Academic Vintage

                                                                     Cassiciacum

            In the year 386 the young Augustine rusticated for an extended period with various friends and family members at a large country house at Cassiciacum, a bit north of Milan.  There he spent a good deal of time praying, reading, writing and discussing books and their ideas, often al fresco, walking along the field paths or seated amid the shade of the vineyards.  This was one of the more consequential vacations in western cultural history.  I can’t go into all that now, but I can confirm the reality of literary seminars conducted in vineyards—a feature of the story I had been inclined to regard as poetic license, along with his sitting under a fig tree to read the Epistle to the Romans—because I just participated in one.

 

            On Saturday last, chauffeured by two good friends from New York, we made our way to the Unionville Vineyards in Ringoes, N.J., where the son and daughter of our recently departed friend and mentor, the great Dante scholar Robert Hollander, had arranged a Dante seminar in memory of their father.  There were I suppose about twenty-five of us, some family members, but mainly old students of the maestro and alumni of his own legendary summer seminars taught for many years in a Tuscan castle.  Our leader was Dr. Frank Ordiway, one of his brilliant students of the 1980s, and a great expert on medieval Italian writers and the Latin classics.

 

                                                      Unionville NJ

 

            The Divine Comedy is a long poem (about 14,000 lines) divided into three long sections, one devoted to each of the “three kingdoms” of the imagined afterlife—Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Heaven (Paradiso).  These long parts are called in Italian cantiche (singular, cantica.)  Each cantica is subdivided into smaller units called cantos, of which there are a hundred in the whole poem—thirty-three in each of the two latter cantiche, and thirty-four in the Inferno, with the very first canto acting as a kind of introduction to the whole poem.  As you can see, a canto’s average length is about 140 lines.  There is a vast body of secondary criticism devoted to Dante, especially in the form of essays that are meditations upon or explications of one of the hundred individual cantos.  Frank chose this mode; the particular canto of his choice was the thirtieth of the Purgatorio.  We began in the Hollander fashion with a viva voce reading of the whole canto, both in Italian and in the English translation.  The Italian reader, Jennifer Borghi, who holds joint American and Italian citizenship and has lived for years in Italy, is an opera singer to boot; the English reader was Katherine Charles, an English professor at Washington College.  The high level of the bilingual elocution was a harbinger of Dr. Ordiway’s presentation and the student discussion it stimulated. 

 

            In my experience people are likely to make one of two mistakes in reading Dante.  The first is to assume that you can simply sit down and read his poem as you would a newspaper op ed or a detective novel.  You can’t, at least not with pleasure and comprehension.  The second is so to quail before the “otherness” of the poem--with its elaborate and perhaps fantastic structure, its huge and promiscuous catalogue of historical, biblical, and mythological personages, its relentless literary allusions, its obscure historical references, and the strangeness of its religious ideas—as to give up in despair.  It was Mark Twain who defined a great book as “a book everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” This is another way of saying that good reading, however pleasurable, sometimes involves real work.  I am ready to guarantee that you really do want to read this poem—but you could probably use some help.

 

            Dante certainly needed lots of help himself.  I refer to Dante the literary character, the first-person narrator of the poem, a man lost in a dark wood, up the creek sans paddle, as the story begins.  Fortunately three heavenly ladies, aware of his situation, conspire to rescue him.  What he needs first of all is good guidance—moral and literary—and so a guide is enlisted.  Who could be more qualified to lead a befuddled Florentine through a Christian epic than Virgil, the greatest poet in the pagan Latin literary tradition?  Well, lots of people, you might think, but you have to get used to surprises in this poem.  By historical misfortune, Virgil himself lived “in the time of the false and lying gods”.  Tough luck.  He is eternally doomed to the Underworld, suburban Hell, so to speak, Hell’s high-rent district, a place without the more sensational torture chambers, but also entirely without hope.  Yet he can guide another toward a goal that he himself could not achieve.

 

 

            There is a difference between leading toward and leading to, a difference dramatized in the canto carefully chosen by Ordiway for our discussion.  Virgil apparently can get Dante no further than 62.5% of the way toward the Beatific Vision, by my reckoning.  In the thirtieth canto of the Purgatorio Virgil abruptly disappears, and his A-Team replacement, a heavenly lady named Beatrice, takes over.  It is hard for a reader not to find cruelty in this passage.  By this point in the poem Virgil has saved Dante’s bacon more times than a reader can remember.  He has taught, guided, comforted, encouraged and literally carried him through intellectual and physical terrors nearly impossible for us to grasp.  Virgil now simply vanishes from the poem.  Dante is given all of six lines to express his distress—a distress for which he is immediately reprimanded by his new and superior guide.  Onward and upward!  Ultreia!

 

        So there we were, seated in a vineyard in a wide circle of folding chairs, thinking and talking about all this.  In speaking of the suddenly absent Virgil, Dante the pilgrim had called him “the sweetest of fathers.”  We were gathered at event convened by a son and a daughter to memorialize their distinguished father.  In Germany, where they virtually invented the modern Ph. D. degree, scholars reverently referred to their doctoral supervisors as “Doctorväter,” doctor-fathers.*  I have heard the leader of our seminar use that term of his old teacher, as I myself have used it of mine.  Analogies are comparisons in which some elements are alike and some unalike; but I believe all of us there grasped the particular poignancy of an extraordinary passage of poetry that invoked at once the sadness of irreparable loss and the promise of continuing vitality offered by great poets and their great interpreters for generations yet unborn.  All of us gathered there in that grassy circle were aware that we had had to say goodbye to a trusted guide and mentor.  But no more than Dante himself had he left us comfortless.  There was a whole warehouse of happy memories; and we were after all reading our text from the bilingual text of the Divine Comedy "in a verse translation by Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander.”  It was a considerable dantisa of the seventeenth century, John Milton, who perhaps said it best.  “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

 

 

 

*In the contemporary scene the term should be recognized as parental rather than exclusively paternal.  There are of course  doctor-mothers, one of the most notable being Beatrice, Virgil’s supererogator.  On that one, Dante was approximately seven hundred years ahead of the Pope.  

 

 

Robert Hollander

 

 

 

            Robert Hollander, the eminent Dante scholar, died about a week ago at the age of eighty-seven.  For more than a decade he had faced with great courage a series of daunting medical challenges.  His last months were spent living with his son’s family in Hawaii, and at the very end, comforted with familial love, he departed in repose and peace.  I call him the Dante scholar, and that is certainly accurate enough, though wholly insufficient.  With equal justice I could call him one of Princeton’s legendary scholar-teachers, one of America’s national leaders in the humanities, memorable conversationalist, amiable bon vivant, admirable husband and father in an impressive family.

           

            Obituaries now in preparation will document Bob’s extraordinary contributions to the study of medieval Italian literature.  They will include rich bibliographies and an impressive list of honors, prizes, and awards.  I may well have some part in writing one of them.  But the category on which I feel most moved to speak in this venue is something quite other: Hollander as friend.  We were friends, close friends, for fifty years.  We were also colleagues, collaborators, and occasional co-conspirators.  There is no greater trial of advancing age than the capricious but inexorable disappearance of old associates.  So many dear old companions of the way are gone, and I have now lost the closest of them all.  Yet I had had some insulation from the bad news, having experienced its premonition two years ago in another devastating blow.  That was when Bob’s wife Jean died.  Bob had himself long been seriously disabled, and he and his children decided that he would leave New Jersey to live with them in the West, alternating between households in Alaska and Hawaii.  Travel arrangements had already been made when a group of family and friends gathered, in what was also a farewell to their lovely house in the Hopewell countryside,  for a mellow meeting in Jean’s memory.  It was a lovely event, if one doubly bittersweet; for we recognized at the time the probable finality of the goodbyes.

 

            Cicero famously defined friendship as “a complete identity of feeling about all things in heaven and earth: an identity which is strengthened by mutual goodwill and affection.”  In my opinion that better defines a cult or a crush than a friendship, but it includes some of the right elements.  Our friendship was certainly based in shared common interest, respect and  affection; but it was also one long, continuing, and movable debate about fundamental aspects of medieval literary aesthetics.  Then, again, even I can recognize that if the beef is about “fundamental aspects of medieval literary aesthetics,” it may not actually be life-threatening.

 

            Our friendship mainly played out, naturally, in our shared professional arena of Princeton University; but many of its most memorable moments occurred far from its campus.  Years ago, the university owned a magnificent white elephant of a vacation “cottage” of robber-baronial dimensions on a Maine island.  Before the Administration got rid of it in a spasm of defeudalization, the Dean of the Faculty used to run an annual lottery that allowed a few interested professors to spend a week or two of the summer in this blissful place.  One year very early on the Hollanders won a spot and invited us to join them.  That was the beginning of periodic social interchanges for the next four decades, and the premonition of marvelous Italian adventures yet to come.

 

            Every university has certain famous courses, and among the most famous at Princeton has been the undergraduate Dante course as established by Hollander.  As notoriously demanding as notoriously rewarding, the course aspired, as Milton’s Paradise Lost had done, to a “fit audience if few.”  So each year the course attracted a few of the institution’s most brilliant students, and thus, over time, developed one of its more intellectually adventurous alumni subgroups.  The annual Class Reunions are a huge deal in this institution, and at some point the burgeoning body of Princeton dantisti—Hollander himself being a member of the Class of 1955—decided that the Purgatorio was preferable to blow-pong as a Reunion activity.  Thus the “Dante Reunion” made its intellectual intrusion into a traditionally saturnalian weekend.  Still later certain alumni, perhaps having grown somewhat thicker of wallet and possibly of girth, had a real brainwave: how about a week-long summer Dante Reunion seminar in some nice, sunny place, for example a trecento castle in Tuscany?  This fabulous place is near Certaldo, home town of Boccaccio; and it was known among the elect simply as “Il Castello.”  There Bob conducted alumni seminars.  As a teacher he was not flamboyant, yet he was nearly magical.  Teaching really difficult materials at the undergraduate level is a special art.  His forte was such teaching.  Italian Studies are not prominent in America, and he had few graduate students.  Fortunately one of those few, the brilliant and charismatic Simone Marchesi, today continues the distinguished tradition of Italian medievalism at Princeton.  Around the millennium I was lucky enough to be included as an ancillary spear-bearer in several of the Castello summer seminars.  Our experiences there remain, and will continue to remain, among the happiest we have ever had.  Most people who read Dante once return to read him again, and then probably yet again.  I certainly do, and as I do I will always remember Bob sitting at the head of a huge mahogany table surrounded by eager students of several generations.  It was through the Castello seminars that Joan and I first met some of our dearest friends.

 

 

 Jean and Bob Hollander in a photo publicizing their three-volume bilingual edition of the of the Divine Comedy, a superb text and mini-encyclopedia of the poem's scholarship

  

            Though I am eschewing any serious discussion of Bob’s copious publications, which would require a book chapter rather than a few blog paragraphs, I do have to make one exception.  Walking on Dante (1974), one of his tomes perhaps lesser known in the scholarly world, is known intimately to me.  That is because I hand-set the type for it, printed it, and bound it.  This book, rather this beautiful book—if I say so myself—is a collection of twenty-two of Bob’s poems, most of them previously unpublished.  Both Bob and Jean were serious poets, a fact that contributes uniquely to the excellence of their highly praised Dante translation.  Jean, indeed, published several volumes of her poetry, and for many years taught courses in poetry writing.  She left behind an admiring alumni body of her own in the Princeton area.

 

            I had only the smallest role in selecting the poems to be included in Walking on Dante.  There is a certain sprightliness to a few of them, as might be suggested by the flagrant musical pun in the title; but a quite serious one for which I’d like to claim some credit for its having been included is called “L’Annunziazione”.  I might describe the poem’s subject as the Italian character.  It reminds me rather of Auden’s famous “Musée des Beaux Arts”, as it is a poet’s reflection inspired by his viewing a painting.  In this instance it was a traditional religious painting by the fifteenth-century Italian artist Marco Palmezzano.   I am no expert on Palmezzano, who produced more than one “Annunciation,” but the painting Bob had in mind must surely be that most often identified as “Annunciation with seascape,” in the Vatican Museums.  Not that it actually matters for the meaning of the painting or that of the poem.  “Palmezzano understood / How things should be announced, /  From bodiless spirit to spiritless flesh;/ And so the two become / Embodied inspirited one.”  Any painting or poem about the Annunciation necessarily reenacts its theological subject even as it describes it: the subject of Incarnation, that is, the word made flesh.  Bob was an agnostic, not a religious believer; but he tolerated believers like me.  Indeed he knew more Catholic theology than many a seminary professor.  Dante, whose aesthetics are fundamentally grounded in an incarnational vision, demands no less of his most serious students.  As a dantista I am myself and will remain an amateur—a fairly knowledgeable one, I hope, but still an amateur.  Like Dante the pilgrim himself I am dependent upon good guides.  How lucky I have been to find one not merely in the pages of books but in the incarnation of a sustaining friendship of many decades.  Robert Hollander (1933-2021): Requiescat in pace.