Boston Adventure

Jean Stafford

 

Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit: “Man proposes but God disposes”.  This daunting aphorism, which became a vernacular proverb in most of the languages of Europe, apparently first appeared in print  in the widely read Imitation of Christ of Thomas à Kempis in the early fifteenth century.  But surely by then folks had already long known that the best-laid plans of men, as well as of mice, often go astray.  The whole proposed drive to Montreal described in last week’s essay never happened.  Whited out, so to speak.  Instead we had  a marvelously mellow Christmas Eve in an apartment on frozen and empty Washington Square in Manhattan, a drive-by Christmas morning greeting with the family in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and a delicious afternoon onion soup for seven of us around the fire in Princeton.

 

An unanticipated Christmas present had come early.  It is the latest arrival (volume 324) from the Library of America, the Complete Novels of Jean Stafford.  I had never read a word of Jean Stafford (1915-1979), though of course I had a vague “name recognition.”  Though she has now mainly disappeared from literary conversations, she was a writer both popular and highly regarded in my own literary infancy.  Her most famous book, and the one in which I am currently wholly engrossed, was Boston Adventure, published when I was eight years old (1944).  She later appeared in my literary education as having been the battered wife, during the 1940s, of the bi-polar Boston Brahmin poet Robert Lowell.  She had her own mental health and substance abuse problems.  She also has connections with the southern Agrarians, and their adherents, especially Allen Tate and Peter Taylor, names frequently bandied about Sewanee in my time there. 

 

   where Sonie lived

 

I have not yet finished digesting Boston Adventure, but I find it remarkably good, and good in ways that are not common even in our most highly respected novelists.  This novel is a kind of sour Bildungsroman—the fancy German word literary scholars use for a “a novel dealing with one person's formative years or spiritual education.”  It is the history of a highly sensitive and intelligent young girl, Sonia (Sonie) Marburg, who dreams of transcending her miserable material and cultural circumstances only to discover….The background details are rich and engaging but still a little slippery, and occasionally melodramatic and surreal.  Geographically, the novel is split between two Boston locations, defining the book’s two long narrative movements—a fictional, grubby working-class community called Chichester on the water, and the posh Pinckney Street dwelling of a Brahmin spinster, Miss Pride.  Miss Pride summers at the Hotel Barstow, a fading Chichester beach hostelry at which both Sonia’s mother and the young girl herself work as domestics.  It is there that Sonie becomes fascinated by her imagined vision of Miss Pride’s cultural and social elegance.   Sonia’s father is a disillusioned German immigrant, an ineffectual cobbler, who met her mother, a shallow-minded and neurotic Russian, on the boat from Europe.  The family lives in a kind of physical and spiritual hovel. The marriage is poisonous, a cauldron of failed daydreams and recriminations, and early in the novel the husband simply walks away from his daughter and his pregnant wife and is never again heard of.  After much storm and stress, Sonia almost miraculously wins the favor of Miss Pride to such a degree that the spinster takes her into her private city home as combination secretary, companion, general dog’s body, and pile of clay to be molded to her patroness’s design.

      where Miss Pride lived 

 

Stafford’s style is strikingly realistic.  The descriptions of the bleakness of the Marburg menage—a kind of shabbiness to which frank squalor would actually be preferable—is bone-chilling.  The revelation of character, at least of most of the characters, is brilliant and subtle.  Yet there is a dimension of the fantastic, and at times of the grotesque, in the presentation of the worlds both of the shanties and of the mansions.  The narration is brilliant but problematic.  The narrator is Sonia, but at what point in her life one cannot say.  Most of the section entitled “Hotel Bristow” takes place when Sonia is in her earliest ‘teens.   She reaches an indeterminate very young womanhood in the second half, “Pinckney Street.”  The novel seems to begin about 1919 or 1920.  One would expect some prominent presence of the Sacco and Vanzetti affair at the end of the Twenties, but very little happens in the "real world" in this book.  The thoughts and general sensibilities attributed to the young Sonie seem far beyond her age.  Are they coming from the somewhat older self on Pinckney Street—or a considerably older self long after both movements?  Does the narrator realize the tragi-comic meaning of her story, or is that for Stafford’s readers alone?

 

Boston Adventure was a big best-seller, meaning that it must have captured a large “popular” audience, but it is very high-brow in its literary ancestry.  It’s a sort of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, so you can’t miss a whiff of James Joyce.  But there’s more than a whiff of two other great modernists—Henry James and Marcel Proust.  This is a book about the subtle interactions of memory, desire, and “art” very broadly conceived.  Early in her acquaintance with Miss Pride, and in hopes of perhaps being able to impress her, Sonia borrows James’s The Awkward Age from the library.  Awkward, indeed!  “After a tormenting evening of poring over the completely unintelligible sentences of the novel…I did not try again to read Miss Pride’s favorite authors…”  I myself was forty before I could grasp Henry James.

 

The quality of the writing is superb.  Stafford’s verbal versatility seems inexhaustible.  Whole paragraphs are gems.  Even her short sentences can have a punch.  Mac, Miss Pride’s chauffeur,  brings her car around to the hotel entrance.  “He was a thin, sharp, silvery young man who, in his gray livery, looked like an upright rat.”  And the quality of the imaginative achievement is extraordinary.  In the current moment the limits of the artistic imagination seem to be defined by the categories of identity politics.  Only women can write about women with “authenticity”, only blacks can write about blacks.  What actually makes literature possible are certain universally shared facts of the human condition.  What makes it engaging and illuminating is the nearly limitless cultural variety amid which those facts are displayed.  Sonia’s quest for self-realization and cultural salvation is obviously the author’s “own” experience in a sense partially real as well as symbolical.  But the way in which a highly educated mid-century, middle-class Anglo-American can imagine both the exterior and interior lives of failing European immigrants of a rapidly vanishing earlier generation is extraordinary.  If you are going to write a book about whalers it undoubtedly helps if you have actually seen a whale-hunt; but seeing a hundred whale hunts won’t expose the greatness of Moby Dick any more than the jagged rocks behind the Mona Lisa explicate her enigmatic smile.

 

In Monday’s newspaper a front-page article documented an early result of the great educational abdication of the Pandemic: the expanding need for remedial literacy courses in many American high schools.   Perhaps I could do worse in the first essay of 2023 than once again to encourage all patriotic Americans who love our language and literature to acquire during the coming year a volume or two of the Library of America.  The LofA is a non-profit enterprise that produces splendid and affordable editions of important American writers who have passed the test of time or are making their serious bid to do so. There is a lot of clucking these days about our “endangered democracy,” as though democracy’s vulnerability were some new thing, and that democracy can be rescued with more relaxed voter registration laws.  American democracy was born in daring and in vulnerability.  It has been in danger since the get-go.  When Franklin said (allegedly) that he and his colleagues had come up with a Republic if you can keep it –he was worried less about the redcoats than about the very hard work involved in being and remaining free.  There is no greater defense of democracy than literacy, robustly exercised.  So defend democracy.  Read a good book. 

 

 

 

Season's Greetings

Two-color job-printing blocks, 1920s; C & P clamshell

 

While I hope that these blog essays are usually about something a little out of the way, circumstances on occasion impose a certain necessary conventionality.  With Christmas now but four days away, and having already spent at least the last ten days in strenuous activities related to it, only a conscious and artificial effort would allow me to let it go unnoticed or to fail to wish all my readers a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.  That to do so might risk offense to someone is merely one among many other puzzling cultural phenomena that have overtaken me in my advancing age.  I myself have always been pleased to accept the good wishes attendant upon any occasion whatsoever, including commemorations in which I have no actual personal involvement, such as National Stamp Collecting Week.  So here’s  wishing you a penny British Guiana magenta in your stocking. 

 

Of course in its origins Christmas is a Christian holiday, the more theologically proper name of which is “the Nativity of Our Lord,” referring to the birth of Jesus.  But in current American cultural reality the religious dimension has long been overshadowed by the aspect of secular commercialism measured in shopping days.  In this aspect it is indeed a national holiday of that vague and non-committal sort for which the annoying greeting “Happy Holidays” had to be coined, the previous “Season’s Greetings” having proved insufficiently ecumenical.  Nonetheless Christmas continues to be bathed in the indeterminate suggestion of biblical nomadic pastoralism, supplemented by reindeer and stockings for non-existent chimneys.  The central player in the scene is no longer a babe in a manger, let alone the incarnate Logos of the neoplatonists, but a bewhiskered and beloved old guy in red pajamas whose tenuous connection to Christianity is in the philology of his strange name, no longer easily graspable even by students of early Germanic dialects.  And of course there is a whole lot of wintry iconography wholly foreign to the climes in which most actual Christians now live.  But Christmas a humbug, Mr. Scrooge?  Nonsense.  Eight hundred and ninety billion in sales last year.  Changing social realties perhaps complicate Christmas celebrations, as also the lack of them; but those celebrations remain, in all their extraordinary variety, a source of anticipation, excitement, and enjoyment for many millions—including, perhaps, you.  They certainly do for us.

 

The highly poetic accounts of the Nativity in the gospels clearly have very different emphases behind them.  Two of them are much concerned with underscoring the fulfilment of specific Hebrew prophecies, and they are the folkloristic ones from which all the great details in church pageants come: crowded inn, chilly stable, shepherds, three kings following a star.  The main point about the Nativity for John, who was something of a Platonic philosopher, is that Jesus was the pre-existent, eternal divine force that had created the universe.  In the beginning was the Word.  And Mark doesn’t say a thing about Jesus being born.  Jesus just shows up, announced by John the Baptist.  There is no particular warrant for the December date.  The European winter can be cold and dark, and various evidences of pre-Christian winter revelries suggest that the gospels themselves were already influenced by widespread social practices intended to relieve winter, at least momentarily.  In this regard the odd medieval belief that God created the world in the month of March—mentioned by Chaucer among others—may have played a role, as a nine-month gestation period would then lead to December.

 

The wintry aspects of the situation are much on my mind at the moment because, with a close eye to the weather forecasts, we are planning on Friday to drive to Montreal to be with Luke, Melanie, John Henry, and Hazel.  More exactly we are planning to be driven to Montreal.  The chauffeur northbound will be Katy, the chauffeur southbound Richard.  So if the creeks don’t rise—a possibility, incidentally, that has merited an actual meteorological caution—almost all of the family will be gathered together somewhere else than in the parental homestead in Princeton.  It is a very happy prospect, if just a little unnerving to us.  Vagaries of the current calendar and a slight uncertainty concerning the precise plans for our return might conceivably alter the publication date of the next post; but it is my hope to continue GladlyLerne on its accustomed schedule in the rapidly approaching year.  In the meantime, we send friendly greetings and all best wishes to all our regular readers and, indeed, anyone who has come upon this post by typing error or other misadventure.

Medieval Orientalism

 

 

I rarely compare myself to Ovid, and must presume that most of my readers share that virtue with me.  But I must bow to circumstances—said circumstances being the following.  Because I try to mix things up in this blog, I am reluctant to deal with scholarly and “medieval” topics in successive weeks.  That’s how Ovid felt about his own literary effusions.  Apparently worrying that he was in danger of getting the reputation of a Johnny OneNote erotic poet, he sat down to write a martial epic—you know, like the big boys, Homer and Virgil.  You probably also know that the verse form required of the Latin military epic is the hexameter, a line of six metrical feet, as opposed to love poetry, in which hexameter and pentameter (five-foot) lines alternate in couplets.  But the moment he wrote his first hexameter lines, Ovid tells us, diabolical Cupid, who was watching over his shoulder, reached down and plucked away one of his meters.  So he had to write the Amores instead.  The devil made him do it.

 

Well, I was already mulling this over during my recent experience  in some very unkempt local woods where I sometimes walk, when I stumbled (figuratively, fortunately) upon the fallen fruits of two osage orange trees I had not before noticed. That probably would have led to my Uncle Wayne’s tales of tank warfare in the hedgerows of Normandy.  But just then there arrived in the post from my friend John Raimo, inveterate reader and pusher of good reading, the gift of something good to read, a very slim volume entitled Double Portrait: Saint Francis in Dante and Giotto.*  Dante was a great writer, Giotto a great painter, and both were Florentines, possibly born within a year of each other.  Francis is perhaps the most famous male saint in the Roman Church.  So it is an inevitable topic, and hardly new, though here treated in an engaging way by Massimo Cacciari, an ex-Communist philosopher, prolific public intellectual, and former mayor of Venice.  I read most of this book in a couple of sleepless hours of the night, and knew immediately that I would have to put the osage oranges back on ice.  Which is indeed what you do have to do with osage oranges if you want to stratify the seeds.  But it just so happens that the subject of visual and literary treatments of Francis by medieval painters and writers has been one of my long-standing interests.  That is doubtless why John sent me this little book, and it explains why it was at least plausible that the Franciscan Institute should award me their Francis Medal a few years back.

 

The linkage of both Giotto and Francis with Dante is almost inevitable, and there have been many essays inspired by it.  Cacciari’s own emphasis is that, in his view, the visual “take” of Giotto and the literary one of Dante present two very different Francises.  This is a little less surprising than Cacciari tries to make it. 

 

                 Massimo Cacciari 

Indeed it was nearly required by what must certainly have been Giotto’s closely invigilated commission to do the famous Assisi sequence.   Francis had been a challenging and controversial figure since his arrival on the historical scene at the end of the twelfth century.  There are probably twenty versions of Saint Francis current even now, the most popular in this country being the peacenik animal lover and supervisor of bird baths.  In the time of Dante and Giotto—both of whom were born decades after Francis’s death—differing visions about the meaning of Francis were still not entirely resolved within the Church.  Was he simply the remarkable founder of a remarkable new religious order?  Or was his proclamation of a doctrine of absolute “evangelical” poverty a unique and apocalyptic intrusion of sacred history?  Certainly that doctrine was a challenge and a threat to many—particularly people who were financially comfortable, beginning with Francis’s own father.

 

Conflict between these two visions brought strife into the Order, and to a degree the whole Church, throughout the later thirteenth century and into the fourteenth.  In the 1260s there was an attempt to suppress all the earliest accounts of Francis and supplant them with one officially sanctioned biography by Saint Bonaventure, the head of the Order.  This book is a literary masterpiece that comes very close to reconciling two irreconcilable visions, and it is the main textual source for most paintings dealing with the narrative content of Francis’s life, including Giotto’s.  Dante’s “word pictures” are much more daring and adventurous.  In a short essay one example will have to serve.

 

        Giotto di Bondoni

 

 Giotto's Francis

 

In the Divine Comedy Dante’s treatment of Francis is part of a “double portrait” different from the one of which Cacciari writes.  It is balanced by a portrait of Dominic, founder of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans).  In Dante’s poem Francis is praised through the voice of Thomas Aquinas, greatest of Dominican theologians; Dominic is praised by Bonaventure, greatest of Franciscan theologians.  Many contemporaries believed that the two founders were divine messengers sent by God to renew the Church.  They found many signs in the Bible to encourage their belief.

 

For example, there are between ten and twenty thousand species of birds known to ornithologists.  And since Noah is supposed to have had seven pairs of each, the sound track of his navigation must have been symphonic.  Yet the Bible singles out only two birds for designated roles.  To scout out whether the Flood is truly receding he sends off first a raven and then a dove.  The allegorical meaning of this initiative was obvious to thirteenth-century apocalyptics.  For the renovation of the Church following the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 God had sent into the world two great new missionary armies: the black friars (Dominicans) and the gray friars (Franciscans)--the colors of the habits of the principal mendicant orders.  But if you are going to be truly apocalyptic, your best bet is not Genesis but the Apocalypse (Book of Revelation) itself.

 

Dante and his book

 

Here are some of the words (the English of which no two translators share) with which Dante introduces Francis.  “[In Assisi] was born into the world a sun, as sometimes it arises from the Ganges.  But he who speaks of this place should not say Ascesi, which would be speaking short, but Oriente, if he would speak properly.”  Ascesi, a far-fetched pun on the Italian name of Francis’s birthplace, is a Latin preterit from ascendo—to rise.  Oriente comes from another verb of similar meaning—orior—but one that very early took on the job of denoting the sunrise.  For people everywhere that was a phenomenon that appeared in the east—that is, the Orient.  So Francis is not merely a solar riser, but an oriental solar riser.  The evangelist Luke, weaving together a medley of old Hebrew prophecies, wrote thus of the prophetic mission of John the Baptist to announce the coming of Jesus  “to give knowledge of salvation unto [Israel] by the remission of their sins, through the tender mercy of our God, whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us” (Luke 1:77-78)  It is obvious what Dante had in mind.  The most radical of the poverty fanatics insisted that Francis of Assisi, Francis of the Arising, was the Sixth Angel of the Apocalypse.  And I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, having the seal of the living God…(Rev. 7:2).  That “seal” was the markings of the stigmata, the very wounds of crucifixion transferred to the body of Francis from the body of Jesus Christ, the dayspring from on high and the chief of all Risers.  Francis was an alter Christus, a “second Christ”.  It’s mind-boggling, but that is what Dante is actually saying (Paradiso 11:49-54).

 

Many historians continue to insist that there is an “unchanging human nature” that enables us to feel considerable confidence about writing of past societies very different from our own.  But even our own documentable familial, tribal, national, political, religious, and cultural pasts—meaning those well recorded in public and private records—are enough to challenge this assumption.  I am now in my eighties, and when I compare what I know about the lives of my grandparents with what I know about the lives of my grandchildren, I feel I am already halfway to encountering two different species.  And that is before we have even scratched history’s surface.   The differentness—or to use a fancy word, the alterity—even within groups of linguistic hegemony and blood kinship over a period of not more than a hundred and fifty years—is truly astonishing.  And they hardly even rank as “historical” in the way we think about history.  The medieval European materials I touch upon here widen the lens on the totality of human history only very slightly.  The past is truly the most foreign of foreign lands.  And we inevitably tend to try to remake it according to our own contemporary liking.

 

*Massimo Cacciari, Doppio ritratto: San Francesco in Dante e Giotto.  (Milan: Adelphi, 2012), pp. 88. 

 

Making Sense of the Senses

Cluny Museum tapestries: taste

 

During their recent trip to Paris, my spouse and our elder son Richard dropped by the Cluny Museum, housed in one of the city’s most ancient buildings, and featuring one of the world’s greatest collections of medieval European art.  Joan brought back a set of postcards of one of the museum’s renowned holdings: the series of six spectacular tapestries depicting “The Lady with the Unicorn” (La dame à la lincorne).  You are probably aware of them, or of a somewhat similar set in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.  I have often stood in awed admiration before the originals.  Now a couple of postcards are enough to set the mind racing.

 

wheel of the senses (14th c.) Peterborough, Cambridgeshire
 

            The principal achievement of the maker(s) of these amazing objects was to give birth to new beauty in the world, but the tapestries  do have an intellectual and scientific theme: five of them exemplify the five corporal senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste).  The sixth, in which the Lady does not seem to be “sensing” anything in particular, has puzzled scholars; but there is a clue to its probable “meaning” in an earlier mural painting discovered almost by accident in Longthorpe Tower, part of a late medieval domestic compound in Peterborough  in East Anglia.  The survival of medieval mural paintings in domestic buildings is comparatively rare.  One of the most interesting of the Longthorpe murals is a wheel of the five senses, in which each of the senses is allegorically represented by an animal: monkey (taste), spider (touch), boar (hearing), smell (vulture), and sight (rooster?).  These correspond to lore textually preserved in The Nature of Things (De natura rerum), the popular encyclopedia of Thomas of Cantimpré, a thirteenth-century Dominican friar.  In that work, however, the emblem for sight is a lynx or an eagle.  The Longthorpe “rooster” is unfortunately in the only seriously damaged section of the painting.

 

Earlier attitudes toward the bodily senses were complex.  In their brilliant exuberance, the Unicorn tapestries present beautiful and affirmative ideas that seem very different from the gloomy moral attitudes of medieval Christian asceticism, which regarded the pleasures of the senses with the deepest suspicion and sometimes with horror.  Medieval saints’ lives are replete with examples of the perverse warfare holy people waged against the gratification of sense.  They sprinkled ashes on their food, hardly “gourmet” to begin with, to render it a penance.  They wore hair shirts, cultivated body lice, slept on sharp gravels near the stench of orchestrated ordures.  Women went to heroic lengths to mar and conceal their beauty.  Origen castrated himself.  The modern mind recoils.  Learned men explained the story of Ulysses’ survival of the Sirens’ song, bound to the ship’s mast with wax-blocked ears, as a prefiguration of the crucifixion of Jesus, whose sacrificial death was also a triumph over sensual gratification.

                                   

 

wheel of the seven deadly sins

  

The elder Jan Breughel, collaborating with Rubens, did a famous series on the senses.  Four of the five individual panels of a set by Jan junior survive.  They are thematically related to the well-known Bosch “wheel” of the Deadly Sins.  The wheel itself was probably suggested by the very common medieval image of Fortune’s Wheel from Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, where the figure standing by the wheel—usually Fortune herself—is sometimes Lady Philosophy and sometimes the author Boethius.  (I suggest that the standing supervisory male monarch at Longthorpe reflects this version of the image; the “lady” in the Cluny tapestries may echo some female allegorical authority figure like Lady Philosophy.)

                                     

wheel of Fortune

   

All of this is of particular interest to me because I have long had in my sights a learned Elizabethan poetic mini-epic, or epyllion, by George Chapman—the same Chapman whose translations of Homer so fired the imagination of John Keats.  Chapman’s poem, which nobody has claimed to understand entirely, is entitled “Ovid’s Banquet of Sense.”  On the surface this is a fantastical bit of erudite pornography in which a fictional version of the poet Ovid becomes a voyeur who sneaks into a private garden where the beautiful young Corinna is bathing.  His exquisite lust for her is elaborated in more than a thousand lines of exquisite verse.

 

The identification of the five senses is ancient, and so is the moral or philosophical analysis of their operations.  Though it to some extent continued Greek philosophical traditions, Christian theology, with its deep hostility to sexual pleasure in particular, insisted on the dangerously misleading nature of all bodily gratifications.  In this regard, strange to say, the Roman erotic poet played a major pedagogic role, for though popularly regarded as a randy writer, he actually treated sexual passion as a madness and a disease.  His lines are frequently cited in medical and moral writings.  This surprising reputation is encouraged by his authorship of a poem called the Remedia Amoris (Medicines Against Love), a kind of palinode to his Art of Love.  But his epic Metamorphoses is likewise a huge catalogue of erotic disasters and sexual crimes in which the gods of Olympus are often the worst offenders.  The genre of the Latin elegy (overwhelmingly love poetry, often light-hearted) conventionally treated the sexual act as a five-stage process (seen from the male point of view).  The five steps of love (gradus amoris) were seeing the woman (visus), some friendly pick-up lines (adloquium), osculum (kiss), tactus (touch), and finally concubitus or factum (copulation).  This quite artificial scheme appears widely in Latin elegy, and then later in many medieval and Renaissance poems and plays.

 

            Ideas are often born of mixed marriages.  It takes only a little vigorous mental shoehorning—regard a kiss as a taste rather than a touch, concentrate on the auditory part of the spoken word, and punt on smell, of which there is a good deal in Chapman’s poem—and you have a reasonably tidy correspondence of the five senses and the quinque gradus amoris, the five steps of love.  That is the sequence of “Ovid’s” experience in Chapman’s poem.  You are hardly likely to lose the sequential plot of the poem’s progression according to the “steps of love”; but the printer of Chapman’s first edition (1595) makes sure you get the five senses part as well.  In the right margin of the “Argument” (brief synopsis) preceding the poem the senses are listed in order of narrative appearance: auditus, olfactus, visus, gustus, and tactus—hearing, smell, sight , taste, and touch.

 

            The “steps of love” had already become the steps of lechery in medieval moral theology.  Chaucer’s Good Parson, in the nearly endless sermon on penance that concludes the unfinished Canterbury Tales, calls the five-step program the devil’s five fingers.  “The firste finger is the fool lookynge of the fool woman and of the fool man.”  Chapman, a deeply scholarly man of the Renaissance, is both more learned and more subtle than a simple medieval parson, of course, and no one has yet explained to my satisfaction the ambiguities of his poem.  But once again we have the printer to help us.  He has put a rare Renaissance emblem or allegorical picture on Chapman’s title page.  Its motto[Mens] sibi conscia recti (“A mind conscious of its rectitude” from the Æneid 1, 604) does not take us too far.  But the picture itself speaks.  Old philosophers in the Platonic tradition, followed later by the Christian moralists, were deeply skeptical concerning the powers of the human sensory apparatus to deliver truth, which belonged to the world of the spirit, not that of the body.  “We see as through a glass, darkly,” wrote St. Paul.  The sensory world is replete with misleading distortions.  An example often used was the palpable distortion of objects viewed through water.  A straight oar seemed to bend at the junction of its submersion.  That is the principle demonstrated in the rather crude title page emblem.  A straight piling or signal post rising from the sea-bed appears to bend at the water’s surface.  The word rectitude derives from a Latin word meaning straightness, uprightness.  Sibi conscia recti. The mind, in the rectitude of which it is conscious, must not surrender to the distortions of mere corporal sense.

Death of the Author

Roland Barthes (d. 1980)

My chosen career as a professional student of old authors got off to a rocky start in the 1960s.  The author—or I should say the Author, capitalized—was already ailing even during my undergraduate years, and I had barely gotten my Ph.D. when his death was formally announced.  That was in 1967 when Roland Barthes, the famous French literary theorist,  published his influential essay “The Death of the Author”.  Barthes explained brilliantly how authors have always had much less to do with the books they write than you might think.  He extended and amplified the idea already popular among some of the so-called New Critics.  These people, who by now probably ought to be called the Paleolithics, held that an author’s intention was irrelevant to the work of art produced, the meanings of which were out of her hands the moment it left the printing press, if not before.  The arena of works by so-called authors now was the black ice and slippery cobblestones of language itself; the reader must be willing to do the heavy lifting of creating meaning, and be prepared for surprises.  So Randy Newman, author of “Short People Got No Reason to Live,” might in vain claim that his song was a satirical indictment of mindless human prejudices, invoking the indisputable biographical fact that he was himself a short person; he still faced the wrath of the Short Peoples’ Lobby, which turned out to be not merely extant but militant and irate.  But it wasn’t all bad.  If the Author was dead, the critic could be all the more lively.  Instead of talking about how smart Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf were, professors could concentrate on how smart professors are.  What was not to like in English Departments?

I was pretty cool with all this because most of my main authors were writers like Ovid, Augustine, and Chaucer; and whatever else you might want to say about them, these guys were definitely dead.  But then I encountered a dead author—name of Brás Cubas—of a kind I hadn’t thought much about before.  Not much, but some.  I remember mentioning in an earlier blog post the name of William Cooper Brann, also known as Brann the Iconoclast, the publisher of a free-thinking journal of that name, shot in the back by an avenging Baptist in 1898 on the streets of Waco TX.  Brann had offended this man’s group by saying: “I don’t have anything against Baptists except that they weren’t held under long enough”—an allusion, I believe, to baptism by full immersion.  Anyway it was in a sizzling essay of his (“The Mistakes of Moses”), stumbled upon in my grandfather’s house in my tenderest years, that I first encountered the potent productivity of dead authors.  It was in Brann’s day the universal belief of conservative Christians that everything in the Pentateuch (alias “Five Books of Moses”) had in fact come directly from the stylus, quill, or lead pencil of the super-prophet himself.  Brann drew attention to the possible difficulties of applying this belief to Deuteronomy 34:5-6: “Moses…died…and was buried in the ravine opposite Beth-Phogor.”  That is, Moses didn’t just prophesy his death, he recorded it.  I read “The Mistakes of Moses” more than seventy years ago, and hardly thought about it since—until quite recently.

 

My loyal readers will know that during the pandemic I have tried to improve the shining hour, linguistically speaking, by attempting to improve my Portuguese, the vehicle of improvement being an endless on-line Duolingo course.  I am a big fan of Duolingo. But though it does not refuse its gratuitous services to geriatrics, it seems designed for the young.  My grandchildren tell me that the structure is vaguely suggestive of a video game.  Indeed videogame (pronounced videogamey) is a word you learn early.  If your interests are in classical literature, you need to take some initiative on your own.  So a while ago I set out to supplement the youth culture of the Duolingo lessons with some independent readings in major novelists.  Certain historical and linguistic parallels between England and Portugal are striking.  Both are small countries—Portugal almost tiny—whose colonial expansion projected their vernaculars into two very large countries in the Americas.  (Brazil comprises roughly half of South America.)    Two famous authors, contemporaries, were brought to my attention, one European and one American.  The first, whom I have mentioned before, is the Portuguese intellectual and diplomat José Maria Eça de Queirós (1845-1900).  The Brazilian novelist is Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908). 

There is a quantum linguistic leap between the level of language needed to order a fish dinner in a Lisbon restaurant or try to pick up a girl in a São Paulo coffee bar and that needed to read a novel of Dickens or Henry James.  I threw myself doggedly into two of Eça’s novels—The Crime of Father Amaro and The Relic.  Very slow going, and I never did get completely through the first novel, though perhaps surprisingly one builds up a pretty big reading vocabulary quickly.  The Relic, on the other hand, finds a place on my top ten.  It didn’t quite change my life; but it certainly inspired me to further reading.  This time I turned to Eça’s South American counterpart, Machado de Assis.

                                    

                                                      Brás Cubas 1.0 (d. 1592)

 

I started with a short story I had seen much discussed—“Missa de Gallo” (“Midnight Mass”), a masterpiece worthy of Henry James at his most ambiguous, but with the apparent simplicity of Hemingway.  Emphasis on the word apparent.  So I then moved on to a novel with an intriguing title: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas).  Perhaps its comparative brevity was also an encouragement.  Both the Eça and the Machado novels are the first-person accounts of scoundrels.  What I will call the original Brás Cubas was a Portuguese nobleman, adventurer and slaver of the sixteenth century, the founder of Santos, now a beachfront city of half a million, sort of at the bottom of the South American “hump” that is the Brazilian coastline.  You are never quite sure who the Brás of Machado’s novel is; but the origins of his branch of the family date from the eighteenth century, and at the supposed time of writing several of his relatives are “still alive”.  Unlike the author himself, who is dead.  He tells us he died in August of 1869.  Indeed one of the first problems facing the dead author in writing his memoirs is whether to begin with his birth or his death.  He opts for the latter.  The novel was published in 1881, a few years before the final abolition of Brazilian slavery.  So if we thought it was perhaps necessary to wait for the arrival of Modernism in order to be post-Modern, we can think again.

                                            Machado de Assis (d. 1908)

The very first paragraph raises the intriguing question of the death of the author.  In reporting his own, as he points out, the narrator has the excellent precedent of Moses, author of the Pentateuch.  But there is still a bit of a conundrum, both metaphysical and linguistic, of distinguishing between an autor defunto and a defunto autor.  I think what this means (and I am consistently in the middle of the cohort of the Diamond League on Duolingo) is a dead author and an author who is dead, a scribbling cadaver, so to speak.  I won’t even try to tell you what is in the rest of the book.

Mozart, Among Others

 The venue for the Princeton University Concerts is the Richardson Auditorium of Alexander Hall.  This delightful building, a roofed arena of Byzanto-Romanesque mien, dates from 1894.  The great architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, here to give a memorable lecture made more memorable by the fact that he delivered it brilliantly despite having had his large box of slides stolen from the Faculty Club while he was having lunch, declared it the most interesting building in Princeton. For decades when the institution was much smaller, it was used for all sorts of solemn ceremonies.  Later, with the large expansion of the university it could no longer serve those purposes.  So the interior underwent a magnificent acoustical upgrading, becoming a superb musical venue: Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall.  You may have noted that university buildings aspire to as many names as possible.  Plural appellation maximizes the confusion of campus visitors, and helps create one of the absolutely indispensable conditions of academic traditionalism and elitism—the dichotomy between an in-group in the know and an out-group anxiously clutching little indecipherable campus maps.  Furthermore the institution can honor the generosity of two major donors at a single blow.  More bucks for their bang, so to speak.  Be that as it may, we were delighted that relaxing Covid conditions made our trip out to a Sunday afternoon concert seem nearly as unexceptional as in the good old days.

 

Alexander Hall 

 

Though I am now long retired and increasingly removed from campus affairs, having some residual friends in high places continues to prove advantageous to me.  For many years our concert seats were in the upper tier of the elegant semicircle that is the interior of Richardson Auditorium.  These were lofty, nearly avian perches allowing a comprehensive and superior view of the whole of the stage and most of the rest of the audience.  But reaching them involved climbing a spiral staircase that leaves even some student athletes in training breathing hard.  One day a couple of years ago we found that our seats had been silently but impressively switched to the very front row of the ground floor (orchestra).  This unsolicited promotion, a response to visibly advancing age and creakiness, puts us about five feet from the stage and seldom more than twelve feet from the soloists, looking up at them at an angle of about fifteen degrees.  Fantastic acoustics and leg-room.  It’s a little ostentatious, but somebody’s got to sit there.

 

Richardson Auditorium

 

Sunday’s performance was a long and uninterrupted recital (about ninety minutes) by the brilliant Icelandic pianist, Vikingur Olaffson.  Mr. Olafsson is a tall, well-built, handsome fellow with a youthful but commanding stage presence.  He is not yet forty but looks as though he were not yet thirty.  He was wearing a quite blue blue suit, tieless, but with a white dress shirt fully buttoned up to the chin, black patent leather shoes, emphatic thick- rimmed glasses, and a wedding ring.  It all added up to what you might call serious, contemporary, minimalist, functional elegance.  Mr. Olafsson was in town because the genius who runs the concert series, Marna Seltzer, is imaginative, well-connected, and entrepreneurial and can sometimes  persuade artists to add a brief trip to Princeton on one side or the other of a scheduled appearance at Carnegie Hall in New York.  The reputation of the programs she has created, working with the law of the conservation of musical energy, has several times paid off for our Princeton audience in this regard.  Carnegie Hall and Richardson Auditorium are now peers.  

 

 

The superb program, which was called “Mozart and Contemporaries,” appears to be similar if not identical to that featured under the same name on one of his hotter Deutsche Grammophon disks.  There were fifteen works—nine by Mozart, two by Baldassare Galuppi, two by Domenico Cimarosa, and one each by Haydn and C.P.E. Bach.  If the performance had been nothing more than an exhibition of the man’s powers of memory, it would have been astonishing.  The very list of names—from the possibly most famous in eighteenth-century Europe to a couple that might send you in the direction of Groves’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians-- highlights the intellectual concept behind Olafsson’s performance.  That is the concept of context.  Artists often preface or supplement the music they perform with a few interesting, illuminating, or annoying remarks.  Olafsson began with what I thought was a brilliant micro-lecture of perhaps seven or eight minutes.  All Scandinavians seem to speak English, just to shame us.  Olafsson, who studied at the Julliard, speaks a virtually unaccented, elegant, educated American English unapproachable by any of the American politicians who have been endlessly talking through the interminable period of our mid-term elections.  “Mixing the celebrated and the obscure, I hope to slightly alter our psychological attunement, removing some of the baggage we all bring with us to Mozart’s music…to approach even the best-known works of Mozart with the same freedom and childlike enthusiasm I felt upon discovering the rare and staggeringly lyrical works from the likes of Galuppi and Cimarosa.”

 

He explained that the overwhelming genius of Mozart flowered in the context of a larger musical efflorescence, some understanding of which actually enriches one’s appreciation of that genius.  If the only thought you have ever given to this—and I fear I here indict myself—is in the cartoonish way that the film Amadeus presents the competition with Salieri, you are likely to have a pretty superficial view of a rather deep subject.  There was something wonderfully generous and expansive behind the pianist’s little talk, a generosity that found its parallel in the scrupulosity with which he addressed the keyboard of the huge Steinway rising from the stage before me, practically within my own reach as it seemed.  One passing remark sticks with me.  It was about Haydn, one of whose sonatas featured in the program.  According to Olaffson, Haydn was one of few of Mozart’s contemporary composers with the breadth of skill and energy of application actually to understand in its fulness the younger man’s achievement.  Haydn applauded that achievement with an open enthusiasm in which there was room only for admiration and thoughtful praise.  “Of course he was himself a very great musician,” said Olaffson.  But he didn’t stop there.  He added: “he was a great human being.”  I do not recall ever before hearing a great artist in any field praised by an expert critic as a great human being.