We just had a great weekend that
included an overnight visit from old friends abetted on the meteorological
front by an unexpected premonition of spring.
There were a couple of memorable meals and lots of good talk. Joan and I capped it off by attending a
“National Theater Live” filming of Shaw’s Saint
Joan in a terrific production with a brilliant rendition of Joan by Gemma
Arteton. The weekend also included one
curious incident, beyond that of the dog in the night, that is.
Shortly before nine on Sunday
morning I was driving toward church with our friend Susan when my clunky old
flip-top cell phone rang. Now my cell
phone seldom rings, and practically never while I am driving. On the rare occasions that does happen, I
practically never try to answer it. But
this time there was an unusual convergence of circumstances that encouraged me
to do so. There was to begin with an
ideal place to pull over and stop; secondly, I actually knew where the phone
was and that I could easily reach it; third, I believed that the likely caller
was my wife, who had forty minutes earlier set off to the hospital to see
another close friend who (we had learned) had been taken there the previous
night with a heart scare. So I pulled
over and answered the phone.
However, the caller was not my wife
but my daughter in New York. The
conversation went like this—
J: Hello.
K: Dad?
J: Hi, hon…
K.
I’m very glad to hear your voice!
It is always nice to feel appreciated, but this was a
slightly odd remark, given that she rather frequently hears my voice
without commenting upon the fact and, as I thought I remembered, had done so
quite recently. Heard my voice, I mean.
But there
was an explanation. She had just
received an email from an eminent medievalist, a colleague of hers presently
resident in Oxford, expressing her condolences upon the occasion of her
father’s death, and soliciting suggestions for possible authors of a memorial
notice to be published in Speculum,
that best-selling quarterly organ of the Medieval Academy of America. The rumor of my demise, which I must
characterize as grossly exaggerated if not flat-out fake news, had in fact
originated at Academy headquarters in Cambridge, Mass. That Sunday was very busy, and by the time I
broke free the rumor had been apologetically retracted quite without my
intervention. I felt no desire to make further inquiry into
it. However, I continued on to church
with an augmented appreciation of my continuing existence and received
Communion with an augmented sense of gratitude.
“It must
have been some other John Fleming.”
That’s the best the medievalists could come up with by way of excuse. John Fleming is not a common name. On the other hand, it is not exactly what you
would call an unusual name either. At
all points of my career there have always been two or three other John Flemings
out there helping to besmirch or to burnish my reputation. One of them was the pre-eminent rare book
dealer in New York. I never met
him. He operated out of baronial offices
on East Fifty-Seventh Street, where he had become wealthy flipping Gutenberg
Bibles and Shakespeare First Folios. He
was supposed to have chopped up one or two precious medieval manuscripts in
order to maximize profit by selling the individual illuminated pages. It is hard to believe that so cultivated a
man could be guilty of so philistine an act, and I report rather than affirm
the accusation. What I can say with more
confidence is that several manuscript experts in the medieval field were no
less certain that John Fleming was a vandal than that I was John Fleming. I have reason to believe that misprision once
cost me a place on the ballot of the New Chaucer Society! But sometimes what you lose on the
roundabouts you can make up for on the straightaways. There was a prolific British art historian
named John Fleming, who often collaborated with his life partner Hugh Honour. Several times when I was about to give a
guest lecturer or participate in a conference panel the presider or introducer
attributed to me, with glowing commentary, one or more of the important books
produced by this couple.
This is, however, the first time I
had been credited with another man’s death.
Descartes’s best known contribution to philosophy is
sometimes called simply the Cogito,
Latin for “I think”. You can arrive at
certain grounds for belief in your existence simply by thinking about it. “I think; therefore I am”; for even if the
mode of that thought be doubt, it requires an extant mind to do the
doubting. So on this one I elect to go
with the Cogito.
