Calibri Controversy

Gothic "book hand"

 

            It took thirteen pages of last Thursday’s Times before I found anything sufficiently stimulating to contemplate as a possible blog topic; but it was worth the wait.  At the heart of an article on page thirteen was Calibri.  As a one-time active amateur letterpress printer, I was nearly thrilled to come upon an article that captured the passionate potential lurking in typefaces.  For Calibri is the name of a typeface launched about a twenty years ago by the Dutch typographer Lucas de Groot.  I don’t know how many typophiles are likely to read my blog, but in case there might be one or two I will say that Calibri is one of the newer “C” fonts, which also include the one I usually use on my own computer, Cambria, fonts that are generally elegant, conservative, unfussy, and maximally legible.  But apparently in the eyes of the current presidential administration Calibri is also suspiciously woke.  Marco Rubio has ordered the State Department to stop using it and to return to the allegedly less edgy Times New Roman.

 

            We now tend to call the original Gutenberg font, that used in the famous forty-two line Bible, “Gothic” or black letter.  It was in fact based on the common “book hand” of the professional scribes of late medieval manuscripts.  Gutenberg, even in the revolutionary act that was letterpress printing, was entirely traditional in his type face.  That is, he tried to make printed text look exactly like hand-written (i.e. scribal) text.  For many years most printing remained “black letter”.  Even when I was in graduate school a large number of German language books I had to consult were in a “Gothic” face.  The modernization of German language printing type faces came about by German governmental policy in 1941, a date at which one might be forgiven for thinking the Germans had bigger things to worry about.  But a modern political movement wanted to make a modern presentation.  The Nazis really looked sharp.  If Calibri is woke, fifteenth-century black letter must be—what?  What is the opposite of woke?  Somnolent, perhaps, or drowsy?

 

            I alluded in my last essay to the twin aims to which poetry should aspire according to the poet Horace: utility and beauty, instruction and pleasure.   Many other social habits combine similar goals.  That the mechanical reproduction of writing was useful was perhaps too obvious to talk about; almost immediately typographers began the competition to make it ever more beautiful as well.  Everyone I suppose is familiar with the distinction between Roman and Italic faces, though if you think about Rome as a city in Italy things can become confusing.   In the great age of the Scholar-Printers the rebirth of learning demanded also a rebirth of scribal form.  The artistic impulse of typography began even before Gutenberg.   A picture being worth some large number of words, I recommend you make a visit to the Letterform Archive museum in San Francisco, which you can do either in person or (as I myself do) via a computer screen.  I don’t know whether, as Secretary Rubio seems to suggest, typefaces vary in their political or cultural wokeness, but surely San Francisco would be the place to find out.

 

            In Gothic book hand—the term often used of the common learned calligraphy of the fifteenth century—the letters i, j, l, m, n, u, and v were composed of what look at first glance like similar if not identical straight vertical strokes.  The technical term for this mark is a minim, also used by musicians to indicate a half-note.  A minim is definitely minimal, sort of the least thing that can be done, calligraphically or musically speaking.  The minim invites visual ambiguity.  The ambitions of verbal communication, on the other hand are maximal, and such early printers as Manutius Aldus in Venice supervised the creation of new fonts (based in ancient classical

monumental sources) both beautiful and precise.

 

            Even in the weird political climate which we are forced to endure, I find it curious, to say the least, that grown men can find the sustenance for their political outrage in the inconsiderable differences between two popular and undramatic modern type fonts.  But of course nobody can really believe that typography has much to do with it.  Our politics have become so fundamentally polarized as not even to require identifiable poles.

 

            Perhaps the English-speaking world, or at least the dominant American parts of it, should adopt an official national typeface.  That might be accomplished without political controversy because of the blandness of the creator of the typeface and its role in our revolutionary history.  It was the typeface of our own sacred foundational documents.  It has been around so long that no one could accuse it of being the slightest bit woke.  Semi-somnolent, perhaps, but that is a different matter.  The natural candidate typeface would be Caslon.  We know quite a bit about William Caslon, who supervised the casting for the punches.  He flourished, to use the old phrase, in the first half of the eighteenth century in London.  The early printers included many rather bold and politically engaged men, but so far as I can tell Caslon was not one of them.  He was a stolid, practical businessman, a fine craftsman, and the founder of an incipient dynasty of typographers dominant in the London trade for more than a century.  Historians have perhaps exaggerated the aesthetic aspect of the early printing industry at the expense of the economic.  Caslon did well.  Yet one will not find a single memorable fact about him in his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography  that might make him stand out as a personality.  His solid, stolid, beautiful, and unwoke typefaces long dominated English-language typography, and they are still around.  Familiarity and legibility are hallmarks of Caslon, or would be if types had hallmarks.  The face presents but one danger and that a minor one.  One form of the lower-case letter s, called the “long” s, has a vertically lengthened form that can sometimes be confused with lower-case f.  In an era in which the f-word was still transgressive, this typographical curiosity was once the source of great hilarity to the students in a graduate seminar meeting at which I was present more than sixty years ago.  But social mores evolve in history no less than does printing  technology.  The only verbal transgressions likely to be noted today are heresies involving class, race, or gender.  But not to worry.  There is an abundant supply of them.  We cannot soon run out of outrage.

 

 

Comfortable Caslon
 

Blueberry Pie

 

Old age is the natural season for introspection and reflection.  All lives are different, but there came a time in my own when serious illness demonstrated that I was over the hill, or perhaps even the foothills.  The road ahead looked steep, as it has proved to be.  The encouragement of well wishers to the effect that I was “eighty years young” or, even worse, that I was only as old as I felt (my God, that bad?!) could not by mere good intention alter mathematics.  Reflection can be dangerous but is more often salubrious.  I have had the opportunity to count my many blessings, as my dear grandmother instructed me to do in about 1943: an assignment I am at last fully prepared to undertake with gratitude.

 

So please allow me to tell you about my latest blueberry pie, even at the expense of granting me an exceptional indulgence of prolixity.  It will take me a little time to give an account of the pie, which arrived mysteriously on at my back door a few days ago.  I have very recently finished it off, but the particularly delicious memory lives on.  A light fluffy crust is a necessary but insufficient requirement for a pie.  The berries and the berry goo are of course crucial.  The mysterious origins of this one made it a symphony of delight.  It was accompanied by a note, unsigned, saying: “You taught us to think.”  So, a real mystery, up to a point.  Though I am genuinely in the dark concerning its donor(s), I do know what it is about, and that is the Augustinian binary concepts of caritas and cupiditas.  And both of those words can be translated by English “love”

 

It is always pleasing to a scholar to find his published work being cited by other scholars.  But in my career I have tried to emphasize the first half of the hackneyed phrase “teacher-scholar,” and on a few occasions I have been delighted to find my lectures being echoed by former students.  A couple of years ago, for example, I was reading a classicist’s learned if slightly edgy study of Ovidian pornography when I encountered a witticism of mine that she must have absorbed from a lecture I gave in about 1972.  Citing someone else’s written “work” without attribution is plagiarism.  Absorbing some memorable spoken remark you heard somewhere is a high form of compliment.

 

Getting back to the topic of love, I can say that it is complicated.  It is probable that you already knew that.  Meaning is conveyed by words, but many words are to some degree ambiguous.  And verbal ambiguity, as philosophers of all the schools have agreed, is the enemy of intellectual clarity.  The Stoic philosophers, for example, were much vexed with the problem of verbal ambiguity.  So was Saint Augustine.  In Anglophone countries the root of all evil is the love of money.  That is because Paul writing to Timothy (I Tim 6:10) says so in the King James English version.  For the love of money is the root of all evil.

 

What Paul says in the medieval Latin version, which is usually the one that counts with me as a medievalist, is that the root of all evil is cupiditas.  Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas  Cupidity, too seldom used today, is a great word, indicating a disordering desire for material possessions of all sorts as well as for sensual pleasure, especially sexual gratification.  Love of money, cupidity—two terms for dangerous moral dangers of very wide practical application.  That’s why Chaucer’s marvelously cupidinous Pardoner, a brilliant preacher, always preaches on the same text: the love of money is the root of all evil.  Some forms of cupidity are, so to speak, age appropriate.  One of the grosser forms often wanes somewhat with age.  I used to joke in lectures (and, alas, it was but a joke) that the only thing that could fully inflame my aging cupidity was blueberry pie.  The unintended but welcome result of this pallid witticism has been, over the decades, about fifty blueberry pies!  Many of them, including this latest, have been of mysterious origin.  Maybe in my search for the perfect emblem of cupidity I should have said instead of blueberry pie “a blue Porsch”?  Probably wouldn’t have worked so well.

 

            The ancient poet and literary critic Horace famously defined the twin ambitions of poetry as entertainment and instruction.  The best poets, he says, do both at once.  The two adjectives he used to identify the balancing goals are dulce and utile, sweet and useful.  The medical equivalent is, I suppose, the sugar-coated pill.  It is true that folksy sayings can be invoked for contradictory arguments.  Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but then again, out of sight, out of mind.  Yet my own experience of teaching, as of many other aspects of life, is that all work and no play is likely to make Jack not merely a dull boy but a resentful and restless one.

 

            A phrase that has become standard in educational circles is “life-long learning”.  In some respects this seems a limited cliché.  We all know that you live and learn.  However the phrase actually denotes something more specific, the idea that the society’s formal institutions of instruction should be extended to reach beyond the years of young adulthood, that they should be sufficiently capacious to be a service to people of all ages.  Hence the alumni colleges, the Elderhostels, the Road Scholars, the Ted Talks, the whole repertory of “continuing education” opportunities that continue to appear.  I think that such organizations have brought pleasure and profit to a large number of our “mature” or “senior” citizens.  I know for a fact that they have brought considerable gratification to at least one senior professor, namely myself.

 

            Augustine has a little book about teaching and teachers (De magistro in Latin) which is at once inspiring and daunting for any teacher. That is because it argues that in a sense it may be impossible actually to teach anything to anyone.  If I tell you that two plus two makes five, presuming that you have the most basic elements of numeracy, your mind will reject the “teaching” immediately.  For the same reason you will effortlessly agree that two plus two equals four.  That is, the mind assents to or balks at propositions proposed for its examination.  The mediating power, according to Augustine, is the “indwelling Christ.”  This is a highly spiritualized theory of knowledge consonant with Augustine’s version of Plato.  Even today many people, perhaps most, believe that conscience is a natural faculty, universally distributed.

 

            But I am a teacher, and I cannot so readily dismiss the potency of the profession to which I dedicated my life.  In my own stage of continuing learning, my most prominent teachers include many of my former students.  This is a most felicitous situation, and of course it has an appropriate expression in Holy Writ.  So far as I have been able to tell, everything does.  Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many  days (Eccl. 11:I).  The more secular if potentially more disquieting old saw is: What goes around, comes around.  The truth is that one never learns more felicitously than when trying to teach well.  It pleases me to think of the world of learning in circular form, indeed as the ever expanding if slowly diminishing circular rings emanating when a stone is dropped into a placid pool.  Or one can think of the matter in terms of an ever-expanding human community.  Intellectuals of the Enlightenment period had the beautiful phrase “the Republic of Letters”.  This community is exclusive but not exclusionary.  It is open to all, and it is the moral duty of all of us to aid in its extension and expansion.

 

            In this matter as in so many others there arises the question of the varieties of human capacity and the unequal distribution of intellectual powers.  Some of the medieval theologians, when speaking about divine grace, developed what might be called the bucket theory.  Though often accused of spending too much time on how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, many of them were almost depressingly practical.  They recognized that people had very different capacities for grace even as they had varying capacities for weight-lifting or long-distance running.  People had different sized buckets.  As Thomas Aquinas sort of says somewhere, it doesn’t matter what size of bucket you have.  What matters is whether or not your bucket is full.  In modern educationalese, is this or that student living up to her or his “potential”?  Are you?  Am I?  These are hard questions, usually more comfortably evaded than confronted.  One of the most influential teachers of our Western world, the philosopher Plato, famously ascribed to his own great teacher, Socrates, the opinion usually rendered in English as “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  He didn’t add, but might have, “even if the examination is too dreadful to bear.”

 

            The operations of grace are as mysterious but also as powerful as the ocean tides.  My own soggy shards of stale bread have been returned to me repeatedly in blueberry pies.  That is definitely what you would have to call an upgrade.  As to this latest pie of happy memory I really don’t have the slightest clue as far as who the mysterious donor(s) could have been.  One or more of them?  Male or female?  For poetic reasons I will call this(these) person(s) Mister Pistor.  I think pistor in classical Latin usually meant a miller or a kind of generic baker; but in the vulgar Latin of the Middle Ages it is definitely the bread guy.  (The bread lady would I suppose be panifica.)  So I conclude this somewhat quizzical effort with my sincere expressions of gratitude to Mr/Ms Pistor, whether singular or plural, in the not absurd hope that (s)he/they, under whatsoever desired pronominal markers of gender and/or person, might be gracious enough to accept them.  And though blueberry pie is my number one favorite, cherry is a very close second.  Just saying….

 

           

Kingwood Thanksgiving

 

Kingwood Forest, not quite primeval but pretty ancient

We managed to spend the Thanksgiving Holiday in a way that accommodated the reality of Joan’s current residence in assisting living facilities at Stonebridge in Montgomery township with a major feast at Richard’s beautiful old colonial mansion in Kingwood township in Hunterdon County.  This beautiful property is far from what you are likely to think of if your concept of the state is constructed around turnpike exit numbers. The surprising truth is that New Jersey, though it ranks at the top of the list of states for population density, has an extensive amount of sparsely populated rural land and even some heavily wooded forest land.  It is of personal interest to me that the county seat of Hunterdon County, Flemington, was founded by an early settler, Samuel Fleming (mid-eighteenth century) whose surname I share.  I think of Samuel as a rather old-fashioned name; certainly my own long deceased grandfather Samuel Fleming now seems to me to have been from another world rather than merely from another generation.  One of the oldest buildings in Flemington still exalts in the rather pretentious name of “Fleming’s Castle,” though it is hardly more than a rather modest frame house that in its present configuration may disguise even more humble origins. 

 

Flemington, N. J., did have one moment of national, perhaps even international fame.  It came in 1935, when its courthouse was the venue for “the trial of the century”.  True enough, in our country trials of the century usually come around at least once a decade, but this one was special because it addressed the “crime of the century”.  A German immigrant carpenter, Bruno Hauptmann, was convicted of having kidnapped and then murdered the infant son of the aviator Charles Lindbergh.  Lindbergh was perhaps the most universally admired hero in America.  In May of 1927 he had performed the astonishing feat of having made the first ever solo flight across the Atlantic, leaving from Long Island in New York and arriving in Paris about thirty-five hours later.   Lindbergh was handsome, courageous, articulate, and highly photogenic.  There was in historical retrospect a downside: he was a voluble philo-germanic antisemite at the time Hitler appeared on the international scene.  Hauptmann’s trial, which was held in the courthouse in Flemington, focused international attention on the place for more than a month.  

 

One of the automobile routes from Princeton to Kingwood takes you through the small village of Rosemont.  Only somewhat confusingly, there is also a place of that name nearer to Princeton, and for all I know there could be a dozen other New Jersey Rosemonts and half a hundred in the country.  Rosemont today seems to consist of perhaps a dozen houses spread out along the right angle of a turn in the inland road between Stockton and Frenchtown.  I say “today” because stretched along the margin of that road is a quite extensive cemetery, fenced in with well laid stone and carefully tended, that testifies to what must have been a much more substantial local population in years gone by.  But of course like destination weddings, destination interments are not uncommon.  The considerable extent of still cleared fields in this part of Hunterdon County suggests that the whole area has long been under cultivation.  So although New Jersey is our most densely populated state, parts of it are considerably less populated now than in previous decades.  Even between the large cities of New York and Philadelphia there are stretches of countryside that suggest in the comparative sparseness of their rural contours the “wide open spaces” usually thought of in relation to the West.  It took me many years of residence in the state to discover and enjoy this pleasing feature.

 

There are two Katies in our immediate family, one daughter and one daughter-in-law.  They are textually distinguished by a small difference in orthography, but orthography doesn’t help with oral homophones, and so for clarity we refer to the daughter-in-law, Richard’s wife, by her fuller name, Katie Dixon.  This is the same means  used in the old ballad to distinguish among an abundance of ladies named Mary: There was Mary Seaton and Mary Beaton, and Mary Carmichael and me.  In any event Katie Dixon, among her other virtues and talents, which are many, has become the historian of her Kingwood property, tracing its ownership at least as far back as the Revolutionary period, when one of its occupants was a proto-American French Huguenot named Lequere.  And if George Washington didn’t sleep in her house, it can only have been due to insomnia.  That’s the vibe the place gives off.  Furthermore, I have a couple of times seen actual native wild turkeys around those parts.  So, a Thanksgiving feast in Kingwood seems about as “historical” as it can get.

 

The name “Kingwood” itself incidentally reveals a typical colonial attitude.  I recently viewed the latest Ken Burns documentary series, “The American Revolution.”  It reminded me of the extent to which colonial populations have been doggedly loyal to the mother country up to the point that they abruptly cease to be.  Many of the place names in the original American colonies are homages to British royalty.  The town in which I have now spent most of my life, Princeton, is one of a chain of villages which included a Queenston and a Kingston.

 

Though timber is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the American East Coast today, its forests were formidable.  There is still much evidence on both sides of the Delaware River of what must have seemed in colonial times the utter vastness of its forested lands.  Though Pennsylvania (literally William “Penn’s forest’) now refers to lands west of the river, the man at one point owned thousands of square miles of what is now New Jersey, including the spot on which I am writing this essay.  Hardly a mile east of my house, where US 1 meets one of the three east-west arteries into our town, and now buried in the mess that Route 1 has becomes, lie the scattered remnants of the one-time village of Penn’s Neck.  An old Baptist church now overwhelmed by the super-highway still boldly evangelizes via billboard.  One recent and memorable message: “Despite Inflation, Death Still Wages of Sin”.  Some verities are indeed eternal.  An old cemetery, walled in probably sometime in the nineteenth century but almost certainly of earlier founding date, is now just an extension of  Princeton’s sport fields.  But William Penn once owned it all!

 

Death and the Poet

Phyllis Wheatley
 

            The dark has returned.  Daylight Saving Time ended three weeks ago, and although the change was immediate from the experiential point of view, it has taken some time for the gloom to set in.  This somber turn is not simply a calendrical phenomenon.  I think most elderly people share the sensation that the autumnal reality, which surely everyone experiences, becomes more poignant each year.  And “poignant” is really a rather gentle adjective for what we experience.  I think that oppressive would be more accurate.  That is, the waning of the year seems more threatening, more inevitable, the more acutely you become aware of your own withering, waiting, and wasting.  The supposedly cheering question—if winter comes, can spring be far behind?—no longer has its solace.  It becomes a real question.

 

            But its answer, if only after real reflection, must be in the affirmative.    Surely the annual death of nature is at least by implication a demonstration also of annual revival or renewal?  How could the human mind be so blinkered and ungenerous as to think otherwise?  We all are subject to the iron laws of our physical existence.  I have undoubtedly written about this topic before.  Perhaps I have written about it every year I have been writing these essays.  I do remember one essay—I think probably just a year ago—in which I talked a bit about Keats’s “Ode to Autumn,” written in 1819 a few years before his youthful death.  And death was on his mind.  In another of his great odes (“Nightingale”) written in a remarkable spasm of invention without which English poetry would be so much less than it is.  Whether it was a spasm of transcendent perception or of alarming neuroticism, he says in so many words “I have been half in love with easeful death.”  But Keats had barely turned twenty when he wrote that.  I am up against ninety.

 

            Certainly the poets have written a great deal about death.  Many of our greatest poems are about it.  If art does indeed hold up the mirror to nature, that can be no surprise.  The laws of thought must lead us to conclude that there is more death in the world today than there has ever been before, for the simple reason that there is a larger population of mortal humans than there has ever been before.  That is another way of saying there is more life too.  Though I am a medievalist, I am a twentieth-century one.  I should not prefer to have lived in, say, 1400, when experts reckon that the world population was perhaps one twenty-fifth of what it is today and therefore perforce also its mortality rate.  There remains a certain paradox, however.  Though death surrounds us everywhere in our newspapers and on our screens, it is but rarely in our personal daily experience, as it would have been in centuries not long ago.

 

I have watched some of the new Ken Burns series on the American Revolution.  It has inevitably set me to thinking about the infancy of our republic.  And since I am a literary scholar, it perforce brings to mind some of our earliest writers.  There are, according to my judgment, but two important poets produced in our early republic: Phyllis Wheatley (d. 1784) and William Cullen Bryant (b. 1794).  Both of them could be somber.

 

          The title of one of Wheatley’s most represented poems is a short essay in itself: “To a Gentleman and Lady on the Death of the Lady's Brother and Sister, and a Child of the Name Avis, Aged One Year.”  Here the dead outnumber the living by a ratio of three to two.  This poem, while utterly conventional in its poetic diction and its consolatory message, is nevertheless very polished in its construction.  Its aesthetic is that praised by Alexander Pope as “true wit”, to wit, “What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.”  Bryant’s only famous poem, written when he was seventeen years old, has the inkhorn title of “Thanatopsis”—which should mean, I suppose, “Looking at Death”.  If a seventeen-year-old boy could write that, I suppose it not too surprising that my teachers could think a twelve-year old boy ought to read it.  In any event, “Thanatopsis” is the first poem I can remember being assigned in school.  At home, my grandmother had introduced me much more gently to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses.  So In winter I get up by night and dress by yellow candlelight….

William Cullen Bryant (probably a few years after "Thanatopsis")
 

            The old Christian poets could be confident perhaps even arrogant in their attitudes toward death.  Think of Donne’s “Death be not proud…”   Modern poets, when they do confront it head on, are likely to do so with bitterness, even bellicosity.  Does anyone still read Dylan Thomas?   Some still delight in “A Child’s Christman in Wales,” but more will turn their minds first to the poet’s savage protest as his father lay dying:

 

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

Or the more direct, but quite possibly intentionally ironic

 

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon…

 

The sentiment of this poem is explicitly, perhaps oppressively, biblical.  But one can almost smell the ironic intention in the phrase that good night.  The connection of death with sleep in simile and metaphor is doubtless a cliché of world literature.  The final lines of Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” use it in what the poet intends as a positive, at least consolatory sense.  Thomas is pretty clearly invoking the expected religiosity of the Welsh chapel.  The title is “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”.  That is an explicit citation of the Apostle Paul (Romans 6:9) “….Christ being raised from the dead, dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him.”  It would be foolish to claim to understand the plain meaning of this text for it is a poetic idea itself, and poems rarely have plain meanings.  But it would appear that that Paul is speaking of a literal resurrection of Jesus and of a metaphorical resurrection—that is, the moral transformation—of Jesus’s followers.   Whether this is in any sense pious, on the other hand, must surely be called into question by the poem’s unmistakable anger.  I think it may have been Chesterton who said of Thomas Hardy that he could never forgive God for not existing.  I see something of similar suggestion here. 

            One of the most successful poems of the English eighteenth century was written by a writer otherwise rather obscure: Edward Young.  Its title is The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality, better known simply as Night-Thoughts.  It is nearly as long as its subject might suggest.  Its popularity was enormous, and there are many echoes of it to be found in our infant American writings.  Quotations from it are to found on the tombstones of some of our oldest burial places. 

 

In an absorbing book dealing with the some of the social effects of the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust, former president of Harvard, studied the rituals of mourning created during the war’s carnage.  In many of them one hears the echoes of The Complaint.  Fortunately the brightness of a new day dispels the gloom of night.  I started writing this in darkness.  As I finished writing, the sun had just broken through what seemed but an hour earlier an impenetrable fog.  That seemed a pretty obvious invitation to conclude.

Wynkyn de Worde

Device of Wynkyn de Worde, heir of William Caxton

In the beginning was the Word…So begins the gospel of John, whose opening sentence proclaims the mind-boggling Christian doctrine of the divine Incarnation in Jesus.  Don’t worry.  I have no intention of writing a blog about that subject.  I wouldn’t dare.  In fact, I shall quibble a bit with John, for anterior to the Word there must have been the Letter.  And though John said that Jesus was the Word, Jesus himself only claimed to be two letters, the Alpha and the Omega.  About letters I must write a bit, for the invention of the alphabet lies behind almost everything in our cultural history. It is extraordinary enough that human beings, unique among all animal species, developed the capacity of complex articulate speech.  More remarkable yet is that they developed means of preserving the articulations of human speech beyond the moment of its articulation and, indeed, beyond the lives of its speakers.  In our language, letters put together make words.  But the Word that concerns me here, usually spelled Worde, was likely a place name in Western Europe made vaguely familiar if not exactly famous in British cultural history on account of the achieved fame of a immigrant Fleming to London in the later part of the fifteenth century, one Wynkyn de Worde. (You can modernize the spelling of his first name, but wy would you want to?)

 

Wynkyn was a journeyman associate of William Caxton, the man credited for introducing into England the craft of printing with moveable cast metal types.  Wynkyn became Caxton’s heir, and after Caxton’s death he eventually set up his shop in London’s Fleet Street, which remains to this day at least the symbolic center of Anglophone printing on account of the newspapers headquartered there of old.   The history of the fifteenth-century printing revolution in Europe features a considerable number of geniuses in the fields of mechanical fabrication, business vision, and commercial innovation.  A German, Johannes Gutenberg, had invented the basic techniques of letterpress about 1450.  His famous Bible dates from 1455.  It is sometimes called “the forty-two line Bible”, and indeed there was some symbolism in the number, though I shall not allow that to tempt me to digression.  William Caxton is called the father of English printing, though his first book printed in the English language actually appeared in Bruges in 1475. But two years later he was printing in London.  I have always though it poetically appropriate that the first English language book Caxton printed there (1477) was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: a collaborative achievement involving two kinds of creative genius.  But everything about the origins of printing are testimonies to the astonishing brilliance of human abstract thinking and mechanical skill. 

 

Homo sapiens literally means the knowing man.  And perhaps the most important thing the species has known is how preserve for their posterity what it is they have known.  As Milton put it so beautifully: “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”  When we think of dramatic moments in the history of human progress, we are likely to invoke the invention of the wheel.   On the level of intellection, I should suggest as perhaps the most appropriate analogy the invention of the letter.  The achievement of representing in graphic form the vocalizations of a broad suite of conventional signs catalogued in orderly form in an alphabet, even if we can understand what that means, may not seem front-page news; but it most definitely should be.

 

“Revolutionary” hardly does justice to the development of graphic technology in fifteenth-century Europe.  It was achieved not by boffins or theoreticians but by hard-headed practical artisans like Wynken de Worde, men trying to make a buck.  Letterpress printing is a very simple technique that almost any intelligent person can easily understand.  But to do it involved all sorts of precision engineering in metallurgy, finely tuned carpentry, finely tuned metal carving and casting, and the means of applying great redirected compressive force.  And this is just to speak of the basic printing machine itself.  The material on which the printing was to be applied, mainly paper made of varying materials, but also animal skins, and the inks to be used in the application—all these were matters of the greatest craft relevance requiring expertise to be gained only through lengthy and robust experimentation.

 

So the first European printers were businessmen whose business often required expert mechanical knowledge.  For many of them it demanded also erudition.  That is, they were likely also to be scholars and editors.  Neither Caxton nor de Worde was a deeply erudite man, but many others among the early printers were.  Classical texts were written in Latin and Greek after all.  Among the many famous scholar-printers the Venetian Aldus Manutius (they are known by the Latin form of their vernacular names for obvious reasons) is conspicuous both for his erudition and for commercial innovation.  He could be said to have invented the small format of the modern paperback, for example.  Most readers know the distinction between a folio and a quarto.  A folio is printed on a large sheet of paper intended to be folded once in the middle to make four pages in a printed book.  If you fold the sheet a second time you will find you have eight pages, or an octavo sheet.  (Octo is Latin for the number eight.)  To risk a daring analogy, it is a distinction parallel to that in handkerchiefs between a blower and a shower.  Do you use it to blow your nose or to stick out from a breast pocket to look spiffy?  A folio is likely to be ensconced on the polished hardwood shelves of a fine library.  A quarto, like a modern paperback, is more likely to be carted around in a book-bag or back-pack, bumped and scraped and coffee-stained.  It is much more probable that the folio will still be enjoying its ceremonial status fifty years hence than will the quarto.

 

As Shakespeare gained a popular following, several of his plays were published in relatively cheap individual editions as quartos.  They sold like hot cakes, however hot cakes are sold.  But relatively few of those copies have survived.  They were nearly all read to death, left at the beach, or chewed up by the family pet over the ensuing four hundred years.  But the sumptuous folio put together after the playwright’s death was a coffee-table book, a shower, not a blower.  Nobody’s going to take a folio to the beach!  But the Folger Library in Washington has, I believe, eighty-two of first folios of Shakespeare!  Earphones and books on tape?  That’s a different matter.  Wynkyn de Worde would have been on it like white on rice. 

 

 Kelmscott House,Hammersmith, London

 

I might sometime in another essay or another life report on my own experiences in London in 1976-1977.  What was the bicentennial of the American Declaration of Independence was the quincentenary of the first printing in London.  I spent that year as the visiting fellow of the William Morris Society, housed in Morris’s eighteenth-century mansion on the Thames at Hammersmith, Kelmscott House.  (This townhouse is not the more famous property in Oxfordshire, Kelmscott Manor, Morris’s summer house.)   There was even a little of Morris still around the old London mansion, including one of the beautiful Albion presses that has been used on the famous Kelmscott Chaucer.

 

Rebecca West

 

This essay will be, eventually, an homage to one of the great English writers of the twentieth century, Rebecca West.  Readers frequently ask me how I arrive at the topics I choose.  The tone of the question understandably sometimes suggests puzzlement.  I have no prepared answer, but I do bear in mind what the Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini said about his paintings.  He liked, he said to “always to wander around at will in the paintings” sempre vagare a sua voglia nelle pitture.  Well, in informal writing like this blog I enjoy more than the odd bit of wandering myself.

 

For an American of my origins and generation, I consider myself to be reasonably well traveled, as I have visited several European countries and even dipped my toe into Asia with a memorable trip to Sri Lanka.  But these days that’s probably average for a third grader.  And   the only foreign lands I can claim to know at least slightly more than superficially are France and Great Britain, and in particular England, where I spent three years studying at Oxford and where I met the English woman who has now been my wife for sixty-three years.  Of course I know that the England I came to know six decades past is not the England of today, but I still maintain a lively interest in its cultural scene.

 

Just now England is in an uneasy, perhaps even in a parlous condition.  Its post-WWII history has been one of gradual decline, and in recent years of accelerating loss of clear national identity.  A mild-mannered professor of War Studies at the University of London, David Betz, has attracted growing public attention with his alarming if not alarmist analysis of the current state of British civil society.  He moved from suggesting that it faces the possibility of civil war to declaring war’s inevitability.  The focus of discontent is a cluster of related problems arising from the huge influx of immigrants, many of them illegal, most of them from troubled Muslim countries, and large numbers of them culturally unassimilated.   These problems are shared with several other European nations of course, but Britain’s small size and literal insularity exacerbate them.

 

The official line of the two heretofore majority political parties—both of which have embraced mass immigration—is that “diversity is our strength.”  Seldom has a linguistic bromide seemed less empirically probable.  The current Labour Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, is a colorless human rights lawyer of Eurocrat tendency.  There is growing force and criticism from articulate conservative quarters at different social registers.  One of the more spirited and controversial dissenting voices is that of a man named Carl Benjamin, often publishing under the erudite pseudonym of Sargon of Akkad.  (Sargon of Akkad, I learn, was a Middle Eastern potentate of an ancient empire springing from the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates.)  Benjamin has been berated, cancelled, condemned, and deplatformed galore; but freedom of speech in England is still at times—if only at times--an operative principle rather than a pious fiction.  From my distant perch it seems to me that the political winds in England are shifting.  And he does have a large following.  He is usually classified as “ultra” right, though he classifies himself (on grounds that are at least historically plausible) as a classical liberal.  Benjamin is very much of a generation and disposition that has left me far behind.  He is, or has been, an enthusiast of video games, for instance.  He is very smart and even quite eloquent, considering the fact that his every third sentence seems to contain the all purpose adjective “fucking”.  There is, unfortunately, nothing abnormal about that these days. 

 

Sargon/Benjamin is sufficiently learned to have shocked me with a glimpse of apparent ignorance.  In alluding to an essay that he had run across in Nicholas Barker’s old anthology The Character of England (1947), he appeared in an aside not to know who Rebecca West, one of the writers who contributed to the volume, was.  This minor lapse is of no significance to his own argument, but it does allow me step back from danger and abandon further commentary on the political and demographic disasters of an admired foreign country to what for me ought to be surer ground, that is, the literature of an admired foreign country.  For I have neither authority nor the desire to talk about Pakistani rape crews, while I say with confidence that I consider Rebecca West one of the great writers of the twentieth century. The essay to which Mr. Benjamin alludes is entitled “The Englishman Abroad”.  One of the features of a good writer is that her title is likely to tell you what her essay is going to be about.  This one is about Englishmen traveling abroad, something they have been doing for a long time.  Two of the most memorable of the shorter poems written in Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) are philosophical meditations that have been named by modern scholars “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer.”  Read Browning’s “Home Thoughts from Abroad.”  Read—without weeping, if you can—Rupert Brooke: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England.”  The series of learned anthologies in which the The Character of England takes its place is, or at least was in the bygone years of my post-graduate education, well known among professors of English literature.   I have to say that I find “The Englishman Abroad” both erudite and elegant, displaying at once impressive historical knowledge, striking psychological insights, and a considerable and wicked wit.  All of this is displayed in a sparkling but modulated prose of marked elegance.

 

And I can hardly be alone in my admiration of Rebecca West.  She didn’t merely gain a great name as a writer.  She had one given to her by a grateful nation.  Of all the honorifics that the British lavish on their big wigs, my favorite is perhaps that of Dame.  My approval stems, perhaps, from the jarring tonal difference between American and British usage of the word.  Were it not already self-evident, we have it on the authority of Oscar Hammerstein and Josh Logan, that there is nothing like a dame—no, nothing you can name.  And Dame Cecily Isabel Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West definitely was a real one.  She was born in 1892 and died in 1983.  She had an intense relationship with another giant of modern British literature, H. G. Wells.  She published about fifty books in many genres, including at least four that I want to think of as permanent classics.  I say nothing of her copious essays and periodical pieces.

 

My own serious appreciation of her work arose from her two books about treason—The Meaning of Treason (1947) and The New Meaning of Treason (1964), which were extremely helpful to me when I was myself attempting a book about literary anti-Communism in mid-century: The Ani-Communist Manifestos.  Her treatment of the affair of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss brought, I thought, a peculiarly subtle intelligence to a controversial topic already much written about.   She is particularly clear-minded and ruthless concerning the role that dogmatically defended political lies played in the episode.  She called the legal action pursued an example of a fairly rare “dervish trial”—an earlier example being the French Dreyfus Affair—in which the supposed impartiality of the legal proceeding had been grossly distorted by obvious political passion.  In one of her later novels, The Birds Fall Down (1966), I find a particular brilliance.  It is a domestic history, spy story, a murder mystery, an imaginative refashioning of actual historical events, a puzzling hall of mirrors, and a politico-philosophical meditation.   It is probably a few other things to boot, but I hope that will be enough to encourage you to consider reading it if you have not read it already.  As for myself, I freely admit that I have arrived at an age, and also in an age, when I find surcease of sorrow in old books about vanished or vanishing places.

 

 

 

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.