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.

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mourning in America

 

I seem to be among the rather few Americans not able to claim that I knew Charlie Kirk well or admired him greatly.  In fact I knew practically nothing about him.  But you don’t have to possess any special insight or personal bond to deplore a fellow man’s brutal murder or to lament the circumstances surrounding it.  And there are times when confident and facile “explanations” merely thicken the actual opacity surrounding aberrant events.  So long as we choose to arrange our political affairs according to the customs of a democratic republic, we perforce must abhor all acts of political violence without equivocation or mental reservation.  Easy to say, difficult to do.  We didn’t make it through our first century of nationhood without the catastrophe of a Civil War.  And while cold wars are to be preferred to hot ones, we surely do not want what so many commentators now tell us we have come to the brink of.

 

I have what might be called an historical consciousness that encourages me to see historical analogies.  Analogies can be useful, I think, but remember that the terms of analogies concentrate on the features that make things, events, and situations seem similar without considering other things that may make them very different.  One such “thing” is political martyrdom, real or imagined.  In 1914 a Swedish-American labor radical whose Americanized named was Joe Hill was executed by firing squad in Utah after being convicted of a murder.  The charge on which he was found guilty was questionable if not actually trumped up.  He was not the first American labor martyr or perhaps even the most prominent.  That title would be jointly share by two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti whose controversial convictions and executions as bank robber/murderers was the greatest left-wing cause of the 1920s and was still alive when in 1977 Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts, on the fiftieth anniversary of the executions  declared them to have been wrongly convicted.  Yet in the annals of political hagiography all American political martyrs pale in significance when compared with Horst Wessel (1907-1930) in Germany.    Wessel became the patron saint of the ascendant National Socialist Party (the Nazis) in the 1930s. He was a Nazi  brawler who participated in the recurrent battles between fascist and Communist demonstrators on the streets of major German cities.  Two of his anti-fascist opponents were convicted of shooting him to death.  I first encountered vivid eye-witness descriptions of this genre of political violence in the accounts given by Jan Valtin (Richard Krebs) in Out of the Night, a book important for me when I was writing The Anti-Communist Manifestos.   Wessel enjoyed a posthumous fame exceeding the normal fictions of even political hagiography.

 

            Poems in honor of martyrs form a special category of medieval hymnody.  It is only to be expected that political martyrs, like their more spiritual models, often inspire musical tributes in song,  The ballad accounts of their virtuous suffering is a frequent feature of their cults.  I myself first heard of Joe Hill from Pete Singer, a once popular folk singer persecuted by the House Committee on Unamerican Activities.  “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night, Alive as You or Me…” appeared in 1936.  But in the twentieth century politics is more important than religion.  And the musical cult of Horst Wessel went off the charts.  The lyrics of the “Horst Wessel Song” are bad enough that they may have indeed and as claimed been written by Horst himself.  This song became the peer of the “actual” German national anthem, the beautiful “Deutschland über Alles”.  It is likely that even now somebody in Nashville is memorializing the ordeal the country is going through in the style of Country and Western.

 

            I presume, at least I hope, that there is still a national consensus concerning the wisdom of our Declaration of Independence, which rests upon truths claimed to be self-evident.  For I do believe in self-evident truths.  One of them is that murder is wrong and abhorrent--in addition to being a crime.  There surely may be numerous sociological factors relevant to the commission of any murder relating both to the murderer and the murdered, but they cannot challenge the absolute certainty of the wrongness of murder.  And although if we are truthful in our self-examinations we must recognize the vagaries and the uncertainties of many of our own actions, we are very quick to assign motives to the actions of others with a certainty totally unwarranted.  My own suspicion is that a serious mental abnormality would be a necessary prerequisite for any murder, and certainly for most political assassinations.  That is perhaps a theological hope rather than a scientific observation, but it is only in the realm of the spirit that we have a chance of understanding the mystery of iniquity.

 

            So far, alas, there has been much outrage but little sober reflection.  For I cannot class the competitive historiographies of partisan mayhem as reflection.  What about sowing and reaping?  What about Paul Pelosi’s battered head?  Yeah, but there’s the girl on the train…Oh, yeah, well what about the maniac in Buffalo? Etc., etc.   In 1977—forty years after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti--Katherine Anne Porter, one of the truly greatest of American writers, published a book called The Never-Ending Wrong.  For it has indeed never ended and never can end except by the conscious and corporate wish of a whole nation.  Imagine though for a moment that our current president were Abraham Lincoln.  Here was a man in whom a sense of grievance might seem plausible, indeed inevitable.  But even on the bloody battlefield of Gettysburg he could exhort our fellow citizens: with malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds. But in those days, there were giants on the earth.

 

 

 

 

Midway

well defended birds, Midway atoll
 

Our eldest granddaughter, Sophia, is about half way through her pregnancy, and I am allowing my mind to savor the impending prospect of my own great-grandparental apotheosis.  Not surprisingly, perhaps, as one thought leads to another, I have been thinking about my own parents, now long departed with their entire entourage of my uncles and aunts.  In particular I have been thinking about my Dad, a man whose life was both commonplace and extraordinary, as were so many of the lives of the parents of my contemporaries, for whom the great upheaval of the Second World War was the defining episode. 

 

For our family, it was almost as if there were two different wars.  My Dad’s two brothers, one older and one younger, were in Europe fighting Germans.  Dad was half a world away in the South Pacific.  The only historical source available to me is family lore, but I think it is at least as reliable as the Chanson de Roland.  All three of the Fleming brothers signed up almost immediately after Pearl Harbor.  Dad had conned my mother into believing that he had a safe non-combatant place in the hastily created Seabees (CB=naval Construction Battalion), as indeed in theory he had.  But he was somehow actually already attached to a Marine unit at the Battle of Midway in June of 1942.  That was only six months after Pearl Harbor.  If you have ever seen a map of Midway Atol—it’s about five square miles in size—you will appreciate that it is a place-name rather than a place.  The slaughter played out in ships and planes.  As it turned out, Midway was a turning point that suggested to the savvy—of whom there were not all that many at the time—the inevitable doom of the Japanese Empire.  As I was six years old when that battle took place, I am dependent upon oral tradition and military historians for my understanding of its significance.  American geography played a large role in how American civilians experienced the War.  We were living in Denver, refugees taken in by my maternal grandparents, and our principal local spiritual fears were “western”, the prospect that the West Coast might be a bloody battlefield.  In retrospect this seems absurd, and probably should have at the time, but life is not lived retrospectively.  The so-called “greatest generation” of Americans is now almost entirely extinct.  Their progeny, among whom I number, will join them in the dusty halls soon enough. But in the meantime, I marvel at the current widespread oblivion of, or indifference to, the extraordinary feats they achieved.  My father, though nearly a stereotype of rugged old American masculinity, was a kind and even gentle person.  But he became a committed warrior.  In his eyes the atomic bombing of a huge civilian population was not merely justified but in some sense required by the barbarism it paused, if it could never fully redress.

 

Midway Island gets its name from its location, roughly halfway across the Pacific Ocean from the coastal United States.  It is usually classified as being a part of the Hawaiian archipelago, though it is not a part of the state of Hawaii.  It has no permanent inhabitants.  From one point of view it’s a pretty good place to fight a war.  There is no civilian population to be its innocent victims.  But from another and saner perspective its insignificance is nearly absurd.  The idea of two violent armadas contesting its possession is rather tragic in itself, an emblem of the vanity of human wishes.

 

This essay was born of my larger pondering of the rapidity of social change, especially in America, and more especially as I find it in my own family history.  I cannot say that my father didn’t give a second thought to the obvious truth that it was the use of the atomic bomb that ended the war in the Pacific.  He was too intelligent and too humane for such thoughtlessness.  But he fully believed in the justness of the Allied cause and had seen much evidence that persuaded him of the barbarity and fanaticism of the Japanese military machine.  His American patriotism was almost instinctive, but it was far from mindless.  He didn’t revel in it.  Much of his early life had been difficult, and he felt that he was fighting not merely against an urgent existential threat but to make a better world, better first of all for his own family, but also superior in an ethical sense, a better world for all.  Those attitudes, or others very like them, dominated the thinking of the “greatest generation,” and must have been practically universal among those who had actually fought in the war.  He lived long enough to hear such attitudes mocked and deplored by what he called “pipsqueaks” who had never heard of Kwajalein, let alone sought it out on a map.  His attitude to “pipsqueaks” was that of a democratic American: “People are free to speak as they pease.  It’s a free country”.  It was a satisfaction to him, in his own eyes, that he had done his tiny bit to keep it free.

 

The Battle of Midway was the beginning of the war for my Dad, but in his allegorizing mind the beginning of the end for the Empire of the Rising Sun.  He was in good military company on that score.  Admiral Yamamoto actually thought the same thing, and even seems to have said so at the time.  My Dad never read Dante, but like Dante he faced the great adventure of his life in “the middle of life’s road”, that is, around his thirty-fifth year.  As for so many millions of others, that stupendous war was and remained for my father the central event of his life, though lurking silently in the background. The Book of Job can always be counted on if you need an accurate pessimistic spin: “The life of man upon earth is a warfare, and his days are like the days of a hireling.” (Job 7:1).    But in life’s adversarial aspects one feels also the warmth-giving fires of life.  We sit astride the shoulders of giants, and however midget-like is our actual perspective, we perforce can see a more distant horizon than could they.  I now have every hope, and every reasonable expectation, soon to greet the arrival of a great grandchild. And that’s just great.  My own great father never had that privilege.

 

In memoriam: Marvin Dale Fleming (1906-1980) 

 

 

Watery Places

 

Perhaps the best-known character in Chaucer--her name at least will ring a bell for most of my readers--is the Wife of Bath.  But I cannot proceed much further and get to the actual aqueous subject of my essay without a brief philological preparation.   “Wife” in modern English is a noun of relationship, referring to the female partner in the marriage of a man and a woman.  In earlier English wif meant woman more generally, but  by Chaucer’s time it often had the relational meaning that it has now.  In modern German, “my man” still means “my husband.”  For Chaucer, however, think “the woman from Bath.”  The Wife of Bath, Alison by name, is actually a widow, but she has a long marital history.  Bath is of course a place name, an ancient town in southwest England.  Not far away is another beautiful town, Wells.  From the natural springs in the location the ancient Romans built an elaborate watering place, in later centuries a kind of resort where people “took the waters,” thought to be healthy and indeed medicinal.  In modern times visiting Bath was often a luxurious amusement of the affluent, as we can see in several well-known English novels.  Chaucer, a very clever writer, makes much of her watery associations.

 

Chaucer evidently connected her in his mind, and therefore in ours, with another aqueous literary character—namely, the anonymous “woman at the well” in the fourth chapter of John’s gospel. The connection is not some subtlety invented by me.  You cannot miss it.  Certainly, the Wife of Bath herself doesn’t miss it.  It was basic to Chaucer’s plan.  Jesus, tired from walking all morning, sits down to rest at a well-known watering hole, namely Jacob’s Well.  (We are not certain of the location of this well, but the ancient Semitic legend was that it had been dug by the patriarch Jacob.)  As he sat there, a Samaritan woman came to fetch water, and the two entered into one of history’s more interesting recorded conversations.  Her Samaritan identity is of significance, for as she says, Jews are supposed to avoid Samaritans.  A slightly transgressive air hovers over the scene.  Like the Wife of Bath the Samaritan woman, it turns out, has had four husbands and was now living in concubinage with a fifth man.  So here we have a biblical model, or perhaps the better word is “type”, of the much-married medieval milliner from Bath.  Jesus asks the woman to give him a drink, as he has no cup of his own.  Then he says: “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up to eternal life.”

When compared with Chaucer’s, my interest in place names will probably seem rather conventional or eccentric; but I have my own little agenda.  I have been making frequent journeys to visit Joan in her rehabilitation facility in a place called Stonebridge.  The journey is short, but it begins in one county (Mercer) and ends in a second (Somerset). About half of the trip is on a road running parallel to the south bank of the little Millstone River.  The road is naturally called River Road.  That set me to thinking about all the topographic names one encounters that reflect their watery origins.  Growing up in Arkansas, the nearest “big city” was Springfield, now the third largest city in Missouri.  I’ll wager there’s at least one Springfield in every state of the Union.  At least two of them (MA and IL) played major roles in our national history.

 

The obvious need of human beings to drink water and to irrigate edible crops of course explains the ubiquity of these watery names, but there are interesting nuances in, for example, the idea of sacred wells and medicinal springs.  There is justice in the linkage of water with origins to be found in the word source.  The word spa is of uncertain etymology, but took on a generally medical aura in the nineteenth century.  Some watering holes have been of high social prestige.  You could soak up some class while you were in the drink.  The German sister of English bath is bad, as in the various European Badens, including conspicuously Baden Baden.  I’ve never seen that place, but I have visited it a dozen times in novels.  Anyway, a bad is a good thing.  The name "Karlovy Vary" comes from Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, who founded the city in the 14th century.  I don’t know quite how the Carlsbad Caverns of New Mexico got named, but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  Carlsbad was the principal aqueous resort in central Europe.  That place was named in honor of a fourteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor.  Strange continuities with Middle Ages show up with a surprising frequency in America, though we seldom notice them.

 

Now and then I find myself pursuing a topic that reminds me just how young our country is.  I live in Mercer County, N.J.; Joan is in rehab in contiguous Somerset County.  Mercer County is named after one of our local heroes, General Hugh Mercer, a Scottish physician killed at the Battle of Princeton in 1777.  Somerset County is named after a beautiful county in England’s south-west.  In England there would be a thick, minutely detailed county history I could turn to.  Shortly before Queen Victoria’s death (1901) scholars launched a gigantic project, still underway (commonly known as the Victoria County Histories) that goes into great detail concerning every mud puddle in the land.  The volumes vary somewhat in quality, but they all are nearly fantastic in their ambition and detail. Ordinarily in one of its volumes you get to Magna Carta only in the third volume, or on about page 1308.  American local history is usually the work of dedicated amateurs or partisan family members and varies enormously in completeness and detail.  In America we still need another two or three centuries for local historians to find their feet.  I can but hope to God they get them.

 

As to the watery content of our literature, the cataracts are too overwhelming even to contemplate.  I do not have primarily in mind “sea stories,” whether that sea be wine-red, ashen, or slatey gray.  I have in mind potable drink.  There is the paradox of the Ancient Mariner: “Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink”.  There is the yet starker realism of Kipling in “Gunga Din,” a poem about the native “water boy” serving a British imperial army regiment in battle:

 

You may talk o’ gin and beer   

When you’re quartered safe out ’ere,   

An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;

But when it comes to slaughter   

You will do your work on water,

An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.   

 

In our own literary moment, in which some writers think no paragraph is complete unless it features the f-word as at least three different parts of speech, it may be difficult to appreciate how artfully transgressive that bloomin’  was! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thomas Kuhn

Professor Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996)

 

Our household, meaning mainly myself, is in a state of transition.  That word, transition, is an improvement over what I first wrote: disarray.  This is the week that our son Luke’s family has had to return to Montreal.  Melanie, John Henry, and Hazel were able to have some days in Greenville with the South Carolina grandparents, but they have had to hurry home to get the kids prepared for the new school year.  But my stalwart friend and aide Chrstie Kadelu is still here.  I now have to arrange some commercial ferrying operation to take me to and from Joan’s rehabilitation hospital on a regular schedule.  She is holding her own there, and many friends are stepping forward to help me.

 

In terms of the weekly essay it is perhaps time frankly to admit that at eighty-nine one has definitely entered the Age of Reminiscence, probably quite soon to be followed by the Age of Oblivion.  One of our sons suggested that anecdotes concerning Colleagues Past might offer material, and I think I might give that a try.  One of the greatest pleasures of a long career has been the opportunity to bask in the reflected glory of famous colleagues.

 

There are literally dozens of these.  Picking one almost at random among so many I remember with a special admiration I might begin with Thomas Kuhn, a philosophical historian of science or a scientifically trained philosopher—hard to characterize.  He was a bit of an academic gypsy, and he spent only about fifteen years here between appointments at Berkeley and MIT.  But they were heady years.  And during that time he chaired a committee I served on.  It was informally and very transgressively denominated among us as the “War Crimes Committee”.  Was there, as some alleged, a danger of allowing government money to divert scholars, however subtly, from pure research to, well, less pure research.  How could something as transgressive-sounding as an Institute for Defense Analysis (the dreaded IDA) be allowed to have a presence on our campus?  Our mandate was not to reach conclusions but “ask smart questions”.  Maybe we did, but they weren’t all that smart, and we didn’t come close to answering them.  We did learn quite a lot about our fellow committee members, though.

 

Prof. Kuhn had been chosen by the President for this particular task partly because of the extraordinary way in which Kuhn’s work appealed to both natural scientists and humanists.  He was the author of a still famous book that demonstrated the breadth of his prowess.  Some books are of such scholarly influence and importance that they—or their publishers—practically demand sequels or extensions.  So it was with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which Kuhn had published in 1962.  I think I understand the gist of his famous book, but I don’t quiz me on it.  I get the ideas of scholarly paradigms and paradigm shifts, both of which have at least fairly clear parallels for humanistic subjects as well.  In any event there appeared posthumously from the University of Chicago Press in 2002 a somewhat miscellaneous collection gathered together by admirers at the University of Chicago and entitled The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview.  So we have a famous scholar who has now become the subject of other scholars.  This is a not unfamiliar pattern in the history of scholarship.

 

 

Many memories crowd my mind, including one that combines in typical academic fashion the ridiculous and the subline.  In the heady days of my friendship with Kuhn, the faculty clamored much about their independence and the semi-sacrality of their deliberations, which were not to be profaned by the presence of outsiders of any stripe.  That is, faculty meetings were “closed”.  The idea that any “outsider” might wish to crash a meeting of the Princeton faculty should seem bizarre to you, but rare occasions did arise.  In May of 1970, in response to the Ohio National Guard rampage at Kent State University, undergraduate journalists from the Daily Princetonian petitioned for admission to the emergency faculty meeting at which the Kent State slaughter seemed certain to be addressed.  For this meeting there was a huge turnout.  There was actually some ambiguity surrounding much of the campus “unrest” of the period.  But that unarmed students walking across campus should not be gunned down by inexperienced and undertrained members of a state’s National Guard did seem a no-brainer to most Americans who were not the governor of Ohio.  That American college professors should protest the slaughter of American undergraduates also did not seem a dangerous political aberration.  College faculties, whose skills in formulating and passing ceremonial motions, were busy passing them all over the country.

But here, with the world burning around us and half the campuses in America in tumult, the assembled Princeton faculty began its conclave with approximately an hour’s  Talmudic debate about the barely thinkable suggestion that in these extraordinary circumstances a representative student journalist might be allowed in to observe our discussions.  What seemed an inessential and peripheral question to me had for some others all the force of the laws of the Persians and the Medes.  Very seldom had I seen even among college professors such an eloquent engagement with the irrelevant at the expense of the essential, or such an elevation of surface at the expense of substance.  After about a full hour of this, Prof. Kuhn was recognized.  He began with a shock.  He was an outspoken liberal.  Yet he opposed observer rights for a few undergraduate student visitors, a novel possibility which seemed a popular idea to many younger faculty.  Perhaps the suggested innovation lacked the gravitas of an actual paradigm shift? “Because,” Kuhn said, “if the next hour of this meeting is as stupid as the last hour, we surely do not want any observers.”

I never knew Tom Kuhn well.  We were simply friendly colleagues whose paths crossed for a short if dramatic moment in American academic history.   I lost touch with him when he moved on from Princeton.  He died in 1996.  But if in general one aspect of an academic career is its steadiness and comforting predictability—a never-failing succession of student generations both always the same and never quite the same—it has its many moments of high spiritual satisfaction born of the nobility of its goals, and at times the fatuity of their means of expression. And amidst all the Arnoldian high seriousness there are a few good laughs along the way.