
The annual Printing of the Christmas Card falls somewhere between a ritual and an ordeal in this household.  The ordeal part is entirely a function of my sloth.  There is no reason, in principle, why a Christmas card could not be printed in the leisure of a summer afternoon.  Certainly nothing would forbid its being printed on a sunny Saturday in October.  In fact, however, the Iron Law of Procrastination determines that the project cannot even be begun before December 15.  Otherwise it cannot compete with all the other postponed non-negotiable Christmas preparations—getting the tree, excavating in the crawl-space for the decorative lights, baking the cookies, cutting the firewood, et caetera.  I do have a fallback position.  Years ago I had a line etching made from a Renaissance woodcut of Saint Anthony Abbot, alias Anthony of the Desert.  This able ascetic is most helpful to procrastinating printers, among others, for his feast day is January 17.  Even when I default on Christmas, I can usually get a card done by then.

Up the Educational Creek, Without Paddle

Get ready for a long, grumpy,  boring political screed, because there’s this lady Julianna Smoot, keeps writing to me about my dinner with Barack.  No kidding!  That’s what she calls him—Barack.  There’s another message in my email box this morning: “John--Have you been thinking about who you'd bring to the next Dinner with Barack?”  Well, I hadn’t been, but now that I do, I’d like to bring my mother, except that she died thirty years ago.  But he could sure use her advice, even from the grave, especially if she brought along my old copy of Paddle to the Sea.

The advice would concern education, one of the President’s supposed priorities as articulated recently in a long and important speech.  The genre was primarily that of a campaign manifesto, and the venue for its delivery—always carefully premeditated in today’s political world—was of course symbolic.  The setting was the town of Osawatamie, Kansas, where Theodore Roosevelt had made an important campaign speech a century earlier.  In the absurd journalistic word-fad of the moment the press tells us that he was “channeling” Roosevelt.  (You may recall Jesus’s “channeling” of Moses in the Sermon on the Mount.)  The specific site was an auditorium in a public high school, a venue that underscored one of the President’s most important themes: the relationship between individual and national economic success and the quality of American education.  To this general subject he devoted seven paragraphs, about a thousand words, which for purposes of readers’ convenience I have reproduced below exactly as I find them in the official White House transcript.

I am neither a public figure nor an expert in public policy.  I have, however, spent much of my life trying to improve my own education, and my entire professional life encouraging the education of young Americans.  So I have some considered ideas on the subject.

The President said some things very much worth saying.  America needs a much larger work force skilled in mathematics and fundamental science, and in the applied sciences of engineering. (¶ 2.)  The country needs more good school teachers (¶ 1.)  He deplored the empirical fact that for the past generation so many of “the best and the brightest” among college graduates have made a beeline from the Commencement celebrations to Wall Street (¶ 2.)  But the punch line of the “education” section of the speech is the president’s claim of a long-term need to make unspecified “investments” in American public education—meaning increased federal spending for education—to be secured by increased taxes on rich people  (¶ 5) and the short-term need to suppress individual Social Security payments, aka the “payroll tax”, for an additional year (¶ 7). 

How pathetic is this?  Forget the simple rhetorical legerdemain that suggests a non-existent link between a “payroll tax holiday” and the improvement of education—approximating the current Republican union of a Canadian pipeline and the continuation of welfare checks for the unemployed.  Move directly to the political prevarication.  Of this there are many varieties, the crude variety of the lie direct being relatively rare.  As Orwell pointed out in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” the most insidious form is linguistic abuse; and in this form President Obama is no less expert than his adversaries. 

Consider his concept of investments—meaning my tax dollars at work.  The usual definition of an investment is an outlay of money against a hope of income or profit.   If I buy a quart of milk for my family’s breakfast for a dollar I am bearing an expense, a portion of what we call the cost of living, not making an investment.  If buy a common stock I am.   I shall have to continue to spend money on food indefinitely, but I shall continue to make stock market investments only so long as experience convinces me of their wisdom.  If after five years a quart of milk costs two dollars but my stock is still worth only a dollar I will not consider that I have made a wise investment.  The tax-funded federal educational expenses that President Obama insists on calling “investments” have roughly doubled since 1970.  During that time the demonstrated abilities of American schoolchildren to handle the basic skills of literacy have remained essentially static.  But as we live in anything but a static world their skills, when compared with those of their little Finnish and Korean competitors in other parts of the world, are actually less satisfactory than they were in 1970.

One of the main reason lots of people are unemployed is not because there is no work to be done but because they don’t know enough and/or are insufficiently motivated to do anything worth even $7.25 an hour to the people who might hire them.  Large numbers dropped out of school as soon as they could.  Many others possess a high-school diploma that cannot be trusted to certify so much as functional literacy.  Lots of them have a “work ethic” less easy to detect than radiation from outer space.

A subtle form of political prevarication—practiced ecumenically by our “leaders” of all stripes—is to talk very earnestly about the wrong problem.   Allegedly inadequate resources in the public schools is the wrong problem.  The chief cause of public school debility and its inevitably dire economic repercussions is the continuing degradation of the American family.  Long before education can happen in a school, however opulently “invested,” it has to be prepared for in a home.  There need to be adults in this home who can and do speak in complete sentences featuring the occasional disyllable, who have real conversations around a shared dinner table, who show their love for their kids by taking them to the public library at least as often as they do to Macdonalds, who show that they recognize the importance of reading and writing by doing a little themselves.  Such parents insist that their children work hard and if necessarily long on their homework, and demand professional competence from the public educational authorities.  It is not President Obama’s fault that these things are not happening; but it is his fault to pretend that our educational crisis stems from insufficient “investment”.

Here’s the educational investment my parents made in 1941, when I was five years old.  It was a pretty good investment, as for $1.95 it secured me a life-time of well-paid work.  They bought me a brand-new book entitled Paddle to the Sea.  This book, beautifully illustrated, tells the story of a Canadian Indian boy who lives on Lake Nipigon in Ontario.  He carves and decorates a miniature canoe, complete with its figure of a paddler, naming the figure Paddle-to-the-Sea.  The young boy puts the carved boat into a snow bank whence, in the spring thaw, it washes down from rivulet to branch to creek to river and, eventually, to Lake Superior.   Over a long period punctuated by dozens of fascinating adventures Paddle-to-the-Sea makes it all the way through the Saint Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic Ocean. 

For Depression-era parents of slender means two bucks was not entirely negligible, but their capital expenditure counted as nothing in comparison with their educational investment.  My mother, my father, and my Uncle John—none of whom had a college degree--each spent long hours teaching me to read this book.  My Aunt Mildred (a school-teacher) also chipped in.  The words, difficult as they were, were the easiest part.  Just beyond them lay vast horizons of geography, forestry, navigation, climatology, hydrology, and several other academic abstractions for which I would not for years know so much as the names.  My parents didn’t just tell me that such things were important.  They loved me enough to show me. 

Paddle to the Sea, which is still in print, won a Caldicott Medal in 1942 and became a big seller.  This means that copies of the first edition are still easily found on eBay.  Now and again I buy one, which inevitably is soon loaned or given away.

Artwork from Paddle to the Sea by Holling Holling (1941)

APPENDIX: FROM THE OSAWATAMIE SPEECH 

1. But we need to meet the moment.  We've got to up our game.  We need to remember that we can only do that together.  It starts by making education a national mission -- a national mission.  (Applause.)  Government and businesses, parents and citizens.  In this economy, a higher education is the surest route to the middle class.  The unemployment rate for Americans with a college degree or more is about half the national average.  And their incomes are twice as high as those who don't have a high school diploma.  Which means we shouldn't be laying off good teachers right now -- we should be hiring them.  (Applause.)  We shouldn't be expecting less of our schools –- we should be demanding more.  (Applause.)  We shouldn't be making it harder to afford college -- we should be a country where everyone has a chance to go and doesn't rack up $100,000 of debt just because they went.  (Applause.)   

2. In today's innovation economy, we also need a world-class commitment to science and research, the next generation of high-tech manufacturing.  Our factories and our workers shouldn't be idle.  We should be giving people the chance to get new skills and training at community colleges so they can learn how to make wind turbines and semiconductors and high-powered batteries.  And by the way, if we don't have an economy that's built on bubbles and financial speculation, our best and brightest won't all gravitate towards careers in banking and finance.  (Applause.)   Because if we want an economy that's built to last, we need more of those young people in science and engineering.  (Applause.)  This country should not be known for bad debt and phony profits. We should be known for creating and selling products all around the world that are stamped with three proud words:  Made in America.  (Applause.)  

3. Today, manufacturers and other companies are setting up shop in the places with the best infrastructure to ship their products, move their workers, communicate with the rest of the world.  And that's why the over one million construction workers who lost their jobs when the housing market collapsed, they shouldn't be sitting at home with nothing to do.  They should be rebuilding our roads and our bridges, laying down faster railroads and broadband, modernizing our schools -- (applause) -- all the things other countries are already doing to attract good jobs and businesses to their shores.

4. Yes, business, and not government, will always be the primary generator of good jobs with incomes that lift people into the middle class and keep them there.  But as a nation, we've always come together, through our government, to help create the conditions where both workers and businesses can succeed.  (Applause.)  And historically, that hasn't been a partisan idea. Franklin Roosevelt worked with Democrats and Republicans to give veterans of World War II -- including my grandfather, Stanley Dunham -- the chance to go to college on the G.I. Bill.  It was a Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, a proud son of Kansas -- (applause) -- who started the Interstate Highway System, and doubled down on science and research to stay ahead of the Soviets.  

5. Of course, those productive investments cost money.  They're not free.  And so we've also paid for these investments by asking everybody to do their fair share.  Look, if we had unlimited resources, no one would ever have to pay any taxes and we would never have to cut any spending.  But we don't have unlimited resources.  And so we have to set priorities.  If we want a strong middle class, then our tax code must reflect our values.  We have to make choices.  

6. Today that choice is very clear.  To reduce our deficit, I've already signed nearly $1 trillion of spending cuts into law and I've proposed trillions more, including reforms that would lower the cost of Medicare and Medicaid.  (Applause.) 

7. But in order to structurally close the deficit, get our fiscal house in order, we have to decide what our priorities are. Now, most immediately, short term, we need to extend a payroll tax cut that's set to expire at the end of this month.  (Applause.)  If we don't do that, 160 million Americans, including most of the people here, will see their taxes go up by an average of $1,000 starting in January and it would badly weaken our recovery.  That's the short term.   

Happy Birthday, Uncle Rick

           

 Richard N. Fleming (æt. 70) with bloguiste brother in Las Cruces, N.M.; photo by Richard A. Fleming

We have just returned from Las Cruces, New Mexico, where we had gone for a family event, a birthday party for my brother Rick.  Participating in the celebration of the seventieth birthday of one’s “baby brother” would hardly be an emotionless experience under any circumstances; but in this instance the emotion was for me a kind of tidal wave. 

The famous opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, endlessly quoted, is one of the few false notes that great writer ever struck.  “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  No doubt life would be less confusing if it submitted graciously to aphorisms, but it rarely does.  Family life is simply the most often observed paradigm of social life altogether, and thus necessarily a mix and a spectrum, rather than an essence.  And my experience, at least, is that joy is far more various than misery, which tends to the monochrome.   

The long weekend of Rick’s birthday would merit an essay of its own, but for me the emotional complications arose from overwhelming feelings of mutability that almost always attend revisiting after long absence a half-forgotten geography.  I was revisiting events shared with my “baby brother” years ago.

 Las Cruces, New Mexico, with the Organ Mountains in the distance

Las Cruces is a small city in south-central New Mexico, perhaps an hour north of El Paso.  It is set in a beautiful desert at the base of a small but dramatic eruption of mountains, called the Organs, their jagged columns having suggested to some early poetic viewers a rank of pipes in a pipe organ.  It is the home of an old land-grant college, New Mexico A&M, now New Mexico State University.  The vast White Sands Missile Range is nearby.   Since I last saw the place nearly three decades ago, it has suffered hideously from highway construction and strip mall development.  The density of big box stores and franchise restaurants seems extreme even for the undisciplined sprawl of the Southwest.  There has also been a boom (and bust) in domestic construction, much of it faux-adobe and “Poor Man’s Santa Fe.”

Rick owns a modest house in a modest “older” (meaning in context 1950s) neighborhood.  It once belonged to our elder brother Peter, now deceased. My father and mother moved there with Rick about 1970, following the first of my Dad’s strokes.  The move was, I think, a mistake, though who am I to say?  My Dad had grown up in New Mexico in the 1920s, when it had only recently been admitted to the union, and there was still some real wildness in the West, as opposed to nostalgic make-believe.  What he now found was a “Sun Belt” slowly filling up, as it seemed to him, with obese retirees in split-level homes, gun nuts, and religious fanatics, with a certain amount of overlap in categories.

He never got better.  Instead he got worse, much worse, as three more strokes rendered him first speechless, then nearly motionless.  When my mother died in 1979 he began saying goodbye to the world.  I last saw him a few weeks before his death in 1980.  He was in a hospital room, taped, tied, and tubed up in grotesque medical indignity.  I have to believe he knew that I was there.  Behind all the apparatus of life support a window perfectly framed as for a calendar a sharp view of the sun-drenched Organ Mountains against a clear blue sky.  To walk out of that room required of me an act of “infinite resignation;” but that remark may need some explication.

On a visit a few years earlier I had taken my Dad, severely limited of speech but to a degree ambulatory, to a meeting of his “stroke club”—a gathering of survivors of cerebral hemorrhages, two or three dozen fellows (if there were women clubbers, I cannot remember them), awkwardly “interacting” beneath the fluorescent glare of the industrial lighting in some cavernous cinder-block church hall.  All of them were visibly damaged, many more damaged even than my father, some wholly aphasic, some in wheelchairs, two or three of them registering that lifeless animation—there is such a thing—that makes you recoil from some of Goya’s Caprichos.

Very few experiences are entirely lacking an educational dimension, but what I was expecting to be a lesson in pity soon enough turned to one in humility.  My Dad “introduced” me to one of his special friends, a high-school dropout, a former truck driver, now a ward of the social services.  This man could speak clearly, though agonizingly slowly. 

Where was I from? he asked.  “Princeton, New Jersey.”  This answer seemed to excite him unduly.  Did I know the Princeton University Press?  Well, I had actually published my first book there, but of what conceivable interest could this fact be to such a man?  So I told him I knew where it was.  “Well,” he said, “you gotta go there.  They’re starting a complete new edition of Kierkegaard…complete…”  He already had several volumes of the classic Walter Lowrie translation.  Indeed, his chief motive for survival in his difficult world seemed to be the hope of resolving to his mind’s satisfaction the conundrums of Fear and Trembling.  “But I know I never will.   That man is a deep thinker, I mean deep…”

“Deep” hardly touches it.  What Fear and Trembling is ostensibly “about” is the willingness of Abraham to kill his own son Isaac at God’s command.  On my campus, placed at a corner of the chapel on one of the main paths to the library, is George Segal’s sculptural rendition of the scene.

 George Segal (1924-2000), "Abraham and Isaac," on the Princeton University campus

Kent State University: 4 May 1970

This had actually been commissioned to commemorate the murder of several students at Kent State University by some panicky members of the Ohio National Guard in May, 1970.  The theme of the father killing the son was perhaps obvious, but Segal’s expression of it proved too painful and political for the taxpayers of Ohio.  What would it take for the father to plunge that knife into the son’s breast?   That is the question Kierkegaard asks, and his answer is infinite resignation.  “Infinite resignation,” says Kierkegaard, writing beneath the pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio, “is the last stage before faith, so that anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation do I become conscious of my eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith.... Precisely because resignation is antecedent, faith is no esthetic emotion but something far higher; it is not the spontaneous inclination of the heart but the paradox of 'existence'.”