Colleagues

 

            Every now and again I am reminded, directly or indirectly, of a very great privilege I enjoyed during a long professional life.  Indeed, I continue to enjoy it still.  I refer to the circumstances of being placed in a professional setting in which I was surrounded by a large number of colleagues of talent and well deserved distinction.  If you have the privilege of teaching at a great university, you are automatically surrounded by such colleagues.  I was reminded of this fact vividly during the last week or so when in an op ed by David Brooks I came upon a reference to the “great historian James McPherson”.  McPherson is indeed a great historian, though he is categorized in my own mind as Jim.  The quirks of the human mind are such that it can all too easily transform the extraordinary into the ordinary.  A random sentence in an op ed by David Brooks set me on the road to a meditation upon scholarly friendships.

 

Over a professional association of decades, one has memorable experiences with dozens of colleagues.  Many, many years ago I was appointed to a term as chairman of the University Committee on Public Lectures.  There are probably ten or twenty public lectures a week on our campus, but there is one official big-deal series called simply “The Public Lectures.”  They are organized a year in advance, and they cover a wide range of scientific, humanistic, and social science topics, but they have at least a factitious coherence of theme.  They command a certain prestige.  The year I inherited the committee the organizing theme had already been set: “Origins.”  A historian who had agreed to talk about the origins of something or another was for one reason or another forced to withdraw at relatively short notice.  I was left with an “origin gap” that needed filling.  Indeed, I needed an historical origin on preposterously short notice.  “How about ‘The Origins of the American Civil War?’” I presumptuously asked Professor McPherson, an affable colleague who had a legendary reputation as a lecturer among some undergraduates I knew, whether he would leap into a breach at insultingly short notice.  I hoped that the emergent circumstances might almost justify the cliché of breach-leaping.

 

In any university, perhaps in any joint enterprise of any kind, roughly twenty percent of the people do roughly eighty percent of the work.  McPherson already had a full teaching load.  He certainly didn’t need to find an opportunity to reshape an academic lecture for a general educated town/gown audience.  But when I explained the difficulty, he barely hesitated.  He gave a dynamite lecture on “The Origins of the Civil War.”  The lecture itself was quite impressive; but what dazzled me most was the Q and A session that followed.  Around the edges of his answers, it became apparent to me that McPherson knew the names and political inclinations of every member of Congress (both houses) at least since the time of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 until the election of 1868 and the presidency of Grant.  This vast command of relevant knowledge was not a bravura knowledge dump, just appropriately deployed “background”.  If you read even part of his synoptic general history of the Civil War* for the “Oxford History of the United States” you will marvel at his ability to marshal the disparate evidence of military statistics and the analysis of personal human capacity and characteristics within the context of an overarching, fast-moving narrative.

 

The joy of an academic career, at least of mine, was having casual, cordial relations with literally dozens of remarkable scholars and teachers in many disparate fields.  I am not speaking here of intimate friendships.  One has only a few truly close friends in a lifetime.  The closest of my own friends have now themselves passed on.  But there can be a much larger circle of valued and admired colleagues and associates with whom from time to time one interacts with pleasure and often enough intellectual gain.  Many such people are witty and engaging conversationalists.  Others are brimming with good social works and community contributions.  Our late neighbor just up the road, Bart Hoebel, was an experimental psychologist of eminence who in his spare time built a steam calliope out of an old fire engine and drove it in the annual whingding alumni parade at class reunions.  For a while on my little suburban street (perhaps a thousand yards long) there lived in their separate modest domiciles two Nobel Prize winning physicists.  Various other neighbors were or are the kinds of people who are used to seeing their names show up in the New York Times.  It was my good luck to know several of them personally.  One enjoys basking even in reflected glory.

 

In the meantime this week the Flemings quietly celebrated their sixty-third wedding anniversary over spaghetti in the company of an old friend.

 

*James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: the Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Pp. 904.

Annals of Academe

Andrew Dickson White

 

 

This week I have been thinking about American higher education, the arena of my professional career and the vantage point from which I continue to view our rather alarming national political tensions.  Higher education is, of course, a vast topic, and even in a short blog essay it invites personal divagations and subordinations of a probably annoying kind.  Eventually I shall arrive at what I have most been thinking about, which is a spirited debate between prominent biblical scholars, one Catholic and one Protestant, around the hinge of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

 

This has been the week of the Princeton Class Reunions, a very big deal around here, and one in which I have traditionally participated in a low-key way.  But this year for the first time I eschewed the campus entirely. I simply wasn’t up to it—physically or spiritually.  The solvent of passing time—I retired from teaching nearly twenty years ago—has eroded the vivacity of my felt connections with current faculty and current students alike.  I am now, like others, an observer.  And every observer will have his or her own sense of the symbiosis between our educational institutions and national political and cultural trends.  In my view the dangerous hostility of the quarrel now in many instances approaches the fervor of odium theologicum, the intense, bitter, mutual loathing of the churchmen of the sixteenth century.  So that is the odd context in which my disparate subjects have been related in my mind.

 

Our nation’s signal contributions to the history of higher education are numerous, and from the very start they reflect important aspirations of the young nation.    The great scholars and teachers involved in their foundations were, in my opinion, among the many heroes of the Heroic Age.  Harvard, Yale, Princeton and a few other institutions were already established before the Revolution.  The first half of the nineteenth century and the post-Civil War period saw the foundations of new institutions that in their variety and founding conceptions would typify a distinctively American cooperation, or symbiosis, of national aspiration, spiritual vision, and practical requirement, a model that has persevered to this day.  At a time when the states had little cash but lots of empty land there emerged a new kind of institution—the land-grant college—that remains, in my opinion—one of our nation’s great cultural inventions.  Among the leaders of what was in retrospect a great national movement was Andrew Dickson White, one of the two co-founders of Cornell University and Cornell’s first president. 

 

Like many other early educational leaders, White was animated by intensely held Christian religious motives.  He recognized, along with nearly the entire educational establishment of his age, both the historical and the spiritual affinities of traditional western education and religion.  But he was also much interested in the natural sciences and the promise of their practical application.  And of course he was  aware of the obscurantist traditions of some Christian thought.  The title of his most famous book, A History of the Warfare of Science with Religion in Christendom (1896), will give you an idea of his view of intellectual progress.

 

The most famous episode of this “warfare”, especially for Protestant historians, was the Roman Church’s persecution of the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1615 on account of his maintenance of the Copernican theory of heliocentrism.  By a somewhat circuitous route I have been reviewing scenes from this ancient war from a literary point of view.

 

I begin with the supposition that whether we know it or not we are by now all Copernicans.  Nikolaus Copernicus was the genius astronomer who in 1543 published a book entitled On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, explaining in its essence the basic astrophysics of our solar system.  The importance of this book in the history of thought would be difficult to exaggerate.  We have been taught (and convinced) that the earth is a planet, that it is in constant and quite regular motion, and that the diurnal phenomena of our visual experience (that is, alternating periods of sunlight and darkness) are the results of our residential orb regularly circulating around another orb, the sun.  But we do not have the felt experience of whirling about in space.  Our experience is of a sun that “rises” and “sets”.  We have dawn; we have dusk.  Earthlings are the center of a large cosmic drama moving in a stately sarabande around them.  This was an “image” potentially comfortable for our self-importance.  To be told that, No, not at all, our bailiwick is a flyspeck in an infinite universe not merely immeasurable but actually unimaginable, one which beggars the concepts of finitude and infinitude alike—you may not find all that good news for the superego of the human species.

 

The “Galileo episode” is among the most famous episodes in the history of science.  It has also remained an indelible stain upon the Roman Church’s magisterial claim.  But the “history of science,” for us a clearly delineated topic with its own scholarly monuments and protocols, did not in the sixteenth century exist as such.  The natural lens through which conventional thought approached most questions was a literary lens.  The astronomical problem was a literary problem since the formulation of its issues were bookish.  The book, naturally was The Book—that is, the Bible, which had quite a bit to say about what we now call astronomy and cosmology, beginning with its first verse: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

 

The debate to which I referred in the first paragraph was between Robert Bellarmine, a learned Jesuit who was one of the ornaments of the Roman Catholic counter-Reformation, and the Anglican William Whitaker, a profoundly erudite English scholar who spent much of his life at Cambridge.  Whitaker was the author of A Disputation on Holy Scripture (1588)—the original of course in Latin, the international language of learned discourse. The dispute is often if indirectly about the nature of figurative language; I hope I might one day explore this debate as an episode in the history of literary criticism.  The prospects are dim, however.  Though the intellectual issues are perennial and at times even still vibrant, the stench of the odium theologicum cannot be perfumed away.  The learnedly unreliable Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood (or as he called himself Anthony à Wood), a late seventeenth-century literary gossip indispensable to students of the literature of his age, claims that though Bellarmine hated the heretic in Whitaker, he admired the scholar in him.  Indeed, he went so far as to keep a portrait of the Puritan polemicist in the Jesuit studium in Rome!  We may regard this anecdote as “of uncertain authenticity.”

 

                                            (Saint) Robert Bellarmine

 

Dim Sum and Victorian Verse

Two Chus, Two Flemings, and a Moy

 

Of the many rewards offered by the academic life, the greatest for me has been the endless succession of students, endless in number but also endlessly diverse and endlessly engaging, whom I encountered during a half century of teaching.  Hundreds of them remain vivid in memory, and not a few of them remain at least to some extent still in my life, or at least close enough to it that I am not all that surprised when they reappear, perhaps only for a few moments, often unannounced and unexpected.

 

An alumna friend with whom I had a pleasant interlude recently is Professor Olivia Loksing Moy of the English Department of Lehman College of the City University of New York.  To find the right stereotype under which to classify Prof. Moy presents the problem one faces with many polymaths, analogous to the problem of the “plurality of worlds” that taxed thinkers in the eighteenth century.  So “altruistic, overachieving female Asian-American literary scholar” will have to do.  She is an alumna of the Class of 2006.  That year was my final year of teaching at Princeton—a circumstance that would make me unlikely to forget her, even if there were not so many others.   I had also known her sister Olympia very slightly—Olympia today being a high-powered lawyer--so that I almost felt that she was a part of an incipient tradition.  In our shared final year Olivia took a class I was teaching in which a Princeton friend of mine for several years—a research physicist named T. K. Chu at our red-hot fusion laboratory—was also sitting in.  Dr. Chu and his wife are fellow supporters of the lively classical music scene around here.  The Moy sisters were both accomplished musicians.  So there was another link.

 

Thus both the nonagenarian Chu and the merely nearly nonagenarian Fleming were delighted to learn that Professor Olivia Moy was planning to make a trip to Princeton on academic business, a trip that might include a lunch with elderly Princeton friends.  That lunch actually took place last Saturday, and it was delightful.

 

In our adopted state of New Jersey, in which turnpike exit numbers are rich in their sociological significance, there is a tradition of locating surprisingly excellent restaurants, especially Chinese restaurants, in unlikely places.  I first experienced this phenomenon many years ago through a locally famous eatery that was an appendage to a BP gas station on US Route 1.  Its name was “A Kitchen”, and it was entirely unclear whether the “A” was a badge of merit or simply the indefinite article.  The fame of A Kitchen slowly grew to command the attention of the food editor of the New York Times.   Journalistic fame of course proved fatal.  Having achieved bourgeois celebrity the place moved to a slightly more conventional locale a little further north on (as I recall) Route 27 and submerged into the sea of Asian restaurants in the area, most of which I am sure are of course okay but, you know, simply lack the attractiveness of the gas-pump ethos.

 

The (current) name of the establishment at which we met Professor Moy is “The Shanghai Bun”.  It is located in one of the more modest, indeed obscure mini-malls of central Jersey, very near to the Princeton Junction railroad station.  I have no more idea of what the “Bun” is about in this name than I do of what the “A” is about in A Kitchen.  The restaurant does not seem to specialize in buns, but it does one hell of a business.  Its popular success seems to me well merited, for the food is delicious in taste and abundant in quantity.  If you consult the Internet for reviews, you will find only that “Dim sum & other traditional Chinese classics are prepared at this unassuming outfit in a strip mall.”  I presume that the “unassuming” in that description is artistic rhetorical understatement.  Nondescript is more like it.

 

The first person I recognized among the diners as we entered the place—indeed the only person I recognized--was the very nice lady who runs the best Chinese restaurant in Princeton proper.  This, thought I, is a very good sign.  Sort of like learning so many years ago that Stan Musial shaved with Gillette Blue Blades, same as me.   (They had “the sharpest edges ever honed,” though I thought the guy said “owned” and therefore wanted to own one.)  The restaurant was very busy, offering us the leisure for protracted catching-up conversations.  At the end, Professor Moy gifted us with two of her book-length publications.  One is a work edited with a colleague at Montclair State University and anthologizing essays by a dozen or so scholars under the general title of Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life.  I have as yet barely leafed through it, but I spent a little more time with her own monograph, The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).  I read a little more deeply in this one, deeply enough to know I want to read the rest.  By a strange chance the first scholarly article I ever published was concerned with Browning’s dramatic monologue “Mr. Sludge, ‘the Medium’”.  Fortunately, that was so long ago that I have ceased to be embarrassed by it, but I was certainly interested in what Prof. Moy has to say about the poem.  The good news is that it is never too late to learn, and there are few better teachers than one’s students.  And speaking of students…

 

I conclude this post with a note of personal privilege.  Later in the day we shall be transported to New York City to celebrate our beautiful, brilliant, and absolutely beloved granddaughter Lulu Mae Fleming-Benite, B.A., who has just graduated, after four years of deep intellectual engagement and high academic achievement, from Barnard College. Lulu will be no stranger to habitual or even intermittent readers of this blog.  She has featured in many essays and, deo volente, will feature in many more in a future that begins with her continuing studies in France.  Congratulations dear, dear Lulu!

Pope Leo XIV

One of the most famous works of modern literary criticism is Mimesis by Erich Auerbach, first published in its original German in 1942.  The subtitle to Mimesis is “The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.”  It has since been translated into most of the languages on earth.   Auerbach was a brilliant German philologist and wide-ranging literary scholar who, as a Jew, fled Nazi persecution to take up a rather obscure academic appointment in Turkey, where he completed his great book.  After the war he moved to America and eventually to Yale University.  He published several other books of wide-ranging erudition and influence.  He is, indeed, one of the giants of twentieth-century literary study.  It is he who introduced into general academic currency the Greek word mimesis, often translated as “imitation” or “representation” as we use those words to describe the relationship between “real life” and life’s portrayal in literary or visual art. The word makes an important appearance in Aristotle’s Poetics, one of the fundamental books of our literary criticism.   As a character invented by one of our more notable playwrights famously remarked, “All the world’s a stage, /And all the men and women merely players.”  Is the whole thing “performative”—that is, one big act?

 

The phrase “art imitates life” has naturally invited the riposte that “life imitates art.” It is always pleasant to see art imitating life imitating art.  During the week just past, like millions of others throughout the world I found myself caught up in the papal election.  Well, “caught up” is probably overdoing it.  But we were subliminally prepared for it in a curious way.  Like a lot of other people, Joan and I had seen the film “Conclave” a few months ago. This engaging film exemplifies the principle that art also imitates art, because it is a cinematic version of the novel Conclave by Robert Harris, an excellent writer of historical fiction whose subject matter has often been taken from Antiquity.   (I particularly recommend the Cicero trilogy.)  Conclave is the fictional account of a papal selection in contemporary times.  You might say that Harris has mastered two thousand years of Roman political intrigue.  The fictional new pope, selected as a dark horse over a quite diverse field of leading candidates, is himself significantly diverse, but I won’t spoil things by explaining just how.  Art imitates life; it doesn’t reduplicate it.

 

We like to say that life is stranger than fiction, but, come on, you know that isn’t true.  There is no Saint Hermaphrotidus on the papal roster even in the darkest of the Dark Ages.  Pope Joan—that’s another issue!  Returning briefly to reality, Pope Leo XIV—concerning whom my entire knowledge comes from limited and often eccentric press coverage and the personal experience of two very brief statements he made in two Romance languages—seems a humble, dignified and sincere man.  He is obviously a man of deep and sincere faith, of unusual administrative capacity, of considerable learning, and of no small amount of diplomatic skill.  That he is by birth an American citizen is of real historical interest and apparently to much of the press the most interesting thing about him.  My own suspicion as a medievalist interested in the origins and histories of the principal religious orders in the Roman Church is that many decades living under the ancient Rule of Saint Augustine and long service as a missionary bishop in a developing country have had greater influence on his character than his American birth.  I am not a member of his branch of the universal Christian Church which is, however, the most numerous and widespread of all its branches, making him easily the most obvious and influential single spokesman for the Christian religion in the world.

 

The coverage of the papal transition has mainly been treated with what I have come to regard as conventional superficiality in our press’s discussion of religious matters.  There seems to be an unconscious imperative to make adversarial comparisons between Pope Leo and Donald Trump and to predict or at least wish for some manifest open conflict between Church and State of similar consequence to that between the pope and the secular potentates of the twelfth-century Investiture Controversy.  This contest between secular and ecclesiastical authority may be remembered from a history course as being important for—well, important for something important.  I am a professional medievalist, and as I can’t give you a serious explanation of all the issues involved, I can hardly assume such knowledge in my readers.  Jesus said that his kingdom was “not of this world,” but at least since the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who died nearly seventeen hundred years ago, the Church has failed to eschew temporal political power and has often eagerly pursued it.  Christians have to live with paradox.  Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave.  This invitation to servility is perhaps not a particularly attractive job description.  No number of decaying Roman palaces and halberd-carrying Swiss guards could persuade a sane man to take it on.  The new pope shows every sign of sanity, and his long record of votive self-discipline and ministerial service in Latin America offers no suggestion of a vaulting personal ambition.  It is, I suppose, of some interest that the new pope might be a fan of the Chicago White Sox—this factoid has been prominent in several reports—but not of as much interest as his demonstrated commitment to the wretched of the earth.  To this outsider he appears to have a servant’s mentality, and I wish him well in the burdensome role he now undertakes.  It is a pity that the mimesis—the representation of this election in the popular press—has been mainly and sometimes trivially political.  All Christian churches, among which the Church of Rome is of conspicuous and unique importance, are facing formidable head winds.  That the clearly designated leader of this church appears to be a person of intelligence, integrity, noble vision, and true Christian charity is good news for a world that gets too little good news.

Behrman Award

 

It has been an unusually active week for us geriatrics, so active indeed that it is not easy to identify its high point.  So I won’t even try, and simply go with the last major event, which was our attendance at the sumptuous annual banquet celebrating the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton University.  As treating this topic will obviously require some talk about the late Howard T. Behrman and some talk about the humanities, with any luck I should be finished before I am required to add any thoughts of my own. 

 

The event is officially a “black tie optional” event, but probably only a third of the male participants, including me, were wearing dinner jackets.  The venue was Prospect House, the closest thing we have (not very close) to a Faculty Club.  In the days of Woodrow Wilson, it was a grand private presidential residence; but the presidents have long since decamped to another mansion off campus.  Prospect has a big kitchen and does a brisk business in lunches and special dinners.

 

Prospect House

 

The Behrman Award consists of a handsome bit of money and a large bronze medallion.  At least in the version with which I am familiar, the medallion has a somewhat bizarre figure on its face, after a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci.  The image is often called “Vitruvian man” because of its obvious relationships to the ideas concerning visual perspective advanced by the ancient Roman architect, Vitruvius, which became popular in the Italian Renaissance.  A student once described it to me as “a naked hippie doing jumping jacks.”  Not bad, even if somewhat demythologizing.   It is also sometimes called “protagoran man” after the pre-Socratic philosopher Protragoras, famous for a cryptic utterance often rendered as “Man is the measure of all things.”

 

Howard Behrman, who died in 1985, was an eminent practitioner, research dermatologist and wealthy book collector (specializing in early editions of classic American writers).  He had no special connection to Princeton, but took up residence in the town and became deeply involved with the Friends of the Princeton University Library.  I came to know him personally in that role.  A generous and cultivated philanthropist, he made many large contributions to various cultural institutions, endowing (among other things) an annual banquet celebrating humanistic scholarship at Princeton at which a sizeable cash prize was to be awarded to an outstanding faculty humanist.  The endowment fund, wisely invested but strictly delineated in its focused purpose—an annual cash prize and sumptuous banquet—soon provided enough to fete two winners each year.  In 1987 I myself was one of the two, the other that year being the historian Robert Darnton, who later moved on to Harvard.  Judged objectively you might find that the dinner has a whisper of wine snobbery and stratospherically haute haute cuisine.   The president in his welcoming remarks stressed the fact that the terms of the gift restrict its use solely to conspicuous consumption. So it is frankly a mainly alimentary event, but there are always five fairly short speeches, one by the president, and one by each winner and their departmental introducers.  These little talks are typically learned and inspirational, often with much good humor; but this year the undertones of the brewing warfare between American academia and the American presidential regime emerged at times simply as tones.  These tensions are to me very worrying, but this is not the occasion to discuss them.  This year’s winners were the British historian Dame Linda Colley and the former Dean of the College Jill Dolan, Professor of English and an eminence in cultural and feminist studies.  For anyone interested, I expect that there will be an account of the work of these two colleagues on the Princeton University webpage by the time I publish this.  This essay is about our experience of the event.  Though long retired, I can still bask in the reflected glory of eminent colleagues.

 

What are the “humanities”?  As usual, linguistic history is a good place to begin.  At Oxford they have long called the classics curriculum that produced so many British leaders and Empire-builders of the modern age the litterae humaniores, the more “human[e]” branches of literary studies.  This course of study in usually referred to in academic lingo as “Greats.” More human than what?  Than theology, of course, than what in the Middle Ages they called “divine science” or “study in the sacred page.”  Secular learning, in short, the stuff, even practical technology,  of at least half of a modern American college curriculum.   Modern education in a sense involves a conscious turn away from the sacred.  Alexander Pope in the eighteenth century wrote the following memorable couplet: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan: The proper study of mankind is man.”  Ancient educators often spoke of the pathways or avenues to learning.  Our word method reveals this in its etymology, hodos being the Greek word for road.   Of course, learning is not static, nor are the arrangements by which learning is pursued.  Though the advanced curriculum still has visible traces linking it with the medieval Seven Liberal Arts—themselves distributed in a preliminary trivium (three ways) and a more specialized quadrivium (four ways)--it is now much more capacious.  The natural sciences and the social sciences now loom large and will likely loom ever larger.

 

A special pleasure of our evening was provided by our dining companions—my fellow emeritus colleague from the English Department Michael Wood and his wife Elena Uribe.  Michael is a well-known and broad-ranging critic still prominent in the literary journals.  Only last Saturday did I learn that Elena, a Mexican by birth, has interests broadly similar to those of our son Luke, in linguistic anthropology, dealing with indigenous cultures.  Much of Luke’s early work centers on remote linguistic groups in Brazil.

 

A festive meal featuring many leisurely courses and several speeches, however mini, made it a pretty long evening.  The party broke up, and we tried to make a quick exit.  But unbeknownst to us revelers in the mead hall, outdoors a pretty serious rainstorm had set in.  We nonetheless set off toward our car, left in a parking lot perhaps six or seven hundred yards away.  Little did we imagine that the President, too, was making a quick exit.  But his car was parked maybe fifty feet away from the venue.  We had a lead of about two hundred feet along a narrowish driveway which he had to drive down.  So I guess he felt he just had to stop and pick us up.  The distance from the parking lot I just quoted is the distance on foot. By car it is substantially farther, and in the opposite direction to his actual residence.  I doubt that his spouse, though herself utterly gracious, could have been exactly delighted with the geriatric hitchhikers.  Just what an overworked college president needs at the end of a long day.  Even as this was happening Wordsworth’s lines from “Tintern Abbey” concerning “that best part of a good man’s life” came into my mind: “his little unremembered acts of kindness and of love.”  Well, they certainly won’t be unremembered by us.

Gatsby Centennial

 

On Sunday the Friends of the Princeton University Library held its official annual meeting, which was followed by its annual dinner.  The after-dinner speaker for this event is usually some eminent “book person,” in this instance Prof. Maureen Corrigan, who surely is one of the best-read readers around.  She is well known to a popular audience as the book critic for National Public Radio, and to many general readers as the author of So We Read On, the subtitle of which is How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.  This is a big year for literature lovers at Princeton.  It marks the hundredth anniversary of the most famous title by our most famous alumnus novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Or near alumnus; he never actually graduated.  So Corrigan was the perfect expert to speak about Gatsby, and she gave a memorable talk.   Command of material is always augmented by spirit and humor in its deployment, and she had plenty of both.  Joan and I had the honor of sharing a table with, among others, Scott Fitzgerald’s granddaughter and great-granddaughter.

 

The Friends of the Library is a group in which civic virtue and personal pleasure meet.  It is easy to be a friend of a library.  You begin by loving to read, doing a lot of reading, and helping others to love, study, acquire, and preserve books.  You will build a personal library of however modest a nature.   Almost anyone can afford to construct a small private library at modest expense.  Or, if you are a person of means you can purchase rare titles for a public institution at staggering prices.  Perhaps your collection will have a dedicated theme.  You will do all in your power to encourage literary habits in others and to practice them yourself.  Our organization of Friends has some members in all these categories, among others.

 

Unfortunately libraries have enemies as well as friends.  Among the political tidbits recently in the press was one concerning our somewhat specialized topic of interest: libraries.  “At the U.S. Naval Academy, it's not what's on the shelves that's drawing attention -- but what's missing. The institution's Nimitz Library has been stripped of 381 titles, according to a list first published in the New York Times, including works exploring race, gender, and national identity.”  Now this news article fits into a conventional genre.  It is not about the crisis of shelf-space familiar to places that house too many books, such as, for example, the Fleming home.  As you read it, your focus must be on the apparent content of the books.  Here’s a hint.  It begins with Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist.  It includes Monsieur d'Eon Is a Woman : a Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade.  You may already have caught the drift.  This is an article about that form of censorship usually called “book-banning.”  In the dreaded academic triad of approaches to humanistic study—class, race, and gender—all three have proved perennial stimulants to controversy.

 

But there is a paradox here.  While book-banning is a topic that should concern anybody concerned with—well, with anybody capable of being concerned about anything—book-banning has historically been pretty good for some authors.  Everybody wanted the latest banned book from Voltaire.  For a certain period of time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the New England Watch and Ward Society stimulated many a faltering author’s sales by declaring their books banned in Boston.  To be able to boast that your book was banned in Boston was probably better for your sales than being able to display a glowing review in some literary journal.

 

 

But my experience as a teacher and American citizen and a friend of libraries is that the real problem about reading in our country is not that by and large Americans are being deprived of books, but that they simply don’t read books.  There is no necessity for bad actors to ban books; our flimsy culture is doing that for us.  We have a very bright granddaughter, aged eleven, who mainly reads “graphic novels,” basically comic books.  That’s apparently just fine with her Brooklyn school teachers.  More paradox: the number of new novels published each year appears to me to vary inversely with the number of people who read lots of novels.

 

Since in my career I have been an English professor I need to be clear that I am here not speaking as one.  A college education will, I hope, introduce many thousands to some very good books and millions to a wide variety of technical or utilitarian ones.  But not everybody should or will be a French literature minor.  Yet if your national educational aim is universal literacy, as ours has long been, everyone should be encouraged to be a life-long reader of something useful.

 

Please do not suppose that I have lost the plot in this essay if I move on to an apparently political topic.  My subject is reading and readers.  But Ms. Corrigan’s prowess as a reviewer, and her stated belief that The Great Gatsby is the greatest of American novels has set me on a track that I hope no one will mistake for run-of-the mill academic Trump-bashing.  During my lifetime I have benefitted from the thoughts of book reviewers who seemed to me to have read everything.  When I was young there was Clifton Fadiman.  More recently the late Christopher Lehmann-Haupt occupied that role at the New York Times.  Ms. Corrigan herself fits the category. The American president is a graduate of one of our most prestigious universities.  Surely it is impossible that he achieved his degree without reading books?  Indeed, he is the alleged author of a book on one of his apparently favorite topics, deal-making.  Its title indeed is The Art of the Deal.   In reviewing Trump’s book Lehmann-Haupt had this to say of the author: “The more important fact is that he arouses one's sense of wonder at the imagination and self-invention it must have taken to leap from his father's shoulders and reach for the deals that he did. Jay Gatsby lives, without romance and without the usual tragic flaws.”  Jay Gatsby lives.

 

The ghost-writer of the book under review, Tony Schwartz, along with the book’s original publisher, deny that Trump wrote a word of it.  I have no independent information, but “of disputed authorship” is a well-established category to students of, say, Elizabethan drama.  The book was a best-seller, and has many admirers to this day. Lehmann-Haupt’s review of it for the Times may have been the occasion by which the name “Trump” first became fixed in my mind.  Jay Gatsby lives, Mr.Lehmann-Haupt wrote,  without romance and without the usual tragic flaws.  Going back in memory to the ‘Eighties, when The Art of the Deal appeared, has been for me a clarifying imaginative experience. The book was followed by several other Trump titles.

 

 The uneven distribution of monetary resources in our country, often called the wealth divide has grown ever starker in our consciousness in recent decades.  It overlaps only somewhat with the literacy divide, but by a pretty large somewhat.  In a fast-moving world our public schools are graduating fewer and fewer young people prepared to find traditional “middle class” jobs or even jobs likely to lead to one.  This is already a serious social issue and may well become a national security issue.  But I believe most high-school English students have at least heard of The Great Gatsby, and not a few have read it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Easter 2025

imagine this with the lights off

 

Writing on the Monday after Easter, I am already reliving in memory the religious and family-centered pleasures attendant upon the festival in our household.  While one size does not fit all, there remain some cultural habits of such long duration and of sufficient current vitality as to provide for most of us a template for the continuity of the human species.  The basic unit of human society has mainly been the family, and the family has mainly been the product of the sexual union of a man and a woman.  Family life, though it reveals an extraordinary variety of forms throughout the human community, generally shares certain common practices.   Important among these are communal gatherings of some implicit or explicit solemnity involving the consumption of shared food, conversation, and other common social pleasures.

 

One is unlikely to think about matters in this schematic way.  Mostly we live life rather than ponder over or anthropologize about it.  But there are occasions, such as when you find yourself sitting alone and in the dark in the chancel of a vast Gothic church at five in the morning, when the thoughts might come.  That is the situation in which I found myself, briefly, on Easter morning.  It all started long ago and with a single short word in the medieval Latin Bible: mane, meaning “early morning”.  The women went looking for the body of Jesus early in the morning two days after the Crucifixion.  My own story happened like this.

 

For the last few days we had been enjoying a visit of one half of the family we call the Montrealers—our younger son Luke, daughter-in-law Melanie, and grandkids John Henry and Hazel.  As simple folk, we call this family the Montrealers because they live in, duh, Montreal.   We also have New Yorkers and Brooklynites.  Naturally we see the Montrealers less frequently than the New Yorkers and Brooklynites.  And on this occasion only Luke and Hazel were able to come.  Melanie and John Henry had other Easter obligations of their own in Canada.  You know the old adage about absence making the heart grow fonder.  But there is a trade-off.  There is always some pain in having to say goodbye to loved ones infrequently seen.  So I felt a little sniffly as their Dodge van disappeared from out driveway earlier in the day.

 

But they had been with us for the whole of the triduum, which is the churchy name for the extended period of the Easter weekend, including Good Friday, a period that includes several interesting ancient rites and services.  The spiritual themes of the weekend obviously accord with the sense of renewal and rebirth visibly present in spring in the northern hemisphere and widely marked by many pre-Christian or simply non-Christian groups.  Many things about Easter are syncretic, revealing pre-Christian parallels in other religions.  The very word Easter is probably pre-Christian.  Rites of Spring must be universal.  Winters are tough; and in earlier periods of history they were much tougher, at least for the vast majority of the population.  I began my teaching career in Madison, Wisconsin.  The winters seemed endless.  When the ice finally began breaking up on Lake Mendota it did so with loud cracking sounds.  Madison, which seemed to me at the time so far north, must actually be roughly along the latitudinal line of Brittany in France.

 

Almost everything about Easter is syncretic—meaning that in its history, its etymology, and even to a degree in its spiritual interpretation it brings together several different poetic and theological traditions.  That spiritual interpretation itself has evolved. But as the festival observance of the stupendous claim at the heart of Christianity—that Jesus, a male human being, after being horribly executed and his dead body buried, a couple of days later, by eye-witness testimony from many alleged witnesses, reappeared as a living man--is of very ancient origin.  The Resurrection has always been for Christians the essential and necessary fact of human history.  So revolutionary and extravagant a belief so long held by untold millions for many long centuries formative of our civilization and so widely examined in their art and philosophy is not to be easily abandoned.  It encapsulates in historical narrative an attractive solution to the most tragic reality of human life, which is human death.

 

But enough about the Meaning of it All, and back to my sitting in the dark.  By heroic effort Luke, Hazel, Joan and I all made it to the Episcopal Great Vigil Eucharist which begins at 5am in the Princeton University Chapel and runs for about two hours.  This is a fabulous service which takes place in the large chancel of a cathedral-sized building.  It begins with the congregation making a solemn procession, two by two, with studied pauses proclaiming the coming of the “Light of Christ”, down what seems like an endless nave in semi-darkness, the only light being supplied by small candles, one for each marcher.  You then climb four or five stairs to the level of the banked choir stalls.  My mobility is poor in bright daylight.  In the dimmest of dim religious lights it could be catastrophic.  So Luke offered to take me in and settle me in the top rank of the choir stalls on the gospel side.   I would have to sit in the dark and wait while he and all the others gathered on the outside of the building’s massive oak front doors for the “lighting of the new fire”, in itself an impressive liturgical event.  They would then join me in my perch high in the stalls.  That meant that for perhaps ten minutes I was sitting alone in a building with a seating capacity of nearly two thousand.  It was not absolutely pitch-dark, but until the slowly advancing Light of Christ approached, plenty dark enough to encourage some serious solemn thought.  It was an experience I never anticipated but one I shall not soon forget.

 

All major human institutions, I suppose, are likely to present interesting patterns of change within continuity.  But to participate in a very lengthy liturgy that is in effect a textual recapitulation of thousands of year of Jewish and Christian history while sitting alongside two other generations of one’s own history, a mere blink of the eye in our species’ existence, offers a special kind of experience, contemplative subject matter of universal utility but with a special relevance for the aged and the infirm.  Why seek the living among the dead?

 

                                           as recorded by Lukas van Leyden