The Tillie Adjustment

Rarely do I really lose track of the calendar, but I did this week as I became immersed in the excitement of a new research project.  Only last night as I was going to bed did I remember that I was facing blog day.  Thus I find myself sitting before a computer screen instead of setting off for my regular early morning swim—the obligatory nature of which is for me as the law of the Persians and the Medes.  Naturally there is a back story.   As most of the world is aware, the northeast coast of the United States has been experiencing a serious cold snap.  The current thermometer reading is 9º Fahrenheit.  Getting to the gym and back involves a fair amount of outdoor walking.  It is not entirely inconvenient for me that the law of the Persians and the Medes should on rare occasion be subject to meteorological modification.  I am not unwilling to invoke the “Tillie Adjustment”.

            I had a great uncle named Win or Wynne.  He has been dead for probably sixty years, but he is oddly fresh in my memory.  He was an older brother of my paternal grandmother, and he would briefly descend upon the Arkansas farm at long and irregular intervals.  I never saw the name written out.  I now presume it was an affectionate nickname or abbreviation for something more mainstream and conventional, even if I can’t tell you what.  Like my grandfather Fleming he was a veteran of the Spanish-American War.  Having served in the Spanish-American War appeared to be by far the most significant fact of my grandfather’s life in the years I knew him, and he seemed always happy to welcome under his roof a brother-in-law his children seemed to regard as suspect.

            Little pitchers have big ears, and I deduced from unintentionally eavesdropped talk among my aunts that Uncle Win was some kind of Bad Boy.  His turpitude, so far as I could tell, was largely stylistic.  He smoked, but so did my own parents as well as two of my uncles and one of my aunts.  He also—rarely but memorably—did use very vehement and foul language.  I thought that Uncle Win was a pretty stylish old guy.  I never had known a man with jewelry, but he wore a dramatic Masonic ring with actual sparkling stones.  He would descend upon us from somewhere in the Chicago area driving an older model of a huge luxury car.  Once it was a Cadillac.  While not technically in violation of state law, this vehicle was so culturally inappropriate for an Ozark farm as to fall beneath my aunts’ barely suppressed censure.

            I now realize that his real crimes were marital.  He had been married to somebody named Aunt Elsie.  Aunt Elsie has been universally beloved of the Flemings, but she had died before the dawn of my consciousness.  Uncle Win shocked his nephews and nieces by declining to remain a widower.  He married again—and again.  Number two wife was also deceased by the time I became aware of things, but it was clear in the eyes of my uncles and aunts she had fallen far short of the standard set by the sainted Aunt Elsie.

            This anecdote involves wife number three who, like Win himself, had an odd name.  It was Tillie.   Win and Tillie probably were both about eighty when they married in Saginaw, Michigan, or some such place.  Very soon thereafter Win put his new bride into a big old Oldsmobile and headed south.  One of the few things known to us in advance about Tillie was that she was a practitioner of Christian Science.  The fact was damning on the face of it.  Better by far a Zoroastrian.  They arrived, melting, in the middle of a hot Arkansas July day.  Win said, as he always said on such occasions, “I thought I’d just pop down for a little visit.”  What “a little visit” entailed was a talking contest of gigantic proportions undertaken by talkers of heroic abilities.  Uncle Win talked about the good old days with a geography and population unknown to me.  What the Flemings mainly countered with was the good old days as exemplified by how great Aunt Elsie had been.  Seldom in human history was so little said by so many at such great length.

            Tillie was hard to take, but I did feel sorry for her.  She was a demanding, obtuse whiner; but I tried to think what it must be like to be thrust among strangers, ignored by an equally obtuse husband whose relatives’ sole topic of conversation appeared to be the virtues of his former spouse.   She was suffering terribly from the heat.  She actually panted.  Air conditioning did not exist in that time and place.  She fanned herself with a folded magazine.  She mopped sweat, real or imagined, from her brow.  She made a great show of being unbearably hot.

            “Win,” she said, “I need some ice cream.  Do you think they have ice cream?”  Although “they” were sitting within ten feet in the same room, Tillie addressed all her remarks concerning the establishment to her husband, who ignored her.  She continued at a slightly higher pitch: “Win, do you think they could get us some ice cream?”  At this point one of “them” stipulated that “they” had no ice cream and that the nearest ice cream was about twelve miles away.  This information was conveyed in such a manner as to suggest that people who require ice cream to endure the supposed rigors of unexceptionally seasonable weather are sissies.  Tillie’s next utterance was in the imperative voice: “Win, get in the car and go and get me some ice cream.”

            For some reason the peremptory tone riled Uncle Win.  “My God, woman” (he actually talked like that) “my God, woman, can’t you put up with a little heat?”  He went on to appeal to the principle of mind over matter.  “I thought you were supposed to be a Christian Scientist!”  Her reply, now enshrined in my private philosophy as the “Tillie Adjustment”, was striking.  “I usually am,” she said, “but not in Arkansas.”  What a sensible subordination of the theoretical to the meteorological.

Chacun à sa Goutte

If I took my cue from the journalists I most admire I would seize the occasion to write a proper New Year’s essay lamenting the follies and fatuities of 2013 or assessing the likely perils and pitfalls of 2014, but that really isn’t my style.  I do wish all my readers all the best for 2014, and I do pray for the relief of our troubled land and our needy world.  But for better or worse my modest muse, when we get to the crossroads, generally nudges me in the direction of the humorous or the absurd rather than that of the profound.  So I will relate my curious experience in ringing out the old year.

            Our recent trip to Geneva was delightful, but it included one awkward moment.  On the third morning, I woke up with a sore and slightly swollen finger—the ring finger on my left hand.  What we often call “denial” is the human mind’s eagerness to avoid unpleasantness by finding “rational” solutions, however implausible, to the little emergencies of daily life.  I persuaded myself that I had somehow all unconsciously banged my knuckle on the bedside table during the night.  We had things to do and places to go, and so went there and did them.  But by midafternoon my finger was really bothering me, and by day’s end the knuckle practically glowed in the waning light.  It was hot to the touch, half again its normal girth, and throbbing with pain. 

            My son Luke was sufficiently alarmed to suggest an immediate trip to the hospital.  Still in denial, I assured him a drug store with some “Icy Hot” would be sufficient; but the pharmacist’s assistant practically fainted when she saw my finger.  This was a case for the “Permanence”—which, I deduced, was an off-hours walk-in clinic.  Luckily for me there was supposed to be a Permanence only four blocks away. 

            We actually found it, and less than an hour later I was in the office of the doctor on duty, an animated Italian woman, approximately four and a half feet tall.  We met on neutral linguistic ground.  I have often explained to my students that the social genius of medieval Latin was that it was nobody’s mother tongue and therefore the common domain of all.  There is a reason that French was the lingua franca of the Swedish Crusaders.  Admittedly limited experience with small female doctors has led me to hypothesize that small female doctors enjoy having large male patients at their mercy.  I tried to engage in spirited repartee in French, but she immediately established her authority

            She took one look at the finger and instantly offered two hypotheses.  The first was an acute attack of inflammatory osteo-arthritis, but this in her view was unlikely.  (In fact I think that hypothesis primo was mainly to scare me.)   Her second hypothesis, which rapidly moved from probability to certainty as she talked, was  la goutte.  This caught me doubly by surprise.  I was not prepared to suffer from gout.  Even less prepared was I for the French word for gout to be goutte.

            Gout was an ailment of aging eighteenth-century aristocrats who drank too much port.  (What an insult to teetotalers that fruit juice is apparently even worse!)  In later ages its victims were the caricature plutocrats of Monopoly board iconography, who are likewise the objects of cruel mirth in old Punch and New Yorker cartoons.  Let me tell you that outside the pages of humor magazines, gout is no joke.  Furthermore, gout was supposed to attack the joints of the toes, not those of the fingers.  There was the additional linguistic insult.  I thought I actually knew the French word goutte: a drop, as in a drop of rain.  I even knew the special fancy meaning in medieval heraldry, in which a goutte is one of those little globs roughly in the shape of teardrops that feature on many coats of arms.  This was a painful way to expand my vocabulary.

            With confidence later vindicated by speedy results Dr. Colitta was sure she could fix me up in a matter of hours with prescribed anti-inflammatories.  In the meantime, she told me, I faced an immediate crisis.  My wedding ring was about to strangulate my finger; it must be removed immediately.  I hope that captures the linguistic ambiguity I experienced, as it was not at first clear to me whether it was the ring or the finger that faced imminent removal.

            It was the former.  Digital goutte might be news to me, but it is apparently so common that your ordinary Swiss Permanence keeps not merely a machine to do the job but a highly qualified professional to operate the machine.  The operator was a lively lass.  I judged from her name—Svetlana—that she must have sprung from one of the eastern-most cantons of the Helvetic Confederation.  She took an immediate interest in my son, who is a great deal younger than I and, truth forces me to admit, even better looking.

            The ring-cutting device seems to work on the principle of a can-opener.  The operation took quite a while, and it hurt like hell; but a good deal of life is dealing with lesser evils, and the only alternatives on offer appeared to be amputation or forcing the ring over the inflamed knuckle.

            Very soon we were back on the streets on our way, first, to the all-night pharmacy with its anti-inflammatories and then to another splendid supper.  We were also chuckling over Svetlana’s parting shot to Luke.  With a wicked wink she had asked him if he didn’t want her to remove his ring as well.

Merry in Montreal

Neither blog-writing nor blog-reading is a particularly appropriate occupation for Christmas day.  On the other hand I can think of no better time to to publish a manifesto of universal good will to all readers, whether intentional readers or accidental ones,  of "Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche."  Snow is everywhere here in Montreal, and it is not of the Jingle Bells variety.  Last night on my way to church I relived an experience nearly forgotten since I lived in Wisconsin six decades ago.  When you step out into a certain degree of cold you can feel on your second or third intake of breath a strange sensation as the hairs on the insides of your nostrils stiffen and freeze.  There is also a distinctive sound to the scrunch of the snow beneath your foot.  Under these circumstances such a casually uttered cliche as "warm-hearted" becomes vivid with meaning.  So I send you my warm-hearted greetings and my hopes for peace and wisdom in our lives.

Essential Bookness

There is in our town a fine institution of continuing education or “senior academy” called the Evergreen Forum.  Each year it offers in conjunction with the Senior Center a large number of courses impressive in their range and scope.  I have  taught a few courses in this program in the past, and in the spring I am scheduled to teach another—this one on eighteenth-century occultism and other matters raised in The Dark Side of the Enlightenment.  I have met many engaging people among the Evergreen seminarians, including Harry Pinch, whose wife has been over the years one of the Forum’s principal movers and shakers.

            Harry asked me a couple of weeks ago whether I was receptive to suggestions for weekly blog topics. I’ll take the opportunity to announce publicly that the answer to that question is affirmative.  My aim is “general interest”—a category perhaps not always or entirely coincident with my default religious and political opinions.  Harry had been struck by an essay by David Streitfeld entitled “Out of Print, Maybe, but Not Out of Mind,” published in the New York Times “Technology” section in early December.  Harry wondered whether this stimulating piece might offer some grist for the bloguiste’s mill.  And of course it does.  Its subject very generally is the fascinating commerce between the printed book and the e-book.  Yes, I know--but this really is an excellent essay, and you should read it in its entirety, as I am engaging with only a few of its implications.

            Everybody knows that electronic technology can revolutionize the reading experience.  What Streitfeld is struck by is the reluctance of the book industry to let it do so.  You don’t need to turn pages in an electronic book.  However, makers of reading machines are going to extraordinary lengths to try to recreate the “feel” of turning a page.  Although the idea of an autographed or inscribed copy of an e-book ought to seem absurd on the face of it, canny Amazonians are inventing one.  I guess that if you can make an electronic cigarette, you can make an electronic anything.

But why?

            Although literacy commands a legitimate private sphere (personal letters, diaries, etc.) the great historical impulse in graphic communication is directed toward the public sphere.  I have lots of reasons to be interested in “publication”, broadly understood.  I am a reader and a writer, the owner of a library, an expert on medieval manuscripts, an amateur historian of printing, and an actual letterpress printer.  I conclude that all major developments in the history of publication have been driven by one or more of four considerations: the authoritative accuracy of the published text; the durability of the publishing medium; the number of copies that can be produced; and the cost of the publishing process.  The first consideration—accuracy of text—may take you by surprise; but many early printers considered the new option of authorial correction of proof sheets quite as important as the capacity for the multiplication of copies.  From the analytical point of view an electronic text satisfies all four desiderata as well or better than all previous modes of publication.  Yet many of us resist.  But why?

            Part of the answer—an important part—lies in universal habits of cultural conservatism.  “Most things that exist in the world,” said the great cultural anthropologist E. B. Tylor, “exist for the reason that they once existed.”  Contrary to popular academic belief the argument that “we have always done things that way” is among the most powerful one can muster.  We have always made books by the mechanical application of ink to paper—so long as “always” means perhaps a tenth part of the long history of publication and so long as we restrict ourselves to our own neck of the cultural woods.

            It is no easy thing, however, cleanly to separate the essential from the decorative.  That is a major point of Streitfeld’s essay.  The particular thought that captured Harry Pinch’s attention was this: “We pursued distractions and called them enhancements.” My late colleague and friend, Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science, became famous for his concept of the “paradigm shift,” a rearrangement of the mental furniture so thorough-going as in effect to supplant an old “reality” and establish a new one.  Such, for instance, was the triumph of the Copernican astronomy over the Ptolemaic.

            But few shifts were so dramatic or so complete.  The perfection of durable writing surely qualifies, and perhaps, but only perhaps, so does the invention of movable types.  But Gutenberg’s technology, however incrementally improved, remained essentially the same for half a millennium.  Now letterpress has been trumped by offset lithography, the process used to produce every book that most people alive today have ever read.

            The matter is perhaps semantic, but I cannot consider the advent of lithography as a paradigm shift, any more than I can so regard the shift from scroll (words laid out in a single long roll) to codex (words laid out in sequentially bound discrete sheets).  That shift, incidentally, has been reversed on your computer screen.  There is very little theological difference between a Torah procession in a Jewish liturgy and the gospel procession in a Christian liturgy; but you will see fossilized in the contrast two historical moments in the history of writing and reading.

            So what is “the future of the book”?  There will not be a single future, but many.  It is possible to read writing produced in a myriad of forms: spray-painted on the sides of subway cars, traced by a finger on a steamed-up mirror, puffed into the cold air by a sky-writing airplane.  Some poor souls will doubtless come to think of a “book” as a fugitive sequence of pixels on a hand-held screen.  But how can there be a real book without the tactile ghosts of the type on the backside of a sheet of laid paper, or the smooth feel and smell of old calf?  And how can you really read it except with the aid of green-shaded glass lamps on a polished old library table?

Geneva--Johannine and Lukan

 Geneva: December 10, 2013

 I try to maintain a regular schedule of Wednesday publication, but there are times, as for example when I find myself climbing into an airplane in Geneva midmorning of a Wednesday, when sticking to schedule would be more in the genre of electronic athleticism than of journalistic virtue.

            This visit to Geneva was my first in more than fifty years.  On my last stay there my mission was to seek out an illuminated manuscript of the Roman de la Rose for work on my doctoral dissertation in preparation.  My companion then was my newly married bride and life-partner.  My companion of the past few days was our younger son Luke, now himself a doctor of philosophy and the father of a young son.  Quite a lot can happen in half a century.

            Like his mother, Luke too is a splendid companion of the road.  A few years ago we visited Lisbon together.  That was a memorable trip, but I shall remember our three days together in the Alps as even more rewarding.

            If you have arrived from Europe at JFK or Newark any time recently you might be interested in how they do things in Geneva.  In the immaculate luggage hall there is a machine that dispenses tickets for free train rides to the center of the city, good also for a transfer to any of the frequent buses or trams that radiate out from Cornavin Station in all directions including almost necessarily the direction of your hotel.  Once at the hotel the clerk hands you, along with your key, a pass good for free public transport for the duration of your stay.  I cannot deny the truth of what many tourists also notice—the place is very expensive--but you still have the feeling people actually want you to be there.  So, yes, you may have to take out a bridge loan to cover lunch, but it’s a really nice lunch.

            Geneva is relatively small, with many beautiful features, and it is so eminently walkable that we never even used our free bus passes.  There is lots of clean, fresh water dramatically channeled for visual effect, and a large artificial geyser springing from the lake, beyond which rises Mont Blanc in all its majesty.

           Walking and water were perhaps the trip’s unifying themes.  One of the most prized treasures of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire is a great altarpiece made for the city’s cathedral by Konrad Witz in the 1440s.  This magnificent work of art was attacked by Protestant iconoclasts in the sixteenth century, broken apart, and severely damaged.  But unlike their more enthusiastic brethren in the Low Countries, the Swiss Calvinists did not utterly destroy the despised relics of Gothic piety.  The broken bits were gathered together and stored in a civic warehouse where, long forgotten or ignored, they survived into our more happily ecumenical age.  Witz’s altarpiece has been almost miraculously restored through the skill and technology of modern museum science.

            Four large panels have been preserved.  In my opinion the most striking is the “Miraculous Catch of Fish”.  The story is told twice in the gospels—in Luke (cap. 5) and John (cap. 21)—and in significantly different forms.  In the latter it is presented as one of Jesus’s post-Resurrection appearances.  The basic “plot” is this.  The disciples--many of whom were actual fishers of fish before they became fishers of men—are plying their piscatorial trade without luck until Jesus tells them where, precisely, to cast their nets.  Then they catch a huge haul.  There is a particularly striking fact about John’s version—entirely aside from the failure of Jesus’s intimate disciples at first to recognize him—and that is its curious numerical specificity.  The fisherman’s net is so full that it tests the tensile strength of the net’s webbing.  But John doesn’t say anything so indeterminate as that they caught a lot of fish or scores of fish, or whatever.  He says they caught one hundred and fifty-three fish.  It’s as though in the story of the “Feeding of the Five Thousand” there were an editorial note saying that the actual number was 4,996.

            One hundred and fifty-three is an odd number in more senses than one, and medieval exegetes marshaled their remarkable powers of ingenuity in attempts to explicate its hidden meaning.  The results of their efforts might one day provide the materials for another essay.  Konrad Witz’s remarkable panel painting is satisfied with the more obvious and literal theme of divine plenitude, the bounteously given fruits of soil and water.  In that context, I realized as I walked with a beloved son along the water’s edge, that the Lake of Geneva can be no great spiritual distance from the Lake of Genneseret.  How little could I know in 1962 of the fullness of providential possibility.  Another watery scriptural text came to my mind—one that was a favorite of a long-departed grandmother.  Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.

Annals of Homiletics

 

Life, you know, is rather like opening a tin of sardines. We are all of us looking for the key. And I wonder how many of you here tonight have wasted years of your lives looking behind the kitchen dressers of this life for that key. I know I have. Others think they’ve found the key, don’t they? They roll back the lid of the sardine tin of life. They reveal the sardines, the riches of life, therein, and they get them out, and they enjoy them. But, you know, there’s always a little bit in the corner you can’t get out. I wonder is there a little bit in the corner of your life? I know there is in mine!

                                                      From Alan Bennett’s Anglican sermon in Beyond the Fringe (1981)

            Sunday last, the first Sunday of Advent, might be called “the Christian New Year”.  The endlessly repeated liturgical cycle of the Christian year does not begin with the birth of Jesus.  The early Christians regarded that event as so stupendous as to require at least a brief period of thoughtful preparation, and this became the penitential season of Advent, which begins with the fourth Sunday before Christmas. 

           

            The Scripture readings for the first Sunday of Advent, established in ancient times, are particularly solemn and impressive.  They include the stirring passage in the letter to the Romans (cap 13) in which Paul likens the coming of the Christ to daylight breaking through the darkness of night, an archetypal image shared by many religions and philosophies, but here used distinctively by Paul as an appeal to action and the reformation of moral life.  This is the very passage on which the eyes of the young Augustine fell as he brooded beneath the fig tree.  The text changed his life, and with it the intellectual history of the Western world, in an instant.

tolle, lege

            Many of the great preachers of my tradition have dealt masterfully with this passage.  I think particularly of John Donne’s sermon before the Prince and Princess Palatine on June 16, 1619.   So naturally I was eager to hear what my own rector would have to say about it.  Of course I knew in advance that this man’s homiletic style tended less to the Pauline than to the Victorine—recognizing in this term his penchant for the striking domestic metaphor.  In the seventh chapter of his second book (Pantagruel) Rabelais gives an extensive catalogue of the theological titles that Pantagruel supposedly found in the famous library of the abbey of Saint-Victor, including such masterpieces as The Codpiece of the Law and The Mustard-Pot of Penance.

            Even so I was startled to hear that the anticipation of the coming of Christ was to be understood in terms of the way a viscous blob of red condiment slowly oozes from a bottle of Heinz ketchup.  The image, we were told, related explicitly to one of the old glass bottles, before they came up with a squeezable plastic model, as squeezing considerably accelerates the flow.  One of the geniuses of Madison Avenue had summed it all up in a TV ad of an earlier age (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_uDta6cLPk).  It takes a long time for the ketchup to flow, but “It’s worth the wait.”  That’s the way to understand what Paul means when he says “now is salvation nearer to us than when we first believed”!  It takes a while to get here, but it’s worth the wait.  For  the slow oozing of divine grace eventually builds to the crescendo poetically described by the theologian Richard Armour:
                    Shake and shake the ketchup bottle
                    None'll come, and then a lott'll.

            Historically, the sermon is actually a fairly late addition to Eucharistic worship.  The sermon was of course a common enough literary genre, but most of the famous sermon collections of the Middle Ages—those of Augustine, Caesarius of Arles, or even Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century--were perhaps never actually preached.  They were instead passed around in manuscript for pious reading in religious houses.  They were like “closet” drama.

            While preaching as the actual center of a religious service appears only with Protestantism in the sixteenth century, the beginnings of the weekly parish sermon will be found in the evangelical revival of the thirteenth century and the coming of the friars.  The real name of one of the two largest orders of friars, the Dominicans, is Ordo Praedicatorum, the Order of Preachers.  The Dominicans had some really great preachers.  Berthold of Regensburg, without mechanical amplification of any kind, could command an audience of thousands in the open fields for his three-hour harangues.  He attached a pennant to his portable dais so that people on the periphery could see which way the wind was blowing and station themselves downwind of his bellowing.  If you are architecturally savvy you can often tell a medieval Dominican church by its distinctively wide nave designed to serve the acoustical needs of large auditory.  Some art historians have called these buildings “preaching barns.”

            Barns are surrounded by barnyards.   The famous Franciscan preacher Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) usually stayed indoors, but one of his specialties was the scripturally based barnyard metaphor.  We are told that on occasion he did not scruple to supplement his theological point by braying like the ass on which Jesus entered Jerusalem, clucking like a mother hen, or grunting like the Gadarene swine.  It was, of course, an agrarian age.  Animal husbandry was everywhere the normal extension of human community; and human community was mostly small villages surrounded by cultivated fields, grazing pastures, and untamed forest.  It is not too surprising, therefore, that some of the earliest Franciscans took the logical step toward indiscriminate zoological homiletics.  Who has not seen at least a reproduction of Giotto’s depiction of Francis preaching to the birds?  Assisi is of course a land-locked place.  The next great Franciscan Saint, Anthony of Padua, actually came from Lisbon, a famous seaport.   Anthony preached to the fish.  With such an awesome precedent as Francis’s to compete with, he perhaps felt he had to play ketchup.  But these days if you come up with a sermon that is strictly for the birds, it’s probably best preached in an aviary.   

 Franciscan homiletics: (a) avian; (b) piscine

My Fragment of Kennedy Memorabilia

 The Senate Document Room in Days of Yore

The varied assessments of the presidency of John F. Kennedy published during the week memorializing the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination left me with a variety of impressions, two of them personal.  The first is of my antiquity.  Every pundit in America found it necessary to reminisce about where he or she was precisely at the moment the terrible news arrived, and where they were was usually in Mrs. Higgenbotham’s third-grade classroom or some such.  I was already a college instructor. However, their infantile perceptions remembered after half a century seemed to offer them a sufficient platform from which to announce confident and sweeping views about the mood of America in 1963 and President Kennedy’s role in creating it.

            Though I remember those times vividly, I cannot recall that there was a national mood.  In my experience life’s complexity is fairly constant.   So I have no field theories to propose.  I can offer by way of a second impression only one quite small and specific point.  I had to conclude that none of the pundits talking about the Kennedyesque “Camelot” had the slightest idea what or where Camelot is or was—though the more astute among them connected it to a Broadway show.  Medievalists rarely appear in prime time, so let me take the opportunity to remind you that Camelot was the legendary place that was the legendary seat of the legendary medieval King Arthur, and that it was somewhere vaguely off in the West—meaning the West of England, of course.

            I suppose it is natural that a figure so attractive, indeed charismatic as President Kennedy would attract mythic comparison, but I am not sure that  popular journalism has picked up the right myth.  The idea that the thousand days of the Kennedy administration created a Camelot on the Potomac is one that I, at least,  cannot fully endorse.  It is not simply the matter of the inexactitude of the parallels, significant though they be.  (For example, in the real Camelot it was the queen, not the king, who was the adulterer.)  It is more a question of mythic tone.  Broadway musicals are not big on ambiguity.  Medieval poets were much better.

            Of Arthur at his Christmas feast at Camelot the great author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight writes thus: 

Þis kyng lay at Camylot vpon Krystmasse….

He watz so joly of his joyfnes, and sumquat childgered:

His lif liked hym lyȝt, he louied þe lasse

Auþer to longe lye or to longe sitte,

So bisied him his ȝonge blod and his brayn wylde.

We don’t know for certain what the key adjective childgered means, but it is probably closer to “childish” than “child-like”.  The restlessness, I think, has to be borderline pathological: Royal Attention Deficit Order is my guess.  Anyway the king’s appetite for action sure gets Gawain in a spot of bother.  Young blood and wild brain make for hair-raising adventures, but they are hardly presidential.

            I have one personal and trivial Kennedy anecdote that is perhaps worth recording.  I spent the summer of 1958 in Washington, working in the Senate Document Room.  In the old days (and for all I know, still) each piece of legislation proposed in either of the houses of Congress was printed in a large number of copies at every stage of its discussion and amendment for the consultation of interested legislators and staff members.  The Senate Document Room stored these papers and distributed them among the senators on demand.  I was a well paid summer clerk in this office.  The duties were not taxing, and I had plenty of time to enjoy Washington.  What a wonderful way to spend a summer between graduating from college and sailing off to Europe!  

Senator J. William Fulbright in 1965

            The instigator of this boondoggle was Senator J. William Fulbright (D-Arkansas).  All the senators had a certain number of patronage jobs at their disposal.   Some may have gone to political cronies, but several of the senators sponsored “promising youth”, a category into which I once plausibly fit.  Bill Fulbright, one of the genuine American statesmen of the last century, took a special interest in Rhodes Scholars elected from Arkansas.  He was still doing that ten years later when he patronized Bill Clinton.

            Among my summer friends in the Document Room was a smart guy who later became an American historian at the University of Wisconsin, where I ran into him again.  We both regarded the Senate as though it were an all-star baseball team and we card-collectors.  There were many highly prized cards, but for this fellow the Jack Kennedy card, had there been one, would have outranked the T208 Honus Wagner.  One hot, bright afternoon after work we were walking near the Capitol vaguely in the direction we both lived when Senator John F. Kennedy drove right by us.  We were not twenty feet away.  He was driving a red convertible car with the top down.  In the passenger’s seat at his side was a good-looking blonde.  She could have been some latter-day Daisy Buchanan.  They were both laughing. 

            Religious rapture is rare this side of baroque painting, but my friend’s affect surely must have approached that of Saint Helena when she saw the Vision of the True Cross.  We had seen Kennedy often enough on the floor of the Senate, but this was entirely different.  I myself was thrilled.  “That man,” he said with oracular solemnity, “is going to be President.”  He didn’t tell me that he would be President even before I got back from Oxford.  Thus it is that I have in the book of memory two images of President Kennedy in an open car.  One, shared with a whole horrified world, comes from the home movie of Abraham Zapruder.  The other is a much more limited edition.  Kennedy as Royal Victim.  Kennedy as Prince Charming, somewhat childgered.