Death and the Virus

           

            All politics is local, and so at heart is most journalism.  I once read an anecdote concerning the reporting by a regional paper in New York State of Lindbergh’s famous transatlantic flight in 1927.  Its headline was “Lindbergh Flies Over Poughkeepsie on Way to Paris”.  Ever since I can remember I have been struck by a kind of morbid parochialism in the way our papers treat disasters: “Four Americans Die in Crash of Pan-Am Flight.”  When you read the story, you learn that there were thirty-six others who lost their lives as well.  The daily pandemic statistics of recent months have also tended slightly in this direction.  American leadership in coronaviral morbidity may be humiliating, but it is also fascinating, and certainly fully reported.  Beyond that I have wanted to know what has been happening specifically in New Jersey.  How about in my immediate community?  In both instances the answer has not been good.  But our own most distressing experiences have not been local.

            Our second coronavirus fatality—I’ll come to the first in a moment—occurred during the past week.  The man’s name was Eric Dean, a South Carolinian, and he was an uncle of one of our daughters-in-law, Melanie.  I did not know Mr. Dean personally.  From all testimony I have heard he was a lovely fellow.  I perhaps met him at the wedding, but if so I have no clear memory of doing so.  There is a lot I don’t recall these days.  Yet despite the lack of any actual relationship with this man, news of his death has brought vivid grief to our house.  Friendship and kinship are broad channels of vicarious experience and sympathy.  Melanie’s distress, amplified by that of her father, who had been very close to his brother, radiates out into our home and no doubt many others as though conducted by shiny copper wires.  To say that our nation has suffered a hundred and thirty thousand coronavirus deaths is a somber but somewhat abstract statistical statement until you think of the intricate emotional networks and sympathetic grids through which each individual loss crashes down on half a dozen, or twenty, or a hundred concerned neighbors, friends, and family relations.  From this perspective the statement that “the nation is grieving” or even “the world is grieving” moves from metaphor to simple fact.

            What I now regard as “my” first coronavirus death was of a different sort, beginning with the fact that, so far as I know, the cause of death was not coronavirus.  It happened on April 10 in New York, though I did not learn about it until mid-June and then only fortuitously.  All this requires some explanation.

            I shall identify him only by his first name, Eli.  I know little about his background, but I suppose he was of that second-, possibly even first-generation of American-born offspring of the large Eastern European Jewish immigrantion so important to the cultural history of the country, and to New York City in particular, the subject of Irving Howe’s memorable book The World of Our Fathers (1976).  Eli and I met while serving together on the board of the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni.  His graduate degree had been in Politics.  Only our American educational meritocracy, imperfect as it is, could have brought people of our very different backgrounds together—or put us on the board of anything.  I mention this sociological detail as it is relevant to the larger anecdote.  Eli and I became “periodical” friends, getting together at widely distanced board meetings.  He got interested in my blog and, especially in my work on The Anti-Communist Manifestos, which he proofread for me in galleys.  His interest stemmed from the fact that he was a 1959 graduate of Hunter College, one of the oldest components of the City University of New York, a conglomerate of institutions significant in the history of American Communism, with a radical political tradition from the 1930s not yet entirely dead in his own day.  Hunter was long an all -female institution; Eli became the first male president of its alumni association.  He was a great cataloguer, and he played a prominent role in the herculean task of organizing Hunter’s alumni records. 

            Time passed.  We rotated off the board.  Illness prevented me from attending some meetings at which we might have met.  In short, we fell out of touch for a few years.  Then, in the initial stages of soon aborted research into decipherers of mystery languages, I came upon a letter (published below in an appendix) written by a grateful student to her old teacher at Brooklyn College, Dr. Alice Kober.  Both Professor Kober and her admiring correspondent Mrs. Green (née Popper) were typical products of the magnificent free New York City university system, which had taken as its explicit mission the advancement through education of the city’s large population of youth of modest means, most of them the offspring of immigrants.  As you can see from the letter, however, this was not exactly what we usually regard as vocational training.  Kober was a great classical scholar, long under-sung, who did important work on cracking the ancient Minoan script called “Linear B.”  There’s an excellent popular book dealing with this adventure, but I wanted to know more.  Alice Kober was a Hunter alumna, and I personally knew the world-class expert on Hunter alumni.  So about the beginning of June I wrote a “catch up” letter to my friend Eli, its centerpiece being an inquiry about Kober.   One of his eccentricities was that he did not use email.

            Should you be puzzled about the relevance of a seventy-five-year-old letter to coronavirus death, it is this: although a wild good chase never ends in bagging a goose, it sometimes stirs up other interesting game.  About ten days later I got a letter back from Eli’s sister, with whom he had lived in Woodside, Queens.  She told me that Eli had died two months earlier.  He had been overwhelmed by a sudden debility, gone into hospital and, after a few days, died.  She had been late in answering my letter because she, too, had been in hospital. This news was abrupt, brutal, and final.  I had heard nothing of it because the normal channels through which I might have were disrupted during the coronavirus crisis.  I tried to learn more from one of the deans at Hunter with whom Eli had worked.  He had not learned of the death either.  I scoured the Internet and eventually found a brief obituary in one of those sad little sites established by funeral homes for “memory books”.  The only memorial then registered was that of a hospital transport worker, limited in education perhaps but rich in human decency, relating his brief moments of friendly exchange with a dying patient.  “Rest in peace friend,” he wrote, “in your ‘Deluxe Apartment in the Sky’.”  Whatever actual ailment was fatal for Eli, this, too, is “coronavirus death”: abrupt, capriciously communicated, forbidden such public solace as customary obsequies foster, caught up in a vast and undiscriminating sadness, rushed over, passed by as we stumble on to the next stupefying statistical chart.

APPENDIX

Readers sometimes ask me, no doubt in puzzlement, where I get my topics for blog posts.  The answer is: mostly from my random reading.  The letter below, which is of a kind any old professor would practically die for, is available on-line in a scholarly archive at the University of Texas devoted to materials relating to archaeological discoveries in Crete  and elsewhere.  The archive was founded by the great American archaeologist Emmett Bennett and is now curated by another distinguished scholar, Thomas Palaima.  It has no relevance to Linear B or any other object of Kober’s scholarly research, but it is a delightful testimony to her accomplishments as a teacher.  My small effort to identify Fritzie Green was without success.  But her letter, written three weeks after D-Day, is replete with tidbits of social history.  If you do what I did—use the Google Maps function to check out the two addresses in the letter—you will see something of the “two Americas” that are troubling so many of us today.

 [Printed Letterhead]

Lawrence Green

3221 Gladstone

Detroit 6, Michigan

[The rest of the letter is in longhand]

Dr. Alice E. Kober

Brooklyn College

Brooklyn, N. Y.

Dear Miss Kober,

                                                                                                                                                Tuesday 6/27/44

                                 This letter has been so long in the process of being written and yet so very often thought about, that I find it at once difficult, yet easy to put it down on paper.

                                 I know that name and address on the top of the page mean nothing to you and even though I would amplify and write Mrs. Lawrence Green  neé Freida (Fritzie) Popper of 208 Avenue I Brooklyn, that too, would probably not strike a familiar chord.

                                 However, my identity is not really important.  I was just one of that group of Latin students who, during less troublesome times six or seven years ago, enjoyed Horace and Plautus and Terence under your capable guidance in the evening session at Brooklyn College.

                                 I want you to know how much it meant to me when you carried us through so that we had  [ p. 2] sufficient credit to consider Latin our major—despite the fact that you no longer wanted to teach at night.

                                 I hope this letter reaches you because I do want you to know, even at this late date, that I was one student who never believed or considered that Latin was “not practical” and that whatever love and understanding I have for the classics, I attribute for the most part to you.

                                 Thanks so much.

                                                                                          Sincerely,

                                                                                          Fritzie Popper Green

The Coronavirus and Animal Liberation

It is an ill wind that bloweth no man good, and I suspect that future commentators will find that even in the lowering sky of a viral pandemic there was an odd silver lining or two.  I certainly hope so, for like so many others I am left exhausted and jittery by the duration and uncertainty of the imposed social restrictions, and seriously depressed by the national trauma accompanying, and to a significant degree exacerbated by them.  Here on our little acre we have already been delighted by one apparent development, a redress in the animal kingdom that is to a measurable degree humiliating some of the imperial claims of the human species.

We live on a fairly quiet street, though we see little of it, there being no windows facing onto it.  All the house’s kinetic instincts, and thus also those of its inhabitants, are directed towards the open and inviting land to the back of the house, which features about thirty feet of wall to ceiling windows, successfully designed to blur to a large extent the indoors/outdoors distinction.  Nature, which is highly visible, seems very close.  And since our modest private property abuts a largish track of heavily wooded commons, one has the very real sense of rustication: not quite Walden Pond, but not suburbia either.

About two weeks into the lockdown we became acutely aware of birdsong.  There has always been a lot of it in our yard, but suddenly the dawn chorus was sounding more like a symphony.  Then there simply seemed to be more and brasher birds around the yard all day.  The traffic on the bird-feeder in the atrium, of which I have a view from my study, suggested a sudden increase in the feathered population altogether.  Objective means of testing these impressions were lacking, but people with whom we spoke often shared them.  Then we saw in the Times a brief piece confirming the idea with regard to New York City.  The explanation was twofold.  There was in the first place much less sonic competition with vehicular movement virtually eliminated; so one heard the birds more clearly.  Then, too, the birds themselves were enjoying cleaner as well as quieter air, and tended to feel bird-frisky.  And as you know, if you read it in the Times, it’s bound to be true.

And as with the birds, so also with the beasts.  Of the latter there has always been a considerable variety resident in the back yard, mainly little, furry critters: chipmunks, rabbits, squirrels, and of course the dreaded groundhogs.  All of these suddenly seem more numerous, darting or waddling about the lawns, climbing trees, popping in and out of stone crevices according to their various natures.  Except for the groundhogs, which remain as timorous as they are obnoxious, these little animals also seem to be growing bolder, showing little concern for any human beings who happen to be sharing their space.  In insomniac moments I sometimes hear the creatures of the night—opossums and raccoons—feuding or scrapping around the garbage bins, and in daylight hours abundant spoor is to be seen in places likely and unlikely, such as the flat tops of stone walls, from which small, dark, shiny, dew-covered turds sparkle in the rising sunlight.

Above all, there are the deer.   The deer are a perennial subject of controversy in the neighborhood, and for understandable reasons.  They make it very difficult to have a vegetable garden without investing in expensive fencing more appropriate for a maximum security prison.  Though they seem to move lightly and gracefully, their dainty hooves are specially designed for smashing flower beds.  What they eat from those beds is a bit hit-or-miss, a favorite hit unfortunately being all varieties of tulips, and practically any seedling of anything .  (Daffodils are safe, thank God.)  People also worry, and not unnecessarily, about the small deer ticks that can spread Lyme disease.  This is not a problem to be pooh-poohed, as anyone who has suffered from Lyme will appreciate.  But I am from Arkansas, and you don’t really know what ticks are, or how to combat them, if you have never been to the Ozarks.  I tend to think that they are just one of the prices paid for living in a beautiful place.  Can you imagine Vermont without noseeums?  Of course my view that the inconveniences of a vast deer herd in your backyard is on a level with that of poor cell-phone reception in a national park is not widely shared.

Be that as it may, the deer herd has been ostentatiously flourishing throughout the coronavirus pandemic.  The fawning season, if there is such a term, pretty much coincides with the sprouting of the bamboo recently covered in this blog, and one frequently sees tinies on the margins of a squad of ten or twelve adults.  No fewer than three deer babies have been born in my yard in the last three weeks.  We are getting used to being a cervine maternity ward.  Faithful readers of the blog may remember that we had a birth on our actual doorstep two years ago. But now the numbers seem to me staggering.  I also detect, unless my imagination is running away with me, a measurably higher degree of deer self-confidence and adventurousness.  They seem to know they are now living in a more deer-friendly world. 

            We had an interesting “incident” a few days ago.  The guys who do the lawn, sort of, use a large and noisy riding mower.  While starting off on the front they seriously frightened a mother and her fawn, who had been hanging out I know not where in the bushes, and the panicked youngster fled to our open carport and hid, for a time successfully, behind a piece of heavy printing equipment stored among the chaos of the back wall.  It took me some real effort first to find this deer-child and then to free it from its dangerous refuge.  The whole time the terrified mother champed on the front tarmac.  When I finally freed the fawn, both fled, but not very far, to our neighbor’s lawn and thence to the middle of the currently underused public street.  The mother bathed her infant with her tongue.  I suspect that the dramatic reduction in vehicular traffic on the roads has been gratefully absorbed in the consciousness of animals no less than in my own.

            The speed with which “my” animals seem to be responding to environmental amelioration leads me to hope, against the global-warming apocalyptics, that the extinction of Mother Earth would be much harder to achieve than some believe.  And on a simplified, purified planet we might even see the emergence of a new Peaceable Kingdom.  A fox family has recently taken up residence in the vicinity, and Papa Fox is partial to a short-cut at the bottom of my garden.  The other days I saw him marching purposefully past a cohort of ten or twelve munching deer.  Neither fox nor deer paid the slightest attention the one to the other beyond, of course, the observance of appropriate social distancing.

The Queen's Speech

 

Essays beginning with the author’s profession of faith, either political or religious, are often pretty bad, but what I am undertaking requires one.  I am a sincere democrat (or republican), that is, a believer in that form or government prescribed by the Constitution of the United States and famously described by Lincoln as “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”  I am opposed to monarchy, and I deplore the principle of hereditary power especially as it survives in the modern world and in our country in particular, largely divorced from any sense of hereditary responsibility.  Although I was partly educated in England, and spent a career studying the English language and literature (among other languages and literatures) I am not particularly Anglophilic.  I admire certain characteristics of the vanishing British middle class, but Atlantic culture becomes ever more homogeneous in its cultural decadence, and there’s not all that much difference between York and Youngstown when you get right down to it.  Apart from York Minster, that is.  So when I write in praise of the Queen of England, it is not out of predisposition or favoritism.

On Sunday Queen Elizabeth made a four-and-a-half-minute speech to her countrymen, and to anybody else in the world interested in listening to her, on the subject of the huge challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic.  The Queen is an old lady.  To be precise, she turns ninety-four in a couple of weeks.  She has been the queen for nearly seventy of those years.  Her reign has been a marathon of dutiful and dignified service to her country during a period of dramatic social change that has left the nature of constitutional monarchy, always ambiguous at best, nearly incomprehensible to many.  Is she supposed to be a relic or a rock star? Unlike other personages of real or self-imagined consequence, and especially our political leaders, the Queen rarely seeks to speak to large audiences.  But she gave one hell of a speech on Sunday.   Nobody has a better right than Elizabeth II to speak the Queen’s English.  This may sound stilted to American ears.  Patrician or “U” accent and usage are on the wane in Britain, and various big-wigs now aim to sound closer to Mick Jagger than to Lord Cholmondeley.   But when you are ninety-three you have every reason to behave as though you belonged to a bygone age, since in fact you do; and you have every right to act like it.

 

The talk was eloquent though not rhetorically elaborate, and it had a clear and effective structure.  She began by acknowledging the disruption the pandemic has brought to people’s lives, the sorrow that has been thrust on many, the financial difficulties on many more, the fear, the uncertainty.  She then offered heartfelt thanks to the medical professionals of the National Health Service, to their official and unofficial helpers, and indeed to all Britons of every stripe who have been cooperating with the policy of isolation and who have through small but concrete acts of charity and aid been helping to protect the needy, especially the elderly.  Right on, Queen E.!  The circumstances reminded her of her first radio broadcast, at the age of fourteen in 1940, when she and her younger sister spoke words of encouragement to all those children who had been evacuated from the dangers of the German bombers.

It was a serious, dignified, and in some ways somber talk.  What else do you want under the circumstances?  But it was not just a list of “steps” taken by her government.  It was an appeal to all Britons so to behave in this crisis that future historians will truthfully report that the nation had lived up to its historical traditions.  This was the only vaguely “literary” moment in the talk.  One could hear Churchill promising to fight upon the beaches, and behind that Henry V rallying his troops on Saint Crispin’s day in 1415.

In one important function the speech was a pep talk, with a pep talk’s exhortation to difficult struggle and its prediction of eventual victory.  But the basis of the speaker’s optimism deserves attention.  There was nothing in it of the narrow or the self-regarding.  She acknowledges the crisis as one shared by all nations, and requiring a world perspective, grounded for her audience, of course, in their own nation and its responsibilities.  She did not count on pulling through because of “Britain First,” “We are the greatest,” or “I am a stable genius.”   Instead she identified three personal qualities as the ones that could see us through: self-discipline; quiet, good-humored resolve and fellow feeling.

My first reaction upon watching the Queen’s modest video was admiration, but it was soon followed by one less worthy: envy.  I shall not even pretend to avoid odious comparisons.  I don’t know whether our current medical crisis will prove in the long run to be so grave as to define an historical epoch.  I am old-fashioned, and for me history is more convincing as retrospection than as prediction.  But anyone with eyes can see that it is a crisis, that it is huge, that it is ubiquitous, that it is frightening, and that its duration and outcome are uncertain.  When, God willing, we look back upon this episode from a vantage point of relative security, how will we remember our own national performance and the lead offered by our own head of state?  How can I regard a four-minute talk as a near model of Ciceronian eloquence simply because it is composed of coherent paragraphs made up of complete English sentences each of which has a subject and a predicate in agreement?   How can I find it newsworthy that a national leader knows what self-discipline, good humor, and fellow feeling are?