Camões--and a Little Chaucer--at Harvard

   

 

 

    

 Watch out, Geoff.  I've got my eye on you.

 

 If I declare our visit to the Camões Conference at Harvard a great success—and I do—the credit for our personal comfort goes primarily to Leah and Brian, our generous hosts, who with what appeared to be ease balanced busy professional careers and the demands of two adorable children with the care and feeding of a couple of octogenarians.  On the academic side, on the Harvard campus, the treatment was likewise most welcoming, and the intellectual feast quite rich.  Many of the principal scholars in this field, including the Portuguese ones, were there; others made presentations via Zoom.  Rita Marnoto came from the University of Coimbra, the ancient academy at which Camões himself must have acquired some large part of his enormous erudition.  It is rather as though Davy Crocket had picked up a Yale doctorate on his way to the Alamo.  She gave the introductory talk, a bibliographical tour de force concerning the poem’s first edition(s) of 1572.  Around the edges there were pleasant group meals full of friendly and informative talk; Joan sneaked off for half a day at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and offered a report on some of the marvels viewed.

My belief concerning the European Renaissance, a belief by no means widely accepted by my colleagues, is that in most essentials it continued in the philosophical and theological traces of high medieval culture.  Historians are more interested in change than in stasis, and there of course appeared in the sixteenth century major stylistic changes and intellectual innovations for us to talk about.  My talk, indeed, in part concerned possible “medieval” relationships between Camões and Dante.  Such relevance as the digressive comments about the Middle Ages in this paragraph might possibly have  concern my welcome of two unexpected fourteenth-century Chaucerian interventions into our sixteenth-century Camonian event.

At the Houghton Library, where some of Harvard’s fabulous bibliographic treasures are stored, experts had mounted a small collection of first and other editions of the Lusiads.  The Harvard library is among the richest in the world in this as in so many other subjects.  But there is hanging in an elegant room not far from the exhibition space what is probably the most famous, and possibly authentic , portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer.  I had seen a hundred reproductions of it, but never it.  The Librarian of the Houghton, knowing that I had taught Chaucer for many years, took me aside for an unscheduled private viewing.  It was a very memorable kindness.

                         The Houghton Rare Book Library, Harvard University

A second way the Middle Ages intruded into our very Renaissance conference was via the front page of the New York Times, which reported that two major Chaucer experts had discovered new evidence concerning a mysterious episode in the poet’s life.  Though Chaucer’s life records, when sufficiently spread out and annotated, occupy a pretty thick book, there is a great deal we do not know about him, including practically anything that might shed light upon his “personality”.  One intriguing document, however, has garnered a great deal of attention and much speculation.  It is a legal affidavit attesting that a woman named Cecily Champagne absolves Chaucer of any charge of raptus against him.  This document has sometimes been used by feminist scholars and others to impute patriarchalism, misogyny, and other unpleasant medieval attitudes to the father of English poetry.  What is new in the Chaucer scholars’ discovery is that Cecily and Geoffrey were allied in a legal action denying the charge.  Any scrap of evidence about Chaucer is a major discovery, and the discoverers of this one merit high praise.  But there is no particular illumination of Chaucer’s character in it.  Anybody with access to the Du Cange dictionary of medieval Latin would know that it is quite unlikely that raptus in the context of the original document means forcible sexual possession.  Hardly more likely does it mean that he secretly married her.  No form of “kidnapping” or “false imprisonment” or other coercion is likely.  Secondly, and without the slightest ambiguity, what the document says is that Chaucer did not commit raptus, whatever raptus means.  Only in places like Park Slope has inveigling away somebody’s cleaning lady with an offer she cannot refuse risen to the level of a crime.  Somewhat strangely, one of the discoverers of the supplementary document was quick to add that nothing in this episode undermines certain previous scholarship concerning it.  This is a little like saying that nothing in Copernicus undermines anything in Ptolemy.  That is one of the current stylistic differences between scholarship in the humanities and scholarship in the natural sciences in America.  The study of past ages can be very rewarding and indeed instructive.  But the past is a series of unique ages, each with its own inherited cultural patterns each with at least some cultural innovations.  It cannot be true that “to understand everything is to pardon everything.”  Still it does little to divvy up the past into convenient but inadequate categories for flagellation among our own current moral and political certainties, many of which would seem novel if even comprehensible to our not too distant ancestors.

Traveling by train worked out very well.  It took about five hours.  Flying would not have required less, though it would have involved a great deal more difficult walking and the general hassle of security lines.  There are far worse fates than to sit in a comfortable, roomy seat with a good book for a few hours. 

Still I was once again struck, as I so often am, by the disparities between the private and the public in our country.  Everything I saw on the Harvard campus was elegant, functional, imposing, inviting.  It was clean.  It was tidy.  You might never guess that the institution’s endowment is less than sixty billion dollars.  Boston South rail station, where we arrived and whence we departed, is a civic disgrace.  The area from which the trains arrive and from which they depart has the air of a long-abandoned steel mill.  The vibe of the interior waiting room, where I was able to buy a pint bottle of soda water for $3.84, is decayed inelegance.  And though the Amtrak train did get us to Trenton, and on time… How are you going to keep them down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?  The distance between Marseilles and Paris is greater than that from Trenton to Boston.  The TGV (very fast train) covers the distance in three hours and twenty-seven minutes, and you can safely place your bottle of soda water on the little-fold down table without fear that it will be bounced into your lap within the first quarter mile.  Of course my weekend thoughts were full of other cities: Lisbon on the Tagus River, and others I shall never see, Mombasa, Malinde, Goa.  Forget the train stations for the moment.   In this country I have actually been paid good money to read, teach, love, talk, and argue about old books that I love with a never-failing succession of inspiring young people.  And hang out at Camões conferences for down time.  What a privilege.  What an honor!

April Poets

We have entered April, a month of poetic significances, but also of deceptions.  “April is the cruelest month,” writes Eliot in that part of his poem called “The Burial of the Dead.”   April comes “breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”   It is in the mix of memory and desire, or at any rate in the imperfect ratio between them, that the danger of deception lies.  The last two days of March here were warm and sunny.  Some of the early daffodils were already out, but now they came on in a riot.   And the forsythia, until now a mere golden-green haze, popped overnight into full gold.  “The flowers have appeared in our land, the time of pruning has come” says the singer of the Song of Songs.   “The voice of the turtle is heard in our land.” That’s the King James Version, of course, where the “turtle” is Tudor English for the turtle dove. At the Fleming homestead, however, it was real turtles, two of them, Hector and Chloë, who were suckered into thinking that spring was really here.  They are not much for voice, actually, but they waddled out of their hibernation in our enclosed atrium to sniff the air and have a paddle in the pool.  As I have done no serious yard work for months, the atrium is a real mess; but it was still a jolly scene, turtles strutting in the sunshine.  Then, most cruelly indeed, at nightfall on Sunday, the temperature fell again to freezing; April Fool’s day broke bright but chill.  The turtles had returned to the drawing board stage of spring under their hibernatory blankets of dead leaves.

The greatest of April poems in English—to which Eliot obviously alludes--is undoubtedly the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer with its famous first sentence: “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote/The droghte of March has perced to the roote…”   As I used to make my living teaching this poem, its rhetorically gaudy opening has for me a special significance.  It is the one bit of Middle English known to the general public; most educated people of sixty winters or more learned it in high school, back in the days when people used to learn things there, and many can still quote a large portion of it.  Can and do.  It’s quite an opening line: nine couplets and a hundred and twenty words long.  Despite the fact that all it “says” is that people want to go on pilgrimage in April, a surprising amount happens in it, actually, and rather quickly.  Some of my fellow Chaucerians want to deny that Chaucer is an allegorist.  I am not quite sure what they make of “the drought of March.”  Just what March drought is that? I ask.  Chaucer is either an allegorist or a really lousy meteorologist.  The latest statistics I have are from 2018.  In February of that year 64.3 millimeters of rain fell on London, in April 86.3.  In March there were 104.4 millimeters.  Just saying.

There are other poetic months, especially May and June.  The first poem I can remember being made to memorize in school was by the American poet James Russell Lowell.  I don’t think it actually has a title, but our reader called it “June Day.” Lowell is pretty obscure these days, probably better known (if at all) as an abolitionist than as a bard.  He was big in the mid-nineteenth century, but I’m not sure that even I own his works.  To get the text I sought I had to turn to the Internet, where the subject of his poem is defined as “the weather”.  Just like Chaucer, I guess.  It begins by asking the question, “What is so rare as a day in June?”  As our summer vacation began in that month, it was a question some of us could get behind.  But our teacher had very interesting things to say about it.  She told us that the words in poetry often need a little more thought than “ordinary” words may call for. For example, what about the word rare in the first line? she asked.   What rare ordinarily meant was “seldom occurring” but it must mean something else here.  Otherwise the answer to the question, “What is so rare as a day in June?” would be a day in April, September, or November—other months of thirty days.  I’m still pondering the ingenuity of that one, meaning that she had achieved the teacher’s higher goal—getting a student to think, rather than simply telling him what to think.  Then there was the cook-out at which the host asked his friend, Will Shakespeare, how he liked his steak.  O rare Ben Jonson.   I also had to think a little about the third line (Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune), since the meaning of try was not the ordinary one and there was this rather fancy if it be, a form of verbal contingency I could recognize and was happy now to be able to name as “subjunctive”.

One special function of the subjunctive becomes increasingly important with advancing age, and that is the “condition contrary to fact”.  If I were you, blah blah blah.  If all were as it should be, one swallow would a summer make.  At the very least, two turtles would make a spring.

Groping: A Brief Literary History

"Adam catched Eve by the Furbelow"
traditional English folk catch

Can a medievalist possibly have a special take on the latest from Donald Trump?  After all, the locker room must be a comparatively recent architectural development.  The Greek palestra was something altogether different, and “palestra talk” was probably mainly devoted to speculation concerning the ordering of the cardinal virtues or the metempsychosis of material individuality and stuff like that.  Nevertheless since there is a literary history of almost everything, there must be a literary history of sexual groping.  It’s a hard assignment, but somebody has to undertake it.

            One might be tempted to suggest that Mr. Trump is a Rabelaisian figure. But though he achieves the requisite grossness, he lacks the cordiality of Grandgousier, the savoir-faire of Pantagruel, and the erudition of Gargantua.  As painful as it is for me to admit it, he is much more a Chaucerian character:

                        A Donald was there in that compagnyë

                        Whose speech was aldermost of harlotryë.

                        He wolde restore the greatness of the lande,

                        With bluster, insult, and a gropynge hande.

That’s not really Chaucer, of course, but the following is.  In the transcendentally brilliant “Miller’s Tale” there are two characters who have perfected Trumpian techniques.  The first is the Oxford student “hende” (clever) Nicholas who seizes the opportunity of his aged landlord’s temporary absence to make the following move on Alisoun, his winsome young landlady:

                        As clerkes ben ful subtile and ful queynte;

                        And prively he caught hire by the queynte,

                        And seyde, “Ywis, but if ich have my wille,

                        For deerne love of thee, lemman, I spille.”

The repeated word queynte is obviously a quibble.  In the first line it is an adjective meaning something like “inventive”.  In the second it is a vulgar noun, still in common use in a slightly different form, for the female private part—thus justifying a pun on “prively”—that throughout history has also been denoted by the linguistically challenged with a select menagerie of small, furry animals, including rabbits, squirrels, beavers, and pussy-cats.  It is important to realize that Chaucer is being satirical, and that the object of his satire is hende Nicholas, whose actual subtlety approximates that of a battering ram or of the Black Death.  Chaucer also knows that nobody in history has ever actually died (spilled) from sexual continence, frustrating though it may be, and that Nicholas’s hyperbolic concerns on that score could be resolved with a small hair-shirt or perhaps even just a cold bath.

            Quite apart from the hapless old husband, Nicholas has a competitor.  A second character is chasing the same young wife, and that is the dandy Absalon—like the biblical character from whom he takes his name, a pretty boy with long blond hair.  His ambitions to “score” are somewhat more modest than are those of Nicholas:

                        To Alison now wol I tellen al

                        My love-longing, for yet I shal nat mysse

                        That at the leeste wey I shal hir kisse.

                        Som maner confort shal I have, parfay.

                        My mouth hath icched al this longe day;

                        That is a signe of kissing atte leeste.

Now one of the more remarkable passages on the recently published “Trump tape” involves oral hygiene.  Mr. Trump is just about to get off a bus to be greeted by a young woman he has never before in his life met but who has already been sufficiently ogled from the bus window by Trump’s pandering sidekick, Mr. Bush, to have been declared officially “hot as shit!”  Now you or I might find some ambiguity or even restraint in enthusiasm in the phrase “hot as shit!” but it only sends Mr. Trump to his travelling medicine chest.   “I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her,” he tells Bush.  “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss.”

Returning to the fourteenth century we find the fop Absolom preparing for his hot date in a manner somewhat similar.

…hym arraieth gay, at point-devys.  [all dolled up]

But first he cheweth greyn and lycorys,

To smellen sweete, er he hadde kembed his heer.

Under his tongue a trewe-love he beer,

For therby wende he to ben gracious. 

Gracious (pronounced grahs-i-OUS) preparing to rhyme in the next line with the word house (pronounced as it still is in Tidewater Virginia) is a marvelously ambivalent adjective that can refer either to a deep moral virtue or a flimsy and superficial affectation of “class”.  The “greyn” mentioned is cardamom seed, or “organic” Tic-Tacs. 

Should there still be anyone in the world who has not read the “Miller’s Tale,” it is too delightful by far to have me ruin it with a plot summary.  It is a beautifully plotted gem in which the high comedy begins where the dirty jokes end, yet so transparently moralistic as to be called “Chaucer’s Measure for Measure.”  Suffice it to say that the bad guys get exactly what they deserve--and in a way that may have vindicated Billy Bush's odd index of female pulchritude.  Oh that life might imitate art!