Bears, Literary and Local

 

Ursa minor Princetoniensis

 

I followed a career as an English professor, so that I naturally have spent a certain amount of my time—not enough time, of course, but still quite a lot—reading, teaching and thinking about Shakespeare and his works.  He remains, and is likely to remain for some time, the most famous writer of the English language.  This fact is due in part to what I shall call the law of classics.  Once an author or a work has been acknowledged as “classic” for quite a while, the classical status itself becomes classic.  I continue to believe that Shakespeare’s classical rating is amply deserved, but it is also now traditional.  And in a cultural world in which change, innovation and fleeting novelty are the norms, his eminence should remain encouraging to people like me.

 

Almost everything about the Bard has been studied to near extinction; so I today am reduced to writing about his stage directions.  One of the more memorable of Shakespeare’s stage directions occurs in the third act of The Winter’s Tale.  In fact it is a famous stage direction.  Antigonus, a Sicilian nobleman in the service of King Leontes, is charged with the indelicate task of getting rid of the infant Perdita by losing her in some distant wilderness. “Perdita” means in Latin “the Lost Girl.”  Antigonus opts for a desert in Bohemia, but no sooner has he dumped the poor babe than a bear shows up.  Antigonus hot foots it out of there, but to no effect, as we learn that the bear pursues and dispatches him.  The stage direction for the actor playing Antigonus is Exit pursued by a bear.

 

            Staging this scene is a little tricky, and probably was even for the Elizabethans, whose familiar commerce with bears was more culturally entrenched than is our own.  The British Isles were free of the more obviously dangerous animal species that inhabit our own wilderness areas and are the stuff of scary stories.  I mean critters like lions, tigers, Gila monsters, etc.  The English forests had their dangers, to be sure, but the only really plausible feral danger was presented by wild dogs, wolves, and bears.  For England did have some bears, and the English made the most of them.  A popular amusement was bear-baiting.  Bear-baiting—essentially chaining a captured bear to a stout post and then torturing it for fun and profit (you usually had to pay to see a bear tortured)--was one of several ancestral amusements now happily relegated to the past.  The poor bear faced sharp sticks and fierce dogs.  This “sport” had a long run, but was perhaps at the zenith of its popularity in Shakespeare’s day.  He mentions or alludes to such amusements more than once.  Macbeth, in his sense of outraged coercion, speaks thus: "They have tied me to a stake. I cannot fly, / But, bear-like, I must fight the course".  Ah, Merry England!  But what also interests me in the passage of The Winter’s Tale is a very small detail, the word exit.  This is the third person singular indicative of a Latin verb, exire: (s)he leaves, departs, steps out.  Elsewhere in Shakespeare and in other older dramatists you will find the plural form exeunt omnes, they all leave, everybody leaves.  

 

 

            Of course there are many splendid stage directions in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.  One of my favorites is Offers to stab him.  Talk about an offer you can refuse!  There is no precise modern English equivalent for the verb offers here, though threatens come close. The actor was doubtless instructed by the word to brandish the dagger in a threatening fashion as he spoke them.  Why the Latin, though?  Well, Latin was the language of learning, and of much practical information of all kinds.  It was in particular the language of commentary and explication.  Some of this tradition is preserved to this very day.  Most people would easily realize that a Vade mecum (go with me) is travel book, and that a primer is a book for tyros, or a book preliminary to another. 

 

             Of course it is important, if you are reading a prepared text, to be alert to the difference between what is text and what is commentary upon the text.  Otherwise you end up saying things like “…and this is my solemn vow!  Pause for applause.”  During his painful public decline shortly before retiring from the last presidential race, President Biden uttered a couple of things along those lines, and I know from experience that it is easy enough to do.  During the medieval period young scholars often wrote little “cribs” for difficult words in their communal textbooks.  You may have done the same thing in your French or Spanish primers.  By a kind of scribal “Chinese whispers”—you may know the game as “telephone”—the original text and the explanatory crib could get confused.   The pious thought that “God encompasses us” could end up as the pub name “The Goat and Compass”, together with its puzzling sign of a horned animal with a cartographer’s  instrument.  A good deal of the more famous classical scholarship of the modern period was devoted to sorting out texts in which this process of scribal distortion had taken place.  The great English scholar Richard Bentley (1662-1742) was particularly brilliant at the art of emendation, as the process of philological first aid is called.

 

 

            To get back to bears, we had one very recently on my little road, Hartley Avenue, in Princeton, NJ.  Bears actually show up in the East Coast suburbs with surprisingly frequency.  They are not quite as predictable as the official garbage collectors, of course.  What I shall call “my” bear, which appeared rather nonchalantly from between two houses as I was taking my daily constitutional, was surprising in several ways.  He was young; he was black; and he paid me not the slightest heed.  How do I know he was a he?  The answer is, I don’t; he just struck me as definitely boyish.  I can’t say he ignored me entirely, but he certainly was exercising a welcome ursine aloofness.  He trotted away from me at something close to what in a horse would be a trot, straight down the sidewalk ahead of me, then hung a louie across the road and into a large expanse of tall grass and brush trees of the still empty acres of the Butler Tract. He was now out of sight.  Upon reflection, I concluded that was actually a good place to be.  I decided to cut my walk short and return to the comfort of my library.  Baby bears do, after all, have mamma bears.  Thus I exited, pursued by the thought of a bear.

Whither Albion?

 

The calamity that struck Joan down some months ago has naturally presented us with practical as well as spiritual difficulties.  I had already had to give up driving some time ago, and even my basic ambulation is seriously compromised.  A one time student and colleague, and very longtime friend in the higher education business has been of inestimable aid and comfort to me both as an intellectual companion and as practical helper during the difficulties brought on by the situation.  I leave this personal hero unnamed only because among his many other virtues a self-effacing modesty is so prominent. We frequently grocery shop together, and not infrequently dine while watching something on the tube.

 

One recent binge was devoted to the original British version of the political series called House of Cards.  (This was the model, of course, for the excellent American series of the same name.)  British politics, while in many respects no less depressing than our own, often display a stylistic and rhetorical elegance wholly foreign to Washington.  It is clear that several British politicians have actually read books.  Certainly the fictional Francis Urquhart, played by Ian Richardson, a Tory leader positively reptilian in his fatally smooth and eloquent sleekness, has mastered the whole library.  You keep thinking you are hearing a Shakespeare play, and with good reason, for there is lots of Shakespeare, and especially of Macbeth, bubbling about.

 

I would like to say, and actually will say, that House of Cards is fantastic at the literal level.  I mean it is robustly fictional.  It is in the nature of fiction, including “historical” fiction,  to impose specific imaginative  interpretations on actual events.  But it still is strikingly relevant to our current political scene.  Mrs. Thatcher left the premiership in 1990, and a great deal has changed in the decades since.  But the great social issues at the center of the current crisis in Britain, mass immigration and its social manifestations, were already more than sniffable in the political air in the Thatcher era.  They had been at least from the late 1960s and a famous controversial speech made by a learned Tory politician named Enoch Powell.

 

The current reversal of fortunes of both of the two major political parties in Britain is nothing less than stunning.  Less than a year and a half ago the Labour Party won a landslide victory after two decades of Tory rule.  At the time the result seemed to counter a conservative trend discernible across the continent of Europe.  But that appears to have been a misreading.  It is true that today the exhausted Conservatives, having already nearly approached irrelevance, seem on a path to virtual extinction.  But Labour, too, is under water and still sinking deeper.  Nigel Farage, a seemingly paleolithic conservative English nationalist, momentarily basks in such glow as is cast by what many characterize as the best of bad lights. In May Britons saw the extraordinary volte-face of the Labour Prime Minister declaring unregulated immigration to have been an “unmitigated disaster” for which, actually, the Tories are responsible.  The general political consensus is that the first part of that judgment is wholly true and the second part partially so.  What is very clear is that the great controversies roiling Britain have to do with the long maturing and suddenly exploding backlash to mass immigration and the widening concentrated communities of unassimilating Muslims from various parts of the defunct British Empire, especially Pakistan and its eastern cousin, Bangladesh.  Pakistan itself is a country created amid much violence and what is usually called “sectarian strife” only after the second War in an attempt to separate the majority Hindus and minority Muslims in old British India.

           

The British press is perhaps yet more partisan, and thus to be taken even more skeptically, than that in our own country; and the dominance of the cultural left even yet more pronounced there than here.  But it is clear that there is, especially in England, some kind of a revolt of the masses, as yet inchoate, and that both of the business-as-usual parties are in deepening trouble.  Certainly the current Prime Minister, a colorless and lawyerly bureaucrat, is taking his knocks.  For the terrifying words racist and racism, on account of their formulaic and repetitive misuse, are clearly losing their once almost talismanic power to intimidate the aggrieved.  Patriotism emanates from a love of locality, inherited customs, and a feeling of belonging, of familiarity, of amenable geography.  Many ordinary native Britons no longer entirely feel easy access to such unacknowledged spiritual resources.  I think—or perhaps only imagine—that we all must share some vague version of their disquiet.  Old men forget, yes, but they also remember.  And to remember is to call to mind things past.  Can any person of mature years claim to do this entirely without regret or at least wistfulness? 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….What I myself have discovered in old age—as have so many of my contemporaries—is that I am no longer living in a world which I claim fully to understand or with which I am wholly comfortable.  Social change can be very swift, and certainly very powerful. 

 

It is quite remarkable that what is in effect a major revolutionary force in British politics seems to have arisen by spontaneous combustion.  It is one thing to “forge” or “create” a movement and quite another to find one lost on the sidewalk.  For Nigel Farage, an articulate and sometimes clever gadfly, can be said to be the “leader” of the Reform Party mainly by adoption.  That is, the movement has adopted him very much faute de mieux.  He is no Robespierre or Huey Long.  The conservatives still have some able people, but the Conservative Party is so shop-worn and tainted that it seems impossible that any of them could soon, or perhaps ever, regain robust national backing.  The greatest of several villains in the eyes of many of the revolutionaries is Boris Johnson, whose lengthy years in office as Mayor of London, Foreign Secretary, and then Prime Minister coincided with the entry into Britain of huge numbers of immigrants.

 

There are parallels between the political climates in Britain and America, so long as we recognize that some similarity is very different from near identity.  Who would doubt that the situation at our southern border has been chaotic?  Or that border chaos did not on the whole invite a big win for the Trump forces?  Although I have never thought of myself as a documented person, I can still tremble at the thought of being an undocumented one.  So I am not much relieved by the assurance that the number of persons illegally resident in the country is probably actually only ten million, not the twelve million or more claimed by alarmists.  That is to say, only the population of Michigan as opposed to that of Illinois. Michigan, incidentally, is just about the same size as the British Isles: England, Scotland, and Wales taken together.  In area, the United States is about forty-seven times the size of Britain.

 

Renan Remembers

Ernest Renan
 

My life at present involves much to-ing, the logical consequence of which is an equal amount of fro-ing.  And as my own not inconsiderable infirmities render me unfit to operate my own car safely, I have become something of an expert in cadging rides whenever possible and trying to game the Uber ap when cadging fails.  The Stonebridge medical facility where Joan is currently residing is a mere seven miles away, but the ruthless algorithm by which the Uber-masters operate severely limit my options.  And while I am in the free-form moment of this essay, I ought to say I actually deplore the misuse of the word “algorithm”, an example of which is prominent in the foregoing sentence, but what the hell?  Go with the flow.

 

There are few things to do while riding in the backseat of a car as it drives through repetitious landscape, but one thing you can do is read.  Ordinarily one does not choose one’s current reading because of the small format in which it is published, though that was the motive behind the invention of the small-format paperback also known at the pocket book.  If you do a lot of travelling in the back seat of a car and you also like to read books, it is useful to have a product that can minister to both needs.  But I don’t really like paper covers on my books, especially on books that I am going to be reading intermittently, with much intermittent putting them in and pulling them out of pockets or bookbags.  Such books soon become ragged and lumpy.  Reading a ragged paperback is very annoying to me.  Hence I regard the cultural contribution of book-binders to rival that of book-printers.  Fortunately I have a fair number of small-format hardbacks on my shelves.  The backseat book that I plucked from a shelf almost at random and have been consuming in intermittent small draughts with pleasure, is the autobiography of Ernest Renan, the nineteenth-century French orientalist: Memories of Childhood (Souvenirs d’enfance, 1883).  Some controversy surrounds this book.  And certainly some opprobrium lurks about my particular copy of it.   It was formerly in the possession of the Porter Library of the Kansas State College of Pittsburg, where it bore the identifying call number 848.8 R29s.  In that institution, likewise,  it was powerfully if coarsely repaired with black Monster Tape.  There is however no evidence that anybody ever checked it out.  Its “Due Date”, though hoary, is virgin.  What is indisputable in that my edition is six and a half by four and a quarter inches in format, in other words, perfect size-wise.

 

But Imagine a cultural world in which a British publishing house could profitably publish an extensive list of books in the French language.  For such was the “Collection Nelson”, published by an eminent Edinburgh publisher whose Paris office joined with other similarly eminent French houses (in this instance that of Calmann-Levy) to bring out a series of French classics. This collection began in an age when it was simply assumed that an educated English person would read French as an educated French person would read English.  This was the world reflected in my essay three weeks past, “The Man in the Red Coat.”  Renan’s most famous book by far was a tender but non-mythological biography of Jesus, a book that has remained in print continuously since its publication in 1863.  The Pope called Renan “the master blasphemer of Europe”.  I take some comfort in the fact that this papal opinion was possibly antecedent to that on papal infallibility.  The Académie called Renan an “immortal”.  You pay your money, and you take your choice. 

 

Many readers are partial to literary biographies, including that special branch of the genre that we call autobiography.  This perhaps is because though very few of us are likely ever to be the subject of a biography, each of us possesses a more or less structured autobiography in our minds.  At least it is difficult for me to imagine that there lives a man with soul so dull as never to contemplate at some level the interstices of at least one life—his own, of course.  To examine the contours of one’s own life is no easy task.  The easiest form of deception is self-deception, and usually one of the most comforting forms.  But the biographical mode offers models of description and explication which most of us can recognize as having relevance to our own lives, sometimes as admonition and at others inspiration.  One of the very first poems I was introduced to as a child was Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life.”  Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and departing leave behind us footsteps in the sands of time.  It is also of course possible to leave only some muddy footprints on the oriental rug instead.

 

Renan was an honest man of the most ruthless sort, which means a man honest about and to himself.  Born into modest material and cultural circumstances in the sticks of Brittany in the first generation after end of the Revolution, he was well along in a course leading to the priesthood when his philological learning proved superior to his religious training and eventually to his basic Christian faith.  In some ways he transferred the patterns of his discarded religious belief to the notions of nationality and nationhood itself.  Having spent most of my own life in allegedly exalted academic spheres, I am well aware that there is such a thing as stultifying secular dogma that can be quite as oppressive and blinkering as the religious sort.  But I would be misrepresenting the spirt of his autobiography if I failed to emphasize its modesty and geniality.  Though his Life of Jesus was destined to be the source of much cultural conflict, the author as revealed in his autobiography was gentle and genial.  The history of scholarship is replete with a certain kind of rags-to-riches narrative in which people of modest birth found recognition and preferment based on intellectual capacity and energy.  That is, learning has always been to some extent a realm of meritocracy.  Not every disadvantaged scholar was a Jude the Obscure.  In the thirteenth century John Pechkam, born in a peasant’s cottage, became the learned primate of England.  Ernest Renan, this hick from the sticks, was from the same mold. 

volumes from the Collection Nelson

 

 

Lepanto

  

Last week’s post was about a novel.  This week’s will be about a poem.  While I don’t intend to move sequentially through all the literary genres, this progression is so obvious as to seem nearly compulsory.  But you may be surprised by the poem I choose: “Lepanto,” by G. K. Chesterton.  Chesterton (1874-1936), a prolific author in several genres, is probably best known, to the extent he is generally known at all, for a series of mystery stories in which the detective is an unassuming Roman Catholic priest, Father Brown.  Chesterton himself was a Catholic convert who, until eclipsed by C. S. Lewis, was probably the most successful popular high-brow apologist for literate Christianity in the English-speaking world.

 

“Lepanto” is a fairly long (more than 125 lines) poem devoted to a consequential naval battle that took place in the waters of southern Greece on October 7, 1571.  As a possible essay topic, the battle of Lepanto came to me purely fortuitously from a snippet I read somewhere on October 7  just passed.  Lepanto is a place-name, the western version of home base of the Ottoman fleet.  The poem “Lepanto” is so raucously polemical and so overt in its political incorrectness as to be nearly breath-taking today.  Chesterton, both in his own voice and in that assigned to the Turkish sultan, is almost enthusiastic in presenting the conflict as a renewal or a continuation of medieval crusades of earlier centuries.   The names of crusading all-stars—Richard the Lionheart, Raymond of Toulouse, Godfrey of Buillon—are invoked with ungrudging awe by the sultan himself.  But in terms of works of art, I know of few poems in which subject matter is better wedded to metrical form than this one.  It is a military poem in which the brilliantly orchestrated rhythms suggest the patterns of marching feet, the orchestrated tempi of galley oarsmen, and percussive reports of canon fire that were the essence of the battle. 

 

We may think of the sixteenth century as a golden age in Europe, but one macro-political truth was the increasing power of the Turkish Ottomans.  The expulsions of the Christians from Constantinople (now Istanbul) in the fifteenth century was by no means the end of Muslim ambitions.  Islam was still on the march.  Lepanto begins with the image of a smiling “Soldan (Sultan) of Byzantium” whose increasingly bold corsairs are ravaging the Adriatic, including even the Venetians.  The call of the Pope, Pius V, for a defensive crusade receives differing levels of support from the Catholic monarchs of Europe joined in alliance in their so-called Holy League.  Their military leader is a very young bastard—a real bastard that is, for there was seldom a shortage of bastards around the royal houses of Europe—Don John of Austria.  Don Juan was one of the illegitimate offspring of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.  (Please remember that Voltaire would joke that the Holy Roman Emperor was neither Roman nor an emperor.  I leave you to make your own judgment as to sanctity.)   Young Don Juan was on the make, and he turned out to be one hell of a soldier.  He became the Supreme Commander of a formidable galley navy charged with seeking out and destroying the galleys of the Ottomans.  The two flotillas made contact among the channel waters of southwestern Greece.  In one of the world’s most consequential naval battles the Christian fleet emerged absolutely victorious, destroying virtually all the “Saracen” fleet and liberating as many as ten thousand Christian galley slaves who had been conquered or kidnapped by the Turks.  The outcome of the battle, though fully explicable on materialist grounds to modern historians, was regarded as semi-miraculous in the Christian West.

 

Chesterton’s poem tells this story in booming verse from a triumphalist point of view, focusing at the end on one obscure seaman who would later become rather famous in literary history himself, Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote.  Cervantes had been seriously wounded at the battle, losing the effective use of one of his arms.  It is perhaps lamentable that religious, cultural, and political strife is a major topic of world literature from the Iliad to War and Peace and beyond.  But to the extent that literature is a reflection of real life, there is little enough hope that this situation is likely to change.  In his Art of Poetry Horace suggests that the only worthy subject of serious literature is the Trojan War.  We have at least expanded that window.  Tolstoy’s novel is one of several contenders for the title of the greatest novel ever written but it must compete with a few others, including one written by the famous Lepanto veteran, Cervantes, whose legendary hero is less chivalric hero than chivalric fantasist.

 

John of Austria is, for Chesterton, “the last knight of Europe” and “the last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung”.  But those compliments—and I do regard them as compliments, if rather fanciful ones—might better be bestowed on Cervantes.  As he himself had spent some years in captivity to Barbary pirates, the ancestors of those alluded to in the phrase “the shores of Tripoli” in the “Marine hymn”, he may well have had a point of view about barbaric behavior.  Among the results of the Battle of Lepanto was the liberation of as many as ten thousand kidnapped galley slaves of Christian birth.  This dramatic emancipation may well have had a special meaning for him personally.  Yet he is among the gentlest and most compassionate of our great writers, and his own most ingenious invention of character, that of the knight of La Mancha who has given us the indispensable English adjective quixotic, has to be among the most lovable of fictional characters in world literature. 

 

What may seem the final acts of history often prove in the end actually to be temporary phases.  Lepanto did put an end to Turkish piracy in the Adriatic, or at least severely limited it.    And taken together with the earlier successful defense of Malta, besieged by the Ottomans in 1565, the stunning victory bolstered the military confidence of the Christian nations to a significant degree.  But the Turks soon enough licked their wounds and rebuilt a fleet.  Greece did not gain its independence from Ottoman satraps until the time of Byron and of the American marines on “the shores of Tripoli”.  And if you are following the news out of Britain and France you can hear the strange, distorted echoes of an ancient clash of cultures yet today. 

 

 

                                                G. K. Chesterton

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Go-Between

 

 

I do have a real topic in mind, but getting to it involves some probably annoying professorial stuff by way of preliminaries.  I also operate under the assumption that if you are reading this essay you are likely to be a reader also of books, including works of fiction.  According to Aristotle literature is mimesis, a word usually translated as imitation or sometimes with the phrase imitation of an action.  Maybe such words as presentation, interpretation, or description might also serve for the relationship between life as lived experience and verbal narration.  I don’t know what your favorite novel is, but I suspect you agree that it tells a story.  The novel is a presentation, treatment, or interpretation of life in narrative form.

 

            One of the happier signs of my wife Joan’s improvement in hospital is her desire to read a novel, though the novel she specified surprised me.  It is L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953).  I was surprised because only a year or so ago we read the novel together, out loud, and that was not our first reading of it.  The first reading had been at Oxford, probably in 1959.  It was among our earliest bonding experiences and has been in our lives, so to speak, for well over half a century.  Chances are good that you have read it as well, or seen the pretty good movie version.

 

            The book is the fictional reminiscence voiced by a man looking back in late middle age of a his experience as a young lad in 1900 while on a vacation visit at the grand house of a blue-blooded school classmate.  The experience had been traumatic, but in ways it would take years of maturing and reflecting to understand.  At the time, he had innocently been a participant in a scandalous and consequential violation of rigid social taboos far beyond his childish knowing.  These have to do with sex and social class.

 

            Anyway, Joan asked me to bring her the book.  By happy accident I could not find our old paperback Penguin with it yellowing brittle pages.  In my undergraduate days at Oxford I had been astounded by the town’s plethora of bookshops, new and used, and by the endless riches of their contents.  I was particularly impressed by the variety and cheapness of orange and white Penguin paperbacks, and there are still many crumbling survivors from that era now mouldering on my shelves.  I say my inability to find the book was “happy” because I was forced to get another copy pronto.  The one I got for less than ten dollars and in less than a week from Abebooks is vastly superior in its physical integrity, and it has a gem of an introduction by another fine novelist, Colm Toibin.  Toibin’s essay expanded my understanding of the delicate subtleties of a novel I had thought I already knew quite well.  Over the years I have concluded that most of the best critics of fiction are themselves writers of fiction.

 

            Less polite synonyms of “go-between” are procurer or pimp, practitioners of the office of sexual intermediation.  Pimps can be male or female.  Think of Pandarus in Boccaccio or Chaucer.   Pandarus  is the name of a literary character from whom we get the generic word.  The female model, found in one of Ovid’s elegies, was named Dipsas (“Thirsty,” perhaps).  Hence the long cultural connection between drunkenness and sexual debauchery.  As the Wife of Bath says, “In woman vinolent [i.e.,bibulous] is no defence, / This knowen lecchours by experience.”  Anyone familiar with the contemporary life of our college campuses knows that the overwhelming number of instances of serious sexual misbehavior actually begin in the abuse of alcohol.  The biblical model for a supposed campus “rape culture” is King David’s nephew, Jonadab (2 Samuel 13), “a very subtle man” who orchestrates the fate of his female victim, Tamar.

 

            The technique used in The Go-Between plays with what literary critics call “the unreliable narrator”.  You cannot be sure that what the narrator tells you is true.  Another of our favorite novelists of that period, Lawrence Durrell, whose Alexandria Quartet (four novels) giving brilliant different accounts of more or less the same events, remains in my mind a stunning achievement.  And so much great sex!  But of course many authors of novels are themselves to a certain extent seducers.  How well do we understand even our own stories, those we mentally construct for ourselves?  And however often do we later come, often considerably later, to reinterpret past experiences in the light of new and illuminating discoveries or “recovered” memories?  How can we expect the novelist in his narration to be more truthful than we are, or even can be, in the narration of our own.

 

            And though the chief purpose of articulate expression is to make significant and reliable statements, accurately transferring understandable articulations from one consciousness to another, our language is seldom an absolutely perfect vehicle.  That is why we so often say, or think, “How I wish to could find the right words for this.”  On the other hand, language is not hopelessly inadequate either, as some recent literary critics would have us believe.  It is not only because of inadequacy in articulation, however, that statements may fail in their intended purposes.  They have to be mediated, by the consciousness to which they are addressed.  That is, they have to be interpreted.  It is very interesting that the old Latin word for a pimp was interpres, that is, go-between.  I don’t think that L. P.  Hartley had any such  learned idea consciously in mind.   But I know of few books that better dramatize the wide gap between what we think we know and what we actually know.  The opening paragraph of The Go-Between is probably the most famous thing Hartley ever wrote.  “The past is a foreign country,” it begins.  “They do things differently there.”  The distance between 1900, when the novel is set, and 1953 when it first appeared, is barely half a century.  But the England depicted in the novel seems a light year away from the world of its first readers, and another half light year from ours.  It is one of the wonders of fine books, and a more than sufficient argument for their continuing appreciation, that they can vivify vast areas of vanished human experience with a unique vivacity.  As Milton famously said:  "A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life"

 

           

 

The Man in the Red Coat

                                          Pozzi in his prime (by Sargent)
 

The “man in the red coat” is, depending on how you look at it,  a French doctor named Samuel Pozzi, (1846-1914), a portrait of that doctor by John Singer Sargent now in the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, or a delightful book about that man by the English writer Julian Barnes.  The book has been out for a while now, and I was leisurely in my discovery of it, but in my present circumstances it has brought some hours of welcome light-heartedness.  The simple title is The Man in the Red Coat.  A happy concatenation of factors—the quality of Sargent’s painting, the quality of Barnes’s writing, the quality of life in certain social circles of Paris at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the quality of the person who gave me the book—made for a delightful escape from personal, national, and probably intergalactic anxieties.

 

A dear friend gave me the book.  At least I hope she meant to give me the book, rather than just lend it to me.   For I fear I have somewhat dog-eared it by carrying it about.  To say that the book is in one sense a biography, while true, will tell you little about it.  The central figure is Samuel Pozzi,  a Parisian doctor, gynecologist to upper-crust matrons of the capital.  He was also free-thinking immoralist, a handsome lothario who seduced a fair number of said matrons.  Brilliance of mind joined with beauty of body to render him irresistible to the ladies of the capital’s beau monde.  That phrase, beau monde (“beautiful world”, perhaps, or “high society”) was popular in its own day.  Historians long since have coalesced around the term belle epoque, “beautiful era” to designate the period between 1871 and 1914.  The logic of the terminal date is obvious: the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, generally regarded as the spark that ignited the powder keg of the First World War.  The year 1871 was the beginning of France’s cultural revival after the perceived national debacle of  the Franco-Prussian War.  In fact, it was a period of dramatic flourishing in several countries, including our own; but for French culture it was a particularly stunning age.

 

Having a good subject does not guarantee the excellence of a book written about it.  But it sure helps to have a great subject, and Barnes unquestionably has one.  For Dr. Pozzi was very active in Parisian cultural circles, and seems to have known many of the major players personally.   So, well-known politicians, artists, writers, singers, painters—they all were within his exalted social sphere.  John Singer Sargent didn’t paint just anybody’s portrait.  But Barnes is a clever and most intelligent writer, and even a bit of an aphorist in the tradition of Oscar Wilde himself (who naturally features in the book along with Proust and other household literary giants of the beautiful epoch.)  The reader interacts with a whole gang of cultural stars and superstars of enduring fame, such as the actress Sarah Bernhardt, as well as a bevy of the once famous. 

 

                         

                                          Sarah Bernhardt
                                     

 

Illustrative portraiture is handled in a witty way.  The marketing tycoon Félix Potin was an early entrepreneur of “collectibles”, some of which, especially ironstone crocks, are now much searched for in antique shops and forgotten attics.  He was a pioneer in the five-and-dime sector, well known in our own land (until recent inflation) as dollar stores.  Some of his advertising memorabilia is now highly “collectible,” including his line of novelty cards (among the ancestors of American baseball cards, cigarette cards, and the like) featuring photographs of men (and a few women) well known for their political, cultural or athletic  prominence.  The Man in the Red Coat makes lavish use of these miniature portraits, which are interesting in themselves but also eloquent in demonstrating the cultural Who’s Who constituting Pozzi’s friendship circle.

 

 

Parisian life in the belle epoque could be very belle indeed, especially if you were male, rich, and socially prestigious.  For women the situation was a bit more complicated, but the spirit of the eighteenth-century salon presided over by some woman of particular intelligence, wit, beauty or simply wealth lived on in various forms.  As for Pozzi, he had all the top cards in the deck, including apparently powerful sexual attraction.  He was no male chauvinist pig, though, more like a male chauvinist stallion.  But the past is to be understood, rather than forced to submit to our own cultural norms, which like all cultural norms are of a particular time and place.  We may reasonably hope that some of our most fundamental social arrangements are superior to those of our ancestors, but we must do so with some modesty.

 

The Frenchness of the French belle époque was in interesting ways Anglophilic.  Indeed, there was an interesting kind of cultural mutual admiration society bridging the narrow English Channel (or la Manche, the “sleeve,” as the French call it.)  Of course, cultural cosmopolitanism ran both ways.  No spirited young Englishman could consider himself sophisticated without becoming familiar with the naughty pleasures of the French capital.  The Man in the Red Coat begins with the invocation of a trip that Pozzi made to London with two posh friends in 1885; but Barnes playfully then says it might just as well have begun with an account of Oscar Wilde’s wedding trip to Paris the year earlier.  Or think of the Irish novelist George Moore warming his meager meals in his flat in the rue de la Tour des Dames.  Throughout the book one hears echoes of the internationalist cosmopolitanism of the culture of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, though always with a marked French accent. 

Barnes presents this deeply engaging world with verve and great elegance, and in a way that captures both its unique features and its more general reverberations.  He is appropriately abrupt in dealing with Pozzi’s abrupt end.  Our own recent experience of bizarre and opaque political violence is hardly new.  In 1918 a probably demented and certainly aggrieved former patient shot Pozzi to death.  The most eminent medical man in France, though now in his seventies, was still quite the stud; he had evolved from the stallion to the silver fox stage, but he was still fully operative on both the public stage and the private bedrooms of the right bank.  But of course even he could not survive being shot in the gut.   There was of course a large public outpouring of grief and outrage.  The secular “saint” is a well-known character in modern French history.  Large, indeed sometimes huge street corteges have marked the funerals of heroes of culture at least since the time of the Revolution.  Prominent examples would include Victor Hugo in the nineteenth century or Jean-Paul Satre in the twentieth.  But Samuel Pozzi.  What a man.  What a book

 

                                                 Pozzi in his later years

 

Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red Coat (New York: Knopf, 2020), pp. 263

 

 

Blanco White

                                                The Rev. Joseph Blanco White
 

Several older editions of the Oxford Book of English Verse include the following poem, lauded by some of its early readers as “the finest sonnet in the English language.”  Comparatively few of today’s readers will be familiar with it, let alone be able to identify its author.

 

Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,
This glorious canopy of light and blue?
Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew,
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
Hesperus with the host of heaven came,
And lo! Creation widened in man's view.
Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find,
Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed,
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind!
Why do we then shun death with anxious strife?
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?

 

Its argument as summarized in its concluding couplet is rather simple.  It makes the following analogy: the fall of night’s darkness over the earth makes visible sparkling and shining of the skies invisible to the sunlit world.  The coming of death may reveal beauty not visible to the living.  So do not fear death.

 

The author of this poem was an Anglican clergyman, the Rev. Joseph Blanco White.  Behind his remarkable name lay a remarkable story.  José María Blanco y Crespo had been born in Spain in 1775.  Blanco in Castilian “White” in English.  White was  the surname of an Irish Catholic refugee who, fleeing from English persecution, had emigrated to Spain.  The Joseph Blanco White of whom I write was his son.  A young man of unusual intelligence and ability, he almost inevitably became a priest, the priesthood being the most obvious avenue for a commoner of his abilities.  He never seems to have been excessively pious or even deeply spiritual, but he was ruled by an uncompromising intellectual honesty.  He lived by Kant’s famous dictum, which has become the unofficial Horatian “motto” of the Enlightenment: Aude sapere.“  Dare to know”.  Serious doubts concerning the dogmas of Roman Catholicism assailed him.  Furthermore, during the period he came to maturity Spain was still in turmoil at the political level.  In the late Napoleonic era the peninsula had become the battleground in which the French warred against a coalition led by the English.  It is possible to get some sense of the horrors and obscurantism of that era of Iberian history from the haunting paintings of Goya or from George Barrow’s, The Bible in Spain (1843), a fascinating book I can recommend to you on many grounds.  As the century progressed, Spain became ever more of a shambles.   Eventually Blanco White, a fiercely independent thinker, abandoned everything and fled to England.  England was the asylum to which so many persecuted Frenchmen had fled.  Why not a Spaniard?

 

                                             Goya: "Disasters of War"

 

An English-speaking Spanish Roman Catholic clerical exile was quite a novelty in England.  Almost immediately he became a cultural treasure.  As he had already been ordained as a Roman priest, he could be an Anglican priest with minimal bureaucratic fuss.   As an immigrant whose story flattered several English prejudices, he became an instant social success.  In particular, he soon became the intimate friend of a remarkable circle of his spiritual peers at Oriel College, Oxford, among them a young Anglican priest named John Henry Newman.  Newman and several of his friends were causing quite a stir in the English national church—known to history as “the Oxford Movement”--by trying to revive the Church’s sacramental emphasis of the pre-Reformation period.  Eventually they came to be called Anglo-Catholics as distinct from Roman Catholics, whose subservience to the Pope they rejected.

 

I first became interested in Blanco White several years ago when I was writing my book called The Dark Side of the Enlightenment.  At that time I could find little secondary information about him, though he has a highly informative autobiography.  I now see that a couple of recent books—one of them a collection of essays mainly in Spanish—have appeared.  I shall hope to get my hands on them at some point and learn more.  My interest here is the striking contrast of the spiritual journeys undertaken by the two men, journeys that seem to exemplify the complexity of nineteenth-century intellectual life.  Oversimplifying wildly but usefully, one man was fleeing the Middle Ages while the other was hoping to recreate them.

 

In his philosophical and theological thinking Blanco White was halfway to a kind of Unitarianism when he arrived in England and accepted orders in the Anglican Church, which was already so “broad” that his increasingly relaxed theological views were by no means exceptional.  Just as in Catholic Iberia so also in the Protestant north the clerical professions were among the few that well educated men were expected to follow.  Like seeks our like.  Blanco White eventually became the right-hand man to the eccentric Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, Richard Whately, who had been a fellow of Oriel College and who was among other things an eminent logician.  The adjective “eccentric” could perhaps serve to describe all of the extraordinary circle of friends and colleagues that came together at Oriel in the period, for they all combined what most of us might regard as odd personal behavior with undeniable genius.  Whately published a number of books including one, Erotetics (a fancy made-up terms meaning the linguistic analysis of questions and answers) that can still be read today, and another that should be read today, Historical Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte.  This is a quite tongue-in-cheek spoof of what he took to be an unwarrantedly skeptical turn in biblical criticism.  Whately’s amusing jeu d’ésprit may be one of history’s most widely published pamphlets.  It pretends to call into question the reality of an “historical” Napoleon.  What proof is there that the man ever actually existed?  But Blanco White was quite serious about his own growing religious skepticism, eventually repenting of the “transcendental” premise of his very famous sonnet.  

 

                                            Archbishop Richard Whately.