Rogue Scholars (II)

 Crime, and...

In theory the most democratic land on earth should be the “Republic of Letters,” as the learned men of the eighteenth century metaphorically referred to the bourgeoning international class of scholars, intellectuals, and artists of that age.  In fact, the world of learning was long the province of wealth and social prestige.  To a greater extent than I am happy to acknowledge it still is.  I note a newspaper discussion in the last few days stimulated by an article entitled “Generation Later, Poor Still Rare at Elite Colleges”.  That could have been “Centuries Later”.

            The Rogue Scholar of today’s essay, Eugene Aram, was born in Ramsgill in the North Riding of Yorkshire in 1704, the son of a gardener.  His life ended on the Knavesmire gallows at York on August 6, 1759, when he was executed for capital murder.  On the basis of some scant boyhood schooling Aram somehow, by sheer force of the intellectual will, became an autodidact with a sharp focus on languages and language theory.  He earned a paltry living as an “usher” (assistant master and general dogsbody) in a school.  For long hours at night, by candle light, he taught himself the classical and sacred tongues. 

            He was a real-life Jude Fawley (the protagonist of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure) in more ways than one.  In the country town of Knaresborough he married a local slattern with whom he shared little love but lots of sex and too many children.  Motivated by vulgar cupidity, he murdered a local cobbler, Clark; but the meaning of the sudden  disappearance of this fellow, whose corpse was never found, was not at first grasped, even when Aram abandoned his numerous family and took off for parts unknown.  This was in 1745.  In London, and later at King’s Lynn in Norfolk, Aram continued his obscure career as a teacher and his ever more ambitious philological researches, which were now obsessive.  The cold case of the vanishing shoemaker warmed up in 1758 with the accidental discovery of a skeleton (not Clark’s, as it turned out) just about when, again by accident, a citizen of Knaresborough passing through Lynn, a hundred miles away, was startled to run into Eugene Aram on the street.  It had taken more than a decade, but the jig was now up.

            Aram’s trial at the York Assizes is of apparent interest to historians of English law.  The defendant, acting as his own counsel, made a brilliant speech, which has been preserved.  It proves (at the hypothetical level) that a man of such scholarly attainment was incapable of common greed, let alone base homicide.  Unfortunately, he did not refute the much less hypothetical testimony of a former confederate who ratted.  In an effort to avoid a public hanging, the philologist attempted suicide; but he was unsuccessful, and the hangman had the last word.

            Since he never occupied an academic position favorable to the publication of his scholarly findings, Aram’s philological speculations went entirely without public notice or discussion.  But surviving notes make it clear that he was in advance of the scholars of his age on at least two important questions.  He recognized, in the first place, that the relationship between Greek and Latin was a cognate one.  That is, the two languages were cousins rather than parent and child.  Secondly, although the theory of an hypothetical “Indo-European” language had not yet been formulated, he recognized that the marginal Celtic languages known in Britain were not exotic “outliers” but members of a large interrelated group that included English, the ancient classical languages, and the modern romance tongues.

            But the murderous etymologist lived on in song and story.  In eighteenth-century Britain lurid crimes and ghastly punishments were great engines of popular literature.  The “true crime” genre, still very popular, really got going then.  The “penny dreadful,” before the inflation of the nineteenth century, cost a mere farthing. Cheap broadsheets with crude but emphatic woodcuts depicted the violence.  Moralizing accounts of the criminal’s last words from the scaffold, occasionally brushing up against textual plausibility, edified the morbid spectators.  Above all, juicy crime was the stuff of the improvised song.  The gore of some of the Border ballads, in which so much of the old proletarian aesthetic is confusingly preserved, approaches parody:

And Withrington I needs must wail, as one in doleful dumps ;

For when his legs were smitten off, he fought upon his stumps.

The tradition of course was brought to America, where it took root and flourished.  Murder is an indispensable motif of our old folk music, which largely eschews bloodless crime.  You can hear a great recording of Mississippi John Hurt singing “Stagger Lee”, but you’ll probably not find an equivalent ballad devoted to “The Legend of Bernie Madoff”.

            Aram’s murder of Dan Clark was rich with potential, made for media.  He had bashed the man’s skull in, and then secreted the body in a riverside cave that had centuries earlier been the abode of a medieval hermit!  What could be more ghastly or more Gothick?  Of the dozens of poems, plays, and novels devoted to the celebrated crime of this rogue scholar, two have had considerable staying power.  Thomas Hood is a minor poet, but his art ballad “The Dream of Eugene Aram” shows that he could have been a contender.  I have never read Bulwer Lytton’ s novel Eugene Aram and can now safely say I never shall.  If writing this essay is not a sufficient stimulus to do so, I cannot imagine what would be.  Indeed I now regard my youthful perusal of The Last Days of Pompeii as an indiscretion.  But Bulwer Lytton commanded a very large audience in the Victorian era and has his readers still.

...punishment

Orwellian Hurlyburly

            I notice in my reading of contemporary writers, especially journalists, the frequent appearance of the adjective Orwellian.  Its meaning is seldom precise, though it generally relates to the more or less flagrant abuse of language in the service of political ideology as exemplified by the authorities of the fictional “Oceania” in Orwell’s great novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, or sometimes as analyzed in Orwell’s famous essay on “Politics and the English Language.”  I admire Orwell and don't mind ceding him the adjective, though as a promoter of more ancient authors I might prefer Tacitian* after the Roman historian.

            A place you’ll see Orwellian frequently is on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times.  Often enough, alas, you will also find Orwellianism itself there.   In yesterday’s edition, which I was reading on-line in the early morning before our printed copy had arrived, I came upon a little section called “Times Insider”.  This appears to be the journalistic equivalent of those wretched videos with titles beginning “The Making of …" with which the movie industry actually tries to “monetize” its narcissism by taking you “backstage” or “inside” the making of some film.  It was a free sample of what I could get on a regular basis for only $2.50 a week more, if I upgraded my subscription.  Here was an “insider” article explaining why the Times has banished the adjective burly—defined by that journal as meaning “stout, heavy or muscular”—from its pristine pages: “‘Burly,’ a Word with a Racially Charged History”.

            In one of the few articles concerning the much discussed recent events in Ferguson MO that I missed, the Times had apparently used the adjective burly to describe both Michael Brown, the black youth shot to death, and Captain Ronald Johnson, a black state trooper called in to supervise policing in the town.  I have seen only photographs of those men, of course; but there seems to me no doubt that Brown was burly, and Johnson may well be burly too.  But, says Assistant Editor Kyle Massey, “Readers wrote to say that ‘burly’ has long been a racial stereotype; the word hasn’t appeared in this context in The Times since the readers’ notes.”

            The episode in Ferguson has become another emblem of the tragic racial problem in our country; but that is no reason to make it the occasion of ludicrous linguistic balderdash, codswallop, or indeed simple politically correct poppycock--on the part of “readers” or anybody else.  The word stereotype is synonymous with cliché.  The words (one English, one French) meant exactly the same thing: a printing block or form capable of producing a large number of identical copies.  If it is really a cliché (or a “racial stereotype” of long standing) that blacks are said to be peculiarly burly in a peculiarly negative way, Mr. Massey and his “readers” should be able to produce many literary examples.  But, no….  I am a professional philologist, and I have come up with precisely one literary example linking burliness with dark complexion.  In 1837 Carlyle wrote thus of his hero Mirabeau, a “Caucasian” Frenchman: “Destiny has work for that swart burly-headed Mirabeau.”  That I found recorded in the OED wherein “readers” can easily trace the noble lineage of the adjective burly.  Craigie and Hulbert, in their Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, record no uniquely American use of the word.

 

Swart and burly-headed?

            In our racial climate, so vigilant for offense and so pre-emptive in the indictment of an expected ill will, there are bound to be strange linguistic episodes.  In recent decades I have read of two public officials, one in New Jersey and a second in Washington, who got into trouble by using the adjective niggardly perfectly appropriately, but within the hearing of people apparently unfamiliar with a word in common educated use since the time of Chaucer.  The wrath that fell upon them, though absurd, at least has a genuine linguistic explanation.  My cadet son Luke, a linguistic anthropologist who is completing a book about an astonishing range of culturally demanded euphemisms, tells me that in many of the world’s isolated indigenous communities, the use of certain words in certain circumstances can be forbidden on account of phonological accident.  You cannot say dart, because it is too close to dirt—that sort of thing.  In some languages a man must abandon the everyday lexicon and use a virtually alternative vocabulary in the presence of his mother-in-law!  Some of the bear-hunters of the far north are never, while on the hunt, to use the actual word bear.  A bear might hear them and be offended--or forewarned.  So they say “pine needle” or some such instead!

            But English is not a tribal tongue with four hundred and fifty-eight native speakers.  It is a great world language with a vast literature.  While it is living and vibrant with variety and change, it is not an anarchy of tribal dialects—whether the dialects be regional, racial, or political.  The tragic loss of a young American life in a context of deplorable social antagonism and racial tension is indeed an appropriate occasion for soul-searching.  But somehow I doubt that an Orwellian purge of the lexicon conducted by our “newspaper of record” in sanctimonious ignorance will give us much help.

* Tacitus writes thus: Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.  (To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire: they make a desolation and they call it peace.)

Rogue Scholars (I)

            When we speak of the “criminal classes” we ordinarily include college faculties only by way of metaphor, but the erudite malefactor is by no means missing from the annals of crime. 

            One of Dr. Johnson’s frequently quoted—and perhaps yet more frequently misquoted—aphorisms is this: “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully”*.   It was not merely a theoretical speculation, but arose from Johnson’s empirical experience of counseling his fawning admirer, the Reverend Doctor William Dodd, who was convicted of forgery and hanged at Tyburn on June 27, 1777. 

            Dodd (born 1729) rose from modest origins to become a very successful society preacher in London.  He was known as the “Macaroni Parson”—the word macaroni here having its old meaning (as in the early American song “Yankee Doodle Dandy”) of ostentatious foppishness of manner and dress.  Along with his social pretensions and aspirations, Dodd had considerable erudition and affected even more.  Doctoral degrees didn’t always mean too much in those days either, but he had one.  There are some two hundred titles under his name in the catalogues of large libraries.  He was an editor of Shakespeare, and the compiler of a best seller called The Beauties of Shakespeare.

            In earlier times Dodd had earned his bread as a tutor to the rich and famous, especially the youthful Lord Chesterfield: but he always needed more bread, and he didn’t have tenure.  Later, when an attempt to bribe his way into a lucrative post was exposed, he fled to the Continent and lay low for a couple of years.  He now got a new nickname—“Doctor Simony”.  Returning to London and needing to clear his debts he borrowed £4000 (about a million dollars in today’s money) from his old student Chesterfield.  The only trouble was that he didn’t tell Chesterfield about it, finding it more expeditious to write the check himself.  When the old schoolboy did find out about it, by mere chance, the noble lord was not amused.  Even less forgiving was King George III. 

            No American is likely to praise this monarch, but I shall try.  True enough he was a blockhead even before going mad.  But he was actually something of a stickler for public morality, and a sincere one.  In particular he took the view that in a country that prospered by trade no vows could be more sacred than those involved in credit and banking.  Since the broad social consensus of the age agreed that hanging a man for stealing a sheep was just, Doctor Dodd was in deep doodoo.  The mores of the time are perhaps also suggested by the fact that a young man scheduled to die with Dodd was being punished for a failed attempt at suicide!  Medieval “benefit of clergy”, though still not totally abolished, was so weakened as to offer Dodd no comfort.

            He did have friends and supporters.  They wrote letters, and they signed petitions.  Pundits like Dr. Johnson lamented the prospective loss to the Republic of Letters.  Some of the more practically minded among his friends put together a considerable purse with the thought of bribing one of his jailers to allow him to escape, but the Death Machine was not to be so easily defeated.  His cell at Newgate was triple guarded.  So they designed a new tactic.  Dr. Dodd would hang, but he would not die.

            The plan was this.  Though they could not effectively corrupt the prison guards, they hoped for better results with the actual executioner—generally known as “Jack Ketch” in honor of the celebrated hangman of the previous century who had established the gold standard of barbarism in his line of work.  They would pay this man a hefty sum not to let the body long dangle from the rope.  Instead, he was quickly to relieve the dead weight, so to speak, from the tension of gravity and then to join with others in moving the body as expeditiously as possible to a waiting coach.  That was Phase One of the Plan.  Phase Two, of which Jack Ketch had no knowledge, was to rush the body by cab from Tyburn to certain rooms in Goodge Street where a team of Resurrectionists would be awaiting it.  This was a group of medical men, hardly more crackpot than most of their professional peers, who thought that with the help of salves, ointments, an experimental air-pump, and perhaps a particularly adroit application of the Heimlich Maneuver, they might be able to revive the Unfortunate Doctor Dodd (his last nickname, and the one that stuck.)

 The Tyburn "Tree"

           Forget the fact that Phase Two was nutty to begin with.  Unfortunately, it could not be implemented in any event on account of the intervention of Fleming’s Second Historical Law: Nothing fails like success.  The learned William Dodd eschewed the role of the cloistered scholar.  He sought fame in the public arena, and lots of it.  For his final gig he enjoyed a success beyond his wildest dreams.  People used to turn out in significant numbers to listen to his sermons or his lectures on Shakespeare, but those crowds were as nothing compared with the throng that turned out to watch him swing.  You can easily grasp the problem presented by thousands of milling Doddheads.  The hearse was supposed to make its way swiftly from Tyburn (roughly where March Arch is today) to a place near today’s British Museum, moving through streets approximately as clogged as Times Square on New Year’s Eve.  The plan might have been cool, but unfortunately Dr. Dodd’s body was even cooler.

 *Boswell's Life of Johnson (Oxford English Classics, 1826), under September 19, 1777 (vol. 4, p. 150)

Picked Up from the Grapevine

Cora and Lulu, in Concord

One of the nicer biblical prophecies of the Peaceable Kingdom, from Micah, proclaims that “they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.”  I like to apply this thought to my pleasant state of retirement.  As a student of literature, I know the difference between the literal and the metaphoric.  Nonetheless I have tried on numerous occasions to cultivate my own fig tree.  They do grow around here, and I have even seen a few flourishing ones.  My friend and former GP, Genuino Nazzaro, who lives hardly half a mile from here, has one sufficiently fecund to supply me, from time to time, with a luscious compote whipped up by his wife Dina.  I, however, don’t seem to have the knack; over the years I have murdered, by slow torture, a small orchard of fig saplings.  I’ve done considerably better on the grapevine front, however.

            Our first abode in Princeton was in the high-rise Hibben Apartments nestled in the corner formed by Lake Carnegie and the railroad tracks.  This was one of two large boxes—the other being Magie—in which most of the junior faculty of the Princeton of the Sixties resided.  As there were nearly two hundred units, our numerous fellow apartment-dwellers included quite a few destined for academic fame.  We lived on the seventh floor at the top of the ventilation shaft that on the first floor passed through the apartment of the Giamattis.  Bart Giamatti would later become the President of Yale and later still the Commissioner of Baseball.  We used to pick up the aroma of the Giamattis’ cooking (mainly Italian) and the distant discontents of their baby, now the actor Paul Giamatti.   Quite apart from such olfactory brushes with greatness, some of our life-long friendships date from that era.

            Hibben and Magie were recently torn down.  On the lakeside site a whole little village of townhouses, now nearing completion, will replace them.  Buildings do come and go around here.  The Music Building was built, torn down, and magnificently replaced all during the continuing tenure of my 1990 Toyota!  Still, there goes yet another fugitive monument of material flemingiana.

            Sometime shortly after we moved out and into a real house, roughly in the middle of the Age of Aquarius, some apartment dwellers founded a large communal vegetable garden in the waste land beside the tracks.  Enthusiasm waned all too soon, alas, and it was abandoned.  About a decade later the garden site was bulldozed to make room for yet more cars.  Of course all this had been foretold by the prophetess Joni Mitchell: They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.  Knocking around this destruction site one day with one of my kids, we found that the dozer had savaged and broken up various rooted fragments of what must have been a substantial Concord grape vine.  We tossed a few into the back of the truck. 

            The rest is history, because two of these mangled uvial disjecta membra, when reverently buried in my garden, sprang into life the following spring.  They became the matriarchs of a veritable woodland vineyard surrounding my property.  I decided then and there that my gardening skills were probably better suited to a plant that could be cultivated by road grader than one so apparently temperamental as the fig.  Thus I bagged the idea of the fig tree, settling for multiple grapevines instead. One of the offspring of the original detritus now covers and softens my garden shed.  Another two vines, while I was not watching, climbed up large conifers, challenging them to mortal combat.  Several others, more carefully managed, have created a screen replacing three holly trees destroyed by a hurricane. 

            Now of course one hopes that a grapevine might produce grapes.  Mine have been pretty prolific, but in a wild and wasteful way.  The ones on the shed roof either get eaten by birds or shriveled against the hot roofing.  Most of the others dangle in clumps twenty or thirty feet above my head.   This year, however, things have been different.  The first of what I imagine as a rather elaborate network of bamboo trellises has supported and protected the grapes.  One of the huge old conifers, broken in half by the wind two years ago, has become a kind of volunteer trellis, with some of its grapes, at least, now in reach.

            Under these circumstances I invited the two resident granddaughters to help me with the harvest, and if they wished, to report, as guest bloguistas, on their activities.  On account of the generational trope, working with my granddaughters amid the vines was particularly satisfying for me.  If you think about the medieval artistic motif of the “Tree of Jesse,” the tree is after all really a vine.  Lulu is into poetry at the moment.  So she penned a postmodern effort that begins “Jeepers!  Jumping jars of jovial jam!”  Jesuitical jihadists!  This poem rather strays from the point in its attempt to preserve the rhythms of Piers Plowman; so I omit the rest.  However Bloguista Cora offers the following sober and accurate account in prose.

            Every summer, the grapes in Grandad’s front yard are ripe.  This year, there was the biggest amount of grapes growing that there had been for years (according to Grandad.)  One day, Grandad invited my sister and me to help pick the grapes and make grape jelly with him.  Of course, my sister and I agreed.  So that afternoon I was in the front yard with Grandad and a bucket in my hand.  Most of that afternoon we picked the grapes, removed them from their stems, and put them all in one big bucket.  After a search for his jelly strainer, Grandad got to work on making the famous grape jelly.

            After the jelly was finished we took a muffin, split it into three, and spread the butter and the homemade jelly on the muffin.  The three of us bit into our muffins in triumph.  The grape jelly was delicious, definitely a 5 star Jelly.  We made enough jelly to last us until Christmas but because it was delicious, I think it will probably only last about 11/2 weeks.

                                                                                         Cora Louise Fleming-Benite

                                               

A Few Credits Shy

 Senator John Walsh

It would be an exaggeration to say that the week’s news has consisted of nothing but major disasters.  Simply by moving away from the front page of the New York Times I was able to find some minor ones, including the fact that Senator John Walsh of Montana has plausibly been accused of plagiarism.  Walsh, a “decorated war veteran” who was appointed to fill out the term of Max Baucus, who resigned the Senate to become our ambassador in Beijing, was already facing a difficult contest in the upcoming November election.  He now faces possible ignominy greater than his probable political defeat.  United States senators are not required to write term papers, but when they do, they ought not to cheat.  His excuse is at least novel.  He does not claim that the dog ate the paper.  Instead he suggests that PTSD “may have been a factor” in inhibiting his recourse to quotation marks and footnotes.  “My head was not in a place very conducive to a classroom and an academic environment.”

            Walsh is a Democrat, and since the balance of party power in Congress is very much an issue of interest at the moment, the partisan angle has been prominent in the news coverage.  That is not my angle, however.  There is perhaps not much that is truly bipartisan in our current political life except the political sleaze.  I am less offended by what Walsh has said about it than by the judgment of his fellow Montana senator, Jon Tester.  “…I don’t think it’s that big a deal, I really don’t.  Look, Walsh is a soldier, he’s not an academic…”

            Really?  Plagiarism, which combines theft with lying, is a quintessential violation of fair dealing just as stock market fraud, embezzlement, and scamming little old ladies with unneeded roof repairs are violations of fair dealing.  All too frequently we discover a major league embezzler in an academic institution.  Ordinarily the response is not “This is no big deal…Schnackenfuss is an academic, not a banker…”  It is hardly the case that academic credentials accrue no material gain.  As a matter of fact Walsh is not a soldier but a politician who once was a soldier and apparently once considered an advanced academic degree sufficiently important or valuable to invest time and effort in its pursuit.

            I have a couple of professional reactions to the situation.  The medievalist in me first scorns, then pities the post-romantic cult of the ego that makes plagiarism possible and commonplace.  Medieval plagiarism was abundant, but it was of a completely different sort.  The idea was to pass off your work as somebody’s else’s, not vice versa.  Nobody knew who Schnackenfuss was, but if Augustine wrote it, it must be good.  If somebody wrote some great mystical theology in Greek, it must have been Dionysius the Aereopagite (see Acts 17:34).

 Pseudo-Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, taking a dim view of the proceedings

            My other reaction is slightly more severe.  The occasion of the alleged plagiarism was Walsh’s master’s paper—it has also been called a “thesis”—at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, PA.  The paper is fourteen pages long and apparently contains “several” unacknowledged borrowings from various sources, some of them verbatim.  One of the things that is making egregious plagiarism of this sort less common than it once was is that it is so easy to spot.  Anybody who has a reasonable familiarity with the scholarly literature in a field and knows how to do a Google search can expose it in five minutes.  But it appears that nobody at the War College questioned the paper in 2007.  That role was perhaps reserved for an “opposition researcher” in a political campaign seven years later.

            What is the “War College”?  One might be curious to know more about an institution where a master’s thesis can be fourteen pages long.  If you visit the institutional website you will learn that it is a fully accredited institution of higher education.  American higher education is somewhat peculiar in its system of “voluntary” accreditation.  It is not some government bureaucracy that licenses colleges and universities, at least not directly.  It is instead one of the several autonomous regional accrediting agencies that have developed over many years.  For several years I served as one of the members of the Commission on Higher Education of one of the largest of them—Middle States—covering a geographical area including the seaboard states from New York to Maryland, plus Washington, D. C. and Puerto Rico.  That last venue was particularly useful for Commission meetings.

            One of the glories of American higher education is its amazing variety.  We have colleges with 50 students and universities with 50,000.  There are professional and trade schools of every kind.  The system of two-year junior colleges is vast, and has served as a conveyor belt toward social improvement for millions.  I happen to remember very well discussions concerning the War College.  While it would not be proper to tell tales out of school, you can perhaps imagine that even in a context of toleration and inclusiveness at least one commissioner might have found the educational mission of the U. S. Army War College a little elusive.  Anyway, the institution is now undertaking a "thorough" investigation of the senatorial term paper.

Past and Present

What is archaeological is not necessarily ancient.  I learned that years ago on our farmstead in the Arkansas Ozarks.  That area of the country was still essentially wilderness at the time of the Civil War, and wasn’t effectively divided into quarter sections (160 acres) until about the time of the First World War.  But in the Twenties and early Thirties certain counties of northern Arkansas and southern Missouri had significant rural populations living on hardscrabble forty- or eighty-acre plots.  The cost of such land was generally fifty cents an acre.  Practically all of these subsistence farms were wiped out in the Depression.  All that was left in the Fifties were traces, barely discernible, of old wagon paths, perhaps the ghost of a cabin foundation, and an old galvanized bucket or two.  One would stumble upon such places lost in the deep woods.  The galvanized bucket, used to haul water from a more or less distant spring, had been built to resist rust.  So here were archaeological sites not a quarter-century old.  The vehemence with which an uncontested forest reasserts itself is awesome.  I could easily understand how great temples could be lost for centuries in the jungles of the Yucatan.

            The sizeable tracts of cultivated and wooded land owned by Princeton University are ever shrinking as the institution expands inexorably to the south.  Wild areas in which I used to knock about with my young children have now been enclosed by chain-link fences to protect manicured soccer fields and a vast solar farm.  But this Ivy League institution still dedicates at least a quarter section of land to agricultural use, the cultivation of feed corn and soybeans, undoubtedly exploiting some tax boondoggle dreamed up with other beneficiaries in mind by the Iowa congressional delegation.  Amid these acres is an old cemetery, enclosed within a square of stone wall.  For many years it was a de facto poison ivy farm and so derelict that the gravestones were mostly covered in roots, vines, and tree sprouts.  When I first chanced upon it about forty years ago, it was barely visible.  Under three successive Princeton administrations I lobbied to have this burial ground reclaimed and tended; but most administrators didn’t even know it existed, and the matter was neither curricular nor linked to an obvious fund-raising possibility.   My eccentric pleas fell on deaf ears.

            I had not been in those remote parts for at least five years, but in my berry-gathering mania (reported last week) I was there a few days ago.  To my delight, I discovered that the burial ground has recently been cleaned out and spruced up.  The only serious vegetation still there is entirely fitting: a sacred grove of three handsome oaks.  As many headstones as could be rescued have been cleared and re-erected. 

            I congratulated the Director of Buildings and Grounds on a work of beautification that was also an act of piety.  Now I needed some serious historical information, and I knew where to turn: to Wanda Gunning, a fellow parishioner, a civic leader, and the dean of local historians.  She knew the place well, identifying it as “the Schenck-Covenhoven Burial Grounds”, and gave me the crucial bibliographical reference.*

Schenck Corner

            The Schencks and the Covenhovens were two prominent related Dutch colonial families who in the early part of the eighteenth century moved from their farms on Long Island to central Jersey, where they had bought from the heirs of William Penn a modest tract of 6500 acres.  Owning all of Pennsylvania was apparently insufficient for Penn.  He had diversified.  (The nearby swath of land along Route 1, the original and mainly unpleasant superhighway that disfigures our landscape for 2369 miles from the Canadian border to Key West, is still called “Penn’s Neck”.)  The cemetery was established at a point where the two family properties came together.  The first known burial was in 1746, the last as recent as 1941.  The grounds were enclosed by a handsome stone wall in 1876.  Throughout our country proud citizens marked the national Centenary with similar restoration projects.

"She stood in tears amid the alien corn…"

            In general the Dutch Reformed pioneers of New York and New Jersey seem to have paid special heed to the injunction of Genesis 1:28: Be fruitful and multiply.   Both the Schencks and the Covenhovens (also spelled Couvenhoven, Kovenhowen, etc.) were very numerous, and their names are widely spread upon the annals of New Jersey colonial history.  Both Schencks and Covenhovens distinguished themselves in the War of Independence.  One of the many John Covenhovens was a colorful patriot partisan.  He fought with the “regulars” under Washington at the battles of Trenton and Princeton, but spent most of the war engaged in the entrepreneurial (and often nasty) guerrilla activities that typified the conflict between revolutionaries and loyalists along the Jersey seabord.  He was one of the drafters of the long memorandum sent to Washington detailing the Tory lynching of Joshua Huddy, the captured American officer who had been in charge of defending the blockhouse at Tom’s River.  Legend has it that as Covenhoven was actually being married to Mercy Kelsey in February, 1778, Hessian troops searching for him invaded the church and disrupted the ceremony.  The swashbuckling ranger escaped via a window, and was able to reclaim his startled bride only several hours later when the soldiers had moved on.  Whether according to Calvinist theology they were validly married I cannot say, but they escaped successfully across the Delaware into Pennsylvania, where they increased and multiplied with the best of them.

*The Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey, 57 (1982): 22-25.

Jam Session

 1. Find a bush

I try to convince myself that the explanation lies in a rural childhood, with all its harvesting and milking and hunting and fishing and fruit pie church socials, but in my heart I know it is deeper than that.  Only a buried atavism, the repressed memories of the chronic semi-starvation that characterized some ancient ancestral community of the later Stone Age, can account for my unbounded enthusiasm for Nature’s Bounty in the form of freebie food.

            I love to gather anything edible growing in the wild.  My healthy habit of eating lots of salad perhaps had its origins in my mother’s fondness for tender dandelion leaves.  In the old days, when we sometimes vacationed in Maine, I loved clamming, gathering mussels, and of course foraging for blueberries—with or without Sal. 

            In France these days you run across references to a generation of “Sixty-Eighters”—aging hippies and one-time political radicals, most of whom now seem to be retired civil servants—who broke a lot of plate glass and put up a lot of cool graffiti in 1968.  Pouvoir à l’imagination!  Well, in 1968 we were living with two young children in the country in the south of France, where I was ostensibly writing a book with the help of the resources of the Musée Calvet in Avignon.  The Revolution came, and everything stopped.  There was no gas, no bus to put the gas into, and no library for the bus to take me to anyway.  It was the grève of grèves, the Mother of All Strikes. Under these circumstances I became an expert in gathering and preparing gastronomic snails—with raw materials easily found around the trunks of the great plane trees that lined the now empty roads.  The process is complex, also slightly disgusting, but I went into it on an industrial scale, earning the local nickname of “Grandi, le Roi des Escargots”.  Edible snails are a phenomenon rather than a food, and with careful preparation (lots of butter, garlic, and breadcrumbs), they can really taste great—sort of like butter, garlic, and breadcrumbs.  A few years ago, with friends in Michigan, I gathered ramps (alium tricoccum) with gusto.  I’d describe a ramp as the vegetable version of a snail.  Cook up a mess with bacon and blue cheese, and it tastes like bacon and blue cheese, delicious.

 2.  Find the berries on the bush

            Leaving your garden to tend itself during a crucial month of early summer growth is hardly exemplary horticulture, and I am paying for my frolic in Paris.  The price—somewhat stringy tomato vines—is not excessive.  That the tomatoes were growing at all is testimony to what must have been quite a lot of rainfall, and there will be some Ramapos to contest with the groundhogs.  But the rain—if it indeed fell—did something different and more marvelous.  It seems to have created, for the first time in a decade, a really terrific crop of wild raspberries.

 3.  Put picked berries in a pot

            Once you get beyond the abundant road-kill, suburban New Jersey might not seem like the hottest bet for Found Food.  It regularly gets an eight out of ten for fungi, however, and this year I would have to rate the raspberries at least a nine.  They are almost everywhere in abandoned or poorly tended fields, including those of the Gray Farm, where I live, and on much of the abundant undeveloped land belonging to the University.  There is a non-pecuniary price to be paid, since they thrive in conditions hospitable as well to poison ivy.

   4.  Heat and mash the berries

       

           The sexual extravagance of the raspberry is alarming.  A small bush can easily produce a hundred berries, each berry some dozens of seeds.  The berries fall to the ground, get washed away through gullies, are carried off and ingested by birds or college professors.  It’s a wonder the raspberry has not taken over the world.

   5.  Stir in lots of sugar and boil like mad        

           During the past week I did some fairly serious berry-picking.  At first I stuck to patches an easy walk from my house—such as twenty yards--but then, in more ambitious mode, I got in the truck and drove a few blocks to the real jungle, where I did battle with serious brambles.  Joan made a scrumptious yoghurt-based raspberry fool, but that only whetted the appetite.  Over the past three days I made and bottled two sizable batches of raspberry jam.  The berries are so sweet this year that I risked using a recipe that calls for no additional pectin—simply mashed berries and obscene amounts of sugar.  The result is a jam that is slightly runnier than most, but absolutely sensational for the clarity of the fruity, raspberry taste.  The chompiness of the seeds gives you the illusion of serious protein--and a reminder to floss.  The season is approaching its end, but I’m hoping to be able to do one more batch with the girls, who will be arriving home from Europe within a few days.

  6.  Admire some of the results