Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche

For Better or for Worse

2012-02-01T01:41:00.000-08:00

GOOD In pious times, e're priest-craft did begin / before polygamy was made a sin...

I am in the final push in thepreparation of a book about the Enlightenment period, and as usual thinkingabout issues in distant history intrudes upon current perception. If the earlymedieval centuries were the “Dark Ages,” the thirteenth the “Age of Faith,” andthe Eighteenth the “Age of Reason”, what is the defining characteristic of theage that has given us our formation? Your answer will probably be determined by which of the twolarge historical schools you fall into: the optimistic, or the pessimistic.

When doctors disagree, its best toattempt a comprehensive review of the evidence. When Pantagruel went off to study in Paris, his fatherGaragantua wrote him a letter full of enthusiasm for recent advances inlearning, most of which could be attributed to the invention of printing. “I see robbers, hangmen, freebooters,tapsters, ostlers, and such-like, of the very rubbish of the people, morelearned now than doctors and preachers were in my time.” He does allow that the destructionwrought by another recent invention, gunpowder, might cancel some of the gainswon by movable type.

In the eighteenth century Voltairewrote his immortal novella Candide (subtitled“Optimism”). Candide is a young fellow schooled in the optimism of thephilosopher Leibniz. He wanders through the mayhem of war, rapine, the Inquisition, and the Lisbon earthquakepiously reciting his well-learned mantra: “This is the best of all possibleworlds.” It is not long before thereader perceives that this observation, though acute, is pessimistic ratherthan optimistic.

A famous pop-psychologist of the turn of the twentiethcentury, Emile Coué (1857-1926), gained thousands of followers by getting them to intonedaily: “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better” (“Tous les jours, a tous points devue, je vais de mieux en mieux.”) This mode of therapy was called couéisme, which is apparently French forbalderdash. A recent bestseller bySteven Pinker entitled The Better Angelsof Our Nature would persuade us that in the Great Scheme, there is adefinite uptick.

Another way of asking the questionis this: do you detect in history a pattern of progress, as many people sincethe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have done? As a medievalist I am more inclined to theclassical-medieval view of incremental decay. Several writers of our English Renaissance gave some versionof the following derivation of the word world:“World, from wear-old, that thing thatgroweth worse as it groweth older.” These writers and their Continental contemporaries had been deeplyschooled in the classics, and thus subscribed to the theory of the “Ages of theWorld.”

Thetwo greatest poets of classical Latinity—Virgil in the first of the Georgics, Ovid in the first book of the Metamorphoses—had given beautifulexpression to the myth of the Golden Age, an age of pre-industrial, indeedpre-agricultural, primal justice and bliss, in which the human race lived inharmonious simplicity, feeding itself from the earth’s uncultivated bounty, andslaking its thirst at the rivulets of its crystalline waters. This story seemed to such earlyChristian writers as Lactantius an obvious analogue to the pre-lapsarian stateof our first parents in the Garden of Eden. So it was treated by Boethius in one of his most famous meters (poems), which for a thousand years most people who could read at all werelikely to know nearly by heart. Atranslation of it was one of Chaucer’s early productions.

Oxford: Bodleian, MS Douce 195: Comment iupiter oste les genitoires a son pere

(Translation: "This was the most unkindest cut of all.")

Butthe myth of a Golden Age, like the third chapter of the Book of Genesis, is oneof a paradise lost. Saturn reigned over the Golden Age, theage of justice. But the Golden Agecame to a brutal end when Saturn’s son Jupiter rebelled against his father. There is no polite way of telling you whathappened. Jupiter cut off hisfather’s sexual organs and tossed them into the Mediterranean Sea. The results, after a certain amount ofaqueous bubbling, are well known to you all from a famous painting ofBotticelli: Venus on the half-shell! Yes, lubricious sex entered the world only with primal sin. “Then the eyes of [Adam and Eve] wereopened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together,and made themselves aprons.” (Except that I prefer the reading of the Geneva Bible of 1560, in whichthey made themselves “breeches”. The historical human problem has been hot pants, not hot aprons.)

Thefall from gold to silver was, alas, the mere beginning of a continuing downwardslope of degradation that saw a steady metallic descent through Ages of Bronzeand Iron. Fortunately theclassical period ended before things could get much worse, which they havecontinued to do ever since. Thoughno poet has shouldered the task—How could one? We have no epic poets any more—the materials are there awaiting. The world has had its Ages of Ceramic,of Wood, and of Papier-Mâché. Ithink we are now in a transitional period between the Age of Cardboard and theAge of Bubblewrap. Under thesecircumstances, despite Pinker’s captious statistics, it is hard for me to agreethat our own age, the century of Auschwitz and Vorkuta, is a marked improvementover the century of the Seven Years’ War.

NOT SO GOOD : from Goya's "Diasters of War"

Isidore of Seville and the Dog Whistle

2012-01-25T02:08:00.000-08:00

Iam an alleged expert in allegory—aliterary genre that advances its fiction beneath a dark conceit. There are some pretty famous examples,such as the Divine Comedy, the Faerie Queene, and Pilgrim’s Progress. Some literary manuals define allegory as “an extended metaphor,” but Iprefer the simplicity of the medieval definition of Isidore of Seville: Allegoria,he writes, id est, alieniloquium. Allegory is “saying one thing to meananother.” It’s more compehensive,and, besides, Isidore is the patron saint of the Internet. (Note the cool laptop, below.) Internet users ought to givehim a plug whenever possible.

Ilike this expansive definition because it includes such useful speech acts as sarcasm,as well as literary irony of many kinds. One so rarely meets in real life people called “Red Cross Knight” or“Mr. Worldly Wiseman” that one is likely to suspect them of being allegorical immediatelywhen encountered in books. And ifRed Cross Knight goes on to slay (slay,note, not kill) the Foul Dragon—well,you can be nearly sure he did it with his trusty Sword of Faith.

Real life alieniloquium can be more interesting. Say you run into someone, an old associate you don’tparticularly like but fortunately also rarely see any more, in circumstancesthat require a few minutes conversation. Vapid as it is, the conversation is sufficient to remind you why youdon’t like this person and to demonstrate that the person feels exactly thesame way about you. Nonethelessthe interview ends at the fifty-ninth street stop or wherever with mutualdeclarations of how good it has been to catch up and the suggestion by one orother that “we must get together for lunch”. “We must get together for lunch” is alieniloquium for the unutterable “So long, and with any luck Iwon’t run into you for another seventeen years.”

Though I have written whole booksabout allegory and the difficulties of its interpretation, the currentRepublican primary contests, or at least the learned journalistic disquisitionsthereon, have revealed what an allegorical piker I really am. It appears that the Republicancandidates have all been “telegraphing” in “coded language” certain “messages”interpretable only by hermeneutically adept hillbillies. Very often their utterances have been“dog whistles”, presumably discernible only by the hillbillies’ hunting hounds. Though varied in nature these alieniloquia meet in a single, simple certainty: all criticism of the current president and his policies is racist.

I had been wondering what it was,actually, that is so wrong about MittRomney. Yes, he’s filthy rich and as phoney as athree-dollar bill; but cut him some slack. The man is a presidential candidate. After all, the words and deeds of hiscurrent rival, Newt Gingrich, threaten to give hypocrisy a bad name. Yet Mitt Romney somehow makes Gingrichlook good. Then I saw a snippetfrom one of the talking head festivals, and the scales fell from my eyes. George Will, the columnist and pundit,nailed it. The trouble with Romney, he said, is“Romneyness”. So repellent is Romneyness from the political point of view thatI ordinarily wouldn’t be inclined to defend its only begetter from attacks,even in the pages of the New York Times. But a recent op ed essay there by LeeSiegel (“What’s Race Got To Do With It?”) goads me to draw my tropologicalsword from its anagogical sheath.

According to this essay what’swrong with Romney is not his Romneyness but his whiteness. “MittRomney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory.” Like the probing literary critic he is,Siegel supports this sweeping generalization with concrete textual andiconographic details. Romneyinvokes an America of “white picketfences”. Furthermore, “He isnearly always in immaculate whiteshirt sleeves. He is implacably polite, tossing off phrases like ‘oh gosh’ withStepford bonhomie.” (I thinkStepford Bonhomie is that rock band with white guitars, but I’m not sure.) Siegel’s essay is accompanied by adevastating “visual”—one of those patriarchal family photos favored by rich peoplewho can’t descend to ordinary Christmas cards. You cannot deny the testimony of your own eyes. The guy’s wife is white;so are all the kids, and thegrandkids. The black shirts arejust to confuse the opposition. Then, too, the guy is trying to get into the White House!

“I am sure that Mr. Romney is not aracist” writes Lee Siegel. “But Iam also sure that, for the many Americans who find the thought of a blackpresident unbearable, he is an ideal candidate.” There is no footnote citing the epistemological grounds forthe author’s certainty on either point, but how can you footnote a dog whistle? Only the most intelligent dogs can somuch as construct a complete sentence, let alone give proper citations.

The first thing the student ofallegory needs to learn is that not everything is one. Sometimes a Red Cross Night is simplyan evening spent at a fundraiser for a social service agency. There are even times when an invitationto lunch is an invitation to lunch. Now and again the newspapers report that inNew York or Los Angeles a police officer has shot an unarmed Hispanic youth ina dark alley. The cop always thought the kid had a gun. He almost always saw the “glint ofmetal” in the kid’s hand. Italmost always turns out to have been a cigarette lighter or a soda can. We say that seeing is believing, but itoften works the other way around. Fixed expectation carefully edits our sensory experience. We see what we already believe—oralready fear. But that’s no lesstrue of newspaper columnists than of cops.

Four Pages of Family History

2012-01-18T01:35:00.000-08:00

Over the holiday season the GrimReaper was busy in my little corner. Just around Christmas my cousin Edie Kellemdied in Mountain Home, Arkansas. Last week I learned that one of my closestfriends of undergraduate years, Dupre Jones, died on January 9 in Beaufort,South Carolina. Both of them were killed by bladder cancer. There were lesssavage bonds of coincidence that might link them in my mind, and that mightplausibly give shape to a readable essay. But it is too early for that; for themoment they are the stuff of private meditation rather than public proclamation.“Family and friends.” They are the usual categories of our scrapbooks, ourgeneric Christmas letters, our intercessory prayers. For most of us, too, formost of the time, they are the categories of history.

We all have history. It is themedium in which we live--and die. One mode of history we are all familiarwith is “family history”, but my own family--that of my father and mother, Imean, and their own forebears– have been terrible historians. There are of course material reasonswhy “the short and simple annals of the poor” are short and simple. Most of my ancestors simply did not leadlives nourishing of the archival mentality. I'm trying to do a little betterfor my own posterity. For this reason I was delighted if also flabbergastedwhen a few months ago I found three letters written by my father. I don't knowwhere they came from, although one of them is addressed to me. That is one oftwo printed note cards decorated with Navajo designs—the other is addressed tohis brother John (my uncle) in Arkansas—written after my mother’s death andshortly after his penultimate stroke in 1978. “Dear John,” he writes in a hand barely decipherable throughthe palsy, “I am working hard on speek and writing.” He worked hard at most things; I don’t know many people whoworked harder.

But it is the third letter I intendto share with you. How it cameinto my possession, or why I never saw it before, is a mystery now beyondresolution. This letter isundated, but context shows that it was written in 1942 from Gary, Indiana, tohis father Samuel Fleming (my grandfather) in Arkansas. As the disastrous economy of theDepression began to brighten a bit as a result of the European War, he had foundwork in the steel mills where he had once before worked in the mid 1930s. The letter is more or lessself-explanatory. As my fatherwrites, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is a recent event. He is explaining to his father why hefeels impelled to leave his familyand go to war. The people alludedto are his sister (my Aunt Louise), my mother Janet, and “Ricky”, my babybrother. We talk in a rather vagueand sentimental way about the “Greatest Generation”. For me the penultimate paragraph of this letter givessharpness and specificity to the phrase. And as a bonus I also found out wheremy heart murmur came from!

† † † † † †

DearDad,

Probablyyou have heard from Janet’s letter to Louise about what’s been going on. Believe you are entitled to a moreminute account of proceedings so here goes.

Theday after my arrival from Arkansas I thought I’d take a trip to the Chicagonaval recruiting Station to see what I could find out about their constructionwork. So Janet called there andyes they would be open all day Saturday and yes there were openings in navalconstruction. So up I goes. The Lieutenant in charge, after talkingwith me for several minutes advised my taking a physical and then see if wecould agree on something. So Idid. I passed the vision 20-20 andthe hearing OK also the teeth. Iwas going great guns when bang! the doctor says “How long have you had thathernia and why didn’t you tell us about it before? I was too astounded to answer and even more so when about 3minutes later a doctor called me for a heart murmur. I was beginning to feel mighty blue not only missing out onservice but I dreaded the time should come I’d have to take a physical exam atthe mill. About ten minutes laterthey smacked me again blood pressure 170. I really felt like calling for an ambulance. So they said they were sorry but come back and take a GCTtest. I supposed it was some sortof heart test and only went up Monday because I wanted to get it over with andbe rejected and get something done about the hernia. Monday I found that the test was a mental one—they wanted tosee as they cold bloodedly told me whether it was worth their while to assumesuch a poor risk! Thank the Lord Ipassed the mental with a high grade. Then they found the blood pressure was down to normal the high readingof Saturday I suppose was caused by shock and apprehension. So they passed me physically. By the way the Doctor said the heartmurmur was wholly functional, that 18 out of 100 have it and it’s not to beconsidered as a heart disease or anything of the sort. It just isn’t a perfect heart.

Aftergetting some recommendations from the mill and out West the Lieutenant offeredme a rating in construction Battalion. This is a new branch of the navy. I am listed as a carpenter’s mate, first class. That is a first class Petty Officersrating, corresponding with a Top or First Sergeants rating in the Army. I am to await call and after 3 weeksinoculation etc be shipped to whatever base we are to help in constructing. They range from Alaska to the southSeas and from Ireland to Brazil. Rather expect when the time comes to head South as I am listed as havingsome command of the Spanish language. The base rate is 114.00 per month plus 34.50 for Janet and 22.80 forforeign service. There is nodomestic service in our branch.

Inmany ways the rating should be better, at least financially than a higherone. One grade up—chief Pettyofficer and you have to buy your own uniforms. They total I am told about $300.

Iam very thankful to get the rating. I will be doing vital and important work even though it is considerednon-combatant. The enlistment runsuntil 6 months after the war. I amto be hospitalized whenever the rupture bothers me and I can carry $10,000insurance.

Tosay that the thoughts of separation do not appal both Janet and I would flatlybe a lie. I hope the war is short– I fear it will be long. That’s asacrifice we must make.

Janetwill be going to Denver for over the winter at least. Give Ricky one more year and Arkansas should be much less dangerousto him. If I can obtain permissionI’ll drive her out.

Concerningthe money we owe you Dad I guess if you’re willing we’ll have to let itride. Janet will have to have alittle reserve until my checks start coming.

Inmany ways this has been a fortunate break. They laid off to May 1936 in my department, so I’m hangingon by three months service. There’s another cut coming later sure as shooting. Of course there are jobs and plenty ofthem. The armor plate mill, […]rubber plant etc and of course back in the copper mines they are crying formen. But that rupture wouldn’thelp at all in getting those jobs and it would have been found out I’m sure forthe navy doctors caught it instantly. I had been aware of a chafing feeling for some time but never dreamed ofa hernia.

Pleaseall of you write to Janet regularly. She has had her heart set on going to Arkansas for a long time and she’sgoing to be very lonely. Afterall, as she says, she rather got accustomed to being around Flemings. But I felt it best she should go to herfolks over the winter. You knowhow those Arkansas rains are and with the lack of doctors it makes a hazard forRicky. But of course in anemergency wire for Janet right away. I told her she could probably go to Arkansas in the spring.

WhenI’ll be called I don’t know and I know enough of military procedure not tostart fretting. You cant rushthose people and when they want me they holler. Meantime I’m on the active list.

Ihope my course of procedure does not grieve you. We have under God each our own conception of duty that we oweto ourselves and our loved ones our country and our Lord. In the case of my wife and myself thisconception left us but one choice of action – the choice is not mine but ours –for we see eye to eye on this matter.

Idoubt extremely if I will get to see you again before leaving for duty. So to all I say may Godbless us – one and all.

Yourson

Marvin

Leper Leads Calais!

2012-01-11T05:38:00.000-08:00

YourBlue Jays is to be found sitting before his machine playing with his favoriteChristmas present, 2 Rick his voice recognition program: Dragon Dictate. Itwill be immediately apparent to you that Mr. Dragon and I will have to work atour relationship. What I thought Iwas writing was not “Your Blue Jays” but “Your bloguiste”, while the “2 Rick” was intended as “to wit.” Then againmy brother Rick can be quite a wit, so I can understand the confusion. The interesting point about thistechnological marvel is that its mistakes are almost always more interesting,from the point of view of language and ideas, than the intended burden of mydull prose. I was prepared for Mr.Dragon to have some difficulty dealing with foreign words and especially propernouns. I first grasped the full dimension of his awesome genius when I tried to writethe following sentence: “Madame de Krüdener took as her lover a stripling youthnamed Hippolyte Tarray.” This inDragonese became: “Not in the creator took as her lover is Stripling use named leper leads Calais.” The manifestsuperiority of the latter requires no comment. Leper Leads Calais. What a fantastic headline! I am trying to work up a story worthyof it.

We all must be aware of instancesin which the erroneous rescues or redeems the humdrum canonical. The small child who in reciting theLord's Prayer petitioned “Lead us not into Penn Station” demonstrated atheological acumen unparalleled in two millennia of scriptural exegesis.

A few years before he became famouswith the publication of his novel TheMoviegoer (1961), Walker Percy published in the Sewanee Review a brilliant essay entitled “Metaphor as Mistake”. Infact I can remember the date--1958, my senior year--though I retain only avague sense of the argument. But should you be interested in the habitualfailure of language to do what it is supposed to do by doing something better, you would find Percyconsiderably more engaging than Jacques Derrida (or shocked Gary in Dragonese).

M and M

Two Giants of

American Literature

There is a particularly strikingexample of the ameliorating powers of error related to our great HermanMelville. It is well known to professional bibliographers, a group that unfortunately makes up at least half my boutique readership, but I shall rehearse it anyway. Near the end of Melville’s novel White Jacket the first-person narrator recounts a terrifying experience—namely, that offalling a hundred feet from a yard-arm into the sea below. As he plummets downward, seemingly inslow motion, his life passes before the screen of his mind, and he is perfectlyconscious of the certainty of death. Then he hits the water:

The feeling of death flooded over me with thebillows. The blow from the sea must have turned me, so that I sank almost feetforemost through a soft, seething, foaming lull. Some current seemed hurryingme away; in a trance I yielded, and sank deeper down with a glide. Purple andpathless was the deep calm now around me, flecked by summer lightnings in anazure afar. The horrible nausea was gone; the bloody, blind film turned a palegreen; I wondered whether I was yet dead, or still dying. But of a sudden somefashionless form brushed my side–some inert, soiled fish of the sea; the thrillof being alive again tingled in my nerves, and the strong shunning of deathshocked me through. [Library of America edition, p. 763.]

That is what Melville wrote, or atleast what nineteenth-century editions of WhiteJacket led readers to believe he wrote. One such reader was Professor F. O. Matthiessen, of HarvardUniversity (1902-1950), sometimes credited with “inventing” the field ofAmerican literature as an academic subject. Matthiessen was very struck by this passage—so struck,perhaps, that when he chose to end his own life he did so by leaping from atwelve-storey building. He wrote agood deal about Melville, and famously about the paragraph just cited. According to Matthiessen Melville, inchoosing the adjective soiled todescribe the fishy form which by its touch gave evidence to the submergedsailor that he was still alive, had performed an act of linguistic magic. The astonishing phrase soiled fish—so surprising, soindeterminate, so evocative—was a hallmark of genius.

soiled

coiled

Then the bibliographers set abouttheir spoil-sport work. There was acompelling argument that the soiled fishof the sea was a typographical error. The fact that the phrase was meaningless was only one clue. Documentary evidence showed prettyclearly that the author had written coiledfish. (Remember, we aretalking Herman Melville, author of the world’s biggest book about whales.) The transposition of the letters “C”and “S” is not uncommon in old hand-set copy. If you examine the layout of the job case you can see that theerror is based in a kind of spatial dyslexia. So the great literary critic F. O. Matthiessen had beencaught with his hand in the linguistic cookie jar.

To which I am tempted to say: Sowhat? Had Melville been offeredthe option of the mistake, he would have been a fool to reject it. From now on I am going to write “HippolyteTerray” only on those rare occasions when it is absolutely necessary. Otherwise it’s “Leper Leads Calais”every time.

The Auld and the Yaung

2012-01-04T08:26:00.000-08:00

Gilded youth see the New Year in (New York, 2012)

Events that occur but once a year–-birthdaysand wedding anniversaries being the most notorious–-are probably occasions ofwhat might be called necessary reflection. For the better part of three decades, with occasional offyears when we were living abroad, we have celebrated the advent of the New Yearin the company of a group of long married couples who are also close personalfriends. All the men were professional faculty colleagues at Princeton. It was a kind of movable feast in slowmotion, as we moved about from house to house. There were originally five couples, with a sixth soon added,making a large dinner party of a dozen.

But as fast as the years move on,people often move faster yet. Soon enough our group experienced the inevitablemutations attendant upon increasing age and eminence. One couple went off to inhabit the presidential mansion of afamous university in the South. Another (I will call them “the musicians”) moved to exciting newpositions in New York. Then,shockingly soon as it seemed, people began retiring. One couple went back to their New England roots in rural NewHampshire. The universitypresident has now taken up permanent residence on Martha’s Vineyard. Another eminence went off toHarvard. Of the original New YearDinner Club couples only one other now remains in the area, and this particularyear they were visiting a daughter in China. Sic transit gloriamundi. Things change, asTennyson puts it, “lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”

Thus it was that on Saturday wewent up to Greenwich Village to have dinner at the marvelous abode of our“musicians” in the company of three other of their musical friends. It was a mellow evening, but it ended aboutten forty-five when the seven of us arrived at the mellow decision that we weresufficiently venerable to waive any implicit requirement to stay up to hear themidnight roar from Times Square. (It is, however, an interesting acoustical fact, personally experiencedat the turn of the millennium, that the Times Square roar is heard loudly insouthern Manhattan.)

New Year’s Eve should belong to theyoung, as one is quite sure that it does if one takes a train into the city inthe early afternoon. Many of themore forward-looking youth are already preemptively intoxicated by the timethey get on at Metro Park. Whichmakes it all the stranger that the evening’s canonical anthem is “Auld LangSyne,” a song that is notethically singable by people under the age of fifty. Concerning this song I know considerably more than I did aweek ago, for we spent a couple of hours of our sober New Year’s Eve afternoon atthe Morgan Library working up an appetite for our Darby-and-Joan dinner party.

Darby and Joan see the New Year in (anywhere, anytime)

Readers familiar with thisdelightful venue will know that there is on the ground floor, across from glassbox elevators, a single exhibition room ideal for showcasing the carefullydefined literary collections that are one of the library’s specialties. Not too long ago they had a splendiddisplay of Miltoniana, including the Charles Ryskamp Milton portrait. The highly topical exhibit of themoment is “Robert Burns and ‘Auld Lang Syne’.” The Morgan curators had laid it all out: originalmanuscript, autograph letters, contracts with publishers, musical settings—thewhole lot. So I am now prepared toannounce as proven facts a number of suspicions I have long harbored concerning“Auld Lang Syne”, to wit:

1. Auld langsyne is a meaningful phrase in no known ancient or modern language ordialect, least of all the Northumbrian dialect of English known to theunlettered as “Scots”. It sharesthe status of the imaginary “English” one frequently sees on the tee-shirtsworn by teen-agers in Barcelona or Civitavecchia, the product of the residentlinguists in Chinese sweatshops: “Baby Happy,” “Cool Frisk,” etc.

2. Burns was fibbing outrageously when he claimedto have transcribed the song as sung by some toothless old gaffer crooning onthe heath amid the heather. Heobviously made the whole thing up.

3. “Auld lang syne” is a perfectly atrociouspoem. And…

4. “Auld lang syne” is therefore the perfect songto be sung by those who do not wish to remember having done so even so soon as twelvehours later.

The Burns holograph currently on display at the Morgan Library

Particularly acute are the secondand third verses. However, since Iknow that there are more people—three, by actual scientific count--who know thesecond and third verses of the “Star-Spangled Banner” than there are of thosewho know the second and third verses of “Auld Lang Syne,” I take the liberty ofsupplying them for you.

We twa hae rin about thebraes,

And pu'd the gowans fine;

But we've wander'd monie a weary fit

Sin' auld lang syne.

We twa hae paidl't i' the burn,

Frae mornin' sun till dine;

But seas between us braid haeroar'd

Sin' auld lang syne.

With this I wish the happiest ofpossible new years to all my readers. May your gowan-pulling be joyous and your burn-paddling moist.

Dead Letters

2011-12-28T07:04:00.000-08:00

We had a wonderful family Christmas of the sort I would wishfor all my readers. The smallerones have now departed with their larger adherents in tow; and quiet has onceagain descended upon my study, where I sit with all my Christmas loot tidilyarranged on a composing stone behind me. It’s back to serious work. Well, semi-serious. I’mtrying to write about the cultural background of Valérie (1803), an epistolary novel by Julie de Krüdener.

The bloguiste’s assembled Christmas loot. The recurrent gastronomic motif may seem compromising, but less sothan the usual multiple bottles of Listerine and sticks of underarm deodorant. Top prize goes to my two littleKosher-keeping granddaughters Lulu and Cora, who somewhere came up with aconvincing facsimile of my favorite French pork sausage in chocolate.

I’dbe surprised if you had ever heard of Madame de Krüdener. She was at first a friend and later aliterary rival of Mme de Staël, the more famous author of the more famousepistolary novel Delphine. (I must say thatI prefer Valérie to Delphine if for no other reason thanthat the scholarly edition of the former is exactly eight hundred page shorterthan the scholarly edition of the latter.) But the form of the epistolary novelitself you surely know. It is anarrative deployed in fictional letters supposedly written by, or to, or aboutthe fictional characters. Theepistolary form was particular important in the novel’s eighteenth-centuryyouth, when it enjoyed famous practitioners. Richardson’s early blockbusters Pamela and Clarissa arein epistolary form. In Francethere are famous letter-novels by Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Chodleros deLaclos. Goethe’s Werther is epistolary.

Well,the thing is this: a few days before Christmas I got a letter. It was not an annotated Christmas card,but a real letter, written on real paper folded within a real, stamped envelopeand really delivered to my house by Mike the letter-carrier. It was personal, substantial, thoughtful,well written, full of interesting and surprising news and ideas. Since not everyone welcomes even suchpublicity as is commanded by an obscure professorial blog, I shall identify theletter’s sender no more precisely than to say that I knew him forty years agoas an undergraduate crowned with the success of a brilliant student career and radiant with promise—meaning,incredibly, that this golden youth of memory must now be sixty years old! Widely interspersed episodes of contactover the decades gave me distant glimpses both of remarkable professionalachievements and challenging dislocations, but we have essentially been out oftouch.

As he kindly mentions an awarenessof my blog, he may read this. If so,he should know that I intend to answer the letter properly in the next few days. In the meantime, its mere existence hascrystallized in my mind a cultural apprehension vaguely forming over the pastmany years: the demise, the very sad demise, of the personal letter.

The chief reason there were so manyepistolary novels in the eighteenth century is that the entire culture wasepistolary. People who could read and write—meaning all of polite society, andlarge swaths not so polite—read and wrote letters.Hence if art is truly an imitation of life, as our classical criticism tellsus, nothing could be more artistic than an epistolary novel.

The contribution of our greatletter-writers has been enormous. Justhere on my own shelves I have twelve elegant tomes of Madame de Sévigné(seventeenth century) and nine much thicker volumes of Horace Walpole(eighteenth). The first sixvolumes of the Pléiade edition of the letters of Voltaire, which take him onlyto the age of 65 (he died at 84, pen in hand) and are all I can afford for themoment, come in at about 10,000 pages on bible paper in an eight-point font. Altogether we have more than 20,000 ofhis letters, written around the edges of what we usually think of as his“work”.

Action: Gerard ter Borch the Younger (1671-1681)

The tradition carried on into theVictorian era and beyond. Think ofall the wonderful Life and Letters ofnineteenth-century figures. By nomeans is all of this material is highbrow in nature. One of the first extensive English letter collections wehave (the Paston Letters fromfifteenth-century East Anglia) is as full of grubby bourgeois concerns asanything imagined by Balzac or Trollope. Many viewers of Ken Burns’s justly famous television series on The Civil War have been struck by onefeature of its documentation—namely the informal letters written by soldiers oneither side of the conflict, and generally addressed to distant family membersat home. Many of these men wereprivate soldiers of modest social station and limited formal education, raisedon farms in Indiana or Tennessee. What is likely to seem extraordinary to us is that so many of them wrotewith such competence, and often enough with elegance and even eloquence. It might be possible to draw from thisevidence postulates potentially useful for such theorists of American educationas the hapless Arnie Duncan, but the point here is an historical one. These men were the late inheritors of aculture in which competence in letter-writing was among the fundamentals ofliteracy.

Reaction: Jan Vermeer (1632-1635)

All this is vanishing, if not infact long-since vanished. Thegreat age of letter-writing was enabled by material innovation (cheap ragpaper, ink producible in quanity, the metallic quill, improved carriage wheels,a regular postal service, and various other things rarely brought to mind), andit is being abandoned by material innovation. I very much doubt that our cultivated progeny will findpleasure in The Collected Email of JonathanFranzen, Tom Robbins’s GreatestTweets or The Cell Phone Recordsof Tama Janowitz—not even if read on a Kindle.

Impressions of Christmas

2011-12-20T05:45:00.001-08:00

Long ago in the late Sixties Ibecame the Master of Wilson College at Princeton. The grandiose title was more misleading than most. Wilson College was a monument of socialengineering, an “alternative” residential and dining facility designed bycollege administrators for students who rejected, with greater or lesserpolitical vehemence, the old system of private, selective dining clubs onProspect Street, a relic of the age of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wilson College was a club, that is, forpeople who hated clubs. Being itsMaster was roughly like being the Chief Whip of the International AnarchistCongress.

Several of the most enrichingrelationships of my life date from that period, which witnessed large stridesin the more unconventional aspects of my education, including some practicalones. For instance: we mountednumerous “events,” many of which we advertised with printed posters. Printing costs were shockinglyhigh. Some students suggested wemake posters ourselves in the sadly underused University typographystudio. The rest is history. I became hooked on letterpressprinting—its history, its products, and above all its practice.

A Vandercook Proving Machine with a poster-sized form on its bed

For my birthday in 1970 my wifebought me a very imaginative gift: a sixteen hundred pound flatbed Vandercookpress (proving machine). She hadfound this, by methods unrevealed, at what I must describe as a printingequipment morgue in Camden, New Jersey. If this place was not a Mafia front, its proprietors deserved to beprosecuted for false pretenses. Theycannot possibly have made a living from selling the superannuated machineryoccupying a couple of acres of New Jersey urban blight. But that was not my problem. My problem was that I had to take a truckdown to Camden, load the press, transport it, and then get it up the frontstairs of a large Victorian house on University Place, Princeton.

The great age of the VandercookPress overlapped with the origins of commercial offset lithography. The Vandercook Proving Machine wasdesigned to produce a single very high quality sheet that could then bephotographed. My particularly beautifulpress had been retired probably about 1955, since which time it had beengathering dust in Mr. Carbone’s warehouse. With an act of terminal piety its operator had run theroller unprotected over the last form to be worked on—a somewhat ghoulishecclesiastical poster, perfectly preserved on the ancient make-ready:

NOVEMBER:MONTH OF THE HOLY SOULS

ENROLLYOUR DECEASED NOW

Thus began our Pilgrim Press. And as one thing leads to another, Ispent the next decade or so expanding its holdings: four more presses, severaltons of old foundry type, gorgeous old printing cabinets and composing stones,and a large quantity of the miscellaneous beautiful old steel, brass, andpolished wood implements that were the accoutrements of letterpress printing. I do most of my printing thesedays on one of two identical, superbly maintained 14” Chandler and Priceclam-shell jobbing presses.

A Chandler and Price clamshell press

The history of our printingadventures, the last chapter of which has not yet been written, might onanother occasion make an appropriate subject of a weekly essay. I raise it now in the context ofwishing a very happy holiday season to all my readers. There seems to be a surprisingly largenumber of them, surprisingly scattered across the globe. I cannot send each of you one of myprinted greetings cards; but please be assured of my best wishes. The holiday I celebrate is the Nativityof Our Lord, commonly known as Christmas; and therefore I send you Christmasgreetings. For you it may beHannukah, the Solstice, or simply the midwinter semester break. Whatever it may be, let it be for youfilled with peace and plenty. Ourworld is sufficiently needy to absorb the most ecumenical spectrum of benignwishes. So whether your thing beBaskerville or Bodoni, God bless you.

The annual Printing of theChristmas Card falls somewhere between a ritual and an ordeal in thishousehold. The ordeal part isentirely a function of my sloth. There is no reason, in principle, why a Christmas card could not beprinted in the leisure of a summer afternoon. Certainly nothing would forbid its being printed on a sunnySaturday in October. In fact,however, the Iron Law of Procrastination determines that the project cannoteven be begun before December15. Otherwise it cannot competewith all the other postponed non-negotiable Christmas preparations—getting thetree, excavating in the crawl-space for the decorative lights, baking thecookies, cutting the firewood, et caetera. I do have a fallback position. Years ago I had a line etching made from a Renaissancewoodcut of Saint Anthony Abbot, alias Anthony of the Desert. This able ascetic is most helpful toprocrastinating printers, among others, for his feast day is January 17. Even when I default on Christmas, I canusually get a card done by then.

Up the Educational Creek, Without Paddle

2011-12-13T13:40:00.000-08:00

Get ready for a long, grumpy, boring political screed, because there’sthis lady Julianna Smoot, keeps writing to me about my dinner with Barack. No kidding! That’s what she calls him—Barack. There’s another message in my email box this morning:“John--Have you been thinking about who you'd bring to the next Dinner withBarack?” Well, I hadn’t been, butnow that I do, I’d like to bring my mother, except that she died thirty yearsago. But he could sure use heradvice, even from the grave, especially if she brought along my old copy of Paddle to the Sea.

The advice would concern education,one of the President’s supposed priorities as articulated recently in a longand important speech. The genrewas primarily that of a campaign manifesto, and the venue for itsdelivery—always carefully premeditated in today’s political world—was of coursesymbolic. The setting was the townof Osawatamie, Kansas, where Theodore Roosevelt had made an important campaignspeech a century earlier. In theabsurd journalistic word-fad of the moment the press tells us that he was“channeling” Roosevelt. (You mayrecall Jesus’s “channeling” of Moses in the Sermon on the Mount.) The specific site was an auditorium ina public high school, a venue that underscored one of the President’s mostimportant themes: the relationship between individual and national economicsuccess and the quality of American education. To this general subject he devoted seven paragraphs, about athousand words, which for purposes of readers’ convenience I havereproduced below exactly as I find them in the official White House transcript.

I am neither a public figure nor anexpert in public policy. I have,however, spent much of my life trying to improve my own education, and myentire professional life encouragingthe education of young Americans. So I have some considered ideas on the subject.

The Presidentsaid some things very much worth saying. America needs a much larger workforce skilled in mathematics and fundamental science, and in the appliedsciences of engineering. (¶ 2.) The country needsmore good school teachers (¶ 1.) He deplored the empirical fact that for the past generation so many of“the best and the brightest” among college graduates have made a beeline fromthe Commencement celebrations to Wall Street (¶ 2.) But the punch line of the “education” section of the speechis the president’s claim of a long-term need to make unspecified “investments”in American public education—meaning increased federal spending foreducation—to be secured by increased taxes on rich people (¶ 5) and the short-term need to suppressindividual Social Security payments, akathe “payroll tax”, for an additional year (¶ 7).

Howpathetic is this? Forget the simple rhetorical legerdemainthat suggests a non-existent link between a “payroll tax holiday” and theimprovement of education—approximating the current Republican union of aCanadian pipeline and the continuation of welfare checks for the unemployed. Move directly to the politicalprevarication. Of this there aremany varieties, the crude variety of the lie direct being relatively rare. As Orwell pointed out in his famousessay “Politics and the English Language,” the most insidious form islinguistic abuse; and in this form President Obama is no less expert than hisadversaries.

Consider hisconcept of investments—meaning my taxdollars at work. The usualdefinition of an investment is an outlay of money against a hope of income orprofit. If I buy a quart ofmilk for my family’s breakfast for a dollar I am bearing an expense, a portionof what we call the cost of living, notmaking an investment. If buy acommon stock I am. I shall have to continue to spendmoney on food indefinitely, but I shall continue to make stock marketinvestments only so long as experience convinces me of their wisdom. If after five years a quart of milkcosts two dollars but my stock is still worth only a dollar I will not considerthat I have made a wise investment. The tax-funded federal educational expenses that President Obama insistson calling “investments” have roughly doubled since 1970. During that time the demonstratedabilities of American schoolchildren to handle the basic skills of literacyhave remained essentially static. But as we live in anything but a static world their skills, whencompared with those of their little Finnish and Korean competitors in otherparts of the world, are actually lesssatisfactory than they were in 1970.

One of themain reason lots of people are unemployed is not because there is no work to bedone but because they don’t know enough and/or are insufficiently motivated todo anything worth even $7.25 an hour to the people who might hire them. Large numbers dropped out of school assoon as they could. Many otherspossess a high-school diploma that cannot be trusted to certify so much as functionalliteracy. Lots of them have a“work ethic” less easy to detect than radiation from outer space.

A subtleform of political prevarication—practiced ecumenically by our “leaders” of allstripes—is to talk very earnestly about the wrong problem. Allegedly inadequate resources inthe public schools is the wrong problem. The chief cause of public schooldebility and its inevitably dire economic repercussions is the continuing degradation of the American family. Long before education can happen in aschool, however opulently “invested,” it has to be prepared for in a home. There need to be adults in this home whocan and do speak in complete sentences featuring the occasional disyllable, whohave real conversations around a shared dinner table, who show their love fortheir kids by taking them to the public library at least as often as they do toMacdonalds, who show that they recognize the importance of reading and writingby doing a little themselves. Suchparents insist that their children work hard and if necessarily long on theirhomework, and demand professional competence from the public educationalauthorities. It is not PresidentObama’s fault that these things are not happening; but it is his fault to pretend that oureducational crisis stems from insufficient “investment”.

Here’s theeducational investment my parentsmade in 1941, when I was five years old. It was a pretty good investment, as for $1.95 it secured me a life-timeof well-paid work. They bought mea brand-new book entitled Paddle to theSea. This book, beautifullyillustrated, tells the story of a Canadian Indian boy who lives on Lake Nipigonin Ontario. He carves anddecorates a miniature canoe, complete with its figure of a paddler, naming thefigure Paddle-to-the-Sea. Theyoung boy puts the carved boat into a snow bank whence, in the spring thaw, itwashes down from rivulet to branch to creek to river and, eventually, to LakeSuperior. Over a long periodpunctuated by dozens of fascinating adventures Paddle-to-the-Sea makes it allthe way through the Saint Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic Ocean.

ForDepression-era parents of slender means two bucks was not entirely negligible,but their capital expenditure counted as nothing in comparison with their educational investment. My mother, my father, and my Uncle John—noneof whom had a college degree--each spent long hours teaching me to read thisbook. My Aunt Mildred (aschool-teacher) also chipped in. Thewords, difficult as they were, were the easiest part. Just beyond them lay vast horizons of geography, forestry,navigation, climatology, hydrology, and several other academic abstractions forwhich I would not for years know so much as the names. My parents didn’t just tell me that such things were important. They loved me enough to show me.

Paddle to the Sea, which isstill in print, won a Caldicott Medal in 1942 and became a big seller. This means that copies of the firstedition are still easily found on eBay. Now and again I buy one, which inevitably is soon loaned or given away.

Artwork from Paddle to the Sea by Holling Holling (1941)

APPENDIX: FROM THE OSAWATAMIE SPEECH

1. But we need to meet themoment. We've got to up our game. We need to remember that we canonly do that together. It starts by making education a national mission-- a national mission. (Applause.) Government and businesses, parents and citizens. In this economy, ahigher education is the surest route to the middle class. Theunemployment rate for Americans with a college degree or more is about half thenational average. And their incomes are twice as high as those who don'thave a high school diploma. Which means we shouldn't be laying off goodteachers right now -- we should be hiring them. (Applause.) We shouldn't be expecting less of our schools –-we should be demanding more. (Applause.) We shouldn't be making it harder to afford college -- we should be a countrywhere everyone has a chance to go and doesn't rack up $100,000 of debt justbecause they went. (Applause.)

2. In today's innovation economy, wealso need a world-class commitment to science and research, the next generationof high-tech manufacturing. Our factories and our workers shouldn't beidle. We should be giving people the chance to get new skills andtraining at community colleges so they can learn how to make wind turbines andsemiconductors and high-powered batteries. And by the way, if we don'thave an economy that's built on bubbles and financial speculation, our best andbrightest won't all gravitate towards careers in banking and finance. (Applause.) Because if wewant an economy that's built to last, we need more of those young people inscience and engineering. (Applause.) This country should not be known for bad debt and phony profits. We should beknown for creating and selling products all around the world that are stampedwith three proud words: Made in America. (Applause.)

3. Today, manufacturers and othercompanies are setting up shop in the places with the best infrastructure toship their products, move their workers, communicate with the rest of theworld. And that's why the over one million construction workers who losttheir jobs when the housing market collapsed, they shouldn't be sitting at homewith nothing to do. They should be rebuilding our roads and our bridges,laying down faster railroads and broadband, modernizing our schools -- (applause) -- all the things othercountries are already doing to attract good jobs and businesses to theirshores.

4. Yes, business, and not government,will always be the primary generator of good jobs with incomes that lift peopleinto the middle class and keep them there. But as a nation, we've alwayscome together, through our government, to help create the conditions where bothworkers and businesses can succeed. (Applause.) And historically, that hasn't been a partisan idea. Franklin Roosevelt workedwith Democrats and Republicans to give veterans of World War II -- including mygrandfather, Stanley Dunham -- the chance to go to college on the G.I.Bill. It was a Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, a proud son ofKansas -- (applause) -- who startedthe Interstate Highway System, and doubled down on science and research to stayahead of the Soviets.

5. Of course, those productiveinvestments cost money. They're not free. And so we've also paidfor these investments by asking everybody to do their fair share. Look,if we had unlimited resources, no one would ever have to pay any taxes and wewould never have to cut any spending. But we don't have unlimitedresources. And so we have to set priorities. If we want a strongmiddle class, then our tax code must reflect our values. We have to makechoices.

6. Today that choice is veryclear. To reduce our deficit, I've already signed nearly $1 trillion ofspending cuts into law and I've proposed trillions more, including reforms thatwould lower the cost of Medicare and Medicaid. (Applause.)

7. But in order to structurally closethe deficit, get our fiscal house in order, we have to decide what ourpriorities are. Now, most immediately, short term, we need to extend a payrolltax cut that's set to expire at the end of this month. (Applause.) If we don't do that,160 million Americans, including most of the people here, will see their taxesgo up by an average of $1,000 starting in January and it would badly weaken ourrecovery. That's the short term.

Happy Birthday, Uncle Rick

2011-12-06T17:13:00.000-08:00

Richard N. Fleming (æt. 70) with bloguiste brother in Las Cruces, N.M.; photo by Richard A. Fleming

We have just returned from Las Cruces, New Mexico, where we had gone for a family event, a birthday party for my brother Rick. Participating in the celebration of the seventieth birthday of one’s “baby brother” would hardly be an emotionless experience under any circumstances; but in this instance the emotion was for me a kind of tidal wave.

The famous opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, endlessly quoted, is one of the few false notes that great writer ever struck. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” No doubt life would be less confusing if it submitted graciously to aphorisms, but it rarely does. Family life is simply the most often observed paradigm of social life altogether, and thus necessarily a mix and a spectrum, rather than an essence. And my experience, at least, is that joy is far more various than misery, which tends to the monochrome.

The long weekend of Rick’s birthday would merit an essay of its own, but for me the emotional complications arose from overwhelming feelings of mutability that almost always attend revisiting after long absence a half-forgotten geography. I was revisiting events shared with my “baby brother” years ago.

Las Cruces, New Mexico, with the Organ Mountains in the distance

Las Cruces is a small city in south-central New Mexico, perhaps an hour north of El Paso. It is set in a beautiful desert at the base of a small but dramatic eruption of mountains, called the Organs, their jagged columns having suggested to some early poetic viewers a rank of pipes in a pipe organ. It is the home of an old land-grant college, New Mexico A&M, now New Mexico State University. The vast White Sands Missile Range is nearby. Since I last saw the place nearly three decades ago, it has suffered hideously from highway construction and strip mall development. The density of big box stores and franchise restaurants seems extreme even for the undisciplined sprawl of the Southwest. There has also been a boom (and bust) in domestic construction, much of it faux-adobe and “Poor Man’s Santa Fe.”

Rick owns a modest house in a modest “older” (meaning in context 1950s) neighborhood. It once belonged to our elder brother Peter, now deceased. My father and mother moved there with Rick about 1970, following the first of my Dad’s strokes. The move was, I think, a mistake, though who am I to say? My Dad had grown up in New Mexico in the 1920s, when it had only recently been admitted to the union, and there was still some real wildness in the West, as opposed to nostalgic make-believe. What he now found was a “Sun Belt” slowly filling up, as it seemed to him, with obese retirees in split-level homes, gun nuts, and religious fanatics, with a certain amount of overlap in categories.

He never got better. Instead he got worse, much worse, as three more strokes rendered him first speechless, then nearly motionless. When my mother died in 1979 he began saying goodbye to the world. I last saw him a few weeks before his death in 1980. He was in a hospital room, taped, tied, and tubed up in grotesque medical indignity. I have to believe he knew that I was there. Behind all the apparatus of life support a window perfectly framed as for a calendar a sharp view of the sun-drenched Organ Mountains against a clear blue sky. To walk out of that room required of me an act of “infinite resignation;” but that remark may need some explication.

On a visit a few years earlier I had taken my Dad, severely limited of speech but to a degree ambulatory, to a meeting of his “stroke club”—a gathering of survivors of cerebral hemorrhages, two or three dozen fellows (if there were women clubbers, I cannot remember them), awkwardly “interacting” beneath the fluorescent glare of the industrial lighting in some cavernous cinder-block church hall. All of them were visibly damaged, many more damaged even than my father, some wholly aphasic, some in wheelchairs, two or three of them registering that lifeless animation—there is such a thing—that makes you recoil from some of Goya’s Caprichos.

Very few experiences are entirely lacking an educational dimension, but what I was expecting to be a lesson in pity soon enough turned to one in humility. My Dad “introduced” me to one of his special friends, a high-school dropout, a former truck driver, now a ward of the social services. This man could speak clearly, though agonizingly slowly.

Where was I from? he asked. “Princeton, New Jersey.” This answer seemed to excite him unduly. Did I know the Princeton University Press? Well, I had actually published my first book there, but of what conceivable interest could this fact be to such a man? So I told him I knew where it was. “Well,” he said, “you gotta go there. They’re starting a complete new edition of Kierkegaard…complete…” He already had several volumes of the classic Walter Lowrie translation. Indeed, his chief motive for survival in his difficult world seemed to be the hope of resolving to his mind’s satisfaction the conundrums of Fear and Trembling. “But I know I never will. That man is a deep thinker, I mean deep…”

“Deep” hardly touches it. What Fear and Trembling is ostensibly “about” is the willingness of Abraham to kill his own son Isaac at God’s command. On my campus, placed at a corner of the chapel on one of the main paths to the library, is George Segal’s sculptural rendition of the scene.

George Segal (1924-2000), "Abraham and Isaac," on the Princeton University campus

Kent State University: 4 May 1970

This had actually been commissioned to commemorate the murder of several students at Kent State University by some panicky members of the Ohio National Guard in May, 1970. The theme of the father killing the son was perhaps obvious, but Segal’s expression of it proved too painful and political for the taxpayers of Ohio. What would it take for the father to plunge that knife into the son’s breast? That is the question Kierkegaard asks, and his answer is infinite resignation. “Infinite resignation,” says Kierkegaard, writing beneath the pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio, “is the last stage before faith, so that anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation do I become conscious of my eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith.... Precisely because resignation is antecedent, faith is no esthetic emotion but something far higher; it is not the spontaneous inclination of the heart but the paradox of 'existence'.”

Inclusive Language

2011-11-30T00:37:00.000-08:00

Émile Littré:

¡No pasarán!

Every writer has their cross to bear. I say that because after offering token resistance, English teachers throughout the North American continent have had to abandon the defense of the generic masculine singular pronoun as used by such classic writers as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Katherine Anne Porter—need I go on? So as grotesque as their may be, it beats endlessly repeated his or her. “Every dog has his or her day”? All this is a necessary tribute to what is called “inclusive language”. Being a fairly modern sort of a fellow I am all in favor of inclusive language except, perhaps, when unleashed upon the repertoire of great sacred music.

Fortunately our own native tongue, English, and especially American English, is inclusive by long habit, indeed one might say exuberantly inclusive. In this it differs dramatically from an exclusive language like French. I was reminded of this while reading a characteristically interesting post on one of the blogs I follow, “A French Education.” Its author, P. B. Lecron, reminds us that “The French take protection and preservation of their language seriously, so seriously that a commission specialized in terminology and neologisms maintains an inventory of and oversees the introduction of new words officially admitted into the language.”

France is a great nation, and its contributions to world culture are dazzling. But every now and again the French come up with something that gives one pause: the revolutionary Committee on Public Safety, let us say, or the Dreyfus Affair, or Jean-Paul Sartre. Somewhere along that spectrum of dubiety one would have to place the institution of the French Language Police.

Le Robert, from the bloguiste's library

Language is somewhat like war. (What isn’t?) The Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s famous formula for military success was to “get there first with the most”. I just conducted a scientific experiment, and discovered the following. The French lexicon comes in at about fourteen inches. The English lexicon comes in at about thirty-seven inches. We just have more words, and I mean way more words, than anybody else. This richness of the English vocabulary is not the product of committee deliberations in which some graybeards vote on whether or not one can say weekend or fin de siècle. No. This is America. You can say whatever the hell you please. If it jives, it thrives. If not, not. You can stick that in your cybercarnet.

OED, from the bloguiste's library

Imagine that Archbishop Stigand had been able to chair a committee to sniff out neologisms immediately following the piratical Norman invasion of 1066. Old English was a well developed Germanic language, and it had serviceable words for most things that a peasant—I mean of course a churl--came across in the course of the day. There was a nice compact one for the animal that goes moo-moo. It was cú, “cow”. The committee could have nixed beef. The oink-oink animal already had two words: swín and *picga. Surely we didn’t need yet another, (ugh!) pork? But a great language is not some tender seedling that needs to be preserved under artificial light in a hothouse. The idea that it needs “protection and preservation” by a committee is funny, facetious, hilarious, not to mention drôle.

Archbishop Stigand: too busy for words

The way to grow a great language is to let it go with the flow. Anybody who has read Beowulf even in translation knows that there were four hundred and twelve English words meaning guys who run around with spears, swords, lances, and bucklers maiming and killing each other. But a truly inclusive language knows no limits. So we glommed onto some more, including the Norman warrior. (This was before some earlier Parisian committee decided to banish W from the French language, where in the old Norman texts it played such a noble role.)

Nothing is more important in such a society as that of early England than what we now call “homeland security”. Primitive Germanic clearly had several perfectly good words for a fortified place. Among them was the word that developed into the suffix –burg in High German (Hamburg, etc.) and in modern English –bury (Canterbury, Salisbury, etc.) What Canterbury meant was “the fortified place in Kent”.

One of the Latin words for a fortified place was castellum. The obvious English reflex is castle, and we find place-names with -castle in them, with or with actual castles, all over England. But in France castellum first became castel, then chateau. But since in a feudal world a castle is a conspicuous example of real property, the word came to mean other kinds of property as well, goods and livestock. The English word chattels denotes the former, while cattle denotes the latter. But of course many of the folks building the castles in England were still speaking French when they did so, and we get the characteristic French ch in Chester (and many others). West Chester PA is simply the town west of Chester PA, but Westchester County NY derives eventually from an English castle that was, in relation to some other fixed point, west. Today you can butcher one of your cattle, turn it into steak Chateaubriand, and wash it down nicely with a couple of glasses of a chateau-bottled vintage—and not for a moment realize the circle of linguistic tautology in which you are swirling. And there’s no committee to stop us.

Old Castle and New Castle. You tell me which is which.

Esse est percipi

2011-11-23T00:57:00.000-08:00

Most of my readers are probably familiar, vaguely, with the name of George Berkeley. Berkeley (1685-1753) was a philosophical Anglican bishop who developed an odd metaphysical theory summed up by the Latin maxim esse est percipi—“to be is to be perceived.” If your scholastic Latin is getting rusty you may prefer to recall the problem of the tree falling in the remote and uninhabited forest. Since no one is there to see it or hear it fall, since indeed no one will ever know the slightest thing about this putative tree, is it even possible to say that the tree has ever existed?

The Right Reverend George Berkeley

This argument fascinated me in Philosophy 101 half a century ago. Much longer ago than that it seems to have infuriated my culture hero Sam Johnson who, kicking away a small stone that lay on his path, said “Thus I refute Berkeley”—a remark I find more baffling than “Esse est percipi,” actually.

Berkeley was laying the groundwork for his religious metaphysics, of course. What guaranteed the existence of the universe, in his view, was its constant perception by the mind of God.

Berkeley’s hypothesis makes various appearances in English literature. I seem to remember it, for example, in the opening chapter of The Longest Journey, to my mind the best of E. M. Forster’s novels, which would have to mean that it is very good indeed. Nor should we forget the contribution of Monsignor Ronald Knox, a clerical wit of an earlier generation, who wrote a splendid limerick on the theme.

There was a young man who said "God
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there's no one about in the quad.

Brilliant, but perhaps upstaged by its anonymous riposte:

Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd:
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by
--Yours faithfully,
God

Well, anybody who ever writes anything and sends it out alone in search of a public is likely to face a certain amount of Berkeleian anxiety. Maybe God knows about it, but does anybody else?

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

That of course is Thomas Gray, another formidable eighteenth-century English gent, in one of the great and gloomy poems of our tongue, the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”. We know that Keats wanted a single simple inscription on his tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” But what about under water, those “dark unfathom’d caves of ocean”? Have I spent my professional life reforesting a remote and unvisited wilderness?

My first “major” publication, which cost me months of work, was a long essay on the Old English poem usually called “The Dream of the Rood”. It was published in 1966 in an obscure but erudite Jesuit-edited journal called Traditio. According to my argument, which I am still prepared to entertain, “The Dream of the Rood” is not merely a poem written in a monastic milieu—that seems obvious—but a poem allegorically about the monastic life. My essay received the usual academic guerdon. It was “cited”. It “appeared” in bibliographies. Do not indict me for undue cynicism if I tell you that neither of those facts is in itself convincing evidence that anybody ever read it.

Thomas Merton, O. Cist.

Well. One of the great Anglo-American religious writers of the last century was Thomas Merton (1915-1968), a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, and the author of The Seven Storey Mountain and other influential books. I read a couple of them in my youth; but I never met him, nor indeed knew much about him. A few years ago I did have one strange “encounter,” when I was in the early stages of writing The Anti-Communist Manifestos. Thomas Merton, it turns out, was an undergraduate at Columbia right in the middle of the Red Decade. He knew Lionel Trilling slightly and was a kind of protégé of Mark Van Doren, one of the famous English professors of his age (yes, there are some) and a mentor to various literary eminences. During this period Merton very briefly participated in the Columbia cell of the Young Communist League. It turned out that the cell for which he was destined was of another sort.

In 1968 Merton died by electrocution in a freak accident in Bangkok, where he was participating in an ecumenical meeting with Zen Buddhists. I read about it in the press. That may have been my last conscious thought about Thomas Merton until about two years ago. I was at the concluding “social hour” of some large academic conference, wearing the obligatory name-tag, and desperately trying to fight my way through to the hors d’oeuvres. The guy next to me says, “You’re not the John Fleming who wrote about the ‘Dream of the Rood’ by any chance?”

The very same. Well, he explained, he was writing a biography of Thomas Merton. And? Well, he had read all of Merton’s private diaries, which apparently are housed in a large archive of Mertoniana at Bellarmine University in Louisville. One of the last entries in the last of the extant notebooks preserves the careful notes he was making on an essay that had caught his fancy: John V. Fleming’s “The ‘Dream of the Rood’ and Anglo-Saxon Monasticism.” One of the most famous monks of the twentieth century had been reading my article about monastic life just before he died!

The opening section of the "Dream of the Rood" in its unique text in the Vercelli Book. How an Anglo-Saxon vernacular manuscript ended up in northern Italy is an unsolved mystery. My guess is that it had been in the possession of a dying English pilgrim. The poem begins with the majuscule letter: HWæt, ic swefna cyst secgan wille... "Listen! I shall tell you the best of dreams..."

Reading the Leaves

2011-11-16T00:49:00.000-08:00

It seems to be generally true that people in the autumn of life respond with sharpening attention to the annual coming of the autumn of the year. Such at least is my own experience and that of others with whom I have spoken. What might be called the incremental poignancy of the autumnal is neither surprising nor necessarily lugubrious, but it is somber and arresting. It demands its high seriousness. Keats wrote his famous “Ode to Autumn” when he was, I think, twenty-four years old. Can one imagine how much richer yet it might have been could he have written it at seventy-four? But of course for Keats twenty-four was autumn, and late autumn at that. He knew it. That is why he could say in another great poem that he had “been half in love with easeful death,” even as in this one he can eroticize Autumn herself as a woman in the willing oblivion of a narcotic sleep, death’s simulacrum:

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies….

Read the whole of the Ode to Autumn. You will find in it a remarkable density of perfectly chosen images, with one strange lacuna. Keats says nothing about leaves. In the parts of the world I know best, Autumn is all about leaves. The Fall of the Year is a leaf-fall. But the fall is preceded by the turn—the transformation of the green of life into the yellow and red hues of a slow-motion immolation. Dante envisioned the Beatific Vision as an ocean of photons. But by then he had been strenuously prepared by Beatrice. Most of us would find that sea of light impossible to bear, but I can imagine walking on a leaf-strew path in the waning autumnal sunlight filtered through the glowing canopy of a deciduous copse.

The path from the back of our house: without Beatrice, the best you can hope for

A scholar is likely to have another wistful association with leaves. The Latin word for leaf was folium, from which we get our English foliage. But long ago that word folium took on an extended meaning. It meant a piece of writing material, a sheet of paper or of parchment, a page of a book. When one leafs through a book, one is idly turning its pages. To turn over a new leaf is to make a new beginning. Chaucer in a mock warning to prudes that they might be shocked by the Miller’s Tale, advises them thus: “Turne over the leef and chese another tale…” (This is advice, however, to be followed only by those who are willing to miss the second funniest line in world literature.)

In the early periods of printing, important books were made from large sheets of paper folded a single time in the center to make a signature of four pages, two on the front and two on the back of the sheet. That was called printing in folio. Think Gutenberg Bible or the First Folio of Shakespeare. (If you are slow off the mark, think Second Folio of Shakespeare). Fold the sheet again; the pages will be smaller but you will have twice as many of them. That was printing in quarto, and it was still plenty big. Most books you have read will have been printed in octavo—three folds of the big sheet, sixteen pages of text. No matter what the format the printing was always done on single large sheets, meaning that the printer had to take care to get the pages in the right place. The reader had some work to do, too, cutting the pages open so they could be turned one at a time.

The folium as writing surface was not entirely metaphorical. At the dawn of written history all sorts of materials were used—bones, bark, wood, animal membrane, and of course leaves. One leaf-writer of note was the all-knowing Cumaean Sybil, among the most famous prophetesses of ancient legend. Her leaf of choice, Varro tells us, was the fibrous palm. Her sooth-saying gift was honored by the later Christians, for whom she was the precursor of the prophet-king of Israel. The great Latin poem about the Last Day, probably written by Thomas of Celano, biographer of Saint Francis, begins thus:

Dies iræ! Dies illa                                    [Day of wrath! That day
Solvet sæclum in favilla:                        will dissolve the world in ashes,
Teste David cum Sibylla!                        as David testifies along with the Sibyl!]

Michaelangelo's Sibyl: Oh, sweet mama, treetop tall, won't you kindly turn your damper down.

The Sibyl knew everything there was to know, and she wrote it all down on her leaves. That was the good news. The bad news was that as a librarian—excuse me, I meant of course Information Technology person—she was a nightmare. Neither storage nor retrieval was her thing. She simply tossed her prophecies down anywhere in her vast and drafty cave, where Nature soon enough did to them what she does to all fallen, brittle leaves—blew and beat them into powdered compost. The search for a needle in a haystack is child’s play compared with the search for truth in a pile of leaf mold.

This is why Helenus, the friend of Æneas, has advised the hero to seek the Sybil’s revelation in spoken rather than in written form. And so he wisely does.

Foliis tantum e carmina manda,

Ne turbata volent rapidis ludibria ventis;

Ipsa canas oro. [Æneid, vi. 74-76]

“Only do not commit your verses to the leaves, lest they fly about, the sport of strong winds. I beg you to speak them yourself.”

Jan Breughel's Sibyl: The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind...

A scholar spends a lifetime raking up neat piles of leaves, but don’t count on the Sibyl to guard them for posterity. She is too heedless, too oblivious. She, too, is drowsed with the fume of poppies.

Shifting Signifiers, or Signs of the Times

2011-11-09T05:30:00.000-08:00

Omnis doctrina vel res vel signa est, sed res per signa discuntur.

Augustine De Doctrina Christiniana

At the beginning of his brilliant essay on the principles of interpretation Saint Augustine says that “All teaching concerns either things or signs; but we learn about things by means of signs.” Human language is a system of signs essential for social interaction and especially for learning and teaching.

Augustine loves binary distinctions, and he now makes one with regard to signs themselves. There are two kinds, natural signs and conventional signs. Think of the signs of fire. If you see a plume of smoke rising on the horizon, you know that there is also fire. Smoke is a natural sign of fire. Smoke always “means” fire, and smoke means fire everywhere on earth. But what about the word f-i-r-e? The word is also a sign for the thing fire, but not a natural sign. It is a conventional sign, agreed upon by social compact. It is a sign that would have meant nothing to Augustine himself. The sign f-i-r-e did not exist in the year 400, and even its hypothetical primitive Germanic ancestor would never have entered his Mediterranean ear. To signal the thing fire to Augustine you would have to use Augustine’s conventions rather than those of Hrothgar. You would have to say ignis.

In a very famous Supreme Court case (Schenck, 1919) Oliver Wendell Holmes opined that “falsely to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” was not constitutionally protected speech--not in the face of a "clear and present danger". But you could probably shout “ignis!” with relative impunity even at a Senior Citizens’ Matinee at the Classic. I may think that the decline of Latin is a clear and present danger, but I doubt that the Supreme Court would.

A little Greek lad who hears the word b-e-t-a will see one thing in his mind, the little Roman boy another. The disyllable beta does not by laws of nature mean anything. It is not a natural, but a conventional sign.

....beats me...

No conventional sign can mean anything until you sign onto the convention. Think of the monosyllable g-i-f-t. A gift is a desirable thing, at least in Anglophone regions. It is less so in Germany, unless you positively grock on potassium cyanide or Zyklon-B. What this means is that if somebody gives you a gift, hope that it is in Boston rather than Berlin.

BOSTON or

BERLIN?

Augustine was trying to prepare people to approach the Bible in some other spirit than that of a Rorschach test. My purpose in this post is very different, though I will in passing commend Augustine’s essay to the alarmingly large number of my fellow Bible-readers who seem to think that the Word of God is English, subspecies Jacobean.

...all Greek to me....

What dawned on me was an odd extension or corollary of Augustinian linguistics. It seems possible that an entire language can become a conventional sign. On Sunday last I went to the University Chapel for the monthly Communion service. The cornerstone of this mini-Amiens cathedral was laid in 1922, when a buck was still a buck; and cynics almost immediately christened the building “Princeton’s million dollar answer to materialism.” Well, let them scoff. The space is magnificent, and the music excellent even when, as on this occasion, many student choristers were still away on Fall Break.

Chapel services are ecumenical Protestant, though the Gothic architecture pushes the envelope well beyond the comfort zone of, say, John Knox. The Eucharist has the traditional structure, though Catholics, of whom a fair number attend, must face the anomaly of pronouncing the words of consecration themselves, thus practicing if not approving Martin Luther’s concept of the priesthood of all believers.

But the implications of one odd feature of the service only now struck me with full force. The old Roman Catholic Mass was in Latin. We still use Latin words (the Gloria, the Sanctus) to denominate certain parts. One of the principal reforms of the Reformers, adopted by the Catholics themselves after a brief lag of four centuries, was to translate it into the local vernacular. But here we were in a rather WASPish conclave of central New Jersey singing these parts in Spanish. Princeton, N.J, is reasonably cosmopolitan, but it is not Miami. I cannot be sure that there were no native speakers of Spanish in that substantial congregation, but I allow myself to doubt it. Yet there we all were lustily praising El Señor with authentic south-of-the-border (the Massachusetts border, that is) accent.

The explanation of this phenomenon is not so simple as the fact that our musical settings do in fact come from an Argentinian folk mass. I have never heard this crowd singing “A Mighty Fortress” in the original German. No. The explanation is that in a certain American politico-ecclesiastical context the Spanish language itself, quite apart from any of its individual verbal signifiers, is becoming a conventional sign. What it signals is a vague but benevolent aspiration to catholic fraternity and recognition of that biblical category called “the poor, the fatherless, and the oppressed.” I rather doubt that it signaled the same thing to Lope de Vega, but then conventions do shift.

An Upside to the Medicare Crisis

2011-11-01T19:08:00.000-07:00

I believe that most of my students are younger than I am. Ordinarily that observation would be of a banality so oppressive as to forbid it entry even to a blog post, a tolerant genre usually welcoming even to the huddled masses and teeming refuse of one’s most aimless thoughts. But the circumstances are special. For the last several weeks Wednesdays, which I had come to think of as “blog days”, have also been “teaching days”. I have been teaching in an eight-week course, with a two-hour seminar each Wednesday morning, in a local “adult education” program called The Evergreen Forum.

Education for the “older student,” “continuing education” or “life-long learning” has become a vast enterprise in this country. There can be few communities of any size in America that are without some kind of Adult School, Senior Center Seminar, or local Elderhostel. In a college town like mine there are at any moment probably half a dozen such academies offering to “non-traditional students”—a bizarre circumlocution for various categories of post-adolescents--poetry workshops, master classes in sushi preparation, introductions to quantum mechanics, Civil War history, Contemporary Chinese politics, or the novels of Virginia Woolf. By request I have built my own seminar around historical and cultural questions raised in my recent book entitled The Anti-Communist Manifestos.

I have for several decades occasionally taught in such venues. I have frequently given talks in lecture series sponsored by groups with names like “The Old Guard” and “Fifty-Five Plus”. In fact I once taught a course on Dante’s Divine Comedy in this same Evergreen Forum. And I have always enjoyed what I light-heartedly call geriatric education because of the fascinating people one meets. Furthermore there is a considerable relief in being able to assume a shared general knowledge of such matters as the principal adversaries in the Second World War, and the broad outcome of their struggles. (Unfortunately, I’m not quite kidding.) Still, it is a bit of a shock to me to realize that I myself am older than many of these folks. I have become a “non-traditional teacher”.

New York, 1953

In my current seminar there are a couple of people who were at City College not too long after the War, when memories of the Red Decade were still vibrant. They were there to see the street demonstrations to “save the Rosenbergs”. There is a mathematician, a Russian émigré, in his youth forced—and this well after the Stalinist period—to join the Komsomol if he entertained any hope of educational advancement. The capacity of such students to bring living memories of their real life experience to our topics of study is priceless, and affords one kind of mental exhilaration simply unavailable in an Ivy League graduate seminar.

Moscow, 1953

This is the up-side of the fact that lots of people are living longer than the actuaries of the 1930s thought they ought to—a situation know to our politicians and pundits as “the Medicare Crisis.” Many of them are not in fact on ventilators, and they spend more time at the computerized card catalogue than in the catscan machine.

Most of education, and practically all of humanistic education, is about remembering. Our enemy is ignorance, especially that form of voluntary ignorance that is cultural amnesia. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts is the title of a book (2007) by Clive James, a brilliant work first drawn to my attention shortly after its publication by my old friend Dick Schrader. I immediately bought a second-hand copy. Then about a year ago a young alumnus friend actually gave me a brand-new copy of it. I didn’t tell him I already owned it—there is no such thing as a surfeit of great books—especially as I had by then no idea where my first copy was. (It turned out to be on loan--which I could now make permanent loan.)

At the Evergreen Forum the focus of this week’s meeting is Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom (1946), a book now long forgotten, but in its day a powerful thunderbolt of literary anti-Communism and a grievous insult to the fantasies of American and French leftists in the immediate post-war period. Kravchenko was a Soviet industrial engineer, an expert in pipe-rolling, who in 1944 seized the opportunity of an assignment to the Lend-Lease mission in Washington to defect and seek political asylum in America. He was born in 1905, so that his autobiography was in effect a personal history of the entire period of Bolshevik power. Its version of Soviet realities was rather different from that to be found in the pages of such intellectually prestigious American organs of opinion of that day as the Nation and The New Republic, let alone those mandarin journals published in Paris by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Kravchenko had personal connections with only one among the high and mighty of the Soviet state: his boss, the Georgian Grigory Ordzhonikidze, who became Commissar for Heavy Industry in 1932 and committed suicide (with Stalin’s encouragement and possible help) in 1937. Only as I was thinking about this week’s seminar did I remember (discover?) that Clive James has a brilliant little essay on Ordzhonikidze, who is in fact the only “O” in his alphabetically organized book.

Grigory Ordzhonikidze (1886-1937); strong enough to bear the blow

Since being murdered by Stalin has for certain historians been enough to forgive the likes of Bukharin and Zinoviev for their own enthusiastic participation in a state founded on mass murder, James calmly challenges the nascent belief that Ordzhonikidze “might have been some sort of proto-liberal” by quoting a passage from a letter Ordzhonikidze wrote to Kirov in 1934. “Our cadres who knew the situation of 1932-1933 and who bore the blow are truly tempered like steel. I think with them we can build a State the like of which the world has never seen.” The “situation” referred to was the genocidal Soviet policy of state-managed famine in which about five million Ukrainians perished. The famine is known to Ukrainians as the Holodomor—the Hunger—and it must class with history’s epic atrocities; but it didn’t take long for cultural amnesia to set in. Walter Duranty of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for in-depth reporting on the Soviet scene in 1932-1933 without ever noticing the Holodomor. There were a surprising number of things that western intellectuals failed to notice about Soviet Communism.

Those hardened heroes gutsy enough to “bear the blow” were Communist apparatchiks who organized and carried out the murder. The chief apparatchik was one Nikita Khrushchev, best-selling author of The Crimes of Stalin. It was hard work, but somebody had to do it. They did indeed create a State the like of which the world had never seen. We have seen several more since then, though, and if we succumb to cultural amnesia we are likely to see more yet. Continuing education is not such a bad idea.

The Ukraine, 1932; not strong enough to bear the blow

A Beautiful Tale of Love and Death

2011-10-25T17:17:00.000-07:00

We just got back from a quick trip to the opera—Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Lyric Theater in Chicago. Occasional extravagances of that sort are an unanticipated possibility of retirement, but even so we should hardly have indulged were the opera not a pretext for meeting up with Tamara, a very old and dear friend, recently widowed, who lives in Michigan. We had been “young marrieds” together nearly a half century ago. Charles and I spent several years together as junior faculty colleagues before the goddess Fortuna sent us our differing ways. Death, the definitive separation, is of a different order. Any sensitive person will probably have an empathetic sense of widowhood, but the long-married are likely to intuit it with a particular poignancy.

I recently read that divorce rates in America have been in noticeable decline, but even before I was able to register a silent, inward satisfaction at the news the next paragraph was upon me with its disquieting explanation. The reason fewer people have been filing for divorce is that so few people have been getting married in the first place. There is comparatively little difficulty in putting asunder those whom God has never joined.

“The iconic American family, with mom, dad and kids under one roof, is fading” says another statistical essay in a recent Economist. “In every state the numbers of unmarried couples, childless households and single-person households are growing faster than those comprised of married people with children, finds the 2010 census. The latter accounted for 43% of households in 1950; they now account for just 20%. And the trend has a potent class dimension. Traditional marriage has evolved from a near-universal rite to a luxury for the educated and affluent.”

A “luxury for the educated and affluent”—perhaps rather like flying trips to Chicago to attend the opera? Our great literature has principally concerned itself with three things, two of which are God and marriage, frequently enough in combination. English professors used to spend a lot of time worrying about “the decline of the novel.” I think what they were really worrying about—either without realizing it or without being willing to realize it—was the decline of God. The basis for the greatness of Moby Dick and Les Misérables and The Brothers Karamazov is actually the God-question. Take that away, and artistic grandeur is an uphill struggle.

God’s literary disappearance still left us with marriage. Marriage resolves complication, restores order. The comic (meaning optimistic or happy) template of our literature is the so-called marriage plot: the “Knight’s Tale”, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, almost anything by Jane Austen. The Marriage Plot, indeed, is the title of a novel, currently much admired, by Jeffrey Eugenides. And it’s a really great title. So it is more than a little alarming, simply in literary terms, to face the possibility that narrative fiction may soon lose marriage as well. “Thus they split, and lived uncommitedly ever after.” That seems a little lame.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

That is not the problem with Lucia di Lammermoor. Donizetti’s opera (1835) is based in Sir Walter Scott’s novel, The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), and like most of Scott’s great tales this one was based in “real life”. Our modern fetish for individual autonomy hardly prepares us for that old world (or most of our modern one outside the industrialized West) in which social relations are familial before they are personal. If marriage can lead to comic fulfillment, the prohibition of marriage can lead to tragic destruction. Hence according to the unfortunate comparative principle touched upon in my last post, Lucia di Lammermoor inevitably became “the Scottish Romeo and Juliet”.

Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)

Yet things are worse even than that. To forbid Lucy Ashton from marrying Mr. Right (Edgardo Ravenswood) would have been bad enough even without forcing her to marry Mr. Wrong (Arturo Bucklaw). The sinister combination of oppressions means, in terms of a fine old essay on Scott’s novel by Andrew Lang, that Lucy is both Juliet and Ophelia: “for Lucy, in her soft and fragile beauty, her dutifulness to parental authority, and her final madness, corresponds to Ophelia with some closeness.” Here are the ingredients for disaster, and on Saturday night in Chicago at least three geniuses—Scott, Donizetti, and the Alabaman soprano Susanna Phillips—made of it a disaster not soon to be forgotten.

Susanna Phillips as Lucia di Lammermoor

All art is determined by both its form and its content. The very concept of bel canto opera is that the beauty of the singing matches the splendor of the dramaturgy and the moral dignity of the narrative content. I had never before seen this opera, and I had read the Scott story so long ago that I could remember nothing more than the basic narrative situation. But it hardly matters. I have discovered that works of art are like Heraclitus’s river. You never can step into the same river twice. The intellectual and spiritual experiences of one’s seventies are not those of one’s fifties, let alone those of one’s twenties. In some miraculous way the old is also new. The word re-reading is thus inexact.

Still, in art as in life the complement of change is continuity. The origins of our romance tradition are sometimes traced to the opening words of the medieval story of Tristan and Iseult: “My lords, would you hear a beautiful tale of love and death?...” That might be called the bel canto of the eternal human experience.

“My lords, would you hear a beautiful tale of love and death?...”

De-Bard

2011-10-18T23:02:00.000-07:00

Roland Emmerich: a lean and hungry look, with a clear focus on the box office

My dear old Dad had a number of really corny jokes and riddles, apparently devised by and for the simple-minded, that he would pull out for all occasions. This was unfortunate, since at the very best they worked on one occasion. “My name’s Schmaltzmeller. I sell Fuller brushes. Anything you want to brush up on?” Also: “I call my sweetie Oleo. I haven’t any but her.” That sort of thing. Well, yesterday I had amazing success with one of these chestnuts. I was walking along with a young lady when I injected into the conversation, all casual-like, one of my Dad’s favorites. “Do you know who,” I asked her, “is buried in Grant’s Tomb?”

Got her! She fell for it! Of course it is true that that the young lady, my granddaughter, is six years old, has had all her education (meaning pre-school and first-grade) in France, had never heard of Ulysses Grant, and did not know what a tomb was. Still, my feeling of triumph was considerable. If you wait long enough, and stoop low enough, you can find an audience for almost anything.

I presume that is the principle animating the Hollywood “Shakespeare” film directed by Roland Emmerich and about to be unleashed upon us. News of its dread approach has been crackling through the synapses of English Teacher listservs for the past month. It is entitled Anonymous, and amid much foot-stomping, boob-baring, head-chopping, quill-flourishing, and fire-blazing (otherwise known in Hollywood as “Tudor history”) it dusts off the old one about Shakespeare not actually writing the plays of Shakespeare, which were in fact written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

THREE CONTESTANTS

Lord Verulam (Category: niftiest hat)

The Earl of Oxford (Category: itchiest chest; cf Donnelly, below)

William Shakespeare (Category: coolest earring)

The pre-emptive concerns of English teachers have to do with the cinematic power to render their students’ simple ignorance invincible—what might be called the “Kennedy effect”. By the late nineties most undergraduates I met at the supposedly elite university in which I taught were sure that President John Kennedy had been assassinated by CIA agents—Lee Harvey Oswald having been nothing more than a convenient patsy, though of course also the possible author of the works once attributed to Christopher Marlowe. That was on account of a movie of Oliver Stone’s (JFK, 1991).

America’s English teachers constitute an endangered species already. They have the unenviable task of trying to coax the kids to get beyond Act One, Scene Two even in the CliffsNotes version. They need to persuade them of the redeeming social content of technical terms like soliloquy, stichomythia, and dramatic irony. It is an annoying distraction, to use one of our President’s favorite terms of disapprobation, to have to explain to them that Shakespeare wrote the plays of Shakespeare, as of course he indubitably did.
Though it has by now been around for quite a while, the idea that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare is a comparatively recent aberration; it couldn’t appear until the last of Shakespeare’s close friends, business partners, and fellow players had all been dead for a couple of centuries. When the theory did arrive, it must have been at least potentially pleasing to college professors. It maintained that it was impossible that anyone could master the learning deployed in the plays without benefit of a college education, whereas it was a well-known fact that William Shakespeare was diploma-less. “Thou hadst small Latin and less Greek.” Didn’t his old buddy, Ben Jonson, write that himself?

In fact he did—in a passage in which he compared Shakespeare, by no means unfavorably, to some other under-educated playwrights, such as Euripides, Æschylus, and Seneca, none of whom had college degrees, there being no colleges from which to get them back in the day. Anyway, it must have been somebody else—Lodge, Greene, Chapman—yes, Chapman was the best bet, though even there one could occasionally identify the leaden hand of George Peele.

Lord de Vere, though a late starter, is proving to be a strong finisher. He could not append his name to Macbeth or The Merry Wives of Windsor because writing plays was, in the eyes of polite society, infra dignitatem, aristocratically speaking. The hot candidate beginning in the later nineteenth century was Lord Verulam, the Viscount St. Albans, more familiarly known as Francis Bacon. Bacon was not merely a much more appropriate author of Shakespeare’s plays than was Shakespeare, he was also immensely learned. It takes erudition to write stuff like “The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon ...”

Better yet, since espionage was one of Bacon’s many things, he had developed an interest in codes and ciphers. Under these circumstances it was certain that, although he published all his plays under the ridiculous name “Shakespeare,” he cunningly left coded messages within them revealing their true authorship. The great expert in crypto-Shakespeareanism was Ignatius Donnelly, author of The Great Cryptogram (1888) in about a thousand pages, a sequel to his equally revolutionary Atlantis : the Antediluvian World (1882). Donnelly was a Republican congressional representative from Minnesota—founder of a great tradition. Few men achieve even one truly cockamamie idea in a career. Donnelly was so prolific of them as to capture the title “Prince of Cranks,” so far without serious challenge.

Ignatius Donnelly (R-Minnesota)

The word is that if you can manage to backmask the sound track to Anonymous—play it backward at one-third speed—it offers other startling revelations. It gives a definitive resolution to the stirred-or-shaken controversy, and it confirms the fact that Nine-Eleven was engineered by the Mossad. Finally, after centuries, we learn why Hamlet hesitated.

Shakespeare's breakfast

Getting to Carnegie Hall

2011-10-11T22:12:00.000-07:00

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” You know the old joke question; you know also the answer: “Practice, practice, practice!” I have found that in practice, however, for the talentless the N, Q, and R lines are a better bet. So it was the Subway Route that took me there on Monday night for the Carnegie Hall début of the new Salomé Chamber Orchestra.

Among the pleasures of association with a great university are the opportunities to bask in the reflected glory of distinguished colleagues and to enjoy the varied and infinitely surprising talents of brilliant young people. During the last decade of my active service at Princeton the University Orchestra under the leadership of Michael Pratt--a teacher-musician of great talent--reached a very high level of excellence. I became a loyal fan, and all the more so since several of my own students played in it over the years. About the time I was retiring there were three siblings named Carpenter, each of genius quality, among the string players. Their pleasingly ecumenical given names were Sean Avram, Lauren Sarah, and David Aaron. I never taught any of them in class, but I made the slight acquaintance of the latter two simply by being a groupie. On a trip to Philadelphia to hear David Carpenter play the Walton viola concerto with the Philharmonic there I also met the young musicians’ charming mother.

Fiddlers three: Sean, David, and Lauren Carpenter

A couple of subsequent pleasant experiences kept them in my mind; and my ears naturally pricked up when I heard that the three siblings, along with a group of other beautiful young people, were forming a chamber orchestra called Salomé, with David Aaron Carpenter as artistic director. Naturally I showed up for opening night at Carnegie Hall.

When I got to the Weill Recital Room and examined the playbill, I noted with some interest that the program was divided more or less evenly between W. A. Mozart and Joseph Martin Kraus. I should amend the narrative to say that I noticed this fact with interest and some alarm. “Who,” I found myself blurting out to my neighbor, “Who is Kraus”? My neighbor was an Asian-American woman of striking, mature beauty, and I immediately sensed that she was not particularly happy to be blurted out to by strange men. But she answered quite civilly: “Kraus is the Finnish Mozart. It says so right here.” What the musical notes actually said, when I tardily read them, was this: “Very little is known about the music of Joseph Martin Kraus, a composer referred to as the ‘Swedish Mozart’ as he lived almost the exact same dates as his contemporary.”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) and Joseph Martin Kraus (1756-1792)

Ordinarily I don’t like this mode (“the gorgonzola of wines,” “the Ghengis Kahn of Shakespeare Scholars”) of comparison, because one is never sure what is actually meant. And it can be worse. Recently someone assured me with a straight face that “the Alfa Romeo is the Rolls Royce of cars”. If you insist on using such comparisons, they should be reversible, and they rarely are. I attended a small liberal arts college in Tennessee, Sewanee. It was a good place, but its aspirations to excellence had seduced its more enthusiastic admirers to an uncautious bumper-sticker: “Sewanee: the Harvard of the South.” Then, over the years, I began to have commerce with people at or associated with Harvard University. Great was my disappointment to discover that not a single one of them thought of that institution as “the Sewanee of the North”. Even the movie Amadeus, which did everything in its power to turn Mozart into a twit, stopped short of turning him into “the Austrian Joseph Martin Kraus”.

Nonetheless, as interpreted through the viola of David Carpenter, Kraus really is a Scandinavian Mozart. (Actually, he was a German, but let it pass.) And he is unlikely to remain so obscure in the future. Somehow the Salomé came up with two very arresting pieces (a concerto for viola, cello, and orchestra and another simply for viola and orchestra) that so far as anyone knows had never before been played. So not merely was I privileged to be present at the début of an exciting new musical ensemble, I was hearing the world premiere performances of two major works by Joseph Martin Kraus, aka the Swedish Mozart!

Saint Augustine found the emotional experience of listening to music so intense and passionate as to be morally hazardous. I vaguely understand his concern. The experience of the listener is probably always an unstable compound wrought of the objective laws of physics and private, subjective associations. For such private and subjective reasons the viola solo, especially in its higher ranges, had for me come to be plangent, echoing with loss and regret. Salomé and Kraus between them may have rescued me.

One most encouraging feature of the evening was the age and enthusiasm of the audience. It was mainly composed of young people. I suppose many of them were personal friends of the players, come out to lend support and encouragement for such a worthy initiative. But the audience also clearly responded to a kind of “mission statement” on the group’s website: “New York City compels young adults to be at once adaptable, optimistic, multi-faceted and resourceful. At Salomé, we feel that the very survival and evolution of classical music within such a fast-paced, cosmopolitan environment requires a dynamic balance of novelty, tradition, and hard work.” The evening’s final (pre-encore) piece was “Primavera Porteño” by Astor Piazzolla, the Monarch of Tango. It was brilliant even without—dare I say especially without—the accordion! Sort of like this-- only better yet.

David Aaron Carpenter in Artistic Director Mode

The Class War

2011-10-05T02:07:00.000-07:00

We must deny before God and man that one’s attitude towards men may be determined solely by considering them as representatives of this or that class….Every man is made in the image of God, however indistinct that image may become, and every man is called to eternal life; in the face of these truths, all differentiation by class, all political passion, all the superfluities that social life piles daily on the human soul are trivial and unavailing.

Nicholas Berdyaev, Christianity and Class War (1931)

There is in contemporary America a widely shared perception that a large and growing disparity in material well being among our citizens is problematic from both the social and the moral points of view. I confess that I share this perception. I regard the situation as serious and dangerous. On another occasion I might attempt to address its substance directly. It is conceivable that an expertise in medieval Franciscan thought, in which the biblical account of Dives and Pauper (see Luke xii) received penetrating analysis, might allow me to say something useful--but only barely conceivable. What this essay is about is class war.

Lazarus (Pauper) at the Door of Dives Heinrich Aldegrever, 1552

President Obama has called for increased tax rates for rich people (a vaguely defined group variously denominated as “the most fortunate among us,” “millionaires and billionaires,” “job creators,” “small businessmen,” and “Warren Buffet”). Several Republican politicians immediately indicted this proposal as class warfare. The President himself just as quickly denied the charge, but since then other Democrats have opined that a little class warfare is just what we need. In informal remarks innocent of any serious pretensions to coherence, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to suggest that the famous phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was a salvo in an early skirmish of the class war. Less equivocal is the essay entitled “Obama, Don’t Run from Class War by Howell Raines, former Numero Uno at the New York Times. I have seen several others in a similar vein.

To be sure Raines stresses a concept of “non-violent” or metaphoric class war. I still protest. A professor of English can hardly adopt a general hostility toward metaphor, but there are some metaphors that have been ruined by being made literal, just as there are literal realities that have been ruined in becoming metaphoric. If you look up the word holocaust in an old reference work you will see that it is the English form of the biblical Greek term for the “burnt offerings” that played such an important role in early Jewish sacrificial worship. It was a theological concept. Perhaps one in a hundred people who talk about the Holocaust today knows that fact; but it doesn’t matter, for what holocaust is is what Auschwitz made it. To use the word in its old sense would be pedantic and trivial.

Having spent a certain amount of time studying twentieth-century Communism, I have a similar attitude to the phrase class war. The phrase made its serious claim on the modern consciousness through Karl Marx. Marx believed in the “class war,” though the word famously used in the first sentence of the Communist manifesto was “struggle” (Kampf), which is a little different from war (Krieg). “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

I must pause to say that I am no Marx-basher. A lot more of the people who talk about Marx flippantly would do well to read some actual Marx. Much of it is tough slogging, but no fair reader will fail to find even in the leaden pages a profound and original thinker animated by an attractive humanistic spirit. I want to adopt the attitude of the great Russian Orthodox philosopher Berdyaev, from whom I took the epigraph for this post. The dedication of Christianity and Class War reads as follows: “I dedicate this book to the memory of KARL MARX who was the social master of my youth and whose opponent in ideas I have now become.” Marx is no more responsible for all things done in his name or that of his ism than Freud is personally responsible for Ernest Jones’s interpretation of Hamlet or Jesus Christ is responsible for the Spanish Inquisition.

Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948)

Marx was a social analyst, not a revolutionary practitioner of political power, and it was left to later Communists in power like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot to define what “class war” meant in a concrete sense. What it meant is so appalling that the words should not be used in a casual way. In statistical terms class war has meant something like the following (taken from the Black Book of Communism, p. 4):

The Soviet Union, 20 million dead

China, 65 million dead

Cambodia, 2 million dead

North Korea, a million dead

Vietnam, a million dead…

and more.

Class war means that it is right and necessary to kill a very great many people. I suppose that Marxism was never more prestigious among western intellectuals than in the 1930s, which was the decade of the Spanish Civil War, regarded by most intellectuals as a nearly pure instance of good (the Spanish Republic and its allies) versus evil (Franco and his Nationalist insurgents, with their allies.) The following events from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) are well-documented. Nationalist soldiers upon battling their way into a largish village against stiff resistance gathered all the male population of the place into the town square. A committee of officers then examined the hands of all the men who had been rounded up. Those with heavily calloused palms were removed for immediate execution, the assumption being that as manual workers they must be Communists or Communist supporters. In other places where the Republican forces and their international allies were for the moment victorious, all men (and sometimes women) in religious garb were shot. In at least one instance anyone wearing a religious medal was shot. Here the assumption was that such people were necessarily “class enemies”.

By all means let us have vigorous political debate in this country. Let us debate our absurd tax code and even, if we have the stomach for it, reform it. Let us engage our “enemies in ideas,” to use Berdyaev’s term; but, please, leave the class war out of it.

Class War: some collateral damage in Spain

East-Anglian Church-Crawl

2011-09-27T17:07:00.000-07:00

Cansell Grove Farmhouse, Rattlesden, Suffolk

The homeward flight to America, like the outbound flight two weeks earlier, was surprisingly comfortable. I deduce from the popular press that one regards a half-empty glass in a philosophical light much dimmer from that in which one views a glass half-full. But so far as airplane flights are concerned, half-full and half-empty are equally excellent categories. I want to report on the second half of our English tour before its golden memories become overwhelmed by the fierce urgency of now—a phrase I hope I can recycle as our President moves on to the less fierce indifference of whenever. The actual pretext of our trip to England was an annual Oxford reunion. It was splendid, even if for constraint of time I can say nothing more than that about it. The real high points of the trip were a series of reconnections with several old friends.

I left off my last post after the first of two days in the Cambridge area. Our second night was spent in the nearby village of Linton with Hilary (Joan’s niece) and Alan Crooks and their two delightful young boys Ivor and George. On Wednesday, after a pleasant lunch in beautiful Saffron Walden (Essex), Hilary drove us to the Cambridge railway station where we caught a train to Stowmarket in Suffolk, there to be met by our friends and hosts for the next two nights, Michael and Heather Nicholas.

The Athenaeum, Pall Mall, London

We had actually already seen Michael and Heather on Monday, between Oxford and Cambridge. He had organized for a group of old college friends a very elegant lunch at his London club, the Athenaeum. This was my first visit to those sacred precincts, the ne plus ultra of British intellectual exclusivity. In lieu of a visitors’ book they have an album featuring the photographs of the fifty Nobelists who are past or current members. I know people at the Century Club in New York who have wangled their way into that comparatively plebeian institution primarily with the view of exploiting its reciprocal privileges with the London Athenaeum. The plaice was excellent, though there was nary a gaitered bishop in sight.

A word or two more about our host. Many married people, of whom I am one, naturally attach a special importance to the person through whom they came to know a future spouse. I first encountered my spouse in church. All the best medievals first spotted their girlfriends in church. Why should that not be true of medievalists as well? Think of Troilus. He’s wandering around the Trojan Athenaeum, ogles Criseyde, and gets shot through the eyeball by Cupid. Think of Petrarch. There he is in the church of Saint Claire in Avignon. He looks up from his distracted prayers, and there she is. The rest is history—history, deployed in approximately 317,421 European sonnets. Well, fifty years ago in Oxford there were no female students in Jesus College and no male students in Saint Anne’s. Under these circumstances it proved decisive to my personal fate that there was an organization called the “Jesus-Saint Anne’s Musical Society,” which offered occasional concerts in the beautiful seventeenth-century chapel of Jesus College. The impresario of the Jesus-Saint Anne’s Musical Society, and for all I know its inventor, was Michael B.Nicholas. So in a sense I owe him the debt of my life-long indebtedness.

The Lord Lyon King of Arms and the

Chief Marshal of the University

Real and Phoney Ceremonial Grandeur

with Real and Phoney Georgian Royalty

Furthermore, though jealousy hardly features in my lengthy catalogue of imperfections, I must confess that Michael excited in me an intense “title envy”. I eventually became the “Louis W. Fairchild Professor of English, and Professor of Comparative Literature,” which should satisfy the vanity of any man; but I still find myself lusting after the glory of two titles I can never possess. The first, once held by the early Scottish poet David Lindsay of the Mount, is “the Lord Lyon King of Arms”. The Lyon King of Arms is the chief ceremonial officer of Scotland. The other and even more enviable title was that held by Michael Nicholas when I first met him: the Organ Scholar of Jesus. The Organ Scholar of Jesus! With that beginning, his subsequent fame as a church musician was virtually guaranteed.

Michael and Heather now live in the beautiful Suffolk village of Rattlesden, in a glorious old thatched farmhouse, the “new wing” of which considerably antedates the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. Heavy oak beams, many of them fully exposed and transformed by age to the texture of iron, hold its spacious rooms together with impressive conviction. Heather, one of the mainstays of the local history society, pointed out to me faint apotropaic graffiti incised by some pre-Elizabethan in the fire-place beam: a petaled wheel, and the sign of the Virgin (V.V., virgo virginum).

Thursday, blessed by glorious weather, was devoted to a day-long church-crawl in the general direction of the eastern coast. In the Middle Ages and early modern period much of Suffolk enjoyed a protracted agricultural and mercantile prosperity, and many of the area’s parish churches are mini-cathedrals. We ended at Aldeburgh, the home of the greatest of modern British composers, Benjamin Britten, who is naturally one of Michael’s musical heroes. We visited Britten’s gravesite in the beautiful churchyard at Aldeburgh, and admired the “Britten window” in the church itself. We wandered along the shingle beach of the old town in an early autumn twilight..

The Britten memorial window by John Piper, Aldeburgh parish church, with detail of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace

Even the most mellow of days must end, and this one ended memorably, with a splendid supper at the Swan Inn in Woolpit. This was a timely visit, for I had just about decided that the wonderful old pubs of my youth were as dead as Chesterton and Belloc. If you get far enough out in the country you lose the pinball machines and the braying hordes of inebriated yuppies, but partridge is still on the menu. Old wood, old books, old wine—but best of all, old friends.

The spectacular beamed ceiling of Woolpit parish church

Let the Deed Shaw

2011-09-20T01:08:00.000-07:00

Oxford failed me, but not Cambridge. We are now with the wonderful Dignam family (Elizabeth being Joan's niece), a more wired group than which it would not be possible to find on two continents. I am thus able to tell you about our arrival in Britain--now a week out of date, of course, but any port in a storm.

We flew to London on September 11, a date thoughtlessly chosen months ago. I expected to find Newark Airport in a state of lockdown gridlock. In fact, there were few people there, and no lines at all at the security barriers. Even the flight seemed relatively uncrowded and pleasant, and with but a minimum of our usual comic misadventures we made our way From Heathrow to Waterloo and thence by suburban train to Sevenoaks in Kent, where Joan’s brother and sister-in-law, John and Margaret Newman, live. I managed to stay awake, sort of, through the rest of the day, which included a stroll through the extensive grounds of Knoll House, seat of the Sackvilles, one of the great architectural and historical ornaments of this fine old town.

Our one full day with my inlaws, Tuesday, began with a practically motivated walk through Sevenoaks. Money magically appeared when I pushed some buttons on an ATM. That was a relief because I wasn’t sure I remembered the right buttons for my English account. Among the first necessities of international travel these days is getting your hands on a mobile phone that works. There are two ways of doing this. The first is to be already in possession of a very costly hyperphone of the kind that most twelve-year-olds of my acquaintance already have but that I am too stingy to buy and too dumb to use. The other is to seek out the cheapest Samsung on offer at the electronic junk bazaar. In today’s Britain that would be the garish Phones 4U shop (I kid you not) that is now one of the less picturesque features of the High Streets of picturesque British market towns. We found our quarry within three minutes.

We also discovered the following interesting fact of Nine-Eleven relevance. The phone we wanted costs £30 if you pay cash and £20 if you use a bank card. I naively sought an explanation of what seemed to me a curiously counter-indicative pricing policy. It s all about helping Big Brother keep track of the phones. The security authorities are willing to invest ten quid in what they can learn from a swipe of your credit card.

Even a brief tour of a town in the British counties involves for me some indispensable ritual stops. One of these is the charity shops, where my usual purchase is an old suitcase in which I can cart about the old books I buy in other shops. But we are already overloaded, and my book-buying days, if not quite over, are painfully shortened. Having little time, I stepped into the first rummage shop that presented itself: the Children’s Trust. I cased the place swiftly, decided I had done it justice, and was making my exit virtuously empty handed, when my spouse drew my attention to an item hanging on the wall among other hideous decorations: to wit, a shield-shaped pseudo-heraldic plaque with the Fleming coat of arms and motto. Neither the device (the belted head of a billygoat) nor the motto (“Let the deed shaw”) was previously known to this particular Fleming, but when God gives you a sign, sign up. When again would a measly £3.50 allow me to shaw a spurious nobility documented by wood-burning set? This treasure will be a Christmas gift for a certain immediate lineal descendant who, as he never reads my blog, is in no danger of having the surprise compromised.

The afternoon’s more worthy occupations included a lovely walk along the River Medway near Tonbridge, where many years ago my brother-in-law had rowed. We walked about a mile and back without seeing another soul. Indeed for most of the walk no signs of human habitation were in sight, and the only signs of human industry were the anciently cultivated fields and the numbered riparian fishing posts, maintained by a ferociously exclusive angling club, at the water’s edge. One might have been in Montana rather than densely populated southern England.

Before beginning our walk w had made a visit to the lovely old village of Tudeley. All Saints’ church in Tudeley is a kind of beautiful architectural palimpsest, an anthology of architectural styles and enthusiasms. From a distance it seems to be a fine exemplar of the chaste and elegant brickwork of the Georgian period. In fact, the church’s foundations are pre-Norman, and from the inside it is obvious that the chancel is late medieval.

This ancient Christian church owes its modern prosperity to the bounty of two Jewish benefactors. In the nineteenth century the wealthy and civic minded Goldsmid family took possession of the large estate at Tudeley. “Squire” Goldsmid took an active interest in the physical and cultural health of the parish, including the upkeep of the church fabric.

The much more famous beautification of the church dates from the second half of the twentieth century, when through a munificent bequest the church wardens were able to install a series of remarkable stained glass windows designed by Marc Chagall, some of them actually donated by the artist, who was then over ninety years old. We can assume the Gothic church will have had a pictorial window, though we cannot know its iconographic subjects. The old glass had perished even before the eighteenth century, replaced by clear lights. But now one sees above the altar a huge, hauntingly blue hassidic vision of the Crucifixion of Christ.

O Mores, O Temporizing

2011-09-15T04:32:00.000-07:00

Your stymied bloguiste finds himself in a rather seedy Internet Cafe near Victoria Station, unable to transfer the very elegant essay composed with great labor on his flash disk to the slightly verminous machine beneath his fingers. He may try again from Oxford, after disinfecting the flash disk. Then again, he may not. Regular dispatches will resume no later than September 24.

Annals of Political Discourse

2011-09-07T07:52:00.000-07:00

Infrastructure challenge in Detroit

"We got to keep an eye on the battle that we face: The war on workers. And you see it everywhere, it is the Tea Party. And you know, there is only one way to beat and win that war. The one thing about working people is we like a good fight. And you know what? They've got a war, they got a war with us and there's only going to be one winner. It's going to be the workers of Michigan, and America. We're going to win that war," Jimmy Hoffa said to a heavily union crowd. "President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let's take these son of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong," Hoffa added.
James Hoffa (as quoted in the American press)

I have in the past expressed my admiration for the great Doctor Samuel Johnson, one of the first and best of bloguistes, and especially for his utter unflappability with regard to writing deadlines. He frequently would not even begin writing his required periodical essay until the printer’s boy appeared at his door urgently demanding copy. What Johnson achieved through sangfroid can be achieved also through mere oblivion and distraction. Tuesday offered a most pleasant distraction: an exhilarating doctoral defense by a brilliant young scholar of my acquaintance. The experience was so tonic that I went home and wrote a few scholarly paragraphs of my own. And though Wednesdays have been following fast upon the heels of Tuesdays even since my earliest youth, it was only latish on Tuesday that the significance of the time-tested sequence dawned upon me, blog-wise. Now what has dawned upon me is Wednesday itself.

Though I try to avoid current events, the week’s political developments have been importunate. First there was the flap over the President’s really pathetic attempt to upstage the orgy of self-promotion, posturing, and pandering that the Republican presidential candidates are pleased to call a “debate.” Hardly had this battle of titans achieved its uneasy resolution than alarums sounded on a new front: Detroit, where the president had gone to preview his speech (now scheduled for Thursday) before a friendly audience of “working Americans”. Among the friendliest of all (as in Johnny Friendly) was James Hoffa, whose office it was on this occasion to welcome the President to the podium. His introductory remarks, which according to Rush Limbaugh and numerous others included a generalized incitement to violence against members of the Tea Party, have become the object of journalistic--and now bloguistic—scrutinty.

My treatment of Mr. Hoffa’s remarks, though perforce censorious, will also be dispassionate. I have no animus against Jimmy Hoffa. In fact, I find Jimmy Hoffa rather reassuring. He is the living proof of the greatness of our democracy. For in this country it is not merely the presidency of the Republic that can be passed from father to son like the lordship of a thirteenth-century manor. The same is true of the Teamsters’ union. Nonetheless I must agree with Hoffa’s critics that the “Detroit remarks” crossed a line.

Johnny Friendly and Friendly Jimmy

But what line? You undoubtedly have heard the academic Q and A joke about the Mafioso and the Deconstructionist. The small degree of cultural literacy required for its appreciation—a passing familiarity with the Godfather movies—will be child’s play for my erudite readership.
Q: What is the difference between the Mafia Don and the Deconstructionist?
A: The Deconstructionist makes you an offer you can’t understand.
I had long since recognized the Mafioso style in the American labor union bureaucracy, but only now do I fully appreciate the more subtle influence of Deconstructionist style. In a stirring medley of striking but utterly indeterminate martial images Mr. Hoffa seemed to posit a “war” between “workers” and the “Tea Party,” a war in which the former must triumph. His specific and vigorous encouragement was this: “Let's take these son of bitches out.” The phrase “take out,” even when not being used of fast food, is I suppose sufficiently slippery that we must give Hoffa a pass. Take me out to the ball game. My husband never takes me out. That sort of thing. “Son of bitches” is another matter.

Even in American politics, where almost anything goes, this is entirely unacceptable. The term son of a bitch, a term of opprobrium dear to such great twentieth-century politicians as Roosevelt, Truman, and Nixon, is nearly as venerable as the eighteenth-century English whoreson, which in America it replaced. Its vernacular variant forms esohbee and sumbich are also amply recorded in our political discourse. But you simply cannot say what Hoffa said. You would never talk about “Knight Templars” or “mother-in-laws”. The proper plural is sons of bitches, with sons of a bitch being at least theoretically possible, if somewhat stilted. The English professors of America demand an apology. As for beating the war and giving America back to an America, those sound like sensible bipartisan suggestions.

=====================

A note for regular readers. Travels in England for the next two weeks may disturb the wonted schedule of postings.

Mycology, and Yours

2011-08-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

While I am sure you are eager to see my stunning Power Point Presentation called My Irene--featuring my photos of my arboreal debris, my wet crawl space, my downed power lines, and my local inundated highway, complete with its stranded, half-submerged automobile—such images are a dime a dozen on this morning’s Internet, probably a penny a peck. I therefore elect a more upbeat topic, namely my cology, which is to say, the fungus among us. For abundant early autumnal rainfall in the north-central coastal states of America encourages a profusion of fungal growth, much of it of a scrumptious nature.

Regatta Row, Princeton NJ

I took a little walk around my neighborhood this morning, camera in hand, and within five minutes I had found succulent champignons (agaricus campestris), several fine boleti (including the boletus edulis), two different kinds of delicious leucoagaricus (sometimes called parasol mushrooms), not to mention exotic but edible tree fungi. In Europe most of these would have disappeared by eight-thirty, but here in New Jersey I can count on them to be there until they melt into the ground.

South Harrison Street, Princeton NJ

The American attitude toward wild mushrooms was neatly summed up a few days ago in an NPR squib reported to me by my wife. The word from that eco-friendly group of tree-huggers and dioxiphobes, Sierra Club members to the last earnest voice, is that you should under no circumstances eat a mushroom lacking the cellophane imprimatur of some grocery chain. Now it is true that a few mushrooms are poisonous, and a very few potentially lethal. They are far less dangerous than roller skates or stepladders, however; and just as you should not operate a car if you don’t know how to drive, you should not eat a mushroom if you cannot identify its species. It is about as easy to confuse a chanterelle with a Destroying Angel as it is a hawk with a handsaw.

R. Gordon Wasson, ethnomycologist extraordinaire

The message that Nature is out to kill you is unhealthy for our young people. What we need on NPR is a little less ecological pseudo-piety and a little more R. Gordon Wasson. Wasson (1898-1986), the father of American ethno-mycology was an English teacher who later became an investment banker and a VP of J. P. Morgan. This was an unusual career move, but one that with impressive economy raised the cultural level of two professions. He was married to a Russian doctor who was crazy about wild mushrooms, and found Americans’ fear of them just as crazy. She knew that there is nothing in the world more delicious than a fine mess of field mushrooms, and that eating the cultivated and cellophaned ones (bisporigera) is by comparison the gastronomic equivalent of taking a shower in a boiler suit.

He was a great amateur scientist of the Victorian stamp. Together with his wife he wrote important books that are beautifully written in addition to being splendid specimens of typography. The two most important are Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality and Mushrooms, Russia, and History. Second-hand copies of the latter, one of the great books of the twentieth century, now go for about $1500.

You can still afford Divine Mushroom of Immortality, though. Wasson was rich enough to be able to publish it on a “vanity” basis with a major New York trade house. But as is well known, the rich get richer, and the book was a huge commercial success. In it Wasson arrived at the stimulating if controversial conclusion that the mysterious substance of the Rig Veda called in Sanskrit soma was actually the hallucinocenic fly agaric mushroom, the amanita muscaria. This is the really sensational red or yellow spotted one most people think of as the quintessence of the so-called toad-stool. I didn’t actually see one on my morning rounds, but they are very common here, and in many other places.

Needless to say, you should not consume a fly agaric unless you happen to be a native of Lapland or the Kamchatkan peninsula, where piebald poison is “part of the culture,” and where there is not a hell of a lot else to do on a Saturday night anyway. There the preferred mode of ingestion is via the intermediary urine of someone who has eaten some fly agarics or, failing that, of a reindeer that has browsed upon them. Don’t ask.

Do, on the other hand, take advantage of wet autumnal weather to check out some of the more delectable funky fungi of your area. One golden rule eliminates ninety-five percent of all potential problems: Never, ever, eat a white amanita. But look around for some delicious field mushrooms. You might even luck out and find some morels or chanterelles. All of these are very easily identified from books or from the Internet. If you are timid, you can start with the baby step of a pasta sauce. If you do, you’ll never turn back.

agaricus campestris (champignon, field mushroom)

boletus edulis

chanterelle

Bloguiste Rescues Literature

2011-08-23T19:24:00.000-07:00

The author of Criminal Queens, with impedimenta

I am aware of my good luck in having an unusually literate readership—“fit audience though few”, as Milton wrote concerning his own blog—but I wonder how many of you have read Criminal Queens: Powerful Women as the Playthings of Love? It’s a trick question, of course. Nobody has read Criminal Queens, because nobody ever actually wrote it. It is the imaginary title of an imaginary potboiler written by Lady Matilda Carbury in Trollope’s great novel The Way We Live Now. She is a distressed gentlewoman with a number of the usual Victorian impedimenta—tradesmen at the door with overdue bills, a daughter needing to be married off, a wastrel son with a serious gambling addiction. She has to do a little writing on the side “to make ends meet”.

Hogarth: The Distressed Poet (with irate tradeswoman at door)

Well, Trollope knew all about that sort of thing. “Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money,” wrote W. H. Auden. “Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic." That became apparent, if it had not done so earlier, with the publication of Trollope’s famous Autobiography in 1883. It is perhaps fortunate that it was published posthumously, for it savaged his reputation even before the first edition had sold out. For in it Trollope “ruined literature,” as one reviewer put it.

Trollope had ruined literature by taking so very commercial an attitude toward it. Writing is like the grocery business, he explained. Sell a sufficient weight of tea each day, and prosper. The Victorians could handle this kind of thinking in almost all areas of life, but they still clung to a Romantic notion of artistic “inspiration”. Fiddlesticks, said Trollope. Inspiration, shinspiration. He rose early each morning and wrote, watching the clock, maintaining a rate of 250 words per quarter hour until the cook rang for breakfast. He then put his writing gear back in its box, ate his coddled eggs, and devoted the rest of the day to more serious matters, such as the Post Office (for which he worked) and fox hunting (his passion).

He kept meticulous financial records, from which he deduced certain principles of literary cost effectiveness. His readers didn’t much like Ireland; so he quit writing novels set in Ireland. They seemed to love the old cathedral towns of southern England; so he took them as a specialty. Over a lengthy career he netted about £130,000 before breakfast (maybe fifteen million dollars in today’s money), with which he was able to buy some really good hunting horses. He laid it all out in statistical tables in his autobiography. He ruined literature by making writing profitable.

Anthony Trollope (after breakfast)

I, on the other hand, have just rescued literature. I found this out by accident late last week. I still have a mailbox in my old departmental office. I pass through and empty it occasionally. It’s mainly textbook catalogues and other items of the sub-junk category. What I’ll call my real correspondents use my home address. Very rarely there is a piece of “real” mail in the box, and such was the case last Thursday or Friday. There was a real letter in an envelope to which an actual forty-four cent stamp had been affixed. The elegant printed return address was that of a university press with whom I published, some twenty years ago, one of the seminal books of the last several decades—to wit, Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s “Troilus”.

I am sure it is unnecessary to tell you that I did not dash this thing off before breakfast at a rate of 250 words per quarter hour. No, it was the fruit of long hours of labor, mainly in the Classics Reading Room of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. As to the actual writing of it, it took about a year. On an extraordinary day, when the inspiration was positively crackling, I might achieve five hundred words; but on many days there were fewer words, and on some none at all. Hence I was hoping that my royalty statement—for such, I deduced, the envelope must contain—would allow me to purchase at least one small hunting horse, or at the very least a colt.

With trembling hand I opened the envelope, carefully using a cardboard advertisement as a letter opener. I then unfolded the statement and cast my eyes upon it. These things are always a little confusing, but I finally had to conclude that my total earnings for the period between July 1, 2010 and June 30, 2011 was--$0.00! However, the statement was not all noughts. There were also some crosses. It turns out that the account carried a “Balance Forward from Prior Statement.” That balance was minus $1.86. I am sure you have from time to time come across a book of which you thought: “They’d have to pay me to read that book.” Well, I wrote one like that! I had made history. I had achieved negative sales. I had saved literature.

Click to increase size; buy a copy to increase amount

Shaggy Granddaughter Story

2011-08-17T02:25:00.000-07:00

One Sunday in 1786 Robbie Burns was sitting in church trying to filter out the sermon by concentrating on the back of the neck of the young lady in the pew in front of him when he noticed something alarming. There was a wee critter of ill repute crawling across the lacey fringe of the woman’s bonnet. In one of his most beloved Scotch dialect poems Burns characterized this odious insect as “ye ugly, creepin, blastit wonner / Detested, shunn’d by saunt an’ sinner”. The title of the poem: “To a Louse.”

Robert Burns (1759-1796)

Many people today don’t know what a real louse is, as opposed to a metaphoric one in an old James Cagney movie, nor may they recognize the related adjective lousy. There is a better chance that the plural form, lice, will ring a bell. The truth is that in most industrial countries the louse has been rendered a seriously endangered species by the dramatic improvements in plumbing witnessed by the twentieth century. Body lice, the dreaded porters of typhus, are now mainly relegated to memoirs of Auschwitz or the gulag. It would be hard to find a body louse even in the New York subway system, and that is saying something. As the admirable Hans Zinsser pointed out in a classic book*, indispensable to anyone approaching our subject, this should be no laughing matter. But it is. “The louse is foremost among the many important and dignified things that are the subjects of raucous humor by the ribald. Despite the immense influence of this not unattractive insect upon the history of mankind, it is given, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, two thirds of a column—half as much as is devoted to ‘Louth, a maritime county in the province of Leinster,’ one fifth as much as is allowed for Louisville, Kentucky.”

On the other hand, head lice, which fortunately do not carry diseases, have maintained their small but unshrinking market share among even the higher echelons of the American bourgeoisie, specializing in middle schools and summer camps, including the most de luxe. The website of the National Institutes of Health is very comforting. “Having head lice does NOT mean the person has poor hygiene or low social status”. Of course if you have to be reassured by a governmental bureaucracy concerning your “social status,” you are probably in deep trouble already.

pediculosis capitis in mid creep

My beautiful and delightful granddaughter Lulu had to learn this the hard way last week. Everybody knows that if you lie down with dogs you get fleas. But what happens if you hang out for hours on end with the offspring of physics professors and tax lawyers in an “enrichment program” at an upscale Quaker summer camp? Answer: head lice. It was only as she was about to board a train to New York with her grandmother and her sisters that Lulu became definitively aware that some very intimate strangers seemed to have taken up residence in her long, gorgeous, raven hair.

I was not in New York, so I am dependent upon my daughter’s report for the rest of the story. It is a source in which I have the fullest confidence. I have bragged about my daughter in another post , and will not now burden my readers with further praise. But she is a very Can-Do kind of lady, and I had no doubt that she would be able to take care of the louse problem. What was unexpected in her report was the incidental good news about the American economy.

She met the girls upon their arrival in the city. After taking very brief medical advice, and conducting a hurried search on one or another hand-held device from her portable console, she took off, with three daughters in tow, for Midtown. There, somewhere in the mid Fifties are the posh offices and state-of-the-art delousing laboratories of Licenders. I’m one of the world’s leading collectors of silver linings. I try to practice, as well as preach to my students, the art of turning lemons into lemonade. But even I was astonished to discover that some American entrepreneurial genius has made a fortune coming up with a franchise for nit-picking. Jobs, jobs, jobs! And not all of them in Texas!

For my daughter reports that the place was crawling with—uh, let me start that sentence again. She reports that the Manhattan offices of Licenders were replete with concerned matrons from the Upper East Side, each accompanied by a nervous child (mainly long-haired daughters), positively champing at the nit to pay a small fortune to undergo a process that the promotional video makes seem as jolly as a mother-daughter visit to the Camden Aquarium.

One mother in particular stands out in my daughter’s narrative: a severe and soignée blonde ice-maiden, “probably the wife of some hedge fund manager.” She couldn’t possibly have known that sociological detail. She was undoubtedly trying to spare her aging parents her more usual vernacular phrase, “rich bitch”. This woman was scandalized to find herself in a delousing station, however upscale, and positively mortified when an examination of her own expensively coiffured head—a survey of the heads of household being part of the drill at Licenders—discovered a thriving colony of the dreaded pediculosis capitis right there on the mother ship.

Meanwhile, life goes on. It took but a moment for our resilient raven-haired beauty to put this distressing episode behind her. She’s back among the Quakers this week without having missed a beat.

*Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History (1935)

The Sex and Neo-Platonism Commission

2011-08-09T17:47:00.000-07:00

...sed noli modo

No cross, no crown. With that economical maxim the old Methodist preachers summarized their theology. “For I reckon that the sufferings we now endure”, writes Saint Paul, “bear no comparison with the splendor yet unrevealed.” Secular versions of the idea are not difficult to find. “Anything worth having is worth striving for”. On the other hand, we hear that such and such isn’t worth the hassle, or the aggro, or the whatever—suggesting that if such and such were something else, it might be worth it.

I have been led to ponder these ascetic tropes in the course of the recent “debate” about the wisdom of increasing the federal debt ceiling. In particular I was struck by President Obama’s advocacy of a “balanced approach” that involves “shared sacrifice.” To sacrifice means voluntarily to give up something good or desirable with the aim of achieving something better and more desirable, or at least something of necessity on which the very possibility of the good and the desirable may depend. He speaks also of sharing the pain. No pain, no gain. Again the language used to express the view that present unpleasantness is the necessary prerequisite of future bliss has been interesting. We hear of having to “take the plunge” or “take our medicine”. The British Prime Minister, who of course talks Brit-speak, bravely “seized the nettle” of budget reform. One of President Obama’s curious expressions was new to me. He said we had to “eat our peas”. That one doesn’t work for me. There is nothing more delicious than peas, especially when young and not overcooked, and even more especially when served up with a little chopped onion and maybe some shards of fatback. The pea is much to be preferred to the lotus, and we have already done too much national lotus-eating.

As regards the fiscal crisis, I actually do believe in a balanced approach, if by that what is meant is a program that might balance our books. They are very unbalanced at the moment, so unbalanced in my view that the only plausible road to equilibrium necessitates both significant economies (aka “cuts”) in the bankrupting entitlements of Medicare and Social Security and significantly augmented revenues (aka “new taxes”) for the national Treasury.

What makes the achievement of this balanced approach a mere pipe dream is the Augustinianism rampant in Washington. Augustinianism has infected our Congress, and holds the President as a thrall. Yes, I do refer Aurelius Augustinus, alias Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430); but the Augustinianism I have in mind is that of the callow youth, not that of the mature bishop. He was one of the most famous Christian converts in all history, and the history of his conversion the most famous in all literature. Like the Congress, like President Obama, Augustine knew what he had to do, but sought ingenious ways to postpone it.

Young Augustine longed for the God of the Christians, but two obstacles blocked his way: sex and neo-Platonism. That is a dilemma that even across the ages most readers will be able to at least half understand. Augustine fretted a great deal about these matters, and with regard to the sex bit he prayed especially hard. He prayed one of history’s more famous prayers: Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, he implored the Lord, sed noli modo. “Give me chastity and continence—but not yet!” In other words, he chose to temporize by turning the question of his salvation over to a Sex and Neo-Platonism Commission— of course with sex and neo-Platonism “off the table” from the start.

Sex probably is better off the table, actually, and the concept of neo-Platonism on a table is too postmodern for my old mind. I am sure you grasp my point nonetheless. It concerns the fecklessness of our elected officials. Augustine’s actual moment of conversion, when it did come, was dramatic and nearly instantaneous. He walked into a garden with a bible, sat beneath a tree, and heard the sing-song voices of children at play repeating the phrase Tolle, lege; tolle, lege. “Pick it up and read it. Pick it up and read it.” He picked it up and read it. I’d give the same advice to our elected officials. The it could be, among so many other volumes in our grim library of discontents, the national balance sheet, the front page of most world newspapers, the report of the last Budget Commission, or the last poll of public opinion concerning the quality of work done by the Congress. Just tolle,
lege.

The Elusive Primary Source

2011-08-03T01:05:00.000-07:00

The mysterious Count Cagliostro (Houdon it)

“The beginning of wisdom,” said my great teacher, “is the primary source.” He was trying to get us to focus on Chaucer before focusing on what other people had said about Chaucer. This week I am immersed in Cagliostro, and the experience has reminded me once again of the large void between primary and secondary sources: the ambiguous space in which most history is actually written. You may know that Cagliostro was a colorful eighteenth-century character, “an Italian adventurer” and “a gifted conman.” Those phrases I lift from the Chambers Biographical Dictionary, a standard reference source; but similar ones will be found elsewhere in other dictionaries and encyclopedias and, indeed, in almost every account of the man published since 1833, the year in which Thomas Carlyle published what he called a brief “biography of the most perfect scoundrel that in these latter ages has marked the world’s history.”

The only significant primary sources for the life of Cagliostro are the following: (1) various dossiers compiled by the police of Louis XVI; (2) some scabrous articles in the journal Courier de l’Europe for 1786; and (3) reports of reports made by the Inquisition in Rome, justifying throwing the man into the prison from which he would never emerge alive. Now the Paris police would do anything the royal party instructed them to do, and the royal party wanted Cagliostro’s scalp. Practically any number of the Courier de l’Europe, run largely by blackmailers, would make Rupert Murdoch seem like Louisa May Alcott by comparison. And the Holy Inquisition was a far greater iniquity than any it pretended to expose. Hence, one may wish to entertain doubts. Carlyle chose not to, and his brilliant but dubious essay, for want of competition, became a pseudo-primary source for the next century and more.

Primary and secondary sources: DO NOT CONFUSE

That can happen when primary sources are too few, but a surfeit of primary sources may cause other problems for a scholar. When I first joined the Princeton faculty two of my senior colleagues (Carlos Baker and Lawrence Thompson) were engaged in writing the authorized biographies of two major American writers (Hemingway and Frost), for which the copious primary sources to which they were given privileged access taught them more than they wanted to know. They slowly discovered that the men whose brilliant work had attracted their life-long admiration often behaved, in those categories of deportment usually thought of as human decency, like scumbags. Such discoveries did not halt the biographers, but it made their task less pleasant.

In terms of primary sources the historian may perhaps hope, like Goldilocks, for that happy medium between too much and too little. The reason we can have a thousand plausible versions of Jesus and a hundred of William Shakespeare is that although for both men we have excellent primary sources, they are of the sort that give us a workable grid, yet leave it up to us to plot the essential coordinates.

Another difficulty: the sources we use to know about the past have been skewed by historical vagaries of which we are often unaware. Consider for a moment Anglo-Saxon literature. All surviving Old English poetry fits into a set of six octavo volumes, volumes occupying about seven linear inches in my library. With the famous exception of Beowulf and a few much shorter pieces, all of this poetry is very explicitly religious. Most of the poems are biblical paraphrases or versified saints lives. If all we knew about Anglo-Saxon society had to be deduced from its surviving poetry we might justifiably conclude that the place was populated mainly by monks, that most folks visited a church thrice daily, and that what made Merry England most merry was a good psalm-singing competition. But of course we do have other sources, which amply supply the poetically absent quotient of secular rapine, war, ethnic strife, indentured servitude, subsistence agriculture, frequent shipwreck, and various other nasty and brutish aspects of the daily life of our remote forefathers.

Hidden faces of Anglo-Saxon England

The explanation for the documentary “imbalance” is not hard to find. Practically the only people who could read and write were monks. Monks lived in monasteries. Libraries are the places where most books are preserved, and monasteries had the only libraries that have survived even partially. Monastic libraries—just like your library or mine—tended in general to reflect the interests of the people who created them. But it is no easy thing for a manuscript to survive for upward of a thousand years. Beowulf, replete with beer parties, monsters, and dismemberments, somehow survived, though barely. Having by near miracle made it through the Middle Ages and safely into the hands of Renaissance antiquaries, it came within an ace of burning up in a library fire in the eighteenth century.

Think of it this way. Imagine, God forbid, that a thermonuclear firestorm wiped out our entire nation tomorrow. Hundreds of years hence archaeologists sifting through the cinders find some pieces of surviving print: one copy of a supermarket tabloid with the headline “Dead Mum Gives Birth to Child in Coffin,” three Budweiser labels, a Harry Potter novel, twelve Gideon Bibles, a bumper sticker reading “Obama: Change You Can Believe In,” the July, 2002 issue of Penthouse magazine and 112 pristine copies of the 1040 income tax form. How accurate a picture would you then have of American civilization in the early twenty-first century? All too accurate a picture, perhaps, but only because I chose my texts carelessly. I’m sure you get the point.

Grace Abounding to the Least of Bloguistes

2011-07-26T19:17:00.000-07:00

a graceful treasure

Though I have made great strides in reorganizing my library after the seismic upheaval caused by having to leave a large, book-stuffed office of thirty years’ accumulation, I still face the occasional embarrassment of being unable to lay my hands on a book I am sure I own—or owned. There is paradox here. The more obscure the book, the better my chance of finding it immediately. It is the volumes I frequently handle, carry about, read on park benches, or loan to others that are likely to go missing. I have in such manner lost two successive copies of a certain treasured title to which I shall turn in a moment. It reappeared in my life this week through the cooperation of Grace and an eBay auction.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Its gracious reappearance demonstrated a principle that happily haunts my life: the principle of commodious concurrence. For I have been writing this week about Jansenism. You probably don’t want to know, and even if you should you have much better resources than a professorial blog. I could recommend at least two classic works of French literature. If you have a week to spare, you would do well to browse about in the Provincial Letters of Blaise Pascal (1656). If you have a couple of months you might try Sainte-Beuve’s huge Port-Royal from the mid-nineteenth century. If you have five minutes you’ll have to take my word for it that Jansenism (a pejorative term used by its opponents) was a spiritual movement within the Roman Church in seventeenth-century France that, at the doctrinal level, was all about divine grace.

The cemetery at Port-Royal des Champs before its desecration by the Jesuit party

Grace means help, support, comfort, encouragement. Women sometimes carry the personal name Grace, just as others carry the names of the theological virtues—Faith, Hope, or Charity. According to legend, a bishop whose wife was named Grace used to have trouble with the Eucharistic prayer for the whole state of the Church on account of the paragraph beginning “Give grace, O heavenly Father, to all Bishops and other Ministers…” The concept of grace informs some of the all-time greats of religious literature, such as Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and “Amazing Grace”—the hymn for people who don’t know any hymns.

To believe in divine grace does require a belief in a divinity. A surprising number of us still do entertain that belief, but even if you get your help, support, comfort, or encouragement from shrinks, sit-coms, or sauna baths, you can understand the concept of grace. Despite the view famously articulated by A. E. Houseman that “…malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man,” it is my aim this week to advocate poetry as a means of grace.

Poetry As a Means of Grace is the astonishing title of a yet more astonishing book published in 1941 by Charles Grosvenor Osgood (1871-1964), for many years the Holmes Professor of Belles Lettres at Princeton. He had been one of the original preceptors hired by Woodrow Wilson when he instituted his new system of undergraduate education in the first decade of the twentieth century. I never met him. He retired the year after my birth and died the year before I joined the faculty! He was a man of enormous and wide-ranging erudition—“the dean of Princeton humanists,” in President Dodds’s apt phrase. He made many lasting contributions to literary study. Especially famous is the Variorum edition of Spenser, in which he played a major role, and his extraordinarily erudite translation and edition of Boccaccio on Poetry.

When I called Poetry As a Means of Grace “astonishing,” I referred to its content; but the same adjective could be used of it as evidence of the rapidity of social change of the last half century. English professors don’t have titles like that any more. We have titles like Liminality and the Heideggerian Quest in the Fiction of Armand Bol. (This is an imaginary title, used for exemplary purposes. Armand Bol never existed, and some of us heretics have our doubts about liminality and the Heideggerian quest as well.) It is nearly inconceivable that an Ivy League professor would write such a book as Osgood’s today, and flatly impossible that it would be published by prestigious university presses (Princeton and Oxford). For the “humanism” displayed by Osgood is the humanism of Erasmus, Thomas More, Rabelais, or Cervantes, all of whom believed with him that the purpose of literary study was to support “the art of living a good life,” meaning one spiritually informed. He writes, he says, for “all young people who wish to keep themselves articulate and to insure the perennial flow of their springs of spiritual life against the drouth of routine in business or profession.” The path to this goal is the habitual and informed reading of good poets. Here is “job counseling” of a most precious kind, but scarcely to be found, alas, in our academic Offices of Career Services.

Osgood chooses by way of example four great literary figures: Dante, Spenser, Milton, and Samuel Johnson. To each he devotes one lecture (chapter), but he makes it clear that these are merely exemplary. Indeed choosing your “own” poet, one with whom you have a particular and perhaps idiosyncratic rapport, must be done with patience and care. It is the first step to “grace”.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) by Sir Joshua Reynolds

Do not be astonished, incidentally, to find Johnson in the list. He was not primarily a poet, and Osgood hardly touches upon his poetry, justly believing that with a man like Johnson the life is the poem. In such a life malt and Milton were not exclusive. “A tavern chair is the throne of human felicity,” said the great doctor. Meanwhile if among my readership there be anyone who knows what became of either of my two earlier copies, please be in touch.

The Cemetery: Princeton, NJ. The sleep of the gracious

Ripeness Is--Most of It

2011-07-19T17:37:00.000-07:00

Greg Hicks as Lear

Readers of this blog have already “met” our remarkable friends Susan Saltrick and John Meyer with whom we have had such delightful summer experiences along the littoral of the Mediterranean crescent running from Livorno to Barcelona and, on one recent memorable occasion, on a boat between those two places. Susan and Joan were the pilgrims, John and I the motorized support team who would show up at the end, vainly seeking to earn the crown without the inconvenience of first bearing the cross. Well, our adventures continued on Saturday last when they treated us to a delicious brunch at their Manhattan apartment, then treated us to a matinee performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s King Lear at the Park Avenue Armory.

I am always pleased when things I have been saying for years on faith actually turn out to be true in empirical fact. Heraclitus said that you cannot step into the same river twice, and Fleming has been saying that you cannot read the same book twice. I have read King Lear many times, taught it more than once, and remember at least two earlier stage productions. What I saw on Saturday was something entirely new to me.

I am not referring to novel features of David Farr’s production, though some were notable, not to say spectacular. The Armory building, for those who have not visited it, is itself spectacular, accurately described by its promoters as “part palace, part industrial shed”. I learned from my friend John that the palace part—capaciously conceived and sumptuously decorated reception rooms—was the fruit of a collaboration between Stanford White and Louis Comfort Tiffany. The shed part, which has been the venue for nearly every conceivable genre of event and exhibition, including the antiques extravaganza, has for this summer season been turned into a kind of Erector Set version of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater.

a palace...

...and an industrial shed...

...in which to rebuild the Globe Theatre with industrial strength Lego...

Its remarkable engineering allowed us to look down from the highest rung of its heavens, as one might from a helicopter or a mountain peak, at the pitiable carnage below. That mountain might perhaps be Olympus, for as the blinded Gloucester says,

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,
They kill us for their sport. (IV, i, 37-38)

Those are great lines. I had forgotten, indeed, just how many great “quotations” there are in this one play: sharper than the serpent’s tooth, come not between the dragon and his wrath, eater of broken meats, ripeness is all, the rack of this tough world…an anthology nearly endless. But great lines are not necessarily true lines. That was the new thing I saw this time. Neither the play’s tragedy nor its horrors—and one can pretty clearly distinguish between the two—are brought about by the gods.

No, the secondary evils of the play are almost exclusively the work of Edmund, whose very essence embodies the plenitude of illegitimacy once resident in the now archaic word bastard. He does get aid, not to mention comfort, from the two bad daughters, but they are his victims as well. As for the principal evil, it is all of it, every inch, brought about by old King Lear himself. He is stupid. He is foolish. He is vain. He is self-righteous. Indeed, I left the experience with the feeling that there can be few other “tragic heroes” in the dramatic repertory less justified in claiming, as Lear memorably does:

I am a man
More sinn'd against than sinning. (III, ii: 58-59).

Does Lear have even that minimum of grandeur and dignity that would be demanded by any even vaguely Aristotelian sense of tragedy?

Well, yes, when you see this production. But he claims it on the basis of Shakespeare’s language, not on that of his deeds. Lipstick on a pig actually improves the pig considerably. This is, I know, heresy, for which I could be stripped of my English professor epaulettes. But it is the conclusion I reached on Saturday. The reason you cannot step into the same river twice is because the river is always changing. The reason you cannot read the same book twice is because you are always changing.

After seeing the play we sought out the New York Times review by Charles Isherwood so we could know what we were supposed to think. It turned out that the RSC production “can be strongly recommended for hypersensitive souls,” that it was a “competent but immaculately unwrenching production”. I do not know Mr. Isherwood, but I am guessing that he is probably not a foolish fond old man negotiating the Great Generational Shift, nor the father of three adult children. As a matter of fact this is my own first experience of Lear from that particular perspective, and I found it plenty wrenching and the hero maculate as all get out.

"Howl, howl, howl, howl!"

A Political Mess

2011-07-12T18:07:00.000-07:00

I have not written a “political” essay in many months. To begin with, it seems to me that there are already far too many political blogs, and that their ratio of good sense to verbal volume is unpromising. I myself have neither academic expertise in political science nor practical experience in politics. Such developed political ideas as I do have are frequently offensive to my peers. Under these circumstances it seems to me best to honor the classical adage: Cobbler—stick to thy last!

The current mess in Washington is so appalling, however, as to suggest that leaving politics to the politicians is a mere acquiescence in disaster. Do not go gentle into that good night. It is hard to know where to begin. We face some very serious problems, many of them related to a world economy so complex that only fools pretend to understand it entirely. We depend for their solution upon the actions of largely incompetent and partially corrupted legislators, chosen by a largely ignorant electorate who share with them a spiritual attention deficit disorder.

One of our major political parties has spent half a century creating a vast base of dependency which it now proclaims it a sacred duty to protect. The other has managed to reduce the noble concept of Burkean conservatism to a superstitious mantra concerning tax policy, while actually pushing the country into a staggeringly expensive war in Iraq and a huge and wholly unfunded increment to Medicare. But according to the partisan political blogs the one is staunchly “defending ordinary Americans and working families” and the other bravely opposing “job-killing taxes on the wealth creators”. Both are claiming to focus like laser beams on “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.” Is it any surprise that this Congress enjoys job-approval ratings of seventeen percent?

It may not actually be possible to get out of this mess, finally. Nations, no less than their individual citizens, can be subject to powers largely beyond their control, the influences of which they can but exacerbate or attenuate. Certainly we are not going to get out of it swiftly enough to meet the national code of instant gratification. But we are unlikely to get anywhere at all without combining serious reductions in government expenditures with substantial increments in tax revenues. For identifying this “mother of all no-brainers,” David Brooks has been clubbed with the Club for Growth.

Longevity often has the curious side effect of insulating the long-livers from the full intensity of current realities. We have prior spiritual commitments, so to speak. I hope you can believe, however, that there are quite a few folks who know a lot despite the fact that they aren’t even on Face Book. They may know, for instance, that the idea that the New Deal “brought us out” of the Great Depression is pretty hokey. That is an idea I have encountered repeatedly in the web essays of various youthful pundits, who seem to regard the New Deal as a benign model for governmental “stimulus,” such as that in the “Cash for Clunkers” program. I even have a relevant personal anecdote. For a while in 1937 or 1938 my Dad worked for the WPA putting in some railway trestles on the north fork of the White River in Arkansas. His later description of the experience was this: “We pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us.” Many years later I heard the same “joke” quoted as an anti-Soviet witticism emanating from the eastern bloc.

Insofar as some dramatic intervention “brought us out” of the Depression, that intervention was the international disaster called the Second World War. That did indeed rev up the American economy, at the expense of millions of lives lost or blighted, and left us for a time fortuitously unchallenged by the economies of our natural industrial competitors, which were either flattened by our bombs or simply exhausted by a supreme effort. But it also invited the slowly maturing national self indulgence that over six decades has brought us to our present pretty pass.

Are any of my readers old enough to remember the old American work ethic? There is indeed a national “job crisis”. One part of it is this: many of the limited number of jobs that are available, though socially necessary, are ones that “nobody” wants to do. Hence the invasion of the Latino army, concerning which our national hypocrisy daily reaches new heights. If you are a suburban New Jersey householder, you will be predictably faced on a regular basis with the need to remove snow from your sidewalks and driveways, to cut your grass and tidy your gardens, and to engage in various other seasonal chores needed to maintain and preserve your property. If you are an aging householder, or a preoccupied one, chances are that you would be happy on occasion to hire someone to help you with such chores. There was a time in living memory when wholesome looking teen-aged males, often the offspring of friends or neighbors, would appear on one’s doorstep soliciting such work. They were “saving for college,” or trying to get the money together to buy a jalopy, or to rebuild one they already had. I have had no such visitation by a native speaker of the English language in the decades I’ve been living in our current house. I’m not even sure I’ve had a magazine subscription scammer.

A Safe and Sane Fourth

2011-07-05T18:28:00.000-07:00

For the last several years we missed the impressive Town-Gown Fourth of July Fireworks display mounted in our community, and we were on schedule to miss it again. Our fecklessness and indolence bear some responsibility, but so do the unknown civic organizers. One fairly predictable thing about a Fourth of July event, in my opinion, should be that it take place on the Fourth of July. But here the town fathers, most of whom are mothers, have adopted a Precept of Approximation according to which the Second of July will do just as well—in fact, even better. So there we were about nine o’clock on a Saturday night, contemplating the prospective comfort of bed, when several loud boom-boom, ka-boom-boom-boom noises, emanating from the west, rattled the house.

I must pause to say a couple more words about our house. It is in most respects a splendid house, but it has one serious liability: a flat roof. The academic architect who designed it long before our tenancy was apparently dreaming of summers in Marrakesh, or maybe Bristow, California. Flat roofs are not recommended for central Jersey. Quite apart from its intermittent failures, I spend too much time on the roof, sweeping away debris and trying to keep the gutter spouts clear. For this reason there is usually a ladder leaning against it.

"Take me to your ladder. I'll see your leader later."

A second point is this. Until about a year ago there was a huge linden tree that blocked out most of the skyline west of the house, but it blew down in the Tornado of Twenty Ten, missing the house by inches.

As is well known, it is an ill wind that blows no good. Joan, who is quite acute at seeing unlikely connections, intuited a way to combine two deficits—a flat roof and a lost linden—to create an unanticipated asset. “Let’s climb up on the roof and watch the fireworks,” she said. And we did so. The prospect of two septuagenarians with waning eyesight (one of them in his bedroom slippers) clambering in the dark up a ladder to roam around their roof is perhaps not one to make the heart of an insurance adjuster sing. But for the septuagenarians themselves, who after all were the principals, it was a tuneful experience indeed, and one that brought to mind madcap ventures jointly undertaken half a century ago in and about Oxford University.

The view was perfect, like a carefully cropped I-photo that isolates the essentials and discards the distracting periphery. A darkened tree line blocked out all but the upper reaches of the rockets’ ascent and the pyrotechnical bursts themselves. Only as the scintillating fragments were falling did we hear the reports of the explosions that had sent them skyward, followed by faint and muffled oohs and aahs of spectators so unfortunate as not to have their own distant rooftop from which to watch. The effect was, in a pleasing way, rather like that of my misbehaving Samsung 630 television set, from the screen of which a lean and dapper young man silently moves his lips, then purses them emphatically, after which the set says “I’m Alan Cumming, and this is Masterpiece Mystery.” It was an experience that vindicates Saint Augustine’s theory of the primacy of sight in the hierarchy of the senses.

I grew up in a climate of pyrotechnical deprivation. Our idea of a big Fourth of July time down on the farm was to explode a couple of blasting caps with .22 rifle shots. Blasting caps were used (and I assume still are) to make a small explosion sufficient to encourage a huge explosion in a pack of dynamite. The origin of these caps was mysterious. They were generally attributed by my uncle to “a guy I know at the quarry”. If they were the “wrong” kind, they couldn’t be detonated by percussion at all. But the “right” ones did make a hell of a noise.

the Royal Fireworks of 1749 threatened to burn London down

I had heard of cherry bombs and ladyfingers, but I could only fake familiarity with the exotic names of devices sometimes invoked by my classmates. No doubt a comprehensive investigation of these names would yield an interesting study A few years ago, when I was working on some eighteenth-century musical materials, a librarian friend directed me to one of our library’s treasures: the original printed schedule for the Royal Fireworks of 1749, ostensibly celebrating the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, for which Handel wrote his deathless music. The list is an orgy of technical terms deriving, apparently, from the nomenclature of battlefield artillery, already greatly developed by the middle of the eighteenth century. The were no Black Mambas or Whistling Busters, but practically anything else you can buy today on the Tennessee interstates is there.

My first experience of real fireworks was deliciously unreal. It was in the wonderful Hitchcock film To Catch a Thief (1955), which is about upscale criminality on the Riviera. In it there is a memorable scene in which literal and metaphorical fireworks spice up an encounter between Grace Kelly and Cary Grant. Its effect on my adolescent consciousness was to render the national American holiday permanently if subliminally erotic.

in congress assembled

Monasticats

2011-06-28T20:33:00.000-07:00

One of the more complex pleasures of my profession is to have played some role in the education of brilliant undergraduate students who later go on to become famous scholars. If you have ever heard of William of Champeaux—which is at least possible—it is only because he was the teacher of Abelard, of whom you have certainly heard. One of several Abelardian eminences whose reflected glory combats the falling shadows of my senectitude is the provost of Georgetown, James J. O’Donnell. He has appeared once before in this blog, around which we conduct a laconic and intermittent correspondence.

O’Donnell has produced the definitive edition of the Confessions of Saint Augustine, but he is also what you would call a “general reader”. It is he, for example, who introduced me to Chic Sale’s The Specialist, the ne plus ultra in outhouse humor. Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, the “prince of travel writers,” died on June 10. As comment on this sad event, a week or so later Jim forwarded to me one of his favorite Fermorian prose gobbets, a description of a religious liturgy in a two-man Greek Orthodox mini-monastery:

The church, which is scarcely larger than the oratory of a castle, is dedicated to All the Saints. A lowered sanctuary lamp and the tapers that lighted the breviaries of Father Christopher and Bessarion dispelled a little the surrounding shadows. But outside their narrow pools of light, all was dark. I leant in one of the miserere-stalls that lined the small semicircular bay on the right of the chancel. The corresponding apsidal concavity on the left was lost in gloom. The three of us were alone in the church. As Bessarion chanted the office, I attempted to follow the neumes and flexions and quarter-tones in the oriental-sounding monody by the dots and the rise and fall of the slender curves and pothooks in scarlet ink above the text on the taper-lit page. The hair of both the monks, usually twisted into buns and tucked under their headgear, now tumbled in long twists half-way down their backs. From below, the candle-light threw peculiar shadows on the waxen features of Bessarion and sharply defined the deep eyesockets, the fiercely bridged nose and quizzically wrinkled brow of Father Christopher, when, censer in hand, a magnificent colossus in splendid and threadbare vestments, he emerged from the altar. His deep voice groaned the responses to the higher pitch of Bessarion. At a pause in the liturgy, the deacon swung the pyramidal lectern round on its pivot, turned the pages, and began intoning the panegyric of St. Demetrios. Makry the tom cat stalked slowly into the church and up to the rood-screen; the light from the central arch cast his elongated shadow portentously across the flagstones. Nimbly he leapt on the high, mother-of-pearl-inlaid octagonal table supporting the lectern and, curling his tail neatly round his haunches, sat gazing at the page. Without a break in the chanting, Bessarion pushed the raised paw away form the margin and gently stroked the tortoiseshell head as he sang; and slowly the long liturgy unfolded.

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011)

A glorious piece of writing, indeed, a tribute alike to an author’s power and a reader’s taste. I had not read the book from which it comes (Roumeli), and one detail in it captured my special attention: the tortoiseshell cat. That is because among the four-foot shelf of Fleming’s unpublished (because unwritten) books is a study of monks and animals: The Monastic Menagerie.

In it cats would claim an important chapter. The best known is probably the industrial-sized cat who is Saint Jerome’s constant eremitic companion, just as in the secular tradition, and for nearly identical reasons, he is the companion of Androcles. But the most delightful monasticat is surely the humble mouser, Pangur Bán, who crept about the scriptorium of the famous island abbey of Reichenau, in the Bodensee, probably sometime in the eighth or ninth century. In the margins of one of his manuscripts a nameless Irish monk, far from home, wrote in his native vernacular tongue a charming poem about Pangur Bán, whose Irish name means something like “Whitey,” “Snow White”, or rather (with a scriptural allusion to Mark 9:3) “Transfiguration White”.

Bulger Bán and Pangur Bán, alias McCavity, the Mystery Cat

"For he's a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity."

(Irish expatriates appear to be partial to the name “Whitey”, whether for felines or felons.)

Here are its opening lines:

I and Pangur Bán, my cat
'Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night.
Better far than praise of men
'Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.
'Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.
Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur's way:
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net…

You should read the whole poem, which has been rendered into English by many eminent hands, including several well-known Irish poets. I want to recommend this translation of the English medievalist Robin Flower, because he so clearly presents the poem’s actual subject, which is that special mode of scriptural exegesis called by the monks the lectio divina. The lectio divina (“sacred reading”) was to the pleasures of the heart and mind what the Slow Food Movement is to the pleasures of the tongue and gullet. The medieval monks savored their readings in the Bible, which they sometimes compared to the extraction of honey from the comb or marrow from the bone. For they sought what they called the “spiritual sense” of a text, its veiled or allegorical meaning. That is what the old Irish poet meant by capturing a meaning with the net of his thought.

Reichenau today

Our own English poetry was born of the monastic life. Bede tells us as a notable wonder the story of the poet Caedmon, an uneducated agricultural worker in the coeducational monastery at Whitby in Yorkshire. Though illiterate, Caedmon, through divine inspiration, was able to transpose into English verse the Bible stories read to him by the brothers. Bede draws his very traditional monastic simile from the bovines rather than the felines: “And he was able to learn all that he heard, and, keeping it all in mind, just as a clean animal chewing cud, turned it into the sweetest song.”

The word hermit literally means a “desert-dweller,” and the old practitioners of the lectio divina associated themselves metaphorically with the four little critters of the wasteland (Proverbs 30:24) that are “the least upon the earth, yet exceeding wise”: the ant, the grasshopper, the rock-dwelling rabbit, and the lizard (stilio). It is this association that explains the recurrent zoology and entomology of learned medieval and Renaissance pictorial treatments of ascetic themes.

Saint Jerome with friends

Upstate Adventures

2011-06-21T19:23:00.000-07:00

The Falls in the Huyck Nature Preserve, Rensselaerville NY

We have just returned from a nearly magical place called Rensselaerville, near Albany, where my wife had been invited to preach at the bicentennial celebration of the local parish church. As the church is dedicated to the Trinity, and as it was Trinity Sunday, the topic of the sermon naturally had to be that most exalted and mysterious doctrine; and aside from perhaps Saint Augustine and Dorothy Sayers, I doubt that anyone has done a better job. My part in the event consisted entirely in receiving graciously the lavish hospitality afforded us by various fascinating residents of the place.

Trinity Church, Rensselaerville NY, founded 1811

Worthy though it be, however, Rensselaerville will serve this blog post only in an ancillary fashion, providing the excuse for a couple of nice photographs, and acting as an antiphrastic counterpoint to my first experience of Upstate New York, which was singularly bizarre. For Joan has her calling, and I have had mine.

About forty years ago I participated in an academic conference held at the State University of New York at Binghamton, probably a hundred miles west of Rensselaerville. There is at that institution a Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. It is today a kind of living skeleton, but five or six budget-slicing governors ago it was pretty lively. Its comparative prosperity was fostered by a director, a senior scholar in my field, who practiced unconventional economies. He asked me if I could help save the budget a little stress by staying not at a hotel but at his daughter’s apartment, which was not far from the campus. The daughter would return to the parental home for the week-end, and I would be joined at her place by another participating scholar, a friendly acquaintance of mine from the University of Illinois.

Naturally, I agreed. Elaborate three-way communications among Binghamton, Princeton, and Champaign-Urbana took care of driving instructions, the location of a secreted key, and one or two other details. I drove up on a nasty autumn afternoon. By the time I reached Scranton, with fifty miles still to go, the shades of night were falling fast, and snow, which had been threatening all afternoon, began in earnest. So I was glad to get to Binghamton safely, to find the apartment after only negligible misstep, to find the key immediately and, what’s more, to find that it opened the door.

What I did not find was my Illini friend, who never showed. It later turned out that he had been overtaken by the storm and sought shelter in an Interstate motel. But this was in the age before cell phones. So I put the key back in its hiding place, wrote him a note, left the light on in his presumed bedroom, and went to bed in my own. About three in the morning the telephone wakened me. I intended simply to wait it out, but it continued with insistence—I mean twenty rings, maybe thirty.

At last I answered it: “Hullo?”

After the briefest pause, an instantly angry, feral, male voice, in which I seemed to detect chemical additives, shot back: “Donna! Where’s Donna?”

“Uh, Donna’s not here. She…”

“Listen, ---- ----, put Donna on the line, and do it now!” He sounded scary, very scary. Under these circumstances of nearly maximal disorientation I did not acquit myself well. I tried, not very plausibly, to give an account of the situation. My grandfather had an old saw: “When a man argues with a fool, the fool is doing the same thing.” I found myself saying ridiculous things. “Look,” I said. “I’m a speaker.” This fatuity merely gave him an opening for his redneck repartee.

“Oh, yeah? Well, I’m a speaker, too. And I’m speaking to you right now…And I’m telling you I know exactly where that bitch’s place is.” He spoke next about his gun and its caliber—thirty-eight—which he intended to take with him on his speaking tour, the first stop of which was apparently the bitch’s place. The next topic was what he intended to do to me and Donna upon arrival.

He finally got off the line. It was then I discovered that I was alone in the house, that Prof. Illinois was a no-show. That night I slept no further. I reclaimed the key from the icy front porch—for all I knew he was accustomed to finding it there himself—then sat for three hours in the pre-dawn dark watching the dimly lit street through a crevice of Venetian blind. Nothing but wind and waving limbs.

I was not in the greatest form for my speaking role the next morning, but I got through it. As I sat listening to other papers, very few of which reached the standard of my wife on the Trinity, I wrestled with an inner moral dilemma. The matter seemed to me delicate. I didn’t know Donna from Adam—or Eve either, for that matter. I knew Donna’s father only slightly. But I myself was a father—of quite young children, to be sure—and I had to imagine that any father would want to know, and need to know, about the maniac on the phone. So seizing my courage in both hands, I took the distinguished Professor X aside at the afternoon coffee break.

“Uh, Bernie, look…this is very awkward, but I have to tell you about a disturbing thing that happened last night…”

“Yeah? Really? What’s that?”

“Well, there was this phone call…it was for Donna, but of course I answered it. There was a man, maybe drunk, maybe high, but violent-sounding…and…he seemed to have some relationship with Donna, and he…”

My host, looking very puzzled, cut me off with a query: “Donna? Who’s Donna?” His daughter’s name was Susan. I had apparently been terrorized by a seriously wrong number.

Thomas Hardy vs. the Indeterminate Sentence

2011-06-14T17:13:00.000-07:00

I am told that in penological circles no topic is more hotly debated today than that of the indeterminate sentence. Some bad man does some bad thing, and a Judge says: “That’ll be three to seventeen years [or whatever] in the Allegheny Work House [or wherever].” The indeterminacy is supposed to be an encouragement to the felon, so that he might deport himself in such a way as to be more consistent with the smaller rather than the larger number. Of course determinacy might also be an encouragement. In the middle of the eighteenth century a naval court martial condemned Admiral John Byng to death for his supposed cowardice or incompetence at a battle in the Balearic Islands. There were extenuating circumstances, but Voltaire wryly remarked that now and again the British felt they had to hang an admiral in order to encourage the others.

But I must not digress. This post is about indeterminate sentences, and I am against them. That is, Thomas Hardy and I are against them. There is an experience that most readers surely have shared while walking through some populated place, or when crossing with pedestrians walking in the opposite direction. One catches what we call a “snatch” of conversation. Overheard cell phone conversations are also good for this purpose. Sometimes one hears things so extraordinary as to pose a challenge to the imagination. What possible context might lend them coherence?

Once on a street in Rye, Sussex, I encountered two elegant gentlemen, one of whom said to the other: “Was it ormolu? I mean, actually ormolu?” That is all I heard. Here the indeterminacy is fathered by the word “actually”. It is weird enough that anything might be ormolu, but that one would have to attest to its actually being ormolu is just too much. How many things out there are just pretending to be ormolu? Another dilly once overheard was this: “…only solution—get a divorce, or fire the Chinese cook”. I leave that one up to you.

Is it....actually?

Of course a “snatch” of conversation is by definition fragmentary. A sentence is by definition “the expression of a complete thought.” Yet more and more of the prose I encounter in my daily rounds, though ostensibly written in complete sentences, seems strangely indeterminate. Often the problem is one form or another of SDS (the Syntactic Derangement Syndrome), which is now pandemic in editorial offices on both sides of the Altantic. The copybook example of SDS is probably known to you: “Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while riding to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope”. A clever diagnostician will identify the problem here easily enough, and call in the word-surgeons. Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while traveling to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope….Just kidding.

More often, however, the level of incoherence is more comprehensive and hence more baffling. I am usually up and about quite early, some considerable time before the brightening of the eastern sky or the arrival of the New York Times on the carport driveway. At such hours, in my continuing quest for self-improvement, I visit websites claiming to offer news, sometimes even the “latest news”. For the past two or three days I have intentionally avoided American sites, having reached saturation point so far as congressional undergarments are concerned. So this morning I went first to the BBC page. Was I any better off? You be the judge.

The story that greeted me there was summarized in the following sentence: “On Monday, Mr MacMaster, originally from the US state of Georgia but now a student at the University of Edinburgh, said he was sorry for posing as a Syrian lesbian”. What interests me is less the story itself, engaging though it be, than the puzzle presented by the sentence. There is no way to tell what, amidst all the information seemingly contained, the author considers important. Is it Mr. MacMaster’s contrition or his Cracker origins? Would he be equally sorry for posing as a Sudanese lesbian? How about a Syrian bricklayer? Is Monday as significant as its rhetorically emphatic position might suggest?

By chance I happen just now to be reading The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy. Further by chance its opening sentence is superficially similar in its construction to that cited from the BBC news summary. “One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in upper Wessex, on foot.” The big difference is that Thomas Hardy knew how to write a consequential sentence. A reader just knows that every clause in that sentence is stress-bearing. The reader probably also suspects, since it is Hardy, that the child will be dead in no time at all, and the woman soon enough, leaving the man to arrive at his miserable end with Victorian leisure. But Hardy’s is a sentence that makes you want to turn the page, not to send the writer off to writer’s camp for three to seventeen weeks.

Their fates will be cruel, but ever so well written

My First Century of Blogging

2011-06-07T17:07:00.000-07:00

This post witnesses the completion of my first century of blogging. If this claim seems implausible, the problem is probably philological. Cricket fans and readers of Thomas Traherne will have no difficulty, but quite a few other people seem to have forgotten the primary meaning of the word century, which is “a hundred of something”. A hundred years is only one possibility. Long before that it was the hundred centurions making up that division of a Roman legion called a centuria.

A similar fate has befallen decade, “ten of something,” now used almost exclusively to mean ten years. We don’t think that the only thing you can have a dozen of is eggs, do we? But our universal anxiety with time sweeps all before it, including your bloguiste as he sets about writing his one hundredth blog post. For the wheels of Time’s Winged Chariot have been clattering rather than whirring softly since my last effort. For starters, I turned seventy-five on the very day I flew to Europe. Yet more sobering was the news that reached me when after several days I reconnected with my email in Compostela. My Sewanee classmate and long-time friend Dave Evett had died on May 25 at his home in the Boston suburbs. Herein, perhaps, is a topic of sufficient solemnity for the occasion.

David Hal Evett (died 25 May 2011). May the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace.

David was a great man—brilliant, talented, energetic--an athlete, a singer, an actor, a powerful writer. Our careers, personal and professional, had several external parallels. When we first met in the fall of 1954 we were amused by the coincidence that we both came from small towns called Mount Pleasant—one in Michigan, the other in Texas, but both double misnomers. After college Dave went to Dijon on a Fulbright Scholarship, then on to Harvard for his Ph. D. in English and, as it turned out, an equally doctoral spouse, with whom he would raise three highly accomplished children. We almost but not quite overlapped in the English Department at Wisconsin, from which he later moved on to a long and distinguished career at Cleveland State University. He was the author of important studies in the field of Renaissance Literature. In retirement he and Marianne removed to the Boston area, where all three of their children had put down roots. He died peacefully, as I understand it, after a meal at which his whole family was gathered.

Dave was also an excellent poet. In lieu of a Christmas card he would send out each year an original Christmas poem, and we never could regard our seasonal preparations as complete until it arrived. Naturally in my state of disorganization I cannot now lay my hands on the anthology of these poems he prepared for distribution at our fiftieth class reunion a few years past. But I do have one poem of his in my computer—one not entirely inappropriate for this blog century. It is called “Alumni News,” and it responds to the announcement of the death in 2004 of another classmate (called by the poet’s sensitive pseudonym Matthew George Todd), once close friends to us both.

Probably no more lost than most

Gertrude Stein famously called her fast-living expatriate Parisian friends of the 1920s “a lost generation”. But I doubt that her generation was much loster than mine—or perhaps yours, or any other. The sheer number of my bright shining classmates who crashed upon the shoals of life, not a few of them last seen adrift on a sea of alcohol, is appalling. Of them there might seem no more poignant example of sheer waste than that afforded by “M .G. Todd”. Evett’s evocation of the “inheritors of unfulfilled renown”—a famous and tragic phrase from Shelley’s “Adonais”—was hardly hyperbolic, given this man’s talent and potential. Like most good poems, this one tells a story, the outlines of which are sufficiently clear, even without any footnote explication of its enriching details:

ALUMNI NEWS

Matthew George Todd, ’58, of Austin, Texas, died March 11, 2004.

Lean, cool,
with a voice like George Sanders'
and a wry snort of a laugh
and a graduation watch identical to mine.
Riding the Southern on the last leg together,
Nashville to Cowan, Tennessee,
through leads in the senior play,
basketball, Hemingway,
we frisked into cronyhood
like two dogs into a wood.
Bronze hours:
dismayed to find him deadly from the key,
though I was stronger off the boards,
I challenged him at tennis,
and lost there, too;
we both paid homage to Bill Rotten
if the last trump refused to fall.
When the old Dodge balked
an hour north of Knoxville
on the way to some Virginia college weekend
we watched the winter sun strike
through the window of a clean, well-lighted place
the silver bubbles rising through the Bud,
the plywood booth, the green baize; Keats
was more real to us than the bodies of girls, then,
and we were all inheritors
of unfulfilled renown.
Later, he dared auditions and casting calls
off Times Square, the high life
of singles in D.C. played
against a barren federal job,
too much drink and sex,
while I took a safer road
through graduate school and marriage.
After this fraying globe
spun him back to Rose City, Texas,
an epistolary confession
twenty years long
on sheets from yellow legal pads
tracks his battles
with the flesh and the world and the church:
addiction was the Devil,
he knew, and wrote a long, strange book
to prove it that no-one would publish.
When a draft of this sat unread
while I tried to finish a book of my own
the letters stopped. I let it lie.
Can we not think about how he died last month,
leaving me this glum rage
over the slow corrosion
of bronze hours and my failure as a friend,
and about that devilish voice instead?
Three no trump? Double, I say. Snort.
Is there any more beer? [David H. Evett, 2004]

The concluding lines about the obligations of friendship cut to the quick. After twenty years of silence "Todd" had resurfaced in my sphere as well, first with a mad and truculent essay about the Cathars, then with the searing but incoherent manuscript about addiction to which the poem alludes. One didn't know where to begin. I, too, "let it lie". But a couple of years later, around 2000, an academic conference took me to Austin. By a near miracle I tracked "Todd" down by mail, and arranged to meet him for a meal. He had greeted my initiative with something like enthusiasm, but the night before our scheduled meeting he called me at my hotel. He abruptly, rudely, indeed angrily cancelled, then hung up the phone. I never saw him nor heard from him again.

As for David and me, the friendship was continuous if seriously intermittent. In the last decade (of years, I mean) we tried to meet at least once each year, in New York in November, at an annual conclave of the somewhat Trollopian group known as the Guild of Scholars of the Episcopal Church. We had in fact pre-scheduled a private conversation on the topic of "the nature of religious faith" for last November, but I bagged it when I had the chance to go to Paris instead. At the time it seemed to me one of life's easier choices--between talking about religious faith or going to Paris, I mean. Now I am not quite so sure. I'll think about it more during the next century.

The Cumberland Mountains around Sewanee TN

Paean to the Pilgrims

2011-06-01T14:48:00.000-07:00

Joanna Peregrina

It has been facetiously remarked of long-married couples that the partners become so used to putting up with each other through compromise and accommodation that in time they approach near identity even in physical appearance. Approaching my current physical appearance is not a fate I would wish upon most enemies, let alone my life partner, so I was delighted to discover that even after being married for forty-eight years, eleven months, and twenty-five days I could discover an entirely new and unprecedented reason for admiring my wife. As Shakespeare’s Enobarbus says of Cleopatra:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety….
Fortunately, the context in which I recalled the lines was much more propitious than that in which Shakespeare had placed them in his play. It was last Friday, about 11:15 in the morning (local time) near the entrance to the south transept of the medieval cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain. In a miracle nearly as astounding as any of those performed of old by the ferocious apostle himself, we actually successfully met up as planned with our pilgrims—two moving needles in a large and chaotic moving haystack of ambulatory humanity. Though the calculation is not yet absolutely final, Joan and her friend Susan had walked just under a thousand miles to get there.

Susan & Joan / Compostela 27 v 2011 What a feat! Also, what feet!

Five years ago, Joan’s friend and fellow Dante student Susan—twenty years Joan’s junior--was facing her fiftieth birthday. She suggested that a good way to mark the event would be to walk upwards of two thousand kilometers through southern France and northern Spain. You or I might think of a less strenuous way to be festive, but as the old saying goes, Different strides for different brides.

There were literally hundreds of pilgrimage sites in medieval Europe, but the three greatest were Jerusalem, Rome, and Compostela, the legendary home of the relics of Saint James “the Greater”, the brother of Jesus. I use the word "legendary" with some temerity, as Spaniards of the Middle Ages and Renaissance entertained no doubts whatsoever. Saint James, Santiago (i.e. San Yago or San Diego), became their national patron saint, and in his martial role as Matamoros (“the Moor-slayer”) an emblem of their ferocious ethnic cleansing in the fifteenth century and their imperial expansion in the sixteenth.

Any reader of Chaucer will know that medieval pilgrims undertook their travels out of many motives; but a long pilgrimage was always a serious business. The original meaning of the English word "travel" is preserved in the French travail—work—a form preserved in our tongue only for the agonies of childbirth. Travel was in fact so difficult, dangerous, and painful that it was appropriately undertaken as expiation for serious crimes. Canon law required those preparing for a “major” pilgrimage to leave behind their properly executed wills. The chances that they would die en route were significant.

The Compostela pilgrimage drew Christians from all parts of Europe, and it has left its memorial traces in many surprising places. (The rue Saint-Jacques in the Latin quarter of Paris, for example, takes its name from its original destination.) The scallop-shell emblem, originally an attribute of the saint himself, has become the more or less universal emblem of pilgrimage. “How should I your true love know from another one?” sings Ophelia in Hamlet. “By his cockle hat and staff, And his sandal shoon.” In recent years, the Compostela pilgrimage has enjoyed a remarkable rebirth of popularity. The percentage of seriously “religious” pilgrims is not large, but probably not proportionately much different from in Chaucer’s day—about three twenty-ninths in my calculation. There are also many young outdoors types, and lots of life transitions and inner searches. The mode of a few would appear, perhaps, to be that of the Wife of Bath: better described as cruising than journeying. Of course the theory of medieval asceticism always linked the voluntary embrace of self-abnegation with material ministration to a needy world. Joan and Susan called their undertaking "a pilgrimage with a purpose"--one external part of which was to raise a significant amount of money in aid of an imaginative international charity--the Worldwide Orphans Foundation.

The Apostle's Reliquary

But what an adventure! What an engine of companionship! Chaucer’s pilgrims started out in a pretty fancy hotel where they were “esed atte beste.” Joan and Susan, like the huge numbers of today’s Compostela pilgrims, had to content themselves with modest commercial or monastic hostels. So far as I can tell the most typical activity of pilgrims is the nightly hand-washing of intimate items of apparel! You can trace the four stages of our pilgrims’ progress on the map below.

Their plan evolved. Originally, they had plotted the pilgrimage for three stages in three succeeding years. The demands of what we laughingly call "real life," however, soon showed that they could not devote more than seventeen or eighteen days of walking to a stage. This meant it would require four stages. Though circumstances made them miss one year, they kept to their revised design: four stages of almost 250 miles each, averaging fifteen miles of serious hiking a day. Stage 1: from Le Puy en Velay in south-central France to the old medieval city of Cahors. Stage 2: Cahors to Saint-Jean Pied de Port, the traditional crossing place across the Pyrenees into Spain. Stage 3: Saint-Jean to Sahagún between Burgos and León. Stage 4: Sahagún to Compostela. The other pilgrim spouse (also a John) and I have thought of ourselves as a kind of technical “support team”—sort of like the guys who used to accompany Channel-swimmers in a motor launch, ever ready to beat off shark attacks. Pilgrimage turns out to be much easier if aided by the Wizard of Avis. But no cross, no crown. We didn’t get a diploma, the way the ladies did.

The purpose of this blog post is to salute my remarkable wife on a remarkable accomplishment. To gain their certification, pilgrims must register a few vital statistics with the peregrine officials. Joan did note that she was the sole septuagenarian on the large ledger sheet she signed. I doubt there were many on other pages either.
We know that life is a pilgrimage, and so also no doubt is marriage. There are other metaphors as well. We stumbled upon one quite by accident. We spent a most pleasant day in Compostela, before moving on to Madrid for some tapas and Velasquez, and thence back home. Old Compostela has many attractions, quite apart from Santiago and his golden shrines, and we hope one day to return. In the old Dominican monastery, now the regional museum of Galicia, there is a fascinating triplex helicoidal staircase, the work of the seventeenth-century Compostelan architect Domingo Antonio de Andrade. Three soaring sets of steps, each seemingly unsupported and each interlacing but never touching its fellows, rise from the old cloister level to the several stories of the old monastic buildings.

We started up separate flights and for a while circled each other, now coming closer, now drifting away. But by chance the flight I had chosen stopped one floor short of the top, and I was left looking up in admiration at my spouse’s greater ascension. Looking up, perhaps, as the poet Dante once did—
              E quasi peregrin, che si ricrea
              nel tempio del suo voto riguardando,
              e spera già ridir com’ ello stea…(Par. xxxi, 43-45)
And, as a pilgrim, in the temple of his vow / content within himself, looks lovingly about / and expects to tell his tale when he gets home.