The manner in which art imitates art imitating art is demonstrated in the many riffs on a great Thurber cartoon itself riffing on a not-so-great line in a Swinburne poem: “I said, ‘The hounds of spring are on winter’s traces’, but let it pass…” Well, around here we had three nearly perfect days, alias the Memorial Day Weekend, in which the Stallions of Summer appeared to be sniffing the air with satisfaction. The sun shone brightly; community swimming pools opened; and the Princeton University class reunions ran their many decibelled course without the inundation from the skies I had thought was a necessary requirement of the occasion.
For the most part we had a distanced experience of the celebrations this year. We live perhaps a mile from the center of campus festivities, close enough to hear the distant shouting from athletic events and the base line of musical groups and to see something of the fireworks show; but not close enough to be annoyed or kept awake. But the fact that the house is within fairly easy walking distance for a reasonably fit younger person has its payoffs. Though it is wonderful to see old student friends, the typical Reunions encounter is brief, hurried, and unsatisfactory, allowing insufficient opportunity for any significant or serious communication. Our plan this year, which worked to perfection, was to have a few “quality” off-campus meetings with friends we especially wanted to see. In fact we participated in only one on-campus event, and that one was hardly typical of the bacchanalia for which Reunions are famous. That was the “Dante Reunion.”
One of the greatest scholars in the history of Dante scholarship was Robert Hollander of Princeton, who died just about two years ago. He was not merely my colleague in the study of medieval literature, but a very close personal friend for decades. Probably every college has a few small courses that over the years gain a reputation for their exceptional challenges and their exceptional rewards, and at Princeton one of those for about forty years was Hollander’s undergraduate Dante course. It regularly attracted a small cohort of the brilliant and the eccentric, about half of whom were not majoring in literary study at all. I don’t know the exact origins, but at some point Hollander and a group of the course’s veterans from the years past came up with the idea of having a seminar on Dante as one of the optional events at class reunions. The rest is, as they say, history. A most enjoyable part of that history for Joan and me is that as the fame of the event grew in tandem with the generosity of some of the alumni dantisti (as the poet’s votaries are known in the Italian tongue) it became possible to have the luxurious supplement of a week-long summer seminar in a medieval Tuscan castle. Life doesn’t get much better than that. I was sometimes invited along as one of the preceptors, or discussion leaders.
Bob’s death (after a long and punishing illness), though a terrible blow for the dantisti, did not quell their enthusiasm for Dante. His successor in the Italian section is Simone Marchesi, one of his few graduate students, and a brilliant, charismatic, and energetic young scholar whose work has already catapulted him to prominence in his field. He has taken over leadership of the Dante Reunion. Having now taught the Dante course for several years, he has many enthusiastic alumni of his own, all of them new to me of course. Lots of them showed up, joining forces with alumni of earlier generations, including a couple of greybeards from the days of an all-male student body. The seamlessness of the event was beautifully symbolic. Dante, the life of scholarship, the scholarly life of the mind—all these are ever the same yet ever changing. The event was a poignant testimony to the power of an immortal poet, to the inexhaustible plenty of thoughtful reading, and to the vitality of the still precious privilege of higher education.
Our good friends Susan and John, practically cut off from us during the long reign of Covid, came down from New York. Joan and Susan were partners in walking the Compostela pilgrimage together over several summer stints, during some of which John and I (in a comfortable car) drove around the countryside seeing interesting things. So many happy memories, and one unhappy one. (Five beautiful sausages I bought in the market at Carcassonne were seized by customs officials at Newark Airport.) The four of us went to dinner after the seminar to an excellent new Italian restaurant in nearby Kingston. It was not quite Siena, but tolerably close. We had plenty of time for a real catch-up conversation. One of the joys of old friendships is their easy renewability even after long dry spells.
I always have a number of phone calls from old students a day or two before Reunions, and some particularly nice ones this year. We had three special pre-arranged home visitations, two of them by old students still connected with us through the Dante seminar. Another, Annalyn, I had been lucky enough to supervise in the English Department. I should have known from her senior thesis on Virginia Woolf that she would one day win a Pulitzer Prize for her criticism, as she and her husband did in 2005 for their joint biography of Willem de Kooning. She was later a trustee of the university for a while and therefore in a sense my supervisor Another, Carolyn, is a recently retired professor of Hispanic literature with a specialty in the earlier periods; we have many long-standing personal and intellectual connections, especially a shared late friend, going back to the 1970s. She gave me the gift of a book that already has me hooked, and I reciprocated with my little monograph about Luis de Camões, for which she is a member of the small ideal audience for whom it is intended. Small? Minute, perhaps. Another couple—Bill and Anne—take me back even further, practically to the very inception of my career here. Bill, a member of the great class of 1969 (!) was in a raucous undergraduate course in Old English I taught so long ago that it has the flavor of a dim racial memory. But memory is what both class reunions and history are all about. How blessed I have been to have been given so many happy ones. It is a good thing from time to time to bring them together—that is, to reunite them.
