Esse est percipi

            Most of my readers are probably familiar, vaguely, with the name of George Berkeley.  Berkeley (1685-1753) was a philosophical Anglican bishop who developed an odd metaphysical theory summed up by the Latin maxim esse est percipi—“to be is to be perceived.”  If your scholastic Latin is getting rusty you may prefer to recall the problem of the tree falling in the remote and uninhabited forest.  Since no one is there to see it or hear it fall, since indeed no one will ever know the slightest thing about this putative tree, is it even possible to say that the tree has ever existed?

The Right Reverend George Berkeley

            This argument fascinated me in Philosophy 101 half a century ago.  Much longer ago than that it seems to have infuriated my culture hero Sam Johnson who, kicking away a small stone that lay on his path, said “Thus I refute Berkeley”—a remark I find more baffling than “Esse est percipi,” actually.

            Berkeley was laying the groundwork for his religious metaphysics, of course.  What guaranteed the existence of the universe, in his view, was its constant perception by the mind of God. 

Berkeley’s hypothesis makes various appearances in English literature.  I seem to remember it, for example, in the opening chapter of The Longest Journey, to my mind the best of E. M. Forster’s novels, which would have to mean that it is very good indeed.  Nor should we forget the contribution of Monsignor Ronald Knox, a clerical wit of an earlier generation, who wrote a splendid limerick on the theme.

There was a young man who said "God
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there's no one about in the quad.

Brilliant, but perhaps upstaged by its anonymous riposte:

Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd:
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by
--Yours faithfully,
                         God

Well, anybody who ever writes anything and sends it out alone in search of a public is likely to face a certain amount of Berkeleian anxiety.  Maybe God knows about it, but does anybody else?

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

That of course is Thomas Gray, another formidable eighteenth-century English gent, in one of the great and gloomy poems of our tongue, the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”.  We know that Keats wanted a single simple inscription on his tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”  But what about under water, those “dark unfathom’d caves of ocean”?  Have I spent my professional life reforesting a remote and unvisited wilderness?

            My first “major” publication, which cost me months of work, was a long essay on the Old English poem usually called “The Dream of the Rood”.  It was published in 1966 in an obscure but erudite Jesuit-edited journal called Traditio.  According to my argument, which I am still prepared to entertain, “The Dream of the Rood” is not merely a poem written in a monastic milieu—that seems obvious—but a poem allegorically about the monastic life.  My essay received the usual academic guerdon.  It was “cited”.  It “appeared” in bibliographies.  Do not indict me for undue cynicism if I tell you that neither of those facts is in itself convincing evidence that anybody ever read it.

Thomas Merton, O. Cist.

            Well.  One of the great Anglo-American religious writers of the last century was Thomas Merton (1915-1968), a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, and the author of The Seven Storey Mountain and other influential books.  I read a couple of them in my youth; but I never met him, nor indeed knew much about him.  A few years ago I did have one strange “encounter,” when I was in the early stages of writing The Anti-Communist Manifestos.  Thomas Merton, it turns out, was an undergraduate at Columbia right in the middle of the Red Decade.  He knew Lionel Trilling slightly and was a kind of protégé of Mark Van Doren, one of the famous English professors of his age (yes, there are some) and a mentor to various literary eminences.  During this period Merton very briefly participated in the Columbia cell of the Young Communist League.  It turned out that the cell for which he was destined was of another sort.

            In 1968 Merton died by electrocution in a freak accident in Bangkok, where he was participating in an ecumenical meeting with Zen Buddhists. I read about it in the press.  That may have been my last conscious thought about Thomas Merton until about two years ago.  I was at the concluding “social hour” of some large academic conference, wearing the obligatory name-tag, and desperately trying to fight my way through to the hors d’oeuvres.  The guy next to me says, “You’re not the John Fleming who wrote about the ‘Dream of the Rood’ by any chance?”

            The very same.  Well, he explained, he was writing a biography of Thomas Merton.  And?  Well, he had read all of Merton’s private diaries, which apparently are housed in a large archive of Mertoniana at Bellarmine University in Louisville.  One of the last entries in the last of the extant notebooks preserves the careful notes he was making on an essay that had caught his fancy: John V. Fleming’s “The ‘Dream of the Rood’ and Anglo-Saxon Monasticism.”  One of the most famous monks of the twentieth century had been reading my article about monastic life just before he died!

The opening section of the "Dream of the Rood" in its unique text in the Vercelli Book.  How an Anglo-Saxon vernacular manuscript ended up in northern Italy is an unsolved mystery.  My guess is that it had been in the possession of a dying English pilgrim.  The poem begins with the majuscule letter: HWæt, ic swefna cyst secgan wille... "Listen!  I shall tell you the best of dreams..."

Reading the Leaves

It seems to be generally true that people in the autumn of life respond with sharpening attention to the annual coming of the autumn of the year.   Such at least is my own experience and that of others with whom I have spoken.  What might be called the incremental poignancy of the autumnal is neither surprising nor necessarily lugubrious, but it is somber and arresting.  It demands its high seriousness.  Keats wrote his famous “Ode to Autumn” when he was, I think, twenty-four years old.  Can one imagine how much richer yet it might have been could he have written it at seventy-four?  But of course for Keats twenty-four was autumn, and late autumn at that.  He knew it.  That is why he could say in another great poem that he had “been half in love with easeful death,” even as in this one he can eroticize Autumn herself as a woman in the willing oblivion of a narcotic sleep, death’s simulacrum:

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies….

            Read the whole of the Ode to Autumn.  You will find in it a remarkable density of perfectly chosen images, with one strange lacuna.  Keats says nothing about leaves.  In the parts of the world I know best, Autumn is all about leaves.  The Fall of the Year is a leaf-fall.  But the fall is preceded by the turn—the transformation of the green of life into the yellow and red hues of a slow-motion immolation.  Dante envisioned the Beatific Vision as an ocean of photons.  But by then he had been strenuously prepared by Beatrice.  Most of us would find that sea of light impossible to bear, but I can imagine walking on a leaf-strew path in the waning autumnal sunlight filtered through the glowing canopy of a deciduous copse.

 The path from the back of our house: without Beatrice, the best you can hope for

            A scholar is likely to have another wistful association with leaves.  The Latin word for leaf was folium, from which we get our English foliage.  But long ago that word folium took on an extended meaning.  It meant a piece of writing material, a sheet of paper or of parchment, a page of a book.  When one leafs through a book, one is idly turning its pages.  To turn over a new leaf is to make a new beginning.  Chaucer in a mock warning to prudes that they might be shocked by the Miller’s Tale, advises them thus: “Turne over the leef and chese another tale…”  (This is advice, however, to be followed only by those who are willing to miss the second funniest line in world literature.)

            In the early periods of printing, important books were made from large sheets of paper folded a single time in the center to make a signature of four pages, two on the front and two on the back of the sheet.  That was called printing in folio.  Think Gutenberg Bible or the First Folio of Shakespeare.  (If you are slow off the mark, think Second Folio of Shakespeare).  Fold the sheet again; the pages will be smaller but you will have twice as many of them.  That was printing in quarto, and it was still plenty big.  Most books you have read will have been printed in octavo—three folds of the big sheet, sixteen pages of text.  No matter what the format the printing was always done on single large sheets, meaning that the printer had to take care to get the pages in the right place.  The reader had some work to do, too, cutting the pages open so they could be turned one at a time.

            The folium as writing surface was not entirely metaphorical.  At the dawn of written history all sorts of materials were used—bones, bark, wood, animal membrane, and of course leaves.  One leaf-writer of note was the all-knowing Cumaean Sybil, among the most famous prophetesses of ancient legend.  Her leaf of choice, Varro tells us, was the fibrous palm.  Her sooth-saying gift was honored by the later Christians, for whom she was the precursor of the prophet-king of Israel.    The great Latin poem about the Last Day, probably written by Thomas of Celano, biographer of Saint Francis, begins thus:

Dies iræ! Dies illa                                    [Day of wrath!  That day
Solvet sæclum in favilla:                        will dissolve the world in ashes,
Teste David cum Sibylla!                        as David testifies along with the Sibyl!]

Michaelangelo's Sibyl: Oh, sweet mama, treetop tall, won't you kindly turn your damper down.

The Sibyl knew everything there was to know, and she wrote it all down on her leaves.  That was the good news.  The bad news was that as a librarian—excuse me, I meant of course Information Technology person—she was a nightmare.  Neither storage nor retrieval was her thing.  She simply tossed her prophecies down anywhere in her vast and drafty cave, where Nature soon enough did to them what she does to all fallen, brittle leaves—blew and beat them into powdered compost.  The search for a needle in a haystack is child’s play compared with the search for truth in a pile of leaf mold.

This is why Helenus, the friend of Æneas, has advised the hero to seek the Sybil’s revelation in spoken rather than in written form.  And so he wisely does.

                                          Foliis tantum e carmina manda,

                                    Ne turbata volent rapidis ludibria ventis;

                                    Ipsa canas oro. [Æneid, vi. 74-76]

“Only do not commit your verses to the leaves, lest they fly about, the sport of strong winds.  I beg you to speak them yourself.”

Jan Breughel's Sibyl: The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind...

A scholar spends a lifetime raking up neat piles of leaves, but don’t count on the Sibyl to guard them for posterity.  She is too heedless, too oblivious.  She, too, is drowsed with the fume of poppies.

           

           

           

Shifting Signifiers, or Signs of the Times

Omnis doctrina vel res vel signa est, sed res per signa discuntur.

                        Augustine De Doctrina Christiniana

At the beginning of his brilliant essay on the principles of interpretation Saint Augustine says that “All teaching concerns either things or signs; but we learn about things by means of signs.” Human language is a system of signs essential for social interaction and especially for learning and teaching.

Augustine loves binary distinctions, and he now makes one with regard to signs themselves. There are two kinds, natural signs and conventional signs.  Think of the signs of fire.  If you see a plume of smoke rising on the horizon, you know that there is also fire.  Smoke is a natural sign of fire.  Smoke always “means” fire, and smoke means fire everywhere on earth.  But what about the word f-i-r-e?  The word is also a sign for the thing fire, but not a natural sign.  It is a conventional sign, agreed upon by social compact.  It is a sign that would have meant nothing to Augustine himself.  The sign f-i-r-e did not exist in the year 400, and even its hypothetical primitive Germanic ancestor would never have entered his Mediterranean ear.  To signal the thing fire to Augustine you would have to use Augustine’s conventions rather than those of Hrothgar.  You would have to say ignis.

In a very famous Supreme Court case (Schenck, 1919) Oliver Wendell Holmes opined that “falsely to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” was not constitutionally protected speech--not in the face of a "clear and present danger".  But you could probably shout “ignis!” with relative impunity even at a Senior Citizens’ Matinee at the Classic.  I may think that the decline of Latin is a clear and present danger, but I doubt that the Supreme Court would.

A little Greek lad who hears the word b-e-t-a will see one thing in his mind,  the little Roman boy another.   The disyllable beta does not by laws of nature mean anything.  It is not a natural, but a conventional sign.

 ....beats me...














No conventional sign can mean anything until you sign onto the convention.  Think of the monosyllable g-i-f-t.  A gift is a desirable thing, at least in Anglophone regions.  It is less so in Germany, unless you positively grock on potassium cyanide or Zyklon-B.  What this means is that if somebody gives you a gift, hope that it is in Boston rather than Berlin.

BOSTON         or

BERLIN?                                                                                                                                

Augustine was trying to prepare people to approach the Bible in some other spirit than that of a Rorschach test.  My purpose in this post is very different, though I will in passing commend Augustine’s essay to the alarmingly large number of my fellow Bible-readers who seem to think that the Word of God is English, subspecies Jacobean.

 ...all Greek to me....

What dawned on me was an odd extension or corollary of Augustinian linguistics.  It seems possible that an entire language can become a conventional sign. On Sunday last I went to the University Chapel for the monthly Communion service.  The cornerstone of this mini-Amiens cathedral was laid in 1922, when a buck was still a buck; and cynics almost immediately christened the building “Princeton’s million dollar answer to materialism.”  Well, let them scoff.  The space is magnificent, and the music excellent even when, as on this occasion, many student choristers were still away on Fall Break.

Chapel services are ecumenical Protestant, though the Gothic architecture pushes the envelope well beyond the comfort zone of, say, John Knox.  The Eucharist has the traditional structure, though Catholics, of whom a fair number attend, must face the anomaly of pronouncing the words of consecration themselves, thus practicing if not approving Martin Luther’s concept of the priesthood of all believers.

But the implications of one odd feature of the service only now struck me with full force.  The old Roman Catholic Mass was in Latin.  We still use Latin words (the Gloria, the Sanctus) to denominate certain parts. One of the principal reforms of the Reformers, adopted by the Catholics themselves after a brief lag of four centuries, was to translate it into the local vernacular.  But here we were in a rather WASPish conclave of central New Jersey singing these parts in Spanish.  Princeton, N.J, is reasonably cosmopolitan, but it is not Miami.  I cannot be sure that there were no native speakers of Spanish in that substantial congregation, but I allow myself to doubt it.  Yet there we all were lustily praising El Señor with authentic south-of-the-border (the Massachusetts border, that is) accent.

The explanation of this phenomenon is not so simple as the fact that our musical settings do in fact come from an Argentinian folk mass.  I have never heard this crowd singing “A Mighty Fortress” in the original German.  No.  The explanation is that in a certain American politico-ecclesiastical context the Spanish language itself, quite apart from any of its individual verbal signifiers, is becoming a conventional sign.  What it signals is a vague but benevolent aspiration to catholic fraternity and recognition of that biblical category called “the poor, the fatherless, and the oppressed.”  I rather doubt that it signaled the same thing to Lope de Vega, but then conventions do shift.

An Upside to the Medicare Crisis

I believe that most of my students are younger than I am.  Ordinarily that observation would be of a banality so oppressive as to forbid it entry even to a blog post, a tolerant genre usually welcoming even to the huddled masses and teeming refuse of one’s most aimless thoughts.  But the circumstances are special.  For the last several weeks Wednesdays, which I had come to think of as “blog days”, have also been “teaching days”.  I have been teaching in an eight-week course, with a two-hour seminar each Wednesday morning, in a local “adult education” program called The Evergreen Forum.

Education for the “older student,” “continuing education” or “life-long learning” has become a vast enterprise in this country.  There can be few communities of any size in America that are without some kind of Adult School, Senior Center Seminar, or local Elderhostel.  In a college town like mine there are at any moment probably half a dozen such academies offering to “non-traditional students”—a bizarre circumlocution for various categories of post-adolescents--poetry workshops, master classes in sushi preparation, introductions to quantum mechanics, Civil War history, Contemporary Chinese politics, or the novels of Virginia Woolf.  By request I have built my own seminar around historical and cultural questions raised in my recent book entitled The Anti-Communist Manifestos.

I have for several decades occasionally taught in such venues.  I have frequently given talks in lecture series sponsored by groups with names like “The Old Guard” and “Fifty-Five Plus”.  In fact I once taught a course on Dante’s Divine Comedy in this same Evergreen Forum.  And I have always enjoyed what I light-heartedly call geriatric education because of the fascinating people one meets.  Furthermore there is a considerable relief in being able to assume a shared general knowledge of such matters as the principal adversaries in the Second World War, and the broad outcome of their struggles.  (Unfortunately, I’m not quite kidding.) Still, it is a bit of a shock to me to realize that I myself am older than many of these folks.  I have become a “non-traditional teacher”.

New York, 1953

In my current seminar there are a couple of people who were at City College not too long after the War, when memories of the Red Decade were still vibrant.  They were there to see the street demonstrations to “save the Rosenbergs”.  There is a mathematician, a Russian émigré, in his youth forced—and this well after the Stalinist period—to join the Komsomol if he entertained any hope of educational advancement.  The capacity of such students to bring living memories of their real life experience to our topics of study is priceless, and affords one kind of mental exhilaration simply unavailable in an Ivy League graduate seminar. 

 

Moscow, 1953

This is the up-side of the fact that lots of people are living longer than the actuaries of the 1930s thought they ought to—a situation know to our politicians and pundits as “the Medicare Crisis.”  Many of them are not in fact on ventilators, and they spend more time at the computerized card catalogue than in the catscan machine.

Most of education, and practically all of humanistic education, is about remembering.  Our enemy is ignorance, especially that form of voluntary ignorance that is cultural amnesia.  Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts is the title of a book (2007) by Clive James, a brilliant work first drawn to my attention shortly after its publication by my old friend Dick Schrader.  I immediately bought a second-hand copy.  Then about a year ago a young alumnus friend actually gave me a brand-new copy of it.  I didn’t tell him I already owned it—there is no such thing as a surfeit of great books—especially as I had by then no idea where my first copy was.  (It turned out to be on loan--which I could now make permanent loan.)

At the Evergreen Forum the focus of this week’s meeting is Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom (1946), a book now long forgotten, but in its day a powerful thunderbolt of literary anti-Communism and a grievous insult to the fantasies of American and French leftists in the immediate post-war period.  Kravchenko was a Soviet industrial engineer, an expert in pipe-rolling, who in 1944 seized the opportunity of an assignment to the Lend-Lease mission in Washington to defect and seek political asylum in America.  He was born in 1905, so that his autobiography was in effect a personal history of the entire period of Bolshevik power.  Its version of Soviet realities was rather different from that to be found in the pages of such intellectually prestigious American organs of opinion of that day as the Nation and The New Republic, let alone those mandarin journals published in Paris by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Kravchenko had personal connections with only one among the high and mighty of the Soviet state: his boss, the Georgian Grigory Ordzhonikidze, who became Commissar for Heavy Industry in 1932 and committed suicide (with Stalin’s encouragement and possible help) in 1937.  Only as I was thinking about this week’s seminar did I remember (discover?) that Clive James has a brilliant little essay on Ordzhonikidze, who is in fact the only “O” in his alphabetically organized book.

Grigory Ordzhonikidze (1886-1937); strong enough to bear the blow

Since being murdered by Stalin has for certain historians been enough to forgive the likes of Bukharin and Zinoviev for their own enthusiastic participation in a state founded on mass murder, James calmly challenges the nascent belief that Ordzhonikidze “might have been some sort of proto-liberal” by quoting a passage from a letter Ordzhonikidze wrote to Kirov in 1934.  “Our cadres who knew the situation of 1932-1933 and who bore the blow are truly tempered like steel.  I think with them we can build a State the like of which the world has never seen.”  The “situation” referred to was the genocidal Soviet policy of state-managed famine in which about five million Ukrainians perished.  The famine is known to Ukrainians as the Holodomor—the Hunger—and it must class with history’s epic atrocities; but it didn’t take long for cultural amnesia to set in.  Walter Duranty of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for in-depth reporting on the Soviet scene in 1932-1933 without ever noticing the Holodomor.  There were a surprising number of things that western intellectuals failed to notice about Soviet Communism.

Those hardened heroes gutsy enough to “bear the blow” were Communist apparatchiks who organized and carried out the murder.  The chief apparatchik was one Nikita Khrushchev, best-selling author of The Crimes of Stalin.  It was hard work, but somebody had to do it.  They did indeed create a State the like of which the world had never seen.  We have seen several more since then, though, and if we succumb to cultural amnesia we are likely to see more yet.  Continuing education is not such a bad idea.

 The Ukraine, 1932; not strong enough to bear the blow

A Beautiful Tale of Love and Death

            We just got back from a quick trip to the opera—Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Lyric Theater in Chicago.  Occasional extravagances of that sort are an unanticipated possibility of retirement, but even so we should hardly have indulged were the opera not a pretext for meeting up with Tamara, a very old and dear friend, recently widowed, who lives in Michigan.  We had been “young marrieds” together nearly a half century ago.  Charles and I spent several years together as junior faculty colleagues before the goddess Fortuna sent us our differing ways.  Death, the definitive separation, is of a different order.  Any sensitive person will probably have an empathetic sense of widowhood, but the long-married are likely to intuit it with a particular poignancy.

I recently read that divorce rates in America have been in noticeable decline, but even before I was able to register a silent, inward satisfaction at the news the next paragraph was upon me with its disquieting explanation.  The reason fewer people have been filing for divorce is that so few people have been getting married in the first place.  There is comparatively little difficulty in putting asunder those whom God has never joined.

“The iconic American family, with mom, dad and kids under one roof, is fading” says another statistical essay in a recent Economist.  “In every state the numbers of unmarried couples, childless households and single-person households are growing faster than those comprised of married people with children, finds the 2010 census. The latter accounted for 43% of households in 1950; they now account for just 20%. And the trend has a potent class dimension. Traditional marriage has evolved from a near-universal rite to a luxury for the educated and affluent.”

            A “luxury for the educated and affluent”—perhaps rather like flying trips to Chicago to attend the opera?  Our great literature has principally concerned itself with three things, two of which are God and marriage, frequently enough in combination.  English professors used to spend a lot of time worrying about “the decline of the novel.”  I think what they were really worrying about—either without realizing it or without being willing to realize it—was the decline of God.  The basis for the greatness of Moby Dick and Les Misérables and The Brothers Karamazov is actually the God-question.  Take that away, and artistic grandeur is an uphill struggle.

God’s literary disappearance still left us with marriage.   Marriage resolves complication, restores order.  The comic (meaning optimistic or happy) template of our literature is the so-called marriage plot: the “Knight’s Tale”, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, almost anything by Jane Austen.  The Marriage Plot, indeed, is the title of a novel, currently much admired, by Jeffrey Eugenides.  And it’s a really great title.  So it is more than a little alarming, simply in literary terms, to face the possibility that narrative fiction may soon lose marriage as well.  “Thus they split, and lived uncommitedly ever after.”  That seems a little lame.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

That is not the problem with Lucia di Lammermoor.  Donizetti’s opera (1835) is based in Sir Walter Scott’s novel, The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), and like most of Scott’s great tales this one was based in “real life”.  Our modern fetish for individual autonomy hardly prepares us for that old world (or most of our modern one outside the industrialized West) in which social relations are familial before they are personal.  If marriage can lead to comic fulfillment, the prohibition of marriage can lead to tragic destruction.  Hence according to the unfortunate comparative principle touched upon in my last post, Lucia di Lammermoor inevitably became “the Scottish Romeo and Juliet”.  

Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)

Yet things are worse even than that.  To forbid Lucy Ashton from marrying Mr. Right (Edgardo Ravenswood) would have been bad enough even without forcing her to marry Mr. Wrong (Arturo Bucklaw).  The sinister combination of oppressions means, in terms of a fine old essay on Scott’s novel by Andrew Lang, that Lucy is both Juliet and Ophelia: “for Lucy, in her soft and fragile beauty, her dutifulness to parental authority, and her final madness, corresponds to Ophelia with some closeness.”  Here are the ingredients for disaster, and on Saturday night in Chicago at least three geniuses—Scott, Donizetti, and the Alabaman soprano Susanna Phillips—made of it a disaster not soon to be forgotten.

Susanna Phillips as Lucia di Lammermoor

All art is determined by both its form and its content.  The very concept of bel canto opera is that the beauty of the singing matches the splendor of the dramaturgy and the moral dignity of the narrative content.  I had never before seen this opera, and I had read the Scott story so long ago that I could remember nothing more than the basic narrative situation.  But it hardly matters.  I have discovered that works of art are like Heraclitus’s river.  You never can step into the same river twice.  The intellectual and spiritual experiences of one’s seventies are not those of one’s fifties, let alone those of one’s twenties.  In some miraculous way the old is also new.  The word re-reading is thus inexact.

Still, in art as in life the complement of change is continuity.  The origins of our romance tradition are sometimes traced to the opening words of the medieval story of Tristan and Iseult: “My lords, would you hear a beautiful tale of love and death?...”  That might be called the bel canto of the eternal human experience.

“My lords, would you hear a beautiful tale of love and death?...”

De-Bard

 Roland Emmerich: a lean and hungry look, with a clear focus on the box office

My dear old Dad had a number of really corny jokes and riddles, apparently devised by and for the simple-minded, that he would pull out for all occasions.  This was unfortunate, since at the very best they worked on one occasion.   “My name’s Schmaltzmeller.  I sell Fuller brushes.  Anything you want to brush up on?”  Also: “I call my sweetie Oleo.  I haven’t any but her.”  That sort of thing.  Well, yesterday I had amazing success with one of these chestnuts.  I was walking along with a young lady when I injected into the conversation, all casual-like, one of my Dad’s favorites.  “Do you know who,” I asked her, “is buried in Grant’s Tomb?”

            Got her!  She fell for it!  Of course it is true that that the young lady, my granddaughter, is six years old, has had all her education (meaning pre-school and first-grade) in France, had never heard of Ulysses Grant, and did not know what a tomb was.  Still, my feeling of triumph was considerable.  If you wait long enough, and stoop low enough, you can find an audience for almost anything.

            I presume that is the principle animating the Hollywood “Shakespeare” film directed by Roland Emmerich and about to be unleashed upon us.  News of its dread approach has been crackling through the synapses of English Teacher listservs for the past month.  It is entitled Anonymous, and amid much foot-stomping, boob-baring, head-chopping, quill-flourishing, and fire-blazing (otherwise known in Hollywood as “Tudor history”) it dusts off the old one about Shakespeare not actually writing the plays of Shakespeare, which were in fact written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

THREE CONTESTANTS

Lord Verulam (Category: niftiest hat)

The Earl of Oxford (Category: itchiest chest; cf Donnelly, below)

William Shakespeare (Category: coolest earring)

            The pre-emptive concerns of English teachers have to do with the cinematic power to render their students’ simple ignorance invincible—what might be called the “Kennedy effect”.  By the late nineties most undergraduates I met at the supposedly elite university in which I taught were sure that President John Kennedy had been assassinated by CIA agents—Lee Harvey Oswald having been nothing more than a convenient patsy, though of course also the possible author of the works once attributed to Christopher Marlowe.  That was on account of a movie of Oliver Stone’s (JFK, 1991).

            America’s English teachers constitute an endangered species already.  They have the unenviable task of trying to coax the kids to get beyond Act One, Scene Two even in the CliffsNotes version.  They need to persuade them of the redeeming social content of technical terms like soliloquy, stichomythia, and dramatic irony.   It is an annoying distraction, to use one of our President’s favorite terms of disapprobation, to have to explain to them that Shakespeare wrote the plays of Shakespeare, as of course he indubitably did.           
            Though it has by now been around for quite a while, the idea that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare is a comparatively recent aberration; it couldn’t appear until the last of Shakespeare’s close friends, business partners, and fellow players had all been dead for a couple of centuries.  When the theory did arrive, it must have been at least potentially pleasing to college professors.  It maintained that it was impossible that anyone could master the learning deployed in the plays without benefit of a college education, whereas it was a well-known fact that William Shakespeare was diploma-less. “Thou hadst small Latin and less Greek.”  Didn’t his old buddy, Ben Jonson, write that himself?

In fact he did—in a passage in which he compared Shakespeare, by no means unfavorably, to some other under-educated playwrights, such as Euripides, Æschylus, and Seneca, none of whom had college degrees, there being no colleges from which to get them back in the day.  Anyway, it must have been somebody else—Lodge, Greene, Chapman—yes, Chapman was the best bet, though even there one could occasionally identify the leaden hand of George Peele.

            Lord de Vere, though a late starter, is proving to be a strong finisher.  He could not append his name to Macbeth or The Merry Wives of Windsor because writing plays was, in the eyes of polite society, infra dignitatem, aristocratically speaking.  The hot candidate beginning in the later nineteenth century was Lord Verulam, the Viscount St. Albans, more familiarly known as Francis Bacon.  Bacon was not merely a much more appropriate author of Shakespeare’s plays than was Shakespeare, he was also immensely learned.  It takes erudition to write stuff like “The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon ...”

            Better yet, since espionage was one of Bacon’s many things, he had developed an interest in codes and ciphers.  Under these circumstances it was certain that, although he published all his plays under the ridiculous name “Shakespeare,” he cunningly left coded messages within them revealing their true authorship.  The great expert in crypto-Shakespeareanism was Ignatius Donnelly, author of The Great Cryptogram (1888) in about a thousand pages, a sequel to his equally revolutionary Atlantis : the Antediluvian World (1882).  Donnelly was a Republican congressional representative from Minnesota—founder of a great tradition.  Few men achieve even one truly cockamamie idea in a career.  Donnelly was so prolific of them as to capture the title “Prince of Cranks,” so far without serious challenge.

 Ignatius Donnelly (R-Minnesota)

            The word is that if you can manage to backmask the sound track to Anonymous—play it backward at one-third speed—it offers other startling revelations.  It gives a definitive resolution to the stirred-or-shaken controversy, and it confirms the fact that Nine-Eleven was engineered by the Mossad.  Finally, after centuries, we learn why Hamlet hesitated.

 Shakespeare's breakfast

           

The Class War

We must deny before God and man that one’s attitude towards men may be determined solely by considering them as representatives of this or that class….Every man is made in the image of God, however indistinct that image may become, and every man is called to eternal life; in the face of these truths, all differentiation by class, all political passion, all the superfluities that social life piles daily on the human soul are trivial and unavailing.                 

Nicholas Berdyaev, Christianity and Class War (1931)

There is in contemporary America a widely shared perception that a large and growing disparity in material well being among our citizens is problematic from both the social and the moral points of view.  I confess that I share this perception. I regard the situation as serious and dangerous.  On another occasion I might attempt to address its substance directly.  It is conceivable that an expertise in medieval Franciscan thought, in which the biblical account of Dives and Pauper (see Luke xii) received penetrating analysis, might allow me to say something useful--but only barely conceivable.  What this essay is about is class war.

 Lazarus (Pauper) at the Door of Dives   Heinrich Aldegrever, 1552

            President Obama has called for increased tax rates for rich people (a vaguely defined group variously denominated as “the most fortunate among us,” “millionaires and billionaires,” “job creators,” “small businessmen,” and “Warren Buffet”).  Several Republican politicians immediately indicted this proposal as class warfare.  The President himself just as quickly denied the charge, but since then other Democrats have opined that a little class warfare is just what we need.  In informal remarks innocent of any serious pretensions to coherence, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to suggest that the famous phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was a salvo in an early skirmish of the class war.  Less equivocal is the essay entitled “Obama, Don’t Run from Class War" by Howell Raines, former Numero Uno at the New York Times.  I have seen several others in a similar vein.

To be sure Raines stresses a concept of “non-violent” or metaphoric class war.  I still protest.  A professor of English can hardly adopt a general hostility toward metaphor, but there are some metaphors that have been ruined by being made literal, just as there are literal realities that have been ruined in becoming metaphoric.  If you look up the word holocaust in an old reference work you will see that it is the English form of the biblical Greek term for the “burnt offerings” that played such an important role in early Jewish sacrificial worship.  It was a theological concept.  Perhaps one in a hundred people who talk about the Holocaust today knows that fact; but it doesn’t matter, for what holocaust is is what Auschwitz made it.  To use the word in its old sense would be pedantic and trivial.

Having spent a certain amount of time studying twentieth-century Communism, I have a similar attitude to the phrase class war.  The phrase made its serious claim on the modern consciousness through Karl Marx. Marx believed in the “class war,” though the word famously used in the first sentence of the Communist manifesto was “struggle” (Kampf), which is a little different from war (Krieg).  “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

I must pause to say that I am no Marx-basher.  A lot more of the people who talk about Marx flippantly would do well to read some actual  Marx.  Much of it is tough slogging, but no fair reader will fail to find even in the leaden pages a profound and original thinker animated by an attractive humanistic spirit.  I want to adopt the attitude of the great Russian Orthodox philosopher Berdyaev, from whom I took the epigraph for this post.  The dedication of Christianity and Class War reads as follows: “I dedicate this book to the memory of KARL MARX who was the social master of my youth and whose opponent in ideas I have now become.”  Marx is no more responsible for all things done in his name or that of his ism than Freud is personally responsible for Ernest Jones’s interpretation of Hamlet or Jesus Christ is responsible for the Spanish Inquisition.

Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948)

Marx was a social analyst, not a revolutionary practitioner of political power, and it was left to later Communists in power like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot to define what “class war” meant in a concrete sense.  What it meant is so appalling that the words should not be used in a casual way.  In statistical terms class war has meant something like the following (taken from the Black Book of Communism, p. 4):

            The Soviet Union, 20 million dead

            China, 65 million dead

            Cambodia, 2 million dead

            North Korea, a million dead

            Vietnam, a million dead…

and more.

            Class war means that it is right and necessary to kill a very great many people.  I suppose that Marxism was never more prestigious among western intellectuals than in the 1930s, which was the decade of the Spanish Civil War, regarded by most intellectuals as a nearly pure instance of good (the Spanish Republic and its allies) versus evil (Franco and his Nationalist insurgents, with their allies.)  The following events from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) are well-documented.  Nationalist soldiers upon battling their way into a largish village against stiff resistance gathered all the male population of the place into the town square.  A committee of officers then examined the hands of all the men who had been rounded up.  Those with heavily calloused palms were removed for immediate execution, the assumption being that as manual workers they must be Communists or Communist supporters.  In other places where the Republican forces and their international allies were for the moment victorious, all men (and sometimes women) in religious garb were shot.  In at least one instance anyone wearing a religious medal was shot.  Here the assumption was that such people were necessarily “class enemies”.

            By all means let us have vigorous political debate in this country.  Let us debate our absurd tax code and even, if we have the stomach for it, reform it.  Let us engage our “enemies in ideas,” to use Berdyaev’s term; but, please, leave the class war out of it.

 Class War: some collateral damage in Spain