Precious Life-Blood--or Dead Hand?

George Eliot (æt. 30, 1849/1850) by Louis-François d'Albert Durade

I have been home now for ten days, just about the time needed to reclaim and settle back into long-established patterns and habits. While I was in Paris this last time I particularly missed my morning swim, as the local and supremely convenient pool was for reasons no official could or at least would explain, closed until a “further notice” that never appeared. Finding and using one of many other municipal pools was a theoretical possibility; but I was not willing to pay the necessary price in time, travel, and above all in reconfiguring the whole shape of a workday to accommodate an ancillary desideratum. My father used to call such activity “building the house around the doorknob”—that is, making the greater cause subordinate to the lesser.

But there are doorknobs and doorknobs. I find myself at the earliest beginnings of a large project, a situation at once daunting and exhilarating. It is exhilarating because the fields of relevant inquiry open lush before me like the Great Plains at harvest time. In every direction I look I see the ripe grain practically begging to be gathered. It is daunting because I am far from sure I can pull it off. Yet more vexing is a hesitation yet more fundamental: should I try to pull it off?

Like most humanists of my generation I spend a few hours of every day sitting in a library surrounded by walls of books. I continue to think that the all-encompassing “electronic library” is largely hype, but that may just be another index of my increasing obsolescence. Though I often require the resources of large or specialized institutions, the library in which I most happily work is not surprisingly my own--modest of course, but carefully gathered, winnowed, and sculpted in accord with personal need, taste, and even (can I admit it?) aesthetic preference. Many of the scholarly books that form the physical cocoon in which I work are old, handsome, multi-volume sets of breath-taking erudition. All of them were at some point somebody’s “large project” into which untold hours of solitary work were poured. All of them are the products of a mode of industry known to a tiny guild but wholly foreign to the experience of the vast majority of humankind past and present. Most of them rest undisturbed on my shelves year after year. That actually is the fate of most “large projects.” And quite apart from the question of fate is the question of integrity of motive.

The cabinet of Dr. Faustus (by Rembrandt)

THE SCHOLAR'S STUDY

The bloguiste's lair (by Nikon Coolpix 4100)

Among the noblest statements in Milton’s Areopagitica is this: “A good book is the precious life-blood of the master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose for a life beyond.” That is inspiring, but doubts nag. What about the not quite so good books? What, God forbid, of the really terrible books?

My preliminary ruminations have sent me back to George Eliot's Middlemarch--one of a few special books I try to reread every decade or so. In an essay on Eliot Virginia Woolf famously wrote of Middlemarch as a “magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. I do not know the precise “imperfections” Woolf had in mind. For me the novel’s hugeness (800 pages), required by the lengthy development of subplots of questionable necessity to the major theme, is a difficulty. And it makes it hard for me to tell you, as I now do tell you, that your life will forever be the poorer without it. For is it ever a novel written for grown-ups! In fact you probably shouldn’t even try before, say, your thirtieth birthday.

The fifth book (i.e., long section) of Middlemarch is entitled “The Dead Hand,” and like so much else in this brilliant novel, the phrase reverberates with complex suggestion. In an earlier book the Rev. Edward Casaubon has learned that a serious cardiac condition, “fatty degeneration of the heart,” could at any moment claim his life, leaving unfinished the great work of scholarship in which he has invested many decades. “The Dead Hand” chronicles the emotional blackmail and manipulation he employs to attempt to wrest from his young wife Dorothea the promise that, should he die, she will continue the work and bring it to completion exactly along the lines he has dictated. The pattern of emotional coercion is paralleled by a legal coercion, for which the technical term is indeed mortmain (“dead hand”). As yet unbeknownst to his wife the jealous and petty-minded Casaubon has added a codicil to his will making the bequest of his substantial legacy to her contingent upon her not marrying in her widowhood the man she will in fact marry. Thus Casaubon seeks to control Dorothea from the grave, even as he has controlled her through the course of her constricted and increasingly unrewarding marriage.

The fifth book is primarily the story of Dorothea’s inner conflict. She is most reluctant to make the promise Casaubon so importunately seeks; for although she is powerfully moved by a sense of marital duty complicated by sentiments of affection and sympathy, she has little confidence in the scholarly project to which her husband has devoted his life. Indeed, she inwardly judges it to lack intellectual integrity. As every graduate student of English knows, Casaubon’s great work, unfinished and probably unfinishable, is called A Key to All Mythologies. This unwritten book, and what it represents, is also in a large and figurative sense a “dead hand”.

What is it? Casaubon’s proposed Key to All Mythologies is projected as a vast work of scholarship designed to defend and demonstrate the primacy of the Mosaic historiography of the Pentateuch in relation to all other surviving ancient Latin, Greek, and Semitic literary sources. Though we learn only bits and snatches of Casaubon’s method, it is clear that its two principal stress-bearing pillars are what we would today call linguistics and mythography. Casaubon will be concerned to demonstrate according to his linguistic science, and in particular the science of etymology, that all ancient cosmogonies eventually reveal a common source in the Hebrew of the Masoretic text. Here one assumption is that Hebrew was the original language, that spoken by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In a similar fashion, larger narratives—such as, presumably, the myth of the Golden Age as found in Virgil and Ovid--must be distortions or distant reflexes of Pentateuch history. The purpose of Casaubon’s life work is the defense of the literal inerrancy of the Bible and the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch—a task that for thinking Christians had become most difficult by the 1830s (the time of the novel’s setting) and by 1870 (the time of its completion) impossible.

I spent several hours yesterday in the Rare Book Room of Firestone Library reading one of Casaubon’s intellectual models: Jacob Bryant (1715-1804), an Etonian and Cambridge don, author of an astonishing work entitled A New System, or an Analysis of Ancient Mythology—a huge, ornate Georgian flat tire obviously being reinvented for the early Victorian generation by Eliot’s Mr. Casaubon. In fact there is a dismissive allusion to it in Middlemarch itself (book ii, chapter 22). Will Ladislaw (Casaubon’s poor but brilliant cousin, who in the end marries his widow) alludes to “men like Bryant—men of the last century” whose books are as relevant to contemporary scriptural scholarship as the theories of Paracelsus are to modern chemistry. The article on Bryant in the Dictionary of National Biography is hardly less severe: “His research is remarkable, but he had no knowledge of oriental languages, and his system of etymology was puerile and misleading.”

Still the three fine, fat quarto volumes of his New System, bound in tree calf with its old gold stamping still bright and shining—how beautiful they look upon the shelf! So as I set out on my own next small embalming project, I wonder anxiously. Will it be “precious life-blood … treasured up on purpose for a life beyond” or merely a well preserved dead hand?

The Eighty Percent Solution

Robert Goheen (1919-2008)

“Home,” says Frost, “is the place that when you go there, they have to take you in.” There are other slightly more upbeat definitions, such as that home is where even spitting rain on New Jersey Turnpike in rush hour can seem vaguely comforting in its familiarity. There is nothing vague, however, about the comfort and familiarity attendant upon the reunion of long-married couples; and I sat down with the greatest pleasure to a light supper of soup and salad.

My theory was to hit the ground running—or actually sitting, the posture more appropriate for a library—but I have fallen into the reverie of pleasant distraction. On Saturday I have to give a little after-dinner speech at a celebration marking the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of Wilson College, the first of the undergraduate residential colleges in Princeton University. I haven’t actually prepared the talk, but have enjoyed the leisure of preparing to prepare, so to speak.

In fact Wilson College, like many academic institutions, had several “foundings”. The one with which I was associated came in the fall of 1968, when for the first time a small number of freshmen accepted an invitation to join. The master then (Wilson’s first) was the late psychologist Julian Jaynes, author of the once-famous book entitled The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It was Jaynes who had shepherded the Woodrow Wilson Society through its infancy and its transition in becoming Wilson College.

I became the second master just at the time that the anti-War protests were becoming serious, and from that period—especially the spring of 1970, with the Kent State massacre of early May—come some of the most vivid memories of my career. In this country an institution that is celebrating a semicentennial is usually considered venerable. My fear is that a person who has been associated with it for more than forty of its fifty years might have some claim to the same adjective.

Princeton actually has two alumni who became presidents of the United States. I’ve always thought it a little lame that so many things Princetonian are named after Woodrow Wilson, and so few after James Madison. When after a long interval I became Master of Wilson College for a second time in the 1980s I conspired with my friend and colleague Sean Wilentz to pretend that the Wilson involved was Edmund Wilson of the class of 1916, perhaps the greatest literary critic America has produced; but that never caught on. But if I had the chance to pick my own name today, I would call it Robert Goheen College, and Goheen is the real subject of this post.

Consider this a very tardy tribute to a much-admired mentor and friend. I was away from Princeton in the spring of 2008, when he died; and I could not even attend his memorial service. Bob Goheen was the President of Princeton University from 1957 until 1972. I really came to know him only after he left the presidency, and fully to appreciate his true greatness only in his later years, after his service as Ambassador to India. Goheen was as “old Princeton” as they come. He came out of a Presbyterian clerical family, and had taken both his B.A. and his Ph.D. here. He was an assistant professor of Classics at the time of his election. Everything in his background suggested that he would be a thoughtful guardian of the institution’s dearest traditions. How many could have guessed that he would transform it as he did?

For it was President Goheen who presided over the most monumental institutional changes of the twentieth century—and all of them for the good. These included putting the university irrevocably on its path to a nearly unique financial security, dramatically expanding the faculty and the “physical plant,” and charting an essentially new course for undergraduate life. It was in no easy or simply fashionable way that he came to espouse the innovation (which then seemed so radical) of the admission of women students. And so far as undergraduate residential life is concerned, he is the true father of the Princeton college system.

For a very particular, indeed eccentric reason I was struck by a single sentence in the impressive obituary published by the New York Times: “Dr. Goheen would eventually build or acquire 38 buildings, increasing the university’s indoor square footage by 80 percent.” It was the percentage that struck me, for it brought back to my mind the conversation in which he had recruited me to become the Master of Wilson. He invited me to lunch in the faculty club. I was still an assistant professor, and a one-on-one presidential luncheon in a the public dining room rather went to my head. I proceeded to give the president a little lecture on precisely what needed to be done to reform undergraduate social life. I did so with no small degree of certainty, which he tolerated with a polite patience, considering that he had been pondering the issues involved for several years and I for about two weeks. Then he said something I shall never forget. “You know, John, these are complicated questions, and reasonable people are of different minds about them. I’ve had to adopt a little rule of thumb: don’t ever be more than 80 percent right. It just isn’t seemly.”

When I survey what is passing for “political discourse” in our land these days, I hear an angry cacophony of one-hundred-percenters. No wonder their approval rating is seventeen percent.

Transitional Man

big transition: Camões has gone to his long house

Life is pretty much like essay writing. Once you’re into them, the paragraphs take care of themselves. It’s the transitions that are difficult. As a proposition that may be of dubious validity, but it’s style I am after, not substance. My model was Forrest Gump. I am attempting to develop an aphoristic style for a projected self-help book, and I am just practicing. Actually it is an instance of desperation being the mother of invention. I was just now having a tasty bowl of cereal and an interesting conversation with my delightful granddaughter Sophia when she innocently uttered a terrifying word: “Wednesday,” that is, today. Wednesday meant one thing for her—namely a somewhat relaxed start to the school day—and something quite different to me. What it meant to me was that until that moment it had escaped my attention that it was blog day.

Yet it all comes together nicely, for my even more-than-usual forgetfulness is an emblem of my transitional state. Transitions come in various sizes and colors. I am just about to leave Paris. That this is definitely a gray transition is authenticated by the weather, which has suddenly turned rather grim: cold, dark, wet. They have put the Christmas lights up in some of the public places, but not yet turned them on. There is always a certain amount of dreary schlepping about attendant upon arriving for or leaving after a lengthy stay, and I have a number of drab duties to perform before flying back to Newark next Monday.

Another transition is of a pleasant yellowish pastel hue. On Friday I completed the manuscript of the little book I have been writing, tentatively entitled Luis de Camões: the Poet as Scriptural Exegete. On Monday I sent it off for review by a prospective publisher. On Tuesday I returned to the Gulbenkian Library for a final time to say goodbye to its director, and especially to the two charming librarians whose cheerful expertise has on a daily basis eased my path. Such are the formalities of French professional life that it was only in parting that I learned their names. They both have the Christian name Isabel, like several other important women in my life, the fourteenth-century Plantagenet ancestors and kin of Henry the Navigator.

Until halfway through my bowl of granola this morning I was planning yet another transitional step, and I may get to it yet. I actually contemplated trying to write a page or two on my next project. I always feel better when I am starting something new to get a few words down on paper even if they are not destined to survive until the final product. I am under contract to write a book rather grandly entitled in my proposal The Dark Side of the Enlightenment. Talk about transitions!

Early in my career as a medievalist I became aware of and annoyed by a certain historical “narrative,” of nearly ubiquitous credit among the semi-educated, that might be called Gibbon’s Canard. It goes roughly like this. There was once a great Western Civilization in which people walked around in their bathrobes writing epic poems, building Parthenons and Coliseums and civilizing known worlds by imperial domination. That beautiful world came to an end when a cultural disaster (Christianity) and something called the Völkerwanderung (barbarian hordes running hither and thither) joined forces to create the Middle Ages, aka the Dark Ages, a bleak millennium of brutality, disease, ignorance, and superstition. Things began to get a little better eventually when one day Petrarch walked into a cave, found a pile of long-neglected manuscripts, and decided to start a Renaissance. But they only got good again when toward the end of the seventeenth century Newton published the Principia and only really good in the eighteenth century when Jean-Jacques Rousseau arrived on the scene and taught his friends and relations (most of whom in Rousseau’s case were his abandoned bastard children) how to have a New Sensibility.

This new age was called The Enlightenment.

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night,

God said “Let Newton be!”—and all was light.

So wrote the eighteenth-century English poet, Alexander Pope.

This narrative is, shall we say, a little over-simplified. At first I found myself particularly aggrieved by popular uses of the word medieval as a term of disparagement, opprobrium, or contempt. I started making a collection of such usages as found in the popular press, especially the New York Times. My favorite (and I cannot now remember the specific sources) had to do with a man taken hostage by terrorists or kidnappers and kept blindfolded for a protracted period in an underfurnished urban apartment. The only food his captors gave him—ample, but apparently monotonous—was Chinese take-out. This treatment was described as “medieval”. Well, Marco Polo…Some readers may also remember a memorable scene in the film Pulp Fiction in which a really big, mean, black guy prepares to do violence on a really skinny, sicko white guy. The violence is unspecified, but as it required pliers and a blowtorch, it is also probably unpleasant, especially as introduced with the following threat: “I’ma get medieval on your ass.”

But I also started collecting an anthology of Enlightenment weirdness. I soon discovered that just as the witchcraft craze is more typical of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment periods than of its Middle Ages, so also were numerous other “medieval” superstitions, such as alchemy and astrology. If you are really interested in quackery, pseudo-science, and superstition, one of the best places to look is in the nooks and crannies of Enlightenment Paris. I am hoping that The Dark Side, if I can pull it off as a work of light-hearted erudition, might transform Gibbon’s Canard into Peking Duck. I may subtitle it “The Medievalist’s Revenge.” If I can pull it off, you will get to meet some of the following characters:

"Count" Alessandro Cagliostro (here presiding over a Masonic meeting, as imagined by the satirist Gillray) was a weirdo so outrageous that he could exist only in the Enlightenment...

Valentine Greatrakes the Stroker, whose miraculous cures discomfited the Enlightened...

Julie de Krüdener (as painted by Angelica Kauffmann), author of a best-selling sentimental novel, and a do-it-yourself mystic who may have helped a demented Swiss woman to crucify herself...

Home Thoughts from Abroad

American Library in Paris: alleged site of bloguiste's alleged work

My “mystery” retreat was Kandersteg in the Swiss canton of Bern, one of the lovelier places on this lovely earth of ours, and for the opportunity to visit it I shall forever be grateful to my beloved daughter. But just now I’m back and in the trenches at the American Library in Paris again or rather, to switch to a metaphor yet more clichéd, on a two-week forced march toward the completion of a little book on the Sobolos rios of Luis de Camões. My deadline is November 15, when I fly back to America to new opportunities and writing obligations, and especially to a new book project.

Today, however, I am having a little trouble keeping up my martial gait. It is trouble roughly of the sort described in one of John Donne’s most brilliant poems. My mind, which should be pressing eastward toward the romantic Malabar coast with the Portuguese caravels, is pulled remorselessly westward to such unromantic places as the fifteenth congressional district in Ohio, where it appears that a Republican named Steve Stivers has just walloped a Democrat named Mary Jo Kilroy in a contest paradigmatic of the huge tidal wave of Republican victory, or rather, of Democratic defeat. (The two are only accidentally coincident.) Complete results will not be available to me in time for this blog, but the general drift of things has been obvious for weeks to those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

Or has it? We say that seeing is believing, but about half the time it works the other way around. A lot of the time we see or hear what we want or expect to see or hear—or, even worse, what other people tell us we ought to want to see or hear. Surely, all curious minds must construct comparisons, but living abroad virtually forces the comparative perspective upon you. As the American midterms approached, I have inevitably been thinking about them from the perspective of local developments.

Autres pays, autres moeurs, as seen by the British "Independent"

“What developments?” you ask? Well during the last month the economic life of the country was severely disrupted by industrial strikes and street demonstrations protesting new laws, certain to be passed by the democratically elected parliament, that in a most gradual manner will eventually raise the national age of retirement from sixty to sixty-two. Property damage was slight, though not negligible; but the disruptions inflicted some billions of euros of damage on an already wobbly national economy. Prominent among the street protesters, as always, were the lycéens or high-school students. Every graduate of Economics 101 realizes that if present trends continue there won’t be any pensions for these kids until they reach the age of a hundred-and-two, let alone sixty-two, but that didn’t stop Ségolène Royal, the Socialist defeated by Sarkozy in the last elections, from urging them into the streets. Whatever is the matter with Kansas seems to be even more the matter with the gilded youth of the seventh arrondissement.

Vox pop plus teeny bop

American politics gets a lot of lousy press here, as it no doubt deserves in most lands. Yet to compare the absurd French histrionics of pseudo-nullification of the “retirement legislation” with the comparative maturity of American popular opposition to “Obamacare” has been most instructive. But of course that is only the way I see things. Joan flew home on Monday. I accompanied her to the airport, where I bought a copy of the November Monde Diplomatique to read on the bus-ride back, and this gave me an opportunity to find out how others see them. Le Monde is the daily opiate of the French lumpen-intelligentsia, from the political point of view a sort of a New York Times on steroids. The Monde Diplomatique is, roughly, its “Month In Review”.

This month, between the French protests in progress and the American elections in prospect, there was a good deal to review. It will not surprise any of my faithful readers that I am in substantial disagreement with what the Monde Diplomatique’s journalists have to say about these topics. The more interesting comparative point concerns who the journalists are. The interpreter of the anti-Sarkozy protests is Serge Halimi, a public intellectual and journalist who has made a successful career out of attacking French journalists and journalism. He has out-FoxNewsed Fox News in the success of his indictment of a “main-stream media” against which he supposedly stands out in brave, bold profile. He thinks that the fourteen-year-olds so passionate in the pre-emptive defense of “retirement rights” are prescient analysts of a politics that offers them only “a future without hope,” and that “street marches and strikes constitute the best means of avoiding such a fate.”

The other two experts—one addressing the European “austerity wave” generally, the other the American elections—are even more interesting. They are both literary theorists! Slavoj Zizek (whose name is spelled in a variety of ways in America) is obviously against austerity, though I don’t quite grasp why. You have undoubtedly heard the joke question: “What is the difference between a Deconstructionist and a Mafia don?” The answer: “The Deconstructionist makes you an offer you can’t understand.” Zizek is not exactly a Deconstructionist, but he regularly achieves a vatic incomprehensibility. The heart of this essay appears to be the following profundity: “…the credits accorded to Athens will in the first place serve to reimburse its debts to French and German banks. European aid to Greece has no other function than to help the private banking sector.” Presumably rescuing Greece from the social disasters of national bankruptcy is not a legitimate “function”.

For the American scene the Monde Diplomatique turns to an American expert: Walter Benn Michaels, an English professor at the University of Illinois. Professor Michaels is a theorist whose most widely read contribution to literary theory is an essay entitled “Against Theory”. This is but one of the paradoxes of an intellectual career marked chiefly by his ability to deny differences that most others can see clearly, and vehemently to detect differences that others cannot see at all. It would be an injustice to say that his essay in the current Monde Diplomatique is simply common-or-garden academic pseudo-radicalism, for it achieves—and maintains over many column inches--a truly rare level of superficiality. Professor Michaels laments the fact The Road to Serfdom by F. A. von Hayek is currently on the best-seller list. The totality of what he has to say about this extraordinary book is that its author was an “ultra-conservative”. Actually, The Road to Serfdom isn’t doing all that well. It is only number 157 on the Amazon chart. But then the whole point of this post is that everything is comparative. The Shape of the Signifier by Professor Walter Benn Michaels is at number 614,848.

Given the nature of our officially sanctioned interpreters, it is perhaps not surprising that the nations of the world understand each other so imperfectly. With this thought I am left to imagine the horror with which some imaginary Parisian intellectual temporarily resident in Keokuk, Iowa, might stumble upon this blog.

Ubi in mundo est blogator?

The easy answer would be “Nowhere near Carmen Sandiego,” but if my matter has any chance of doing justice to my circumstances, I shall need a considerable elevation of style. For I am composing this at an altitude of 35,000 feet as my airplane sprints Paris-ward over Newfoundland and its chilly schools of codfish miles below.

The Cloisters and Looking Westward therefrom

New York, on a beautiful crisp autumnal day, is hard to beat; and my last two days there were of that sort. On Friday I accompanied a local mini-reunion of the Princeton class of 1970 to the Cloisters, which is a special medieval colony of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, placed amid the spectacular grounds of a great old estate (now Fort Tryon Park) in upper Manhattan. From its pathways and parapets one looks westward across the Hudson to the New Jersey Palisades, where the leaves have begun to yellow. The museum is called the Cloisters on account of its cloisters, natch; a very wealthy medieval buff of the early twentieth century scooped up a few old monasteries from southern France and northern Spain and re-assembled them in New York. The idea was that a tour of medieval art would be more, well, medieval, if undertaken in the presence of an aging medievalist. And so it proved.

Today was no less beautiful, and I spent half of it scuttling to and fro the East Village post office at Fourth Avenue and Eleventh Street. I was trying to ship some weighty books to my house in Princeton, as my Paris-bound suitcase is plenty heavy already. The books were much-appreciated tokens of esteem laid upon me in gratitude for a little after-dinner talk I gave following the Cloisters tour. There were other challenging trophies of my brief American tour. A part of my book prize is a lovely tchotchke, a piece of crystal art memorializing in a small lake of carved glass the names of the book and its author and other particulars. To call this thing a paper-weight would be to commit an act of linguistic lèse-majesté, though it might hint at the useful purpose to which it will be put in my study at home, making sure that one of the composing stones doesn’t blow away. Other purposes it would serve less well. It is not the sort of thing, for example, that one would want to add to the weight of one’s transatlantic luggage just for sport; so I had to search out a suitable temporary home for it pending an opportunity to visit the city in a Mack truck. A brain wave struck, and it has now found temporary shelter in one of my daughter’s currently underutilized offices.

Mention of my dearest daughter brings me to the true purpose of this post. I have bragged about her plenty in the past, but I left out some purely personal parts, such as how solicitous she is of her aging parents. She is aware that hanging out for months on end in Parisian parks, museums, libraries, and restaurants really takes it out of you; and she has decreed that we need a mini-vacation. We all leave early tomorrow (Monday). I am not at liberty to disclose the destination. That’s for you to figure out, but here’s a big hint:

Another hint is that there is no Internet connection at Mystery Mountain, an implication of which fact being that your bloguiste will next resurface on the third of November. That is the day on which the Church remembers the great Richard Hooker, usually called “the judicious,” who died on November 3, 1600. If you’re starved for reading material before then, you could do worse than dip into Hooker’s masterpiece, The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie. That's what I always do if I get bored. I hope you enjoy the week as much as I intend to do.

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ADDENDUM, Wednesday morning, 27 October

As the WiFilosigkeit of my mystery destination--which was, incidentally, correctly identified within an hour of posting by a well-traveled Princetonian of the Class of 2010--seems to have been considerably exaggerated, I take the opportunity to append a photograph taken from my balcony window five minutes ago:

Suprized

Since returning from Arkansas I have been enjoying a stay in New York, punctuated by a very brief visit to Princeton for some necessary domestic business. It hasn’t been a particularly touristy visit, more like a busman’s holiday. I have spent many hours in the Bobst Library of New York University, polishing footnotes. Polishing footnotes surely approaches the acme of pointy-headed professordom, and it hardly requires the world’s greatest city for its backdrop. Still, I have had some fun. I went with good friends to see a fascinating exhibition at the Morgan Library, before going back to their apartment for a magnificent meal. I made an honest blogger of myself by attending a showing of “Waiting for Superman”. (In this I imitated my sainted father who once built a fire-place and then, when it was finished, sought out a book about how to build fire-places.) Last night I had a delightful evening over dinner with my “conversation club” at the Century.

But mainly I have been waiting—waiting for today. For I have just returned from Montclair, New Jersey, where I took part in an elegant evening “celebrating the humanities” with the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. Furthermore, I myself was a part of the celebration; for an important moment of the evening was the presentation of the annual NJCH book award to the author of The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War.

Montclair is a fine old nineteenth-century town that is today half dormitory for New York executives and half multicult suburb. For a very particular reason it has always seemed to me one of the most romantic places on earth. The only school play in which I ever got a role was Cheaper by the Dozen, a comedy about an eccentric fellow with twelve children. It was set in Montclair, N.J., a place I therefore thought must be as exotic as Shakespeare’s Illyria, or Elsinore Castle.

The Montclair Art Museum

And indeed there was something castle-like in the elegant venue for the event, the impressive Montclair Art Museum. There is on its lowest level a large multi-purpose room that served equally well as cocktail lounge and lecture theater. In it was gathered an impressive cohort of supporters and abettors of the humanities in the State of New Jersey. Among them I was delighted to discover a number of personal friends and three former students. One of them was a man whose dissertation I had helped to direct forty years ago, and whom I had not actually seen in all that time.

Bloguiste, Leach, and Katz in ideological conversation

The “main event” of the evening was a staged conversation—meaning in this instance a conversation that took place upon a stage. The interlocutors were yours truly and Jim Leach, the Chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities, moderated by my friend and colleague Stan Katz, the former president of the American Council of Learned Societies. I found Leach, whom I had not before met to be a particularly impressive and attractive fellow. He is an Iowan and a former college wrestler. He spent thirty years in Congress. One of his principal initiatives as Chairman of the NEH has been a “civility tour” throughout the country, a kind of intellectual pilgrimage devoted to the quaint notion that it is possible to exchange and discuss conflicting ideas, even passionately invested ideas, without sounding like the Kentucky senate race.

The announced topic of the conversation was “Ideologies and American Ideals from the Cold War to the War on Terror”. Naturally we mainly talked about other things, though with valiant feints toward “ideology”. Should you be really curious, you can judge for yourselves. The conversation was recorded, and will soon be posted on the NJCH website.

I left the evening with such a deep sense of satisfaction that you might think this was the only prize I had ever won. It isn’t.

And so, as old Pepys used to say, to bed.

Return of the Native

As a boy in school I memorized quite a few poems. They were naturally such poems as appealed to the vestigial Victorian tastes of my earliest English teachers, most of whom had been born in the nineteenth century. They have stuck with me, and “when in idle or in vacant mood” they often return to my mind, less colorful than Wordsworth’s daffodils, but hardly less pleasurable.

There is, for example, the great “Ode” of Arthur O'Shaughnessy. What? Not on your ipod? Shame on you. “We are the music makers. We are the dreamers of dreams…” That poem is the origin, I believe, of the now clichéd phrase movers and shakers. Another favorite was James Russell Lowell’s prelude to The Vision of Sir Launfal--“And what is so rare as a day in June?...” That is a lovely poem with many sweet phrases and images, though it does have one line that schoolboys are likely to apply in a context probably unintended by the poet: “Every clod feels a stir of might.” There were quite a few clods in that particular class. Also, lines from The Lay of the Last Minstrel by the great Sir Walter Scott, so unread and undervalued today:

BREATHES there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
‘This is my own, my native land!’
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d
From wandering on a foreign strand?

Fog along the Buffalo River, Marion County, Arkansas

Such a man perhaps does breathe somewhere, but not within my mortal frame. Even without the prerequisite foreign strand that’s the way I always feel as through the small, square window of an airline cabin, I catch my first glimpseof the Ozarks. Such glimpses have been infrequent for the last thirty years. They are bound to be rarer still now that my last two remaining Fleming aunts are gone. But just now my own, my native land is particularly vivid in my memory.

I arrived at Newark from Paris in the middle of the afternoon last Wednesday. Less than twenty-four hours later I was back at EWR to catch a flight to XNA. As O’Shaughnessy is to English odes, so perhaps XNA is to airport codes: insufficiently known. It stands for “Northwest Arkansas Regional,” and by rights it should have a “W” (for Walton) in it. Mr. Walton was of the opinion that if a manufacturer, distributor, or importer wanted to sell things to Wal-Mart, he ought to be willing to come out to Arkansas for a little chat. Soon there was a handsome airport, with daily direct flights from the East Coast, rising among the cattle ponds and the scrub oak.

Tempted though I am to pause in admiration of the superior powers of the law of supply-and-demand in creating useful infrastructure (what you might call Bridges to Somewhere), I must move on to Fayetteville, one of the towns principally served by this airport, the home of the University of Arkansas. For I was on my way to that institution to deliver an address before the Arkansas Philological Association. This was an experience delightful to me in every way. The weather was beautiful. My hosts were gracious. The conference itself offered many engaging papers and fiction readings, but at a pace sufficiently leisurely to allow opportunity to walk about the burgeoning town. Fayetteville has become a happening place, with all the funky evidences of a vibrant student culture that one would find in Madison or Ann Arbor.

If you absolutely must have an animal mascot, and of course you must, go for baroque. What Styrofoam badger or cardboard wolverine can compete with a really gross razorback hog in vermilion plastic? On the fresh autumn morning of Saturday, as I was preparing to leave, they set up a bountiful farmer’s market around the county court house, complete with scruffy or languid musician at each corner. Listen! I’ve been to the Farmer’s Market in Santa Monica, and if the Arkansans can just cultivate a little more pretension, they’ll be there.

J. William Fulbright (1905-1995)

The newish liberal arts college at the University of Arkansas is named in honor of J. William Fulbright, who had first been a law professor and then the young president of the institution in the late 1930s, before he began his distinguished career in Congress. He played a role in my own life. He had been a Rhodes Scholar. His experience of study abroad was a major factor behind the legislation he sponsored in 1946 establishing those international study grants that bear his name. It also encouraged some private philanthropy. He took a personal interest in any young Arkansan elected to the Rhodes—an event that happened perhaps every three or four years. That is how I came to spend the summer of 1958, before going to Oxford, in Washington in a high-paying sinecure in his patronage gift, filling orders in the Senate Document Room. That whole operation has doubtless disappeared in the computer age, but it offered me a uniquely educational experience. It was probably a similar arrangement that first brought Rhodes Scholar-elect William Jefferson Clinton into Fulbright’s orbit a decade later. The rest is history.

Though we have politicians galore in Washington, you’ll be hard pressed to find a statesman. But Bill Fulbright was, in my view, a real statesman. Since people come in packages he was also, perforce, a few other things as well, a southern politico among them. But history, which seems so soon to have forgiven Teddy Kennedy Chappaquiddick, and Robert Byrd the Ku Klux Klan, will probably turn a blind eye to Fulbright’s signature on the Southern Manifesto.

I had no commerce with the Senator after Oxford. But once about 1990, before XNA had opened, I was on one of the old Ozark Airlines propeller flights to Harrison, with only about a dozen passengers. Senator Fulbright and his wife were aboard, to be taken by a plane yet smaller from Harrison on toward Fayetteville. I don’t like fame-chasers, but I spotted him and struggled up the bouncing aisle to speak to him. It frequently happens in life that what is a plausible idea in theory turns out to be an impossible to achieve in reality. I murmured a greeting, but one close glimpse revealed an ill and confused old man with trembling jaw and uncomprehending, vacant stare. I returned to my seat. Perhaps this little memoir can belatedly convey my gratitude and admiration.

I am overwhelmed and embarrassed to have received so much public and private encouragement in response to the unseemly grumbling with which I began my last post. You can expect another essay next week, sans grumble. It may, exceptionally, be posted on Thursday, since I’ll probably want to report on what happened on Wednesday night. There’s a big hint.