Scholars in Provence

Peiresc 

            I suppose that all scholars are likely to develop at least some interest in the history of scholarship itself.  Most of us, however keen our aspirations to the cutting edge may be, have to acknowledge that we are but the metaphorical dwarves raised upon the shoulders of the actual giants who have preceded us.  Their huge contributions to our cultural growth derive only in part from their individual genius.  There is also the question of the preservation of that genius in transmissible written form.  We owe to the labors of medieval monks the mediation of a vast body learning from classical Antiquity which, for the most part, the mediators themselves were incapable of understanding fully.  The library is the closest thing we have to an immortality machine.

 

This thought, and the subject of this essay, came to mind last week while reading  a biographical essay about Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc.  Peiresc (1580 -1637) is hardly a household name, but as I shall explain he played an important role in my own bibliographic education fifty years ago.  He was a French antiquary, astronomer, and polymath scholar whose vast scholarly correspondence is almost a model of the mode of intellectual exchange that would characterize the Enlightenment period of the century and a half after his death.* Peiresc was born in rural Provence, and spent much of his life in and around Aix-en-Provence.  We are all familiar with the country gentleman.  More important for me was the country scholar.

 

            Joan and I were married in the late spring of 1962 and set off, more or less immediately, for a fabulous year of research and writing, mainly in France.  My manuscript researches on the Roman de la Rose naturally first focused on the collections of two great national libraries: the library of the British Museum in London and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.  Only when I settled down to write in a tiny village in Vaucluse did I come to appreciate the pleasures and resources of many of the provincial French libraries.  Our village was called Beaumes-de-Venise, within fairly easy access to Avignon, where the library of the Musée Calvet (of which I had never heard) proved a gold mine for my needs.  On my first research leave, in the year of semi-Revolution, 1968, I had further opportunity to explore the local scholarly environs when—now delightfully augmented by two small children—we settled down for a time in L’Isle-sur-Sorgue, near Petrarch’s old haunts at the foot of Mont Ventoux.

 

L'Inguimbertine

and

the Archbishop

                                

       There is every reason that Avignon, once a capital and papal city, might have a significant library, but I was amazed by the mouldering treasures of the town library of the grim little city of Draguignan.  Even more amazing was Carpentras, a place I had never even heard of before I drove by it on my way to buy melons in the “melon capital of the world,” Cavaillon.  Carpentras (Vaucluse), with a population today of perhaps 30,000 was the “big city” for the two Provençal villages in which we have lived.  Like many small towns and small cities in the south of France and northern Italy, it remembers a vanished past with imposing public architecture that today seems outsized: an ambitious town hall, an ancient synagogue, and above all an architecturally dazzling library/museum, the Bibliothèque Inguimbertine.  This was the pet project of the humanist-monk Archbishop of Carpentras from 1735 to 1757, Joseph-Dominique (Malachias) d’Inguimbert.  Many French ecclesiastic institutions did not survive the Revolution, but this jewel, and its large and precious collection of early printed books, miraculously emerged more or less intact.  The day I first visited it there was on display a small collection of learned works by the local scholar who—according to the information posted—had been one of the Archbishop’s chief inspirers: Fabri de Peiresc, who had been born just down the road!

            Had I found the peer of the Morgan or Newbury Libraries in a suburb of Altoona, I could not have been more surprised or delighted.  In the half century since I stumbled upon it, the Commune of Carpentras has continued to maintain, improve, and expand this living monument to the learning of the past.  The idea that a communal library might be a civic necessity and a civic treasure was once universal, and has had a particular impact on the cultural histories of the English-speaking world, including the United States in its formative period.

Free Library of Proctor VT
 

Years ago I often spent part of my summers teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College in Vermont.  We have many happy family memories of those years, which offered a kind of family vacation in the beautiful mountains in tandem with an intense professional experience for myself offering the opportunity to work with unusually rewarding students and colleagues.  The Vermont countryside is dotted with small towns dotted with public spaces of a certain historical ambition, such as bandstands and extensive town greens.  I was particularly impressed by the number and size of the public libraries, often monuments of substantial private philanthropy of the nineteenth century.  The Free Library of Proctor, a town of a couple of thousand people, once prosperous from its marble quarries, is of an imposing size and architectural grandeur.  And they apparently had lots of spare marble slabs lying about to give their village edifice a whiff of the Parthenon.  In the budgets and tax assessments of how many of our American communities today does the public library make a significant appearance?  Should you happen to think, as I do, that the much touted and very real “threat to our democracy” lies principally in an apathetic and often shockingly underinformed electorate, there might be some food for thought here.

 

The modern library, while continuous with its ancient and medieval origins, is truly the product of the invention of mechanical printing and its continuous refinement over a period of nearly five hundred years.  Though I greatly admire librarians—those of the present no less than those of the past—I would hate to be one.  For we have arrived at another Copernican moment—in this instance I properly should say Gutenbergian—at which human ingenuity and technological prowess once again challenge our most fundamental concepts of knowledge creation and knowledge preservation.  If it comes to be that the contents of an entire floor of the Widener Library at Harvard can be and actually is securely and accessibly preserved in some easily duplicated electronic device the size of your passport, we are in a new place.  Just what that place is does remain to be seen.

 

* The huge edition of the Lettres de Peiresc, ed. Philippe Tamizey de Larroque, 7 vols. (Paris, 1888–98) is but a part of his epistolary output.

 

A Brief Account of Recent Travels

 The library, Trinity College, Cambridge

            Just before we left Paris there appeared in one of the national daily papers a lengthy article concerning the state of the tourist industry in France.  The tourist industry in France is, in a word, robust.  Not merely is France the number one tourist destination in the world, this year’s cohort of visitors is likely to prove the largest in recorded history.  No one staying in an apartment near the Eiffel Tower, as we were, would be tempted to suspect this was Fake News; but we didn’t grasp the full implications of it until we got to Charles de Gaulle airport about noon on Monday.  Even though the authorities had accelerated the perfunctory process of “passport control” to the speed of the production line in the factory in Modern Times, it took the better part of an hour and a half to run us through the mill.  And the torture of the egress from Paris was actually less wearing than that of the ingress to Newark.  But to dwell on the only unfortunate twelve hours of an otherwise blissful three-week-long trip would be all wrong.

            Our trip devolved in the three stages I outlined in an earlier post: an intensive educational tour in southern and eastern England, a short week of lotus-eating in the Var in the south of France, and a variegated week of cultural, social, and gastronomic immersion in the City of Light.

            A professional medievalist can perhaps be assumed to indulge somewhat rarified tastes, but I can now confess that even I was a little dubious about the sustaining power of our proposed tour of great libraries, even one sponsored by so cerebral an outfit as Princeton Journeys.  To be sure I myself find few things more engaging than old folios stoutly bound in calf.  But how about the famous species homme moyen sensuel, of which there must be one or two representatives among the body of Princeton alumni?  Well, I should have worried rather about whether I could match the erudition and the mental energy of my so-called “students”.   What wonderful places we went, what wonderful things we saw!  Between the expert and imaginative preparations of the travel professionals, and the cohesive bonhomie of our traveling bibliophiles, it turned out to be, as the saying goes, the trip of a lifetime.        

            I am an Oxford man, and over the years I have willingly if mindlessly participated in the kind of boring banter which the alumni of the two ancient universities sling back and forth.  But I have to say that the collegiate libraries of Cambridge seem to me to surpass those of Oxford both in beauty and variety.  Such comparisons are of course finally otiose.  Better to be simply thankful for the nearly miraculous preservation of Duke Humphrey in the top of the old Bodleian in Oxford or the Wrenn masterpiece at Trinity College Cambridge.

 The sitting room at Knebworth House, Herts.

            The tour included visits to various ancillary literary shrines: the archives of Canterbury Cathedral, the Dickens Museum in London, and the extraordinary stately home once the possession of Bulwer-Lytton, author of twenty-nine novels, twelve illegitimate children, and the immortal opening line “It was a dark and stormy night…”  We also took in a number of antiquarian book dealers in London, including Jarndyce (just across the street from the British Museum), whose extraordinary range of Dickens items was of particular interest to the several Dickens enthusiasts on the tour.  Though an English professor and a great admirer of the nineteenth-century novelists, I must confess that my own favorite unaffordable book was of a political genre, and related to my work on anti-Communist literature.  There was on offer at Peter Harrington’s on the Fulham Road in Chelsea a signed and inscribed first edition of Karl Marx’s Kapital, vol. the first, 1867.  The asking price for this rare item: £1,325,000.  One may view this bibliographical phenomenon either as a refutation of Marx’s labor theory of value or as a stunning confirmation of his analysis of the audacity of capitalist commodification. 

            This library trip did keep us on the run a bit—I gave a few lectures and tried to respond intelligently to the numerous questions that came up—and though I was sorry to see it end, I was more than ready for the down time that followed.  We had a wonderful week with our very old and very dear friend Andrew Seth at his paradisal establishment in the south of France: soft, lazy days, lots of reading, lots of challenging conversation, and probably too much good eating.  The final week was in Paris, where another very old friend was being fêted by her extensive family for her eightieth birthday.  I am not moving all that fast these days, and we limited our activities to a single event or museum per day.  There was a big Mary Cassatt show at the Jacquemart-André Museum.  At the Petit Palais there was a fascinating exhibition concerning French impressionists who had for longer or shorter periods been exiled in England, mainly as a result of the Franco-Prussian War and the collapse of the Paris Commune.  Who knew?  Not me.  So that’s the brief report.  I am back now to sweltering Jersey heat and humidity, and the blog has come back with me.

 

Library Crawl

 

Tenth-century glossed psalter in the British Library

In ten days’ time we leave for a long-scheduled European trip full of both promise and challenge.  The challenge part has to do with the infirmities of the aging, which have inexplicably become more noticeable of late.  The promise lies in the purpose of the trip and its various attractive destinations.  It will begin with a secular pilgrimage, of which I am to be the Harry Bailey, to several of the great centers of learning in southern England.  Many American educational and other cultural institutions are now active in promoting tours and cruises intended to combine learning and pleasure, and we have been involved with several in the past.  This one, called “Great Libraries and Literature,” will take us to London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Canterbury, among other places.  Having spent untold pleasant hours in many of the world’s great libraries, and having followed the profession of a teacher of literature, I probably have the superficial qualifications for my assignment.

But they are, truly, superficial.  Only as I have been forced to think about the matter in something like a comprehensive way, have I realized just how superficial.  I wish we knew more about the great Library of Alexandria.  We know basically two things: it contained a very large number of scrolls, and the scrolls were burnt to ashes in a disaster that occurred around the beginning of the common era.  It was a museum—i.e., an institution dedicated to the Muses, and therefore something at least vaguely similar to a modern research library.  The Christian world would have to wait a long time to see its like.

Half a century ago a distinguished British historian, J. H. Plumb, published under the title The Death of the Past a series of essays outlining an argument concerning the origins of the archive.  Somehow I was quite surprised to discover that the conservation of documents was so clearly motivated by, well, conservatism.  Plumb points out the interesting fact that nearly all of the world’s earliest surviving written documents—to the extent that a clay tablet or an inscribed marble qualifies as a “document”—are legal or legislative attestations of ownership, hierarchy, dynasty, and dominion.  The field beyond the rock pool belonged to my grandfather.  Then it belonged to my father.  Now it belongs to me.  It was the material utility of this kind of conservative imperative that gives birth to the archive.  Plumb further argues that until fairly recently few historians had serious ambitions of “objectivity”.  History often had an agenda similar to that of other earlier writings.

            Religious conservatism has a somewhat complicated relationship to political conservatism, but the two have in history been closely, sometimes inextricably, related.  We may start with the Bible.  The English word derives from a Greek plural meaning simply books, and the plural form has its importance.  The Bible is a comprehensive collection of biblical books, which is to say that it is itself a kind of library in itself.  Post-Protestant Americans, when and if they think of the Bible, are likely to envisage a large, heavy book, probably bound in black leather.  But such mini-libraries rarely existed before the age of printing.  It is possible that none of the Fathers of the Church—including Jerome, who translated the whole of the Bible into Latin—ever saw one.  In early Christianity, as in antecedent Judaism—the biblical unit was the individual book or the partial selection of them.

            The word manufactured obviously once meant “made by hand”.  Manufactured goods tend to have an economic value related to three things: the cost of the raw materials of which they are made, the amount and skill of the handiwork required to make them, and the social utility or prestige assigned to the finished good.  Though the materials used in the manufacture of early European books varied, the best were made of prepared animal hides, a relatively expensive commodity.  The labor needed to create a manuscript (literally a “written by hand”) was intensive and, in a largely illiterate world, so highly skilled as to carry with it a whiff of the esoteric.  Finally the social value assigned to the Bible on account of its absolute sacral claims was very high, and encouraged the utmost scrupulosity not merely in the creation of books but also in their preservation.

            One single book of the Bible was a huge factor in the growth of libraries.  I refer to the Psalter—the collection of a hundred and fifty Hebrew hymns attributed mainly to King David.  This book was at the practical center of Christian monastic life.  In the Benedictine centuries (beginning in the sixth century) thousands of monks in every nook and cranny of Europe were required to “perform” the Psalter communally and in its entirety during the course of each week.  Nothing so stimulates the creation of a new book as the example or provocation of an old one.  The “monastic library”—from which our modern warehouses of erudition derive in a fairly straight line—began with the Psalter.  The first examples of recorded vernacular text in almost every language of Europe are to be found in early psalm-books.  The monoglot children brought into the monasteries as oblates and novices needed interlinear vernacular glosses to grasp the meaning of the psalms’ hard Latin words.

            As we set out on our library crawl, we may perhaps wonder whether Karl Marx, sitting day in, day out, at his hard seat in the British Museum gathering the materials for works that would inspire a radical, cataclysmic, and continuing assault on the intellectual and social remnants of Old Europe, might ever have given a thought to those young Godrics, Bodos, and Jãos, pondering to understand the meaning—either in lexical or in moral terms--of  divitias in Psalm 36 [37]:16,  “Better is the little which the righteous has than the great wealth of the wicked.”

Libraries and Heaven

Instead of writing these silly weekly blogs I ought to take up some large and imposing essay of the kind that makes its way into the unread anthologies in the unvisited bibliographies of oversubscribed doctoral seminars in our literature departments. I already have a title, and lack only the essay to go with it. The title would be “Liminality and the (B)other: The Role of the Literature Professor in the Age of Obama”. That’s a nearly perfect title for the kind of academic essay that makes a professor famous, and for two reasons. In the first place it is entirely meaningless, and in the second the one part of it that verges in the direction of comprehensibility, the Age of Obama part, has absolutely nothing to do with the subject.

The problem, though, is not in finding a title. The problem is in the role of the Literature Professor. I ought to know; I’ve been one for upwards of half a century. If an English professor should go to a cocktail party attended mainly by non-professors—something that occasionally does happen—there is one question he fears but can never evade: “And tell me, what is it that you do?” I sometimes try to pass myself off as a mortician or a periodontist, but if I feel brave enough I come right out and say it: “Well, actually, I’m an English professor.” I continue to believe that there is no shame in that admission, but I do dread the inevitable reply: “Oh, I’d better watch my grammar!” Naturally the only rational response to this remark is a cringe.

For the fact of the matter is that most of my fellow citizens seem to believe that the role of my profession is to invigilate the language of the nation. This belief is nearly criminally naïve. Anyone who spends half an hour with a television set listening to our political leaders, or half an hour reading our journalists, should know for a fact that nobody is invigilating the nation’s language. Under these circumstances I thought it of conceivable general interest to explain what it is that a scholar actually does do.

That’s quite simple: a scholar reads, and a scholar writes, and a scholar teaches. In retirement I have somewhat withdrawn from the teaching part, but I continue to read and to write. Given the subject matter that most interests me, the Christian cultures of pre-modern Europe, this means that I am forced to hang out in some of the most gorgeous places on earth—libraries. The project I am engaged in just at the moment—a little book about Luís de Camões, the great Portuguese poet of the sixteenth century—has brought me to a particularly exquisite one.

It is true that the various kinds of “electronic resources,” for which the “Internet” is sometimes the abbreviated code, have greatly aided the work of the scholar. For some, such as the imaginary author of my imaginary essay, they seem to have precluded the need for books altogether. But I’m still addicted not merely to the printed word, but to the sights and smells and sounds of the places where the printed word has been archived by skilled and loving professionals who join technical expertise with greatness of soul. That is why on most mornings I take off as soon as possible for the library of the Fondation Calouste Gulbekian.

The name of Calouste Gulbenkian will be a household word to almost anybody who has done serious work on the culture of Portugal or that of any of the diverse and widely scattered places, from the upper Rio Negro to East Timor, touched by the amazing dynamism of Portuguese expansion in the early modern period. If you suspect that “Gulbenkian” doesn’t sound particularly Portuguese, you’d be right. He was an Armenian by origin, an exile by fate, a diplomat by hobby, an entrepreneur extraordinare by native capacity, and by choice one of the world’s great philanthropists, a Levantine J. D. Rockefeller. He rewarded his adopted homeland of Portugal with the gift of one of world’s truly fabulous art collections; and the foundation bearing his name continues to enrich the world of learning and culture today.

The Paris operation of the Gulbenkian Foundation is housed in a sumptuous hôtel particulier or as we would probably say a mansion on the Avenue de Iéna very near the Étoile. For out-of-towners I will say that that is a good address. The vibe of the place is very much that of, say, the Frick Collection or the Morgan Library in New York, but with the Robber Baron excess constrained by a certain Ottoman mesure. There is a great deal of activity in this building, the meaning of much of which I have yet to divine. There are recital halls. There are lecture rooms. Academic conferences are constantly in progress. There is a lot of gallery space full, at the moment, of seductive botanical paintings by Lourdes Castro. There is a large theater I must pass by, and in it there seems to be flashing upon the screen a never-ending postmodern slide show.

The actual library, at the top of a fabulous marble staircase, is small and jewel-like, a single long room with a fine old table in its center. At either end of the room is a desk where sits one of the highly competent and friendly librarians. Just at the door are the two computer stations, as discreet as such things can be, that give the scholar immediate access not merely to the Gulbenkian catalogue but to the catalogues of the great libraries of the world and even (groan!) to one’s e-mail. The room is girdled in towering glazed cases, at least fifteen feet high, full of beautiful leather editions of every reference book yet devised by the Lusitanian brain. Thick, ancient walnut shelves support rank upon rank of gilded leather: the Lendas of India of Gaspar Correa, Fortunato de Almeida’s Historia de Portugal in six volumes, the fifteen gleaming volumes of the Corpo Diplomatico Portuguez.

Doubtless these volumes are from time to time visited by aging scholars like myself. They sure make impressive stage properties. Most of the small clientele, however, is young; their interests appear to be the current journals, the theater scene in Lisbon, the Brazilian economic miracle, and political developments in lusophone Africa. The large bulk of the holdings are in some repository, invisible but obviously proximate. You fill out a little fiche in the usual European manner; but most unusually you get the book within two minutes.

Luís de Camões occupies the place in Luso-Brazilian culture occupied by Dante in Italy, Shakespeare in England, and Michael Jackson in the United States. When I first wrote a letter of inquiry to the head librarian, Mme Darbord, she responded that the library housed a Camões collection très important. That is putting the matter rather modestly. I have yet to find anything about Camões that the library doesn’t have, or which the charming librarians do not supply with a smile.

Libraries have always had a special allure for me, midway between the spiritual and the erotic. I have not until recently started wondering seriously about my residence in the afterlife, but if there’s no room for me in Dante’s eagle’s eye, something like the Gulbenkian reading room will be just fine, thank you very much. This is one of those libraries in which people still speak in hushed voices. There is always something tonic about the “library whisper”; but whispering in Portuguese, full of sibilants that defy the anatomy of the human tongue, takes it to an altogether new level. There you are, reading this great stuff, bathed in light reflected off polished wood and ancient leather, as a faint, lilting swish-swash burbles in the distance. Ah, stay the passing moment--it is so fair!