Anglo-Saxon

Anglo-Saxon King Rex in full regalia (Order of the Bathrobe) with his two sons Ed and Ward

A former student who studied Old English with me forty years ago or more has written me to ask “What’s with this war on the Anglo-Saxons?”  You may not know what he is talking about, but I do.  The term “Anglo-Saxon” has been declared politically offensive, as it supposedly offers aid and comfort to white supremacists.  Vigilant academics have resigned from obscure scholarly organizations with names including “Anglo-Saxon”; and the societies themselves are encouraged to change names.  Believe me, I hesitate to write about topics of political correctness.  In general, my idea of fun does not run to fruitless arguments with humorless adversaries.   Such arguments generate much heat and little light.  This is a risky topic, and I do not claim any special insight into it, but as it primarily manifests itself in linguistic terms, it does fall into a category that has long interested me and has occupied a good deal of my work. 

Political correctness aspires to sanitize language according to certain political canons rather as euphemisms aspire to sanitize language for other social purposes.  Most people don’t actually rest in a restroom, for example.   Contested terms currently include candidates for erasure such as slave and illegal immigrant.  According to the woke, the first should be replaced by enslaved person.  The latter should not be used at all since “a person cannot be illegal.”  The trouble with “Anglo-Saxon” is that the term “is being used by” white supremacists to advance a hateful agenda.  I don’t know whether that is even true, but it is the argument for censoring the term, and it is just as dumb as it looks.  Cars are “being used by” bank-robbers to pull off heists, but that is not a reason to get rid of cars or even to resign from the American Automobile Association.

White supremacy is no laughing matter, but a reaction founded in equal parts of ignorance and self-righteousness is nonetheless ludicrous.  The current academic leftist advocates of “identity politics” are of course not the first group to come up with spurious interpretations of ancient racial groups.  A good deal of German Romanticism indulged in semi-mystical attitudes toward an imagined originary ancient Teutonic race.  With Hitler the idea would move from the realm of the poetic to that of the homicidal.  The whole idea of “fascism”, to the extent that it can be coherently defined, is visually summarized in the rod-bundled axe (in classical Latin fascis, plural fasces), symbolic of the ancient Roman magisterial power to punish and execute criminals.  Mussolini thought his fascism had recovered the spirit of his imagined imperial Roman forebears.  

Who were the Anglo-Saxons?  They were a Germanic people (the Saxons), part of whom in the early Middle Ages migrated to southern England (Anglia, in Latin) and part of whom remained in Germany.  In time the “English” Saxons came to call their continental relatives the Ealdseaxe or “Old Saxons”.  The language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons was English.  Since it was an early form of a language that has undergone very significant historical mutation, scholars usually refer to it as Old English.  The Anglo-Saxons were people; the language they spoke was English.  Nobody told them it was Old.  I continue to think that the distinction between “Anglo-Saxon” and “Old English” (one a people, the other a language) is a useful one.  But both in common and scholarly discourse “Anglo-Saxon” has long since often been used to denominate the language as well; and it is no big deal.  It is preposterous that the term “Anglo-Saxon” should be indicted for crimes of “racism,” for that is the charge it faces.

            Practically all the societies of the old European world were slave societies, especially that of imperial Rome; but the English were freer than many others.  Nowhere in England was there the match of the slave exchange of Dublin.  The great engine of ancient slavery was military conquest.  The English word slave and its European counterparts recall the fate of the conquered Slavonic peoples (the Slavs).  Similarly in early English wealh means both a Welshman (i.e., a native Briton of the populations conquered by the migrating Saxons) and a slave, among other things.  Of course, Anglo-Saxons were often themselves slaves.  Perhaps the most famous early literary appearance of the “English” is the story of Pope Gregory coming upon some Anglo-Saxon children on offer in the Roman slave market.  “Who are these bonny kids?” asked the Pope in his native tongue, Latin.  Answer: Angli.  No, said Gregory, who was among other things one funny guy.  Not Angli but Angeli, angels, messengers, missionaries!  The rest is history.

            From the time of the earliest Germanic migrations to the British Isles there never can have been an Anglo-Saxon “race,” let alone a “pure” one.  The history of early England, written not only in but on its language, is one of persistent Celtic and Scandinavian admixtures.  After the eleventh-century Norman Conquest (remembering always that the Normans were originally North-men, i.e. Vikings) English monoglotism became an index of social inferiority.  There was not much social cachet in being an Anglo-Saxon at the court of Henry II.

            Nor did the supposed latter-day descendants of the medieval Anglo-Saxons always do all that well, incidentally, in the American migration that began in the seventeenth century.  It has been estimated that around half the English stock that settled in early Virginia arrived as indentured servants.  Indentured servitude—though far from the horror of chattel slavery—was hardly a privileged status.  It was a kind of contracted short-term bondage.  A person unable to pay for the sea passage from England could gain passage in exchange for agreeing to a seven-year period of uncompensated labor.  The model for this system would appear to be the biblical story of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel.  The thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished chattel slavery, implicitly continues to recognize voluntary servitude.

            A happy New Year to all.

Merry Christmas 2019

It is my assumption, and certainly my hope, that most readers of this blog will have something much better to do on Christmas day than to sit before a computer screen or squinch their eyes at a smart phone.   This thought has little to with whether you observe Christmas, whether you have ever even heard of Christmas, or whether you have actually arrived at the age of eye-squinching.  Something similar could probably be said of National Fisheries Awareness Day.

But I do celebrate Christmas, which is a big family event for us.  We are about to celebrate the holiday in a remote rural place where the “reception” is either poor or enthusiastic, depending on whether you speak of cell phones or grandchildren.   As Saint Lawrence once remarked, it’s always good to get off the grid for a day or two,  So, wishing all my readers a Merry Christmas, I shall hope to return to this page on New Year’s Day.

Annals of White Collar Crime

Surely you will remember Bernie Madoff, the perpetrator of the world’s most audacious Ponzi scheme.  He’s now in the hoosegow in North Carolina serving out the early years of a sentence of a hundred and fifty years.  Quite a few greedy rich people got snookered, but there were unfortunately more serious consequences as well.  The lives of various colleagues and family members lie in ruins.  One of his sons was driven to suicide.  Under these circumstances you may not be persuaded that Mr. Madoff got off easy; but history might suggest otherwise.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste…

I have in mind the sadder fate of the Rev. Dr. William Dodd (1729-1777), generally known to historians, to the degree he is known, as “the unfortunate Dr. Dodd”.  It was concerning this unctuous malefactor that Dr. Johnson made one of his most acute, if usually misquoted, apothegms: "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

            The white collar of Dodd’s crime was clerical.  He was a celebrity clergyman with his own private chapel of ease frequented by urban gentlefolk, especially the female of the species.  The Anglican Church of his age was rarely overtly concerned with religion.  The great historian Lecky describes it as a kind of vague ethical improvements society and an admirable extension of the police force.  Though he was a popular sentimental preacher, Dodd’s greatest achievement was his celebrated Beauties of Shakespeare.  Unfortunately, he developed a liking for the good life, the expensive life.

            Already by the 1760s Dodd was known in some circles as “the macaroni parson.”  Macaroni is a great word.  It means (1) an Italian pasta; and (2) in adjectival form, a literary composition combining vernacular and Latin, as in “macaronic verse”.  Its most interesting eighteenth-century usage has disappeared, though it is preserved in a well-known popular satirical song, “Yankee Doodle":

            Yankee Doodle went to town, riding on a pony;

            He stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.

Here “macaroni” means foppishness, the acme of high fashion, the imagined quintessence of the cool, the latest style of dress or speech—something along those lines.  It suggests foreign affectation.  The “macaroni parson” was the Apostle to the Fashionable, the Comforter of the Unafflicted.  To conduct convincing field work among the affluent demanded a lavish life style.   And though he anticipated some of our own celebrity evangelists in doing indubitably well by doing dubious good, he always needed more.  Among the plums of his early clerical employment had been a stint as tutor to the Earl of Chesterfield—big money there.  When in 1777 he found himself in debt, Dodd, in an apparently mad moment, forged Chesterfield’s name on a bond of £4200.  He apparently acted with an insouciance similar to that impelling Madoff, a legitimate multi-millionaire, to lust for felonious billions.  Like many notable crimes, Dodd’s peculation was discovered more or less by accident, but it was a fatal accident.  Even adjusted for inflation, forty-two hundred pounds was less than Madoff’s fictive billions, but it was way more than enough to get Dodd arraigned, tried, and sentenced to death in the twinkling of an eye.  Remember, these were the days in England when a man could be hanged for stealing a sheep.  And the forgery of financial instruments was a crime of nearly infinitely greater import than that.  The King, in solidarity with his principal legal officers, was utterly unyielding.  They knew that British prosperity was founded in commerce, and took the view that in a commercial country few crimes could be more serious than financial fraud.  Therefor the sentence of death must stand.

the Macaroni Parson in more fortunate days

            Dodd did have sympathetic friends, quite a few indeed.  Dr. Johnson rallied to his cause out of Christian charity and simple sympathy.  He had barely known the man, and of course acknowledged his folly and guilt.  He raised no theoretical objection to the capital sentence, but he was a man of great heart.  His biographer, Boswell, has several lively pages on the episode, which is doubtless why the case is still remembered so well and why we know that the prospect of hanging wonderfully concentrates the mind.

            What Dodd’s mind so wonderfully concentrated on, of course, was how to stay alive.  Desperate circumstances invite desperate measures.  When it finally became clear that despite popular petitions, tear-jerking letters to the authorities, and the formidable eloquence of Samuel Johnson, Dr. Dodd was certainly going to swing, a new plan was required.  Since he could not avoid hanging, he had to find a way to survive hanging.  Now there’s a real challenge, and it gave birth to an epic crackpot scheme.   It is impossible now to know the degree to which various parts of the scheme were real as opposed to legendary.  But essentially the plot was for a group of conspirators, including a prominent medical man, to secure a safe apartment in a building near the site of execution at Tyburn Prison.  Dodd himself, as he approached the gallows, may or may not have been supposed to secret some kind of breathing tube into his mouth and throat, thus adding to the uncertain pleasures of pendulation those of a simultaneous endoscopy.  The idea seems to have been that death by hanging is not quick but rather leisurely.  Immediately upon the completion of the hanging, Dodd’s friends, waiting at the side of the scaffold with a horse-drawn carriage, were to take possession of the inert body and transport it swiftly the short distance to the safe house.  There the doctor and his assistants would revive the (only apparently) dead divine. 

Quite apart from any inadequacies of medical theory underlying their ingenious initiative, the conspirators had failed to anticipate the problem of traffic control.  Public executions were popular events in eighteenth-century London, and celebrity executions were huge popular events.  Thousands of hyped-up idlers and proletarians, not a few of them inebriated, surrounded the scene on all sides.  Every avenue was blocked.  The makeshift hearse could have more easily speeded through the Holland Tunnel at 5 p.m.  So the unfortunate Doctor Dodd stayed dead.

Family fun at the Tyburn Tree

An enterprising doctoral student should take up a study of the desperations of debt and its criminal consequences in English literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  The title of the dissertation could be “Economic Crime and Punishment.”  The ubiquitous high-born lowlifes who never pay their tailors in timely fashion, if indeed at all, are only the beginning.  The pages of the English novel are practically crawling with deadbeats and ne’er-do-wells fleeing the bailiffs, dodging debtor’s prison, or being hauled off to some sordid “sponging-house”.  Conspicuous among such crawlers is Rawdon Crawley of Vanity Fair, a great novel set in the period of the Napoleonic wars.  Rawdon escapes with mere misery and an ignominious death; but there are worse things.  The last Englishman I know of who was hanged for forgery was a banker, Henry Fauntleroy  (1784 –1824), whose extravagant embezzlements actually destroyed one of London’s old financial houses.  Forgery ceased to be a capital crime in 1836, Reform being (as the historians put it) “in the air.”

 

School Daze

Though hardly less exercised about our current political situation than most of my compatriots, I rarely deal with explicitly political issues in these essays.  Most of us feel awash, if not drowning, in political commentary.  I have no special insight or authority in political issues.  Furthermore, most of my political ideas, which are often uncongenial to my family and friends, are unlikely to be of interest to a general audience.  But I sometimes make an exception regarding issues at the intersection of politics and education.  Do note in the first place that “intersections” are all the rage, and since I have spent most of what is now a long lifetime pursuing education as a profession as well as a private aspiration, here is an intersection I can perhaps occupy with some plausibility.

I begin with a possible factoid for which I have no solid source.   There are international statistics concerning student performance, presented in charts organized by nation states.  In terms of demonstrated ability in mathematics, American high school students apparently are tied with Italian students in twenty-eighth place.  If, however, you ask American high school students what country is tops in math education, a majority will answer “the United States.”  There is the man who knows he knows not.  Teach him.  There is the man who knows not, and knows not he knows not.  Pity him.

Within the last month we all got some very bad news.  Since it had nothing explicitly to do with disgraceful behavior by elected officials, the dysfunctionality of our legislative institutions, murder, mayhem, terrorism, or cultural vulgarity, this bad news was not prominently featured in our national press.  The bad news was that despite untold millions of dollars thrown at our public education facilities, and despite the substantial implementation of the so-called “Common Core” approach in our high schools, the actual test scores for English and math have on a national level either remained flat or actually fallen during the past decade.  The idea of the Common Core itself—which I champion at least with “two cheers” enthusiasm—has now been roundly rejected by the educational “experts” both left and right.

This is not really a left or right thing, however.  To force it to be yet another episode in the culture wars, or another aspect of racial politics, is actually to trivialize it.  The world is changing around us very rapidly.  The principal tasks of our public education system are two.  The first --not necessarily in order of importance—is to educate our young people to the point that they are capable of meaningful participation in our democratic political system.  The second is to prepare them for productive work that the real world is willing to purchase with adequate compensation to allow them to enjoy decent lives.  That we have been failing pretty abysmally at the first task should be at least hinted at by our current political regimes.  If a few phony ads on Facebook are enough to constitute “serious foreign interference in an American election,” the fragility of our democracy may already be approaching the fatal stage.  As for the contemporary workplace, it has changed dramatically from that of my young manhood, and unrecognizably from that of my parents.  High school Wood Shop and Home Ec are simply not going to cut it these days

The big gripe about the Common Core is that it is all about testing, which encourages “teaching to the test.”  I am no lover of academic tests.  And I suspect I have at least a soupçon of authority in the matter, as I have constructed and, God knows, had to evaluate, a very great many of them over the years.  There are often much better motivations for teaching and for learning than test preparation.  But the idea that tests, even bad ones, don’t actually reveal valuable educational data is pure poppycock.  For some years I was a member of the ETS committee that made up the Advanced Placement exam in English.  And while I acknowledge the sometimes risible extent to which our efforts were influenced by various “multicultural” enthusiasms, I never read a completed exam that left me in substantial doubt, within a menu of reasonably fine gradations, of the capacities of a student to do “advanced” work in English language and literature.

We can either honor that information or reject it on some other (probably political) grounds.  I have to say this for Bill DiBlasio, loathsome politician though he be.  He is capable of unsettling honesty.  When faced with the fact that black and hispanic students are grotesquely underrepresented among the admittees to the small number of elite high schools in New York City, his very straightforward solution is to get rid of the entrance exam.  That appears to be doable.  Supplying minority students with a quality primary school education that might prepare them for the exam on a competitive basis with their less pigmented colleagues is apparently not doable.

The crucial subjects in which American students are so conspicuously wanting on the international stage are the same subjects tested by the elite New York Schools: Math and English.  Math must stand for all the STEM fields, which are of ever-increasing importance in the “new” economy.  “English” must stand for all the arts of the old trivium—arts of literacy--reading, writing, and speaking well.  Though the STEM fields must claim a special priority, the skills of literacy remain indispensable for competent citizenship, not to mention a seriously fulfilling life.  I cannot presume to give advice about the math exam, but I can suggest a question that I think should be on the English test.  And if candidates know in advance that it will be there, so much the better.   The question arises in my mind for a somewhat curious reason; it was stimulated by comments I have heard or read in some of the currently abundant and polemical discussion concerning the pronouns appropriate to use of transgendered persons.  Advocated neologisms such as zee, shay, shim, they (singular) and zer are not without their cultural interest, and will perhaps offer the materials for a subsequent essay.  For the moment it is the concept of the pronoun itself that captures my attention.  So my hypothetical exam question is this: “What are the parts of speech in the English language?  Very briefly define their syntactical functions.”  One might suppose that asking an English-speaker that question is rather like inquiring whether an artist knows the primary colors, or whether a musician is familiar with Guido’s scale.  That is, the question asks for elementary, indeed foundational linguistic information.  But you might be surprised.  According to one report, published in the middle of the Iraqi war, only sixteen percent of American high school students, when presented with a world map, could find Iraq on it.

The Crown

Around here it is all about “The Crown”,  the terrific metonymic television series about Queen Elizabeth II recently launched into its third season.  It is brilliantly made, with superb acting by many people, including conspicuously Olivia Colman as the Queen.  (Claire Foy, who played the younger Elizabeth in the first two season, was also excellent.)  It is fully deserving of binge treatment, and if left to myself I would have probably finished off the series in a day; but that is not my spouse’s style.  The strict rationing is probably good for me, and certainly keeps Buckingham Palace in my unconscious thoughts throughout long days. 

 Queens au pair

This third series has a certain amount of particular interest for me.  It begins with the first premiership of Harold Wilson, immediately following my own years in Oxford.  I vividly remember many of the events its portrays, which are in my mind associated with the beginning years of my professional career.   Furthermore Wilson himself was a Jesus College man, certainly the college’s most prominent political alumnus, and he showed up there from time to time.  Also, it occurs to me that Ms. Colman somewhat resembles my mother in one of her distinctive facial expressions.  This invites me to participate in all the oedipal scenes involving Prince Charles a little more authentically.

PM Harold Wilson at the site of the Aberfan disaster

My enthusiasm for this show involves a kind of inner betrayal.  I have always been somewhat annoyed at the common American fascination with royalty and decayed aristocracy.  The enthusiasm of the Founders of our nation for republicanism was directly proportional to their loathing of hereditary monarchy.  But a decade had not passed until we were busy creating an ersatz aristocracy of our own, and we have never stopped. Think of all the seedy European bluebloods who infect the pages of Henry James novels.  Lord Grantham of recent “Downton Abbey” celebrity, is presented as a sympathetic character when in fact he is a jumped-up fortune hunter on Lend-Lease life support.  Once upon a time in this country Wallis Simpson was more admired by American women than Helen Keller.  But still…

I once personally met the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh.  I believe it must have been exactly sixty years ago, when we were all younger, and when Americans were a little rarer in Britain and consequently somewhat less despised.  It was in a reception line; the Queen merely gave us a wan smile, but the Duke made a conceivably witty remark concerning the inadequacy of British heating.

            As a medievalist, I have to say that English majesty has been somewhat wanting over the centuries.  It is mainly downhill after King Alfred, a man of fine moral character, whom any humanist must admire for his emphasis on education.  I also want to give high marks to Edward the Confessor, Henry V, Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Victoria, and George VI.  Needless to say, recognition of achievement is not in every instance synonymous with approbation of moral character.  But the incidence of royal mediocrity is quite high, as immortalized by Byron’s line about George III: “A better farmer ne’er brushed dew from lawn.”

It is quite odd, of course, to be watching an historical drama about people who are still alive and, if not quite kicking, at least still experiencing the motion of the molecules.  The actual Crown today is in one of its periodic states of crisis.  The Royals got a pretty good run out of their latest dynastic wedding, but now the bloom seems to be fading from the bush so far as Meagan Markle is concerned.  It seems not to have taken her very long to have exhausted her historical role as multicultural specimen and to have discovered that Buckingham Palace is not really much fun for a Valley Girl.  The Duke is ninety-eight and retiring, the Queen ninety-three and tiring; but everybody loves her to death and is understandably worried by the prospect of her moving on.   Prince Charles, entering his eighth decade of humiliation, a good deal of it elective, has decided at last to engage the full force of his septuagenarian vim and vigor.  Unfortunately one of the first tasks he must take in hand is sorting out his truly disgraceful younger brother Andrew.  Andrew was never a really close friend of Jeffrey Epstein, he tells us in a widely viewed interview that redefined moral opacity.  He seldom stayed in one of Epstein’s palatial homesteads more than three times a year.  And as for the woman who insists that he repeatedly bedded her when she was seventeen years old, it is all an inexplicable fabrication.  The photograph of him with his arm around her waist?  Photoshopped. 

            Since it’s a classic he-said-she said situation, we must perhaps give him the benefit of the lout.  But the fact is that she said it under oath and caution of perjury, and one is likely to arrive at a certain conclusion in pectore.  The whole episode is as sordid as it can be.   Its supporting co-star is Ghislaine Maxwell, tycoon’s daughter, socialite, dear friend of the Prince, best friend and lover of Jeffrey Epstein, and the most notable go-between or female pimp since Ovid’s Dipsas.   Dante’s Venedico Caccianemico is pursued through the Malebolge by “horned demons armed with heavy scourges”.  Ghislaine Maxwell’s pursuers are BBC reporters with microphones and video cameras.  That’s part of what is called changing social mores   It is no longer possible to pursue Jeffrey Epstein, hanged in his jail cell unhousele’d, disappointed, unaneled and, apparently, widely unknown.  Among the cast of hundreds who barely knew him are Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.  Prince Andrew is now under orders to keep such a low profile that, were it not for his Adam’s apple, he would have no profile at all. One of my favorite and probably spurious “quotations”—it has been attributed to many people from Gladstone to anonymous society matrons—involves a Victorian spectator’s reaction to a performance of Anthony and Cleopatra: “How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen!”   So one looks forward to the television treatment of all this in season eight or ten, but in the meantime it’s a real headache for the real Crown. 

The Chess Match of Life

Bergman's "Seventh Seal   :   Sir Antonius Block (white)-0     G. Reaper (black) +1

Among the many pleasures I anticipate for our forthcoming family Thanksgiving festival are a couple of chess games with our younger son, who is coming down from Montreal to spend a few days.  I am a halfway decent chess player and he a good one.  Neither of us is really good—meaning having achieved the official level of mastership; but we are fairly evenly matched—meaning that every now and then I am allowed to win.  We have been playing since he was a lad and have enjoyed our contests over many years.

Life is a trip, a journey into the unknown, a pilgrimage.  Life is a cabaret, my friend, also a bitch and more rarely a beach.   Sometimes our poets are more discouraging yet.  For Shakespeare, famously, we simply play out our lives.  “All the world’s a stage,” says Jacques in As Your Like It, “and all the men and women merely players.”  Macbeth is harsher yet: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / and then is heard no more: it is a tale / told by a idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing,”   Elsewhere it is not mere play acting but active playing.  For life, you see, is a chess match.

            Chaucer is our first major poet to whom was can assign a name, and his first major poem, usually called the “Book of the Duchess,” is an elegy for his great lady, Blanche of Lancaster, who died of the plague in 1368.  In it her sorrowing widower, John of Gaunt, is allegorized as a Black Knight.  Blanche, of course, is French for “white”; so you can see where this is going.  Fortune checkmates the Black Knight by capturing the knight’s queen, or fers, to use the word derived from Persian then in use by French-speakers.  This is all quite incoherent, of course, since the black and white pieces are adversaries.  But in none of the  several surviving medieval chess books does actual chess successfully compete with moral allegory.  Philidor, the father of modern chess theory in the middle of the eighteenth century, joked that his sons played chess as though it were a game of chance, the outcome of which is determined by caprice rather than by skill and strategy.  That seems to be the actual operating principle of the medieval chess moralists.

chess board, Paris, Bibliothèque National, MS fr. 9197

The biggest of the medieval chess poems known to me—and I do mean big—is a French work generally called Les Eschéz d’Amours—Cupid’s Chess, or Amatory Chess.  Its title has been assigned by modern scholars and should mislead no one into thinking it is an actual systematic chess manual.  In fact, it is a little hard to say succinctly exactly what it is about.  This late fourteenth-century work, one of several encyclopedic poems inspired by the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose, is even now in the course of publication by one of my former students, Gregory Heyworth of Rochester University, and Daniel O’Sullivan of Boston College, editor of the indispensable Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age.   While we await something like a truly comprehensive literary history of chess, O’Sullivan’s volume offers a good introduction to this fascinating subject.  Heyworth is the digitally adept creator of the brilliant “Lazarus Project”, which aims to recover with recently developed technological tools old manuscripts rendered illegible by time and abuse.  (The principal manuscript of Cupid’s Chess, in Dresden,  was fire-bombed with the support of your tax dollars in 1945.)  Though there remains much still to learn about this curious work, in its own day is was sufficiently important to attract a commentary nearly as vast as itself—a treatment generally reserved for authoritative Latin texts.  The commentator was one Evrart de Conty.  There is a knock-out gorgeous manuscript of this book in the national library of France, which you can view on-line.*

Among its many illustrations is an accurate diagram of a chessboard.  Many other medieval illustrations of the board gesture in the right direction but are inexact.   An actual chessboard has sixty-four small squares in the form of a large square.  The British Chancellor of the Exchequer is the officer who in the Middle Ages pursued his checkered career sitting before his spreadsheet made of color-coded wooden squares deployed in columns.  Exchequer was the vernacular for Latin scaccarium, “chess board.”

The real age of “literary chess” was the eighteenth century.  I have already mentioned Philidor (the musician  François-André Danican), whose brilliant Analyse du jeu des Echecs of 1749 was a literal game-changer.   After its publication one could hardly claim to be an intellectual without also being a serious chess player, and no serious chess player could be less than an intellectual.  One of Philidor’s profound maxims (“The pawn is the soul of chess”) was not without its political and revolutionary suggestions.  Diderot, Rousseau, every self-respecting philosophe sipped coffee over chess matches.  The Founding Fathers of our own nation might have perished from the terminal momentousness of the Constitutional Convention without the restorative recreation provided them by the little carved wooden pieces.  Jefferson was a keen but not particularly powerful player.

The greatest of early American chess moralists was Benjamin Franklin.  For a revolutionary, Franklin preached an awful lot of standard bourgeois morality of the “healthy, wealthy, and wise” sort that is so prominent in Poor Richard’s Almanack.  Among his minor works is a sententious short essay entitled “Morals of Chess”.  In it he writes thus: “The game of chess is not merely an idle amusement….For life is a kind of chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and evil events, that are in some degree the effects of prudence or the want of it.”  Specifically, chess has four special lessons to teach.  The first is foresight—anticipating the results of your moves.  The second is circumspection—keeping in mind the whole arena in which you are acting.  The third is being sure to play strictly by the rules, “as the game thereby becomes more the image of human life, and particularly of war.” But the fourth lesson is the most important: “We learn by chess the habit of not being discouraged by present appearances in the state of affairs, the habit of hoping for a favorable change, and that of persevering in the search for resources.”  This injunction must have been particularly useful to Franklin during the Revolution and his sometimes difficult assignments as our ambassador to France.  But I doubt that he ever had to try to honor it, as I had to,  while being mauled by his teen-aged son.

A happy Thanksgiving to all those esteemed readers who celebrate this holiday.
  

*in French, naturally, but lavishly illustrated

Singin' and the Rain

I have never quite understood boredom, by which I suppose I must mean extended periods of boredom, as opposed to the fleeting experience of a bad lecture or a committee meeting.  For the most part life has been a Heracletian fire, full of crackling rapid movement that has left me wondering what comes next.  Even retirement itself, which I expected to devolve in some pastel monochrome, has already been punctuated by a series of vivid, not to say garish episodes—some of them, admittedly, of the sort I could do without—that have been anything but boring.  No doubt this in part arises from the fact that aging makes many intrinsically simple and ordinary things rather complex and extraordinary, and consequently their achievement more notable.  In the twenty-third canto of the Inferno Dante conjures up a procession of the Hypocrites.  These damned souls can move only at snail’s pace, burdened down as they are with cloaks, flashy on the exterior, but actually lined with lead.  Perhaps I can find a more positive analogy in the sight of some of our young college athletes in training, burdened with heavy backpacks as they run up and down the long ranks of seats in the football stadium.  In any event, I feel leaden a good deal of the time.  When locomotion itself becomes a kind of ordeal, simply showing up can be an adventure.

On Monday night we went to a remarkable musical event in the University chapel—a performance of Georgian folk music by the Ensemble Basiani, the Georgian State Vocal Ensemble.  This was a male choir, thirteen strong, all dressed in traditional ethnic finery, sort of decorated black soutanes, over very elegant high black boots in supple leather.  The singing, which included both religious and secular songs, was amazing.  Only a few pieces included some kind of minimal instrumental accompaniment; the main instruments were deep, powerful male voices.  Georgian folk music is characterized by a lot of orchestrated noise—shouting, clapping, and a very distinctive kind of yodeling, sometimes supplemented by dance.  

But the seemingly mundane tasks of getting to and from the venue were slightly more than routine.  It was, in the immortal words of Bulwer-Lytton, a dark and stormy night, fraught with possible geriatric anxieties.  Driving visibility was poor; finding a parking spot demanded competition and an adrenaline flow.   Triumph in that arena left us still with a bit of a walk through a cold rain.  I was armed, but insufficiently; I couldn’t get my five-dollar umbrella open.  Every few steps of the way we would be overtaken by lither juniors.  This process was repeated in the return trip to the parking lot.  Now if age is daily presenting you with an anthology of petty quotidian reminders of your incremental geezerdom, it is only fair that it offer also some contrasting compensations.  It does that marvelously by giving you grandchildren.  A grandchild is not simply a child at one remove, or a smaller version of their own parents.  A grandchild is a unique blessing, a living symbol of vital continuity, a tolerant and ever-surprising companion, a rewarding student and so bounteous a fount of frank and uncomplicated affection, however undeserved, as to repair a souring view of human nature.

We have six grandchildren, five lovely girls and the most delightful little chap you will ever meet--all geniuses of course, all faster than a speeding bullet, each more powerful than a locomotive, and every single one able to leap tall buildings at a single bound.  Furthermore, you have to bear in mind that buildings are now considerably taller than in the heyday of Superman! Admittedly, the oldest “girl” is in her mid-twenties, beautiful and brainy,  and a high-powered executive in New York.  But  do not press me as to what, exactly, it is that she executes.  It’s one of these techie “platform” things that, so far as I understand, empowers other platforms.  In my mind it must be similar to Garrison Keillor’s National Organization of Organizations.  What really keeps me on my toes, I just realized, is not kefir or yoga; it is grandparenthood.  In a healthy familial setting grandchildren are like works of art as written about in Eliot’s great essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”  They recapitulate a respected cultural inheritance while applying, modifying, and expanding it through individual personality and experience.  They are teachers as well as learners.

The youngest of the grandkids, also female, has only arrived at the beginning of her schooling, though she  already radiates an executive aura.  Four of them live in New York, and the other two not so very much further away, in Montreal.  We see the New Yorkers very frequently and the Montrealers perhaps too seldom but still not infrequently.  We are rapidly coming up to Thanksgiving, which will involve the usual stuff-and-groan contest, and for a New York kid a leafy New Jersey back garden opening on a sylvan path to Lake Carnegie is as good as Camp Gitche Gumee any day.   All the grandkids will be there save Lulu who on her own initiative is spending a (high school) junior semester is Marseille in order to keep up with her French.  But I could feel her sitting next to me at the Basiani concert.  For right in the middle of it the golden youth of the Princeton University Glee Club briefly claimed the stage (i.e., the cathedral-like chancel steps) for a couple of beautiful numbers.  The talented director of this group, Gabriel Crouch, wrote thus in the Program Notes: “…[W]e’ve never come so close to a tradition which makes our own feel so…adolescent.”  According to Chaucer’s Miller, an exponent of the generational war, “Youthe and elde is often at debaat.” But on Monday night youth and elde were in harmony, or at least sweet and fulfilling complement. 

The ancient music of these Caucasian singers had another special balm for my geezerdom.  We were sitting in the second row of the nave, which, as the first row had been left empty, was in effect the very front.  I don’t know how large a Georgian expat community there is in central Jersey, but judging from the friendly personal exchanges between singers and audience members I’d say quite a few.  There is a subsidiary entrance to the chapel at the chancel level on its east side.  During an applause pause midway through, a group of three sodden late comers came in: a middle-aged woman, a very ancient woman in a wheelchair, and what I must describe as an ecclesiastical Gerontius.  They came to the front row immediately in front of us.  The man, though not in full ecclesiastical regalia, was obviously of some high order of Orthodox Christian episcopacy, in the autocephalous Church of Georgia.  His beard, though not quite so long as his full-length cassock, was perfectly proportioned to it.  He wore an elaborately embroidered tall, flat cap that puts to shame the one I bought in the Istanbul market.  He carried a beautiful stick, half cane and half crosier, topped with a large metal ornament in a material I took to be gold.  He was probably not much if at all older than I am, but he radiated the aura of Blake’s Ancient of Days.  He also radiated an unfeigned “child-like” joy for the music both of his foot-stamping, hand-clapping compatriots and the sober reticence of the American teen-agers in the Glee Club.  In that moment neither walking sticks nor wheel chairs seemed a very big deal.

William Blake, "The Ancient of Days"

You can hear a short piece by the Basiani Ensemble HERE: or their whole 2017 concert in Saint Petersburg HERE.

Searching for Jan Valtin

Retirement is something you have to feel your way into.  It took me about a decade to realize its principal point for my life: that there is precious little that I am actually obliged to do.   I realize that I spent a professional career largely defined by deadlines, due dates, and the prompt appearance at duly scheduled meetings.  Furthermore, I felt obliged, in order to “keep up” with my field to read a lot of poorly conceived and poorly written scholarship that dispirited rather than enlightened me.  Just as I shall never have to grade another final examination, I shall never have to read another book on Queering the Quest or Questing the Queer?  Artistic Obfuscation of the Sexual Subject in the “Chivalric” Poems of Reinhardt von Eisenbach.  I can spend my time reading Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” which is how I spent some happy hours during the last week.  Talk about multicultural!  Anyway, the unfortunate feeling of pressing obligation made its unwelcome though thankfully brief return last week.  This is how it came about.

Ten years ago I published a book, The Anti-Communist Manifestos, in which I studied the political and cultural impact in the United States and in France of four best-selling books of anti-Communist tendency.  Probably the least known of the four—although it had been the best-selling book in America in 1941—was Out of the Night by Jan Valtin (the pseudonym of a German sailor named Richard Krebs).    I hope it is not immodest to say that my book has played a role in animating a certain scholarly interest in Valtin/Krebs, a rather mysterious figure who claimed to have been a Communist espionage agent and who was accused by some enemies of being a Gestapo agent.  Together with one of the leading French historians of Communism, Guillaume Bourgeois of the University of Poitiers, I had planned to help organize an international scholarly conference devoted to him.  Serious illness has for the last year somewhat curtailed my activities, however, and I am unable just for the moment to travel to France to participate in my “own” conference.  Bummer.

But Guillaume had the idea that I might at least be present as some kind of spectral presence on a screen; I could send a short contribution by video.  In my professorial life I had naturally given video-recorded lectures many times.  But always I had behind me the technical resources of a university’s Audio-Visual Department or of the private corporation that was paying for the lectures.  Now I had to try to come up with something on very short notice.  I didn’t think my phone, even if I could miraculously learn how to use it, was the right tool for the right job.  How fortunate for me then that my elder son Richard is a sound-recording engineer, and indeed one of the best in the trade.  Sound engineers are not of course the same as videographers, but the two work together and complement each other.  As luck would have it Rich was briefly between assignments in distant parts and proved his filial affection by agreeing to help me out even at the expense of upending his family plans.  So I am grateful not only to him, but to a wonderful daughter-in-law and granddaughter, who tolerated the disturbance.

So on Monday afternoon Rich arrived at my house lugging a large, heavy, stoutly built box containing the state-of-the-art video camera he had borrowed from a brother in the trade.  Taken from this box and assembled, it was one of the most magnificent pieces of techie equipment I had ever seen.  Rich told me that it costs $50,000, of which the lens accounts for four-fifths.  I hope that this was hyperbole, but fear it probably wasn’t.  When it comes to a borrower or a lender being, I am a flat-out Polonian.  My mind was haunted by memories of the Maupassant short story of the lost borrowed necklace.  I was glad to get definitive word that Rich got the precious instrument safely back to Brooklyn.

I had spent so much energy fretting about how it might be possible to produce a video in forty-eight hours that I had given practically no thought to what I would actually say should we be able to find the necessary equipment.  But I did have a couple of hours to sit and think about it, and I was able to jot down a few notes, gather a few show-and-tell items, and stretch out a rather minimalist youtube presentation  to nearly half an hour.  The big question about Out of the Night, which must remain the fundamental written text for any study of Krebs, involves its historical reliability.  It was presented to the public as straight autobiography, but I have had to conclude that it is largely a work of fiction.  Like many novels it is enriched by the author’s personal experience, but as an “historical document”—the category to which its author and publisher assigned it in 1940—it doesn’t come close to passing the smell test.  One of the Irish bishops is supposed to have remarked of Gulliver’s Travels, at the time of its publication, that there were parts of the work he could not fully credit.  Let us say I have a similar reaction to Valtin’s book, though that is far from the reaction of many of its readers.  I pursued this theme, along with a couple of others, in my little talk; and although in the video my son Rich was not able to transform his paternal pig’s ear into a silk purse, he did come up with something surprisingly plausible.  What a great guy!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/60z3H0TNZcE