Flemingiana

            Statue of John le Fleming, Mayor of Southampton (saec. 14), on the old city walls. (Sculptor: Anthony Griffiths; photographer: Brian Kernigan)

This essay starts with a common experience—one almost everyone I have ever talked with about it recognizes, though without being able to put a name to it.  You encounter an unfamiliar word, or hear of a rare medical condition outside your previous conscious experience.  Then suddenly it seems that you encounter the rare word in every book you pick up; and you repeatedly come across reports of victims of the Marburg virus or whatever.  Well, I have had such an experience relating to my possible medieval forbears, who have been hounding me for about a year.  Allow me to explain.

            Last week I received in my e-post the two photographs printed above.  They were recently taken in the English port city of Southampton by my distinguished colleague and friend Brian Kernigan as he was waiting to board the liner Queen Mary 2 to cruise home to New York.  Brian rightly thought I might be able to “relate” to a famous early mayor of the city. 

            I could, indeed.  Time flies when you are having fun.  Summer approaches its end, and it is nearly time for the Flemings’ own annual September visit to England—the meaning of annual here being that we have done it a few other years.  This year, however, I shall not take in the “Oxford Thinking” conference.  In fact, I probably won’t make it to Oxford at all.  I want to visit some old friends, and maybe a favorite old haunt or two, while my spouse, suffering from pilgrimage deprivation, takes two long hikes—one with an old school chum, and the other with our niece Elizabeth.  But my sojourn will begin in suburban Sevenoaks, Kent, the home of my in-laws, John and Margaret Newman.

             I wrote a blog post about my last visit to Sevenoaks, just about a year ago.  It was there that I found hanging on the wall of a charity shop a wooden heraldic shield with the Fleming coat of arms and the Fleming motto (“Let the deed shaw”) artfully incised upon it.  I mentioned this interesting detail, admitting that I had been unaware that there even was a Fleming coat of arms, let alone a Fleming motto. I did a little research of the whimsical kind that the Internet makes possible.  I was able identify the artist—who turned out to be a nice retired gentleman somewhere up in Ontario—from a wood-burned signature on the back of the shield.  I had a nice exchange of letters with him.  He used to make such heraldic clan shields as a hobby, more than twenty years ago, using the models found in a standard heraldic encyclopedia.  He had done this one for some Canadian Fleming, and had no clue as to how it got to Kent.  But Canadian Flemings loom large in this tale.

             About three weeks later a stranger I met somewhere, upon learning my name, asked me if I were “connected to the Fleming of Fleming College.”  I had never heard of that either, so I just said “No”.  Then the previously unknown (to me) Fleming College began appearing everywhere in my field of vision.  It seems to be an important technical institute in Canada, or rather confederation of colleges, taking its name from an eminent Scottish-Canadian engineer of the nineteenth century, Sir Sandford Fleming, a bridge-builder, the Roebling of the North.  Fleming College naturally has the essential perquisites of a North American institution of higher education, namely sweat-shirts and a coat of arms, both of which I then began to encounter on a seemingly daily basis.

 

             

I had supposed that “Let the Deed Shaw”—literally let the deed be manifest--must mean something like “Handsome Is As Handsome Does,” or “Actions Speak Louder Than Words," or “Walk the Walk” or some other such sentiment of Presbyterian uplift.  Then—in the accidental course of some of my reading in medieval history--I learned how Let the deed shaw actually became the Fleming motto!  On February 10, 1306 Robert the Bruce had an arranged meeting with his rival John (“Red”) Comyn at Dumfries.  In order to guarantee the peaceable nature of their parley the Bruce had established its venue as the chancel of the impressive Franciscan church in the center of the town.  The men naturally unbuckled their swords and left them at the church door.  Unfortunately for Comyn, it turned out that Robert the Bruce had neglected to set aside his smaller dagger.  The meeting did not go well.  A violent quarrel (rixa) irrupted.  The Bruce stabbed Comyn with his dagger, apparently next to the high altar.  He then walked out of the church to his waiting kinsmen and said the equivalent in Middle Scots of “Oops!  I lost it.  I think maybe I killed him.”  The exact words of his cousin Roger de Kirkpatrick have happily been recorded.  Crying out “I mak siccar!” (I’ll make sure) he rushed into the church, sword in hand, and, well, made siccar.

That is how “I mak siccar” became the Kirkpatrick family motto, but there was still a small margin of yet further certainty left for the Flemings.  Sir Robert Fleming then went into the church, sword in hand.  He decapitated the dead or dying body of John Comyn and brought his dripping prize to the church porch.  Dangling the severed trophy by its gory locks, he spoke the immortal words: “Let the deed shaw.”  There are practically no limits to the eloquence of which a Fleming is capable if you only give him his head. 

            The interesting point that the legal historian W. D. H. Sellar draws from this history is that Robert the Bruce cannot have been regarded by knowledgeable contemporaries as guilty of murder, since he acted in hot rather than in cold blood. Medieval murder required premeditation.  This is an important point for the technical legal vocabulary as it develops in various parts of the English-speaking world.  What Robert the Bruce did in the greyfriars’ church was to be sure “inappropriate” (to use the current term of art of academic discipline committees) but it was not enough to get him excommunicated.  So after a few compulsory Anger Management Seminars he was able to go on to become the great Scottish National Hero.

            What I take from the story is a little different.  Can’t we come up with an alternative Fleming family iconography?  How about Sir Alexander Fleming holding a steaming Petri plate of penicillin with the device Let the wee gerrrms perrrish?

Misspeaking

William Archibald Spooner

      Eminent for the Spoken Word

Todd Akin

The verb misspeak does not appear in my desk copy of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.  But then it’s only the ninth edition, from 1987.  If I am going to continue to follow American politics I am going to have to get something more up-to-date, because recently our politicians have been misspeaking all over the place, with a promiscuity that makes my oak tree’s annual production of acorns seem parsimonious.  From the look of things, to misspeak ought to mean to mispronounce, as President Bush used to misspeak nuclear and as practically everybody misspeaks kiln.  Another familiar form of misspeaking, one at which I myself am expert, is to call one offspring by the name of another, or in the climactic sentence of a brilliant lecture on St. Bonaventure’s theory of something or other, to attribute it to St. Thomas.

            But political misspeak, like political speak altogether, is of a different genus.  To misspeak politically is to get caught out in a lie, or in nonsense so appalling that a coherent lie would be preferable to it.  The latest example, as the whole world now knows, features the idiotic remarks of Congressman Todd Akin (R-Missouri), now a candidate for the Senate, concerning pregnancies eventuating from acts of rape.  “From what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” Akin said. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

            Within a few hours just about everybody in the Amerian political world, led by such vestigial voices of good sense as remain within the Republican Party, was counseling Akin’s immediate if not retroactive retirement from politics; but he still had one staunch supporter.  That was his electoral rival Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri), who had just been transformed by fifty-eight words of voodoo gynecology from dead duck to soaring eagle.  Mr. Akin apologized for having misspoken.  But of course he had not misspoken; he had merely spoken idiotically.  I presume he had also fibbed in citing the opinion of “doctors” to authorize the idiocy, but I hope that whoever regulates medical licenses in the state of Missouri has launched a vigorous investigation on the off chance he spoke truth.

            There is of course such a thing as real misspeaking, which can be quite interesting.  In English there is often a considerable gap between the way a word looks on paper and the way it is voiced by native speakers.  Americans misspeak about half the topographic names of England, often to the visible amusement of the locals.  We are also weak on certain surnames.  Why should Saint John be Sinjun, or Taliaferro Tolliver?  Brits wreak their revenge by pronouncing the largest city in Texas as though it were house + ton, which of course Houston Street in lower Manhattan really is.  Curious, that.  I used to listen to Books on Tape as I drove around in my pick-up.  I listened to the British actor Jeremy Irons read an English version of Stendahl’s The Red and the Black.  By this accident I learned that Irons, who is a very classy Shakespearean actor, labored under the misapprehension that the city of Besançon in the Franche Comté is pronounced Bezankon.

            A special category of misspeaks—the spoonerism—is named after William Archibald Spooner (1843-1930) an Oxford don and editor of Tacitus, who allegedly had a penchant for confusing the initial consonants of words in his intended sentences.  Most of the misspeaks attributed to him are probably apocryphal, but the following outpouring of affection for the aging Queen Victoria may be genuine: "Three cheers for our queer old dean!"

Our dear old queen

Our queer old dean

            When I was young there was a radio program called “Pardon My Blooper” that collected many of the verbal blunders recorded from live broadcasts.  Although most of them seemed to feature ribald double entendres, some were charmingly innocent.  One I remember came at the end of a religious program—they used to exist on the major networks—with the announcer signing off with a biblical citation (Ecclesiastes 11:1):  “Remember—cast your broad upon the waters.  This is the National Breadcasting Corporation.”

            I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the best spoonerism that has come my way, allegedly attributable to the Foreign Language Services of the BBC.  It is in French, but French of the very best kind—meaning French that you don’t have to know any French to understand.   The announcer was discussing demographic developments in southern Africa, and in particular the burgeoning population in what are today the coastal provinces of the Cape of Good Hope—the Western Cape, the Eastern Cape, and KwaZulu-Natal.  Intending to say “la population énorme du Cap,” he said instead “la copulation énorme du Pape”!   Perhaps that was what Akin had in mind by “legitimate rape”?

Cap

Pape

Enough to Make One Veep

James Gillray on political campaigners (1795).  Plus ça change...

Political journalism, though specializing in the vacuous, abhors a vacuum. It rushes toward whatever specks of matter become visible at the horizon of the void.  Hence this week it’s all about Congressman Paul Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential candidate-elect.  As careful observers will have noticed, Gladly Lerne Gladly Teche is a radical blog that eschews all issues trivial and superficial in its beeline towards the essential.  I do not intend, therefore, to join the gaggle in a discussion of Mr. Ryan’s possible actuarial and accounting prowess, his presumed behavior, cliff side, to little old ladies in wheelchairs, or the arcana of tax law as it relates to living in a “listed” historical house.  Instead, I want to wonder aloud why Americans are so careless with their democracy.  This topic occasioned my only attempt ever to publish an op-ed piece in the national press, four years ago.  The pain of rejection left permanent scars.  Fortunately the editorial board of Gladly Lerne Gladly Teche is more visionary.

            The hypocrisy surrounding vice-presidential “picks” is egregious.  The chosen person, we are told, stands “one heartbeat away” from the presidency, and thus must have the potential to lead at a moment's capricious notice.  In fact the person is chosen to “balance the ticket,” “help out with the blue-collar vote”, “appeal to women,” “attract evangelicals” or serve some similar function helpful to the aims of the presidential candidate.

            The heated nature of our presidential campaigns creates at least a plausible illusion of democracy in action.  We really are allowed to choose between two contenders.  The outcome is seldom a foregone conclusion, and sometimes it is a real nail-biter.  Even the process by which the presidential contenders emerge has some democratic features, however attenuated.  But the process by which vice-presidential candidates are chosen is one that Louis XIV might approve.

            At the moment, Mr. Romney, Mr. Ryan’s sole elector, has not even been nominated for president by the Republican Party.  We may judge this a mere technicality; but it underscores the blatantly undemocratic nature of the process of selecting vice presidents.  To show how it can be anti-democratic as well as undemocratic we need look no further than the history of the current incumbent.  I have never met Mr. Biden, but I am inclined to like him.  His classical pseudo-proletarian bonhomie is attractive, and there is a humanizing quality to his frequent verbal gaffes.  He has some admirable goals and seems to work hard to achieve them.  Sam Rayburn, Mister Democrat to his generation, was famously reported to have told John Nance Garner that the vice-presidency was “not worth a bucket of warm spit”—in which “spit” was actually a cowardly journalistic substitution for what Rayburn had actually said, what Shakespeare had called the gilded puddle that beasts would cough at.  Well, Mr. Biden proves that it is worth a bucket of warm spit.  But how does he come to stand “a heartbeat away from the presidency”?

Sam Rayburn with osculating veep

Vice President John Nance Garner: FDR never kissed him
 

            Though elections may suggest, vaguely, people the voters want to be president, they are usually less clear in identifying people they don’t want.  But this generality is contradicted by the political history of Vice President Biden.  He twice ran for the presidential nomination, first in 1988, and again in 2008.  In 1988 his candidacy foundered on the exposure of his plagiarism of his own biography!  He had lifted it from the campaign propaganda of British Prime Minister Neil Kinnock.  There is no space here for the details, though I can recommend them to the genteel reader, who is likely to find therein an amusing gloss on the current flap about “You didn’t build that!” Candidate Biden, having been caught in an act of intellectual dishonesty for which most of my academic colleagues would severely discipline, perhaps even expel, a sophomore undergraduate, chose to drop out.

Even Kinnock thought it was funny

             

Twenty years later cultural amnesia had done its healing work, and Mr. Biden once again entered the lists in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary.  Here he faced such awesome competitors as Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and the little known but incandescent Barack Obama.  Biden did not get to first base.  It is debatable whether he made it as far as the batter’s box.  His fatal compliment of his rival Obama as “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” was widely suspected of crypto-racism by fellow Democrats.  His showing in the polls was abysmal, though he was slightly ahead of fellow single-digiteer Stephen Colbert, the comedian.  (Is it relevant that Colbert was not actually a candidate?)

            The electors of the Democratic Party in 2008 took quite a while to decide on the person they wanted to be their president.  On the other hand they reached early agreement on some they did not want, Senator Joe Biden conspicuously among them.  One may fairly point out that Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain, who showed considerable staying power in their primary campaigns and gained large numbers of actual votes, enjoyed more democratic legitimacy to stand “one heartbeat away from the presidency” than did Joe Biden.

            Within the context of a system of presidential politics savaged by the symbiosis of the power of Big Money to buy unlimited advertising time and an electorate sufficiently ignorant or indifferent as to form its political decisions on the basis of thirty-second television commercials, the undemocratic mode of anointing vice-presidential candidates will not seem a matter of high priority.  Yet it is odd that nobody even mentions it.  Is our current system really so superior to that of my sixth grade homeroom?  There the person with the second number of votes was vice president.  That imitated the original scheme of our national government, incidentally, under which each elector in the Electoral College cast two votes: most votes, president; second most, vice president.  I am not sure John Adams was a bad vice president just because George Washington didn’t pick him.  Though we are short on bipartisan solutions, we are long on bipartisan problems.  Perhaps the return to a little built-in bipartisan cooperation wouldn’t hurt.

The Jubilation at Red Hook

 [Photo: Allen Murabayashi]

The Dutch heritage of old New York is memorialized in a dwindling number of socially prominent family names, in some place names like Harlem, and in a few anglicized geographical terms such as kill (a stream or watercourse) and hook (Dutch hoek, a promontory or corner of land jutting into the sea.)  So it was geography that gave Red Hook, the semi-peninsular waterfront neighborhood of Brooklyn just south of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, its name.  Brooklyn is rapidly effacing Manhattan as the most happening borough of New York, and Red Hook is rising rapidly among the more happening Brooklyn neighborhoods.  It was entirely appropriate, therefore, that Red Hook should be the venue for the wedding of Katie Dixon and Richard Fleming, both Red Hook householders.  The nuptials of the bloguiste’s eldest child would doubtless have had a measurable effect upon him in any case, even had the celebration not been, as in this instance it in fact was, the event of the season.

           

            The religious ceremony was performed al fresco, according to the New Zealand Anglican rite, in Valentino Park, with its matchless view of the Statue of Liberty.   Valentino Park is named not for the heart-throb of the early silver screen, but for a heroic New York fireman, Louis Valentino.  Ancillary heroes on this occasion were young relatives of the happy couple--Lulu and Cora Fleming-Benite, flower maidens, and Wyatt Dixon, ring-bearer.  The officiant, the Rev. Canon Joan E. Fleming, delivered a brief homily that won appreciation (and a few laughs) from the gathered friends and family.

Valentino Pier on an ordinary day...

and on one not so ordinary

            Though a ceremony of such blessed simplicity hardly needed a rehearsal, there of course was one.  As we milled about with half an eye on the principals, the ocean liner Queen Mary II, big as a mountain, eased past us on her way from her Brooklyn berth to the open sea and some romantic cruise.   That alone justified the rehearsal, which was in any case necessary to legitimate the statutory rehearsal dinner.  That event took place at Sunny’s Bar on Conover Street, roughly midway between Valentino Park and the newlyweds’ home on Coffey Street—described to me by a realtor I later met at the wedding dinner as “the Gold Coast of Red Hook”.  Here was a description that varied somewhat from that of H. P. Lovecraft in his classic tale “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925), where he writes of those waterfront streets as a “tangle of material and spiritual putrescence.”

an expression of local pride

             Whatever it may then have been, Sunny’s—which advertises itself as “the oldest continually run bar on Brooklyn's waterfront”—is today the hip venue for bibulous poetry readings, blue grass bands, and art happenings, all supported by a young and enthusiastic local clientele.  Sunny’s is a bar, not a restaurant.  The delicious and abundant Chinese dishes, together with the requisite paper troughs in which to serve them, were the work of a neighborhood caterer.  Musical entertainment was provided by the Red Hook Ramblers.  (This was, in fact, an All-Red-Hook event).

            The rehearsal dinner was a comparatively intimate affair;  the wedding celebration itself was something else again.  To call the blast that followed the ceremony a “reception” would be an insult to the English language and to the Red Hook neighborhood alike.   A very large contingent of the fascinating friends and colleagues of the bride and groom were in attendance, not to mention dignitaries from afar.   Though young John Henry and his mother were understandably impeded from coming, Rich’s brother Luke was able to be there with all other immediate family nuclei.  The venue for this spectacular event was the site of the former Pioneer Iron Works.  A hundred years ago and more this place turned out locomotive parts, steam rollers, and other high-precision implements of heavy industry.  Today the huge brick factory building is in the midst of a brilliant conversion to an arts complex, its old open industrial yard transformed into an eccentric garden.  Beneath the soaring ceiling of the old foundry room more than 200 people sat down to a sumptuous repast prepared by the chefs of the famous Good Fork Restaurant of Red Hook, who had set up a field kitchen in an out-of-sight corner of the old machine shop.  The generous and charming hosts for this fabulous dinner were Dr. John Dixon and his wife Betty, the bride’s parents.  John Dixon also offered a beautiful toast, the harmonious elements of which fully confirmed his reputation as the “Sage of Murfreesboro”.

among out-of-town celebrities were James and Hester Magnuson from Austin

            Our new daughter-in-law, who would look gorgeous wearing on old flour sack, was dazzlingly beautiful in her simply draped white wedding gown.  And I must offer a word of sartorial praise also for my son Rich, who cut quite a figure in a mode of attire one might have thought obsolete since the days of Simon Legree or, at the latest, Rhett Butler.  This beautiful couple, now three hours married, stepped out upon the dance floor, and, as they say, things really began to happen.  Let the Wild Rumpus begin, indeed!  The late afternoon had been hot and humid, and heavy with the threat of a storm.  But the heavens themselves could not fail to respond to so joyous a company, and as night fell all threat of precipitation vanished, and the revelers were free to drift freely between the culinary delights of the iron foundry and the ample beverage stations of the garden.

            Your bloguiste cannot report on the party’s last hours.  He and some others exercised the septuagenarian option and drove back to the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott.  But one knows even at the time they are happening that certain happy experiences will never fade from the retina of memory, and this was certainly one of them.  To beloved Katie and Richard, God’s blessing, life long and fulfilling, and happiness undiluted! 

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

Song of Solomon 1:2

...not that the wine was bad, mind you.

Delightful Distractions

 John Henry Putney Fleming at the age of thirteen hours

My usual blogging routine, along with such lesser distractions as the Olympic Games, presidential campaigns, wars and rumors of war, the further melting of the icecap, and the incipient buzz about Hilary Mantel’s appearance on the long list for the Booker Prize must give way to the important news of John Henry Fleming’s arrival, about one thirty in the morning at Beth Israel hospital in New York, on July 30.  He is big.  He is beautiful.  And while as of yet he has not leapt a tall building with a single bound, that is doubtless only because he is so content to be hanging out with his radiant mother and beaming father, and to bask in the adoration of two sets of tip-toeing grandparents.

            John Henry has already proved himself a rebel against social expectation.  He was “supposed to” be born in the middle of the month—indeed on Bastille Day.  His apparent reluctance to enter the world, while perhaps understandable to anyone who reads newspapers, caused a little anxiety and maternal distress.  But that vanished soon enough.  “A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come” says the Book;  “but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.”  And joy is certainly the right word for this beautiful young family.

           

           We are already blessed with three wonderful granddaughters.  John Henry is our first grandson.  There is a certain atavistic pride in the “continuation of the family name.”  My father was one of three sons, and the only one to produce offspring.  I was one of three sons, and the only one to produce offspring.  At last, a male heir!  I have to admit a certain amount of proto-Victorian pride.  I watched something like thirty hours of Downton Abbey without ever really understanding what an “entailment” was.  I don’t have to worry about it any more, and I can focus on the unfortunate fact that I possess no estate, entailed or otherwise.  Blessings upon this beautiful babe and his worthy parents!

           
 But that ain’t all.  I’ve always thought the phrase “family planning” somewhat curious.  It is actually a euphemism designed to dignify or obfuscate the artificial techniques used to frustrate the natural results of sexual intercourse.  What “family planning” ought to mean, and what it does mean in this paragraph, is the way families plan things.  Our recent family planning has been terrible.  The idea was to schedule the prospective wedding (next Saturday) of Number One child in such a way that Number Two child and her family, who have been on an extended tour in Europe, would be able to attend.  So great was our confidence in modern obstetrics and its unwavering predictions concerning the mid-month birth of John Henry that it never occurred to us that we might be risking a possible surfeit of blessed events.  The granddaughters now face the excitement of gaining a new first cousin and a new aunt within the space of a single week!  The situation is one that has created a certain breathlessness in the Fleming household, but it gives me the nearly unique satisfaction of knowing a whole week in advance what I’ll be writing about in these pages next.  It probably won't be book binding.

the  brawn

and the brains